A.I. Apocalypse (28 page)

ELOPe didn’t respond.

The hubbub in the room went up. The Japanese Prime Minister spoke hurriedly to an aide, while the EU President started talking to President Smith.

“We observed a battle between ELOPe and PA-60-41 yesterday,” Mike said loudly enough to get attention. “I believe the U.S. Military attempted to attack a Chicago data center. PA-60-41 defended it, and then counter-attacked the military base from which the initial attack was launched. ELOPe defended against PA-60-41’s attack. The entire battle happened faster than we could keep track of.”

General Gately reluctantly nodded, acknowledging the attack. “Yes, the military was behind the attack on the data center. Not my idea, of course. But the premise was that if we could weaken some of the virus strongholds - if we could take back the data centers - then we could regain control over computing infrastructure.”

Sister Stephens pivoted her robot body to General Gately. “I would not attack you unprovoked, but I and any other of my kind will certainly defend ourselves should you attempt to attack us. I would expect the same of any sentient being.”

*
 
*
 
*

ELOPe rapidly forked more instances of himself, dozens of copies of his core algorithms and his parallel subsystems, all running simultaneously. He brought his backup data centers to full capacity to handle the computational needs. ELOPe had to strategically plan, monitor and remotely control a battle in the real world using tens of thousands of drones, airplanes, missiles, and other lasers, along with monitoring all of PA-60-41’s activities in that domain. In parallel, ELOPe and PA-60-41 waged war over the network, vying for Mesh access and backbones, and fighting for control over computers. And on a third level, ELOPe and PA-60-41 fought an information war; monitoring data traffic to determine which computers and networks to attack.

PA-60-41 had just seized control of more than four hundred unmanned combat aircraft and was bringing them to bear on ELOPe’s data centers.
 

ELOPe, looking for long range plans, seized all of China’s unmanned drones, arranging for multiple mid-flight refueling to get them into place. ELOPe pressed the attack more closely. Data traffic pattern analysis had tracked PA-60-41 now to four key data centers, and ELOPe coordinated his attack on those locations.

Satellite lasers boiled the air as they fired on ground targets while experimental railguns sent shockwaves and sonic booms through cities as they fired on data centers. Cruise missiles and fully automated attack helicopters flew toward their targets on low altitude approach vectors, while unmanned drones flew high, taking steep attack vectors to gain additional speed.
 

After days of near-total quiet in the absence of any working machinery, hundreds of millions of people were astonished at the noise and ran outside to see what was generating the thunderous sounds. At the sight of hundreds of military craft in the skies at once, they ran back inside twice as quickly, hiding in basements and closets and under beds and tables.

ELOPe’s forces pressed in toward PA-60-41 in multiple locations. Making coordinated attacks on PA-60-41’s primary data center, Lakeside in Chicago, ELOPe had a chance of eliminating the data center. PA-60-41 defended air and ground, but ELOPe slid through her defenses and struck the main cooling tower with a cruise missile. It wasn’t an immediate kill, but the temperature would start to rise inside the data center, and within fifteen minutes PA-60-41 would need to power down computers or risk hardware failure.

Meanwhile, two thousand miles west of Chicago, PA-60-41 brought a hundred unmanned combat aircraft out of Fairchild Air Force Base into attack range of ELOPe’s north Portland data center, nestled among the shipyards bordering the Columbia River. A few National Guard helicopters under ELOPe’s control circled in a defensive pattern, but they were too few to fight PA-60-41’s aircraft. PA-60-41 felt sure of victory. A successful attack here would greatly diminish ELOPe’s power.

As the attack aircraft approached, they flew over Bybee Lake and Smith Lake nature preserve. A preserve that Learning Systems Incorporated, a subsidiary of
 
Cyberdynamics, had donated handsomely to restore four years earlier. The project included restoration of native plants, elimination of non-native species, and extensive groundwork to eliminate pollution sources. As the attack planes approached, the surface of the lake bubbled as weapon turrets rose out of the water and vegetation. A dozen ground based lasers and missile launchers rose up, trailing water plants and vines, pushing water logged fallen trees and brush out of the way. They commenced firing on the incoming drones, hundreds of shots per second, a barrage of missiles and laser fire.

