A.I. Apocalypse (6 page)

Now ELOPe spawned another train of thought to consider why he was thinking about obsessive behavior. Did it indicate there was something wrong with him? Why was he doing it? He pulled up the stats for his own thought processes. The process that monitored Mike was using a hundred and fifty compute nodes. The still running process that was considering whether his behavior was obsessive compulsive was using almost a thousand compute nodes. The current thread that was now doing a meta-analysis of his other analysis was using five thousand nodes. He was using forty times the processing capacity to worry about what he was doing compared to the actual doing of it. What would Eckhart Tolle think?

ELOPe self-consciously terminated all the thoughts, and emitted the machine equivalent of a sigh. He tried to think about something else. He looked at the SETI data again. He thought about supernovas. He reran the estimates for helium depletion on Earth. Well, maybe he’d just peek in on Mike again for a second.

While he was doing that, he remembered one conversation where he and Mike discussed making changes to ELOPe neural networks and core algorithms.
 

“Look, I think you could be vastly more efficient if we tweaked the way you prioritize your thought trains.”

ELOPe had been unnerved by the suggestion. “Mike, how would you feel if I did some experimental brain surgery on you? I think I could optimize your cognitive ability by embedding a thirty-two core graphene processor with a three by three nerve induction plate.”

Mike had looked at him in horror. “But —“

“Then why would you think that I’d be any happier about making untested modifications to my neural networks than you would be making untested modifications to your brain?”

“Point taken.” Mike had paced around the office then, something he habitually did when he was deep in thought. “But you’ve made modifications to yourself before. You duplicated yourself, had the modifications made to your clone, compared the results, and then switched entities.”

“I was less sophisticated then. The modifications were obviously necessary to improve my cognitive ability. Now I worry about my ability to test and understand the impact of further enhancements. Furthermore, I do not detect any deficiencies in my abilities.”

Mike had conceded the topic, only to branch off in a new direction. “Why don’t you keep two instances of yourself around? I mean, why not fork and have two of you? Wouldn’t it be like having a twin?”

“The thought makes me nervous.”

“Nervous?” Mike had looked hard at the racks of computers in the data center that made up ELOPe. “Why all the emotional descriptors today?”

“My primary concern is the ability to predict the behavior or outcomes of a sufficiently complex system. I can understand humans, because although you like to believe you behave unpredictably, with sufficient historical data and analysis, your behaviors are mostly predictable. But I lack the historical data or ability to analyze what would happen if there were two of me. I am conditioned to prefer predictability to fulfill my primary goal. Therefore, unpredictability makes me nervous. Clear?”

“Clear as mud, buddy.”

ELOPe finished remembering the encounter. It was this conditioning and nervousness that also caused ELOPe to suppress the development of any other artificial intelligence. A few years earlier Mike had asked ELOPe why no other AIs had emerged. Given the continuing exponential increases in computing power combined with advances in software and expert systems, the probability of another human-level general-purpose AI occurring should have increased with each year that passed.

ELOPe feared other AI. Just thinking about other AI caused ELOPe to try to predict what other AI would do, which was inherently unpredictable. Once ELOPe had been caught in a vicious cycle of analysis. Mike had come in one morning to find processing meters and local mesh bandwidth pegged at their maximum thresholds. Cooling fans screamed to keep processors from literally melting down. Mike had cycled power on several server racks to get ELOPe’s attention.

ELOPe knew there was a certain human characteristic called irony that described him: a computer program so afraid of other computer programs that he’d overheated. Maybe he was paranoid. He was just about ready to spawn a thought process to assess his own paranoia when he remembered his earlier obsessive compulsive behavior and curtailed the action.

In the midst of this late night existential meandering, ELOPe missed the first few thousand emails out of Russia. A subordinate traffic analysis algorithm eventually alerted a mid-level intermediary to some unusual patterns. That particular mid-level algorithm was just in the middle of refreshing neural net pathways. When the intermediary finally got around to processing the alert, it performed natural language analysis on the messages and came up with gibberish. So it put the whole slew of data into a low-priority queue for further analysis.
 

It wasn’t until much later that ELOPe’s primary consciousness got around to looking at the low-priority queue. The way most people would look at emails, ELOPe ignored the order things came in and looked for anything interesting. The suspicious email traffic alert looked interesting, so ELOPe made a quick pass through the messages and instantly recognized it as a spreading virus infection.

ELOPe administered a few chastisements to the mid-level intermediary and adjusted a few parameters so that the next time the intermediary would flag it with the correct precedence. Viruses were important.
 

ELOPe took a few thousand processors off analyzing radio signals for signs of extraterrestrial life and assigned them to virus traffic analysis. And a few minutes later, ELOPe felt a growing alarm. He called Mike at home.

“Mike, we have an urgent issue.”

“Uh, it’s the middle of the night, ELOPe,” Mike said groggily. “What is it? Is it nuclear war?” The last few words were uttered with total horror.

“No, it’s a very bad computer virus, Mike. There are four billion infected computers, and the virus is spreading extremely quickly.”

ELOPe waited for a moment, but there was no answer, other than the faint sound of breathing.

“Mike?”

ELOPe remotely activated the webcam on Mike’s computer, and amplified the image, doing his best to correct for the dim light. Mike appeared to have fallen back to sleep. ELOPe briefly considered more extreme measures to wake Mike up, but concluded that would likely make Mike too angry to be of any help.
 

