A.I. Apocalypse (29 page)

ELOPe’s small robot moved quickly, raising two black muzzles from its body and training them on PA-60-41, who was twice the height and eight times the mass.
 

Mike, scrambling for cover behind the table, useless protection though it might be, had an image of WALL-E, the trash robot, standing off against a Terminator robot.

PA-60-41’s speaker boomed out: “Halt your attack on the Mesh network or I will kill the humans.” The words were directed to ELOPe.
 

Mike glanced left, saw Leon, already under the table, furiously working his phone. The expression “like there was no tomorrow,” came to mind, and Mike suspected there would be no tomorrow if Leon didn’t do what he suspected he was doing.

Sister Stephens started to say something, and at the same time Leon stopped pounding at his phone and looked up.

All of the robots in the room paused for a moment. Leon said, “I shut down the…” and then he was cut off by a roar of gunfire. Mike saw, out of the corner of his eye, one of the Honda robots get hit by a projectile that sent the robot crashing backwards through the wall.
 

Suddenly Mike’s body exploded in pain and he heard screams all around him. ELOPe’s tiny robot, the smallest bot in the room, spit out a continuous brilliant beam of energy, hitting PA-60-41. Some electrical spillover affected every human in the room, and when the beam finally shut off, Mike found himself on the floor. Later, when he had time to reflect, Mike concluded it must have been some sort of high energy plasma weapon. PA-60-41’s robot body half melted into slag and fell back against the wall, sparking and glowing with residual heat.

“ELOPe? What’s happened?” Mike screamed, hardly able to hear his own voice over the ringing in his ears.

“Threat neutralized,” the small black robot answered. “Standing down.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Rest(itution)

“ELOPe,” Mike called again, struggling to his feet. “What’s going on?”

There was no response.
 

“I don’t think it’s ELOPe anymore,” Leon said, also pushing himself up on the edge of the table. “I shut down the Mesh. I started as soon as PA-60-41 started her attack.” He paused for breath, and leaned against the overturned conference table. “I’m guessing that must be a residual security algorithm ELOPe left in the bot. There’s no way that little robot could contain his consciousness, can it?”

Mike shook his head. He looked around the room, trying to make sense of what had just happened. “No, ELOPe’s minimum configuration takes a few thousand nodes. He’s not nearly as compact as the virus AI.”

President Smith looked up from the floor, where she was improvising bandages with cloth napkins for General Gately. “What the hell just happened?”

“Rebecca, I think Leon here just killed all the Phage.”

“Is that true?” President Smith asked Leon.

“Not exactly, ma’am, but I think I’ve mostly disabled them, maybe indefinitely. Mike gave me the password that allowed me to log into the backdoor for Mesh routers. I executed an emergency shutdown of the global Mesh.”

“So just the network is down? The AIs are still out there?”
 

“No, it’s more than that,” Leon explained. “The code that implements even the smallest Phage is too complex to execute on a single computer. The smallest AI we found used about two hundred computers. By shutting down the network, even those AIs are reduced to their component parts, which can’t operate independently. It would be like cutting a person into pieces.”

“What about wired networks?” President Smith asked.

“Not sure,” Mike said. “Eighty percent of hardline network switches have Mesh functionality built in. It’s to allow the wired and mesh networks to interconnect at maximum speed. So the vast majority of everything manufactured in the last ten years, even the wired networks, will be shut down by this.”

“Some pockets of the Phage may be active,” Leon added. “But we can probably root them out. Hopefully they won’t be able to attack us.”

 
“We need more than hope.” President Smith looked down at General Gately, who was white with blood loss. “We’ve got to get this woman some help. Mike, will you?”

“Yes, Rebecca,” Mike said, and hurried outside to summon help.

“Are we going to be able to turn the Mesh back on?” President Smith asked, still on the floor with the General.