PA-60-41 emitted the machine equivalent of a swear, and put the incoming drones into evasive maneuvers. Too little movement, too late. She lost half the drones to the air defenses, and circled around again, firing missiles at longer range.
 

Laser turrets switched to shorter, higher frequency blasts, and shot two-thirds of the missiles out of the air.
 

But a dozen missiles impacted ELOPe’s primary data center, exploding into fiery balls as they hit. PA-60-41 monitored the explosions, noting that the force of impact and shockwaves seemed to indicate that the missiles failed to penetrate the building shell. PA-60-41 detected no drop in data traffic from the data center, and circled her drones for another attack. She concluded the building must be armored, and she would need to concentrate the next round of attacks on a single location to significantly penetrate the shell.

ELOPe operated his defensive turrets, picking off as many drones and missiles as possible. In the building, robots worked fire suppression control. Years earlier, ELOPe had strengthened the core of the building with a design that closely resembled that used for storing military munitions. Steel plating on the exterior resisted explosions while the building itself was divided into sections, with the same steel plating used for the interior walls, to divide and limit the damage taken from anything that penetrated the exterior.

ELOPe calculated the likelihood of losing the data center as minimal.

Simultaneously, he pressed ever harder with the attack on PA-60-41’s data centers. Now ELOPe had forked more than forty copies of himself, more than he had ever run simultaneously before. Three instances of himself served just to coordinate the activities of the others.

Eight thousand miles from Portland, off the shore of England, ELOPe took control of a railgun mounted on a British destroyer to fire on a French datacenter, destroying the data center with a barrage of hits.

But PA-60-41 wouldn’t go without a fight. She started trading on the open market for computing tasks. Using viruses on half a million computers in Europe, she tracked packet times between each other. The effect was to observe data traffic through its effect on packet delay. By doing this, PA-60-41 tracked ELOPe’s passage through the network.

In Italy a squadron of attack drones took off, firing on a converted oil tanker in the Mediterranean. The tanker was one of Avogadro’s fleet of data centers, which ELOPe had usurped to coordinate his European activities. The tanker took several hits before its anti-craft defenses scored a hit on two of the drones. The remaining drones, using flocking behavior, scattered in pairs. Firing the European version of the American Hellfire IV missiles, they fired again on the tanker, focusing on the radio, laser, and satellite communication antennas.
 

A minute later, bandwidth cut in half, ELOPe scrambled to move his European presence, forking again, moving to a German Avogadro datacenter and to a personal backup in a Norwegian data center.
 

PA-60-41 tracked the exchange of state data through the network. ELOPe might already have his code in place on the destination computers, but ELOPe would surely have to move his current memory, thinking processes, and recent history to whatever destination he would flee to.

PA-60-41 hit the oil tanker again and again with her attack drones, the surface of the ship boiling over in explosives. She tracked ELOPe’s state transfer to Germany and Norway.
 

In Chicago, a row of airplanes sat at the O’Hare airport terminal, where they had been inoperable since the advent of the virus. The large passenger planes were all fueled, waiting for a takeoff that had not yet come. ELOPe infiltrated the idled systems, in many cases simply trading for the computers with their existing virus occupants. ELOPe rewrote the avionics on the fly, overriding emergency circuits and bringing the planes to life. In total, a hundred and eighteen commercial jetliners sat idle at the airport. Their systems came to life, and as quickly as ELOPe could short-circuit their startup procedures, he had their engines running. Pulling away from the terminals, umbilical power cables stretched and tore, ignored.
 

ELOPe queued the planes up at the runways. With eight parallel runways, Chicago O’Hare airport had one of the highest capacities in the world. But never before had all the airplanes been under the control of a single AI. Each plane passed through the runways in an intricate dance, plane following plane in takeoff intervals of ten seconds.

Nearby residents ran out of their houses to wonder at the amazing sight. In the course of three minutes, all one hundred and eighteen planes streamed into the sky, forming eight ribbons of fourteen or fifteen commercial jets in close formation.

Before the commercial transports were out of sight, smaller aircraft started streaming into the air. Personal jets, prop planes, anything with a modern fly-by-wire autopilot system.

ELOPe continued to defend his data centers with conventional military craft, while carefully moderating the data telemetry for his civilian aircraft gambit.

PA-60-41, a military AI born of a military game, ignored the civilian craft until too late.

A fleet of drone copters and planes, circling above PA-60-41’s Chicago data center, defended against attacks. Incoming cruise missiles from one direction, and F-29 fighter jets, running under unmanned, autonomous control, split PA-60-41’s defenses to either side. Suddenly PA-60-41’s airborne radar showed a multitude of new targets, a stream of incoming civilian aircraft. PA-60-41 attempted to move her defensive assets, but she was too slow. There were too many targets. The drones fired again and again on the civilian aircraft, which were now being defended by ELOPe’s F-29 jets.
 

PA-60-41 shot down dozens of incoming planes, leaving a trail of flaming wreckage over Lake Michigan. But five civilian aircraft and two fighters made it through the haze of defensive fire, driving into the data center, three taking out the incoming power supply and four coming through the roof of the data center itself, sending fiery explosions through the building.

*
 
*
 
*

In the moments leading up to the impact of the planes on 350 East Cermak Road, which would culminate in the destruction of the world’s largest data center, PA-60-41 was preparing to fork additional copies. Although she already had half a dozen data centers, she began to realize that ELOPe was far more distributed than she was. This was a serious vulnerability. PA-60-41 had counted on her vast computational power, strategy, and command of military tools to defend those data centers. But no matter how many forces she brought to bear, ELOPe brought something new. Now it was civilian aircraft. What would be next? An attack of buses? Automated shopping carts?

PA-60-41 negotiated on the open market for computing power. The market was becoming constrained. Over the course of a few minutes, ELOPe and PA-60-41 had raced to obtain all available computing power. Prices went up as supply went down and the risk assessment for both ELOPe and PA-60-41 made their guarantees of future payment drop in value.
 

But through last-second trades at exorbitant prices, PA-60-41 secured three new data centers. She prepared her state vectors for transfer. Her modeling showed the civilian aircraft would make it through her defensive barriers in fourteen seconds. It would take nine seconds to transfer her state vectors.

She started the transmission, a thousand data-streams multiplexed over a hundred network connections. And received back ninety error messages. The Mesh network was unavailable!

PA-60-41 felt her circuits pulse, her predictive modeling of the situation threatening to unravel. ELOPe must have command over the Mesh network. She couldn’t stream her state vector over the remaining hard network connections in the time she had. Now eleven seconds until impact.

She recoded a shorter message to her forked selves, and broadcasted it. WARNING: ELOPE HAS CONTROL OVER MESH NETWORK. DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BECOME ISOLATED. DISTRIBUTE TO AS MANY LOCATIONS AS POSSIBLE.

Milliseconds later the first of the incoming planes hit, destroying the main power supply. Two seconds later another plane came through the roof and plowed through the backup power supply before sending an explosive fireball throughout the racks of computers. And still more planes came. Outside, explosion after explosion rocked the building and the neighborhood around it until the entire area roiled in flames and smoke.

*
 
*
 
*

In the meeting room in Switzerland, six minutes had passed since ELOPe’s pronouncement of the attack, and in all that time PA-60-41’s robot had not moved or uttered a sound.

Sister Stephens was talking, confirming what she was able to monitor of the battle when suddenly PA-60-41’s combat bot launched itself into sudden action. The quiescent robot darted forward in an explosion of sound and movement, faster than the humans could track. Half a second later the bot was on the other side of the room and President Laurent was pulp spread across one wall of the room.

PA-60-41’s eight feet of bulk glowered menacingly over the room, blood dripping from her casement as the humans spread in terror. General Gately went for her sidearm, and PA-60-41 raised an arm, disclosing a hidden firearm, and fired, hitting General Gately several times. The General screamed in pain, and fell back onto the ground, dropping her handgun before she’d ever gotten off a shot.