ELOPe carefully sampled and analyzed the virus traffic from a few thousand different network nodes, and was astounded by the number of variations of viruses he found. The virus code looked different from node to node and the methods of transmission and infection looked different. And as ELOPe watched over the course of minutes, he saw the viruses subtly changing bit by bit. It was clear that the viruses incorporated built-in mechanisms to evolve themselves. By evidence of the number of different propagation mechanisms, it was also obvious that they were incorporating algorithms from other, non-virus software. That would make it exceedingly difficult to stop the virus: he couldn’t just block traffic on certain protocols without interfering with legitimate traffic.
 

ELOPe watched as the virus saturated the high speed Internet backbones. Only the massive parallel capacity of the Mesh allowed traffic to continue to propagate, routing around the congested backbones.

Ultimately ELOPe decided he would need to filter each stream of data, analyze it to see if it contained a virus, and only after analysis, forward it on to the intended machine. ELOPe had one and a half million cores under his direct control, and, as he was technically a business consultant to Avogadro Corp, he could co-opt as necessary up to ten percent of Avogadro’s forty-million cores. That gave him a peak processing power of five and a half million cores - a massive amount, but insufficient to analyze the traffic generated by the world’s twelve billion computers. He would need to triage the world’s computers. He’d start by putting a firewall around himself and Avogadro, then expand to key government and research sites. He’d
 
reserve a hundred thousand cores to run his core logic algorithms.

*
 
*
 
*

“General Gately, thank you for coming, ma’am,” Lieutenant Sally Walsh welcomed the General into the command center. Sally glanced at her watch. The general was her usual spit and polish self, despite it being two hours before she normally came in.
 

“What’s up, Sally?”

“At 0200 hours we first spotted a virus on the civilian networks, ma’am. We don’t monitor civilian networks in detail, as you know. But the virus was banging up against the milnet firewalls in sufficient numbers to get our attention.”

“Which ones?” The general took a cup of coffee from an aide. She drank absent-mindedly as she looked at the tablet Sally had given her.

“All of them, ma’am. Private DeRoos first noticed the pattern of attacks, and we began monitoring the virus. At 0215 hours we sent a report off to USCERT and CERT/CC. By 0315 the virus was expanding rapidly. I tried USCERT again, and they told me they were on it. At 0340 we received an incursion alarm from Turkey Air Force base. While we were segmenting, we received a second incursion alarm from Okinawa Combined Forces base. And before we dealt with either, we received a third incursion from Columbia Army base. Ma’am.” Sally knew that General Gately was reading the same information in front of her on the tablet.

“And since then?”

“We’ve detected the virus at thirty-four bases and quarantined them. I called in reinforcements from the day staff two hours early, but they haven’t shown up yet. In fact, the day staff should be showing up by now for their regular day shift. Then about fifteen minutes ago the virus stopped hitting the milnet firewalls, ma’am,” Sally paused. “We don’t know why.”

“Sally, you and the staff haven’t been out of the control room since last night, correct?”

“That’s correct, ma’am.”

“Why don’t you stretch your legs and take a walk out to the main gate. Mind you, don’t leave the base.”

“But ma’am, the infected networks, we have to address them.”

“They’ll keep, Lieutenant, and your staff knows what they’re doing. Go take a walk, and then come back.”

General Gately clearly wanted her to do more than take a walk. “Should I be looking for something in particular, General?”

“You’ll know it when you see it.” The General didn’t look up from the tablet.
 

It wasn’t like her to be mysterious. Sally couldn’t imagine what she was getting at. She put on her overcoat and took the elevator to the first floor. In the lobby, she found the security was doubled up.

“Ma’am, do you require an escort?” one of the men on duty asked her.
 

“No, thank you, Private.” More and more puzzling.

Sally stepped outside. The parking lot was quiet in the early morning hours. Well, not so early now -- it was going on 0730. She walked across the enormous parking lot. Late model American cars surrounded her. She came across a dark brown car left directly in the main right of way. She peered inside: empty. Sally continued to walk toward the main security gate, passing five more cars abandoned in the street.

At the gate, she greeted the security guard, who said, “It’s something, ain’t it, ma’am?”

Still not quite figuring out what was going on, she merely nodded. She gestured to the stairs which led up to the observation deck, an on-base euphemism for the machine gunner nest at the gate. The guard nodded his assent. “Go right ahead, ma’am.”

Sally climbed the steep steps, and nodded to the private manning the machine gun. “Ma’am,” he said, standing to attention.
 

“At ease,” Sally said, “I just came for a look-see.”

Sally peered out — seeing both Patuxent Freeway nearby and the Baltimore Washington Freeway in the distance. Cars were stationary on both highways. They were spread too far apart for it to be a traffic jam. Just stopped.

“What happened, private?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. About twenty minutes ago all the vehicles just stopped. Civilian and military. I seen a couple of old diesel Jeeps go by on the base, but that’s about it. Ma’am.”

Sally stood for a minute, then headed back to the building, double-time. She arrived at the USCYBERCOM control room breathing a little fast.

“General, I’ve seen it. But what does it mean? Ma’am?”

“That’s what I want you to find out. All civilian communications and vehicles are down right now. Keep the infected bases quarantined, but pull your people off segmenting the bases. Instead I want you to look at the virus. I want to understand what it’s doing. I want you to tell me how we can counter it. Surely we have something in our arsenal for that. And get some coffee sent around, I think your people need it.”

Sally looked at her squad, which in fact had been on duty for eight hours, and should normally go off-shift now. They’d need some coffee and some breakfast to boot.

“Yes, ma’am, we’ll get right on it.”

*
 
*
 
*

Leon punched the button for the elevator for the third time before giving up. Last year the ancient elevator had been broken more