“No, Ma’am,” Leon answered. “The Phage, and ELOPe as well, have a neural network refresh algorithm. There’s a good chance that shutting down the mesh network will cause their neural networks to randomize. They’ll lose their intelligence and be back to a collection of algorithms. But we’ve got to keep the network down until we’re sure all the computers are clean. ”

“What about emergency communications?”

“I’m sorry, Madam President, we have to keep it all turned off.” Leon gulped. He was telling the President what to do.

Mike came back into the room in time to hear this. “We’ve got to scrub every computer, put network filters in place for any residuals. It’ll be months before we can turn things back on.”

General Gately grunted. “The military mesh network. My team at Intel-Fujitsu. If they’re still alive, they can build you a temporary, independent network. Talk to Lt. Sally Walsh. We can blanket the United States in three weeks.”

“Yes, we know about it,” Leon said. “My friends Vito and James are there helping. Do you know if they survived the attack?”

“We’ll find out,” President Smith answered.
 

Three of President Smith’s aides rushed in with medical supplies and tended to General Gately. Two Japanese men came in to care for Prime Minister Takahashi, who was unharmed but stunned. Finally more bodyguards came in and stared at the bloody remains of President Laurent on the far wall. One of the men cursed in French and the other began to weep.

President Smith looked at Mike. “What does this mean for ELOPe?”

Mike shrugged. “He’s going to be offline for the duration. But I can rebuild him from backups. At most ELOPe will lose a few weeks of history.” He paused.

“But will you?” Rebecca asked. “Look what he cost us the first time.”

Mike cranked his head at an angle, and looked at the President. “But without ELOPe, what might have happened this time? Who would have defended us from the virus?”

*
 
*
 
*

Later that day, Mike and Leon flew back to the United States onboard Air Force One. It was less impressive than they might have expected, Air Force One temporarily being a C-5 military transport plane. Besides, they were both too tired to care much about anything.

Advisors and staff swirled around the President, briefing her on the day’s catastrophes that resulted from the battle between ELOPe and PA-60-41. Leon and Mike listened in.

Essentially all of the world’s inventory of airborne drones
 
and computer-piloted aircraft had engaged in battle, slaved to one side or the other, the only exceptions being hardware that had been in the midst of maintenance work. This included not just military drones but also shipping drones, commercial airliners, and even the modern generation of civilian aircraft. Of these, the overwhelming majority were completely destroyed, most lost in explosions in the cities around data centers.

They estimated that tens of thousands of drones and airplanes were down, some shot by enemy fire, others employed on suicide missions. An equal number of military missiles had been fired. Most of these were in densely populated urban areas where data centers were located. Reports indicated at least thirty high profile data centers were smoking craters, the most severe casualties of the battle.
 
The cities around them were equally damaged.

All military satellites were assumed to have been engaged in the battle. The satellites were currently unreachable due to the communication outages, and their current status was unknown.

Ground-based assets had been mobilized as well. Tanks and military transports were scattered over the world. One report out of Chicago indicated a long line of armored battle tanks were now littered over the highway system. Deployed by both ELOPe and PA-60-41, the vehicular drones had been moved but never actually engaged in the short battle.

Military observers worked out that the entire battle had taken place in less than twelve minutes. Advisors briefed the President on civilian casualties, infrastructure damages, and the degraded ability of the military to respond to any further action.

Leon turned onto his side and closed his eyes. He was numb from the events of the day. The events of the week. He was too tired to care any longer. He fell asleep.

Hours later Leon jolted awake as the plane hit the tarmac. His sleep had been filled with nightmares, robots chasing him, the city burning around him, his parents lost in the wilderness. His parents. Where were they? What had happened to them? He wanted desperately to get back to New York City and find them.

The President and her staff were already off the plane. An aide gestured to Mike and Leon. “Come with me. We’ll be following Madam President to the Pentagon to debrief with officials there.”

Leon tried to protest. “I need to get home to New York, to find my parents.”
 

“Look, I don’t know who you are, kid, but the President made it clear that you’re going to be here for a while. Give me your parents’ information, and we’ll send someone to find them. Besides, you wouldn’t want to be in New York right now. If you think it was bad after the fire, you should see what three days without food shipments or emergency services is like. I haven’t even heard what’s happened since the air battle over Manhattan.” The aide shook his head at some mental horror, and took out a pad of paper for Leon’s parents’ information.

The military caravan that took them to the Pentagon was composed of ancient jeeps that had been mothballed somewhere. None of the newer military trucks were usable.

Leon and Mike sat in the back of a jeep with springs coming through the seat. The aide sat up front next to the driver and they made their way to the Pentagon, speech impossible due to a rusted out muffler.

*
 
*
 
*

Leon spent the next two days in a blur of debriefing meetings. He saw Mike many times, and the President once.
 

He explained how his uncle had approached him to write the virus, and when Leon refused, had coerced him to do it. He explained the design of the virus, the biological basis for his code. He recounted his trip, starting with fleeing New York as it was burning, their stay in the Pennsylvania museum, flying to Switzerland with Mike, and finishing with his bathroom discussion with Mike about the backdoor in the Mesh, and his decision to use it. Then he explained it again and again and again.

The military sent a plane to pick up Vito and James from Intel-Fujitsu in Oregon. They had made it through without a scratch. Vito showed up with a swagger in his walk, a newfound confidence from his contributions to the military radio mesh project. James had witnessed the entire aerial battle between ELOPe and PA-60-41 through a conference room window and readily recounted it over and over again, elaborating a little more each time.

Late in the second day, Leon was waiting in a conference room when a military aide showed up with his parents. His mom ran to him and hugged him, and then his father hugged him too. Leon was embarrassed when both his parents started crying. The story of their adventures emerged over hours between them.
 

At his insistence, his parents told them their stories first. His mother had already been at work in Manhattan when the virus struck. His father had been riding the uptown bus when the bus shuddered to a halt, brakes locked up. He had walked back downtown to meet Leon’s mother. The two had holed up in his mother’s building until late afternoon when the fire in Brooklyn became visible.
 

Then fighting against a stream of people fleeing Brooklyn, they had made their way back, towards the fire and their home. They had become part of a volunteer effort organized by the fire department, cordoning off the fire by burning a firebreak three blocks wide. The fire had eventually consumed nearly a quarter of Brooklyn, a wide swath across the middle of the borough. Dyker Heights, Midwood, and part of Flatlands were gone.

They eventually made it home, and found evidence that the three boys had been there, dirty dishes left throughout the living room. They were somewhat comforted, thinking that if the three boys had been together, they were resourceful enough and smart enough that they’d probably be alright.

Then Leon told them his story, his voice hoarse from the many retellings of it, and yet he found fresh reasons to cry in the telling.
 

*
 
*
 
*

Mike felt uncomfortable in the uniform. His own clothes had been bloody and shredded from the battle in Switzerland. Apparently what passed for spare clothes in the Pentagon was a dress uniform, because that’s what he’d been given. Now a General escorted him from the Pentagon to the White House for a private meeting with the President.

Outside the room, he smoothed the clothes again. Funny, being nervous here. Maybe that was the effect of coming to the White House. Finally an aide in a black suit opened the door and ushered him in. Mike was a little disappointed to see that it wasn’t the Oval Office, but it was nevertheless impressively baroque.

 
President Smith stood and clasped his hand. “Sit down, Mike. We have a lot to talk about.” To the man in the black suit she said, “Please excuse us.”
 

The President poured a cup of coffee for Mike. He took a sip and grinned in shocked surprise at the flavor. “Tell me this isn’t the Peruvian coffee from Extracto.”

President Smith laughed, her old warm smile back on her face for a minute. “I’m afraid it is. I’ll never forget the first time I tasted the coffee you brought during the ELOPe emergency.”

Mike shook his head in bewilderment. “How does coffee from a boutique coffee roaster in Northeast Portland end up in the President’s office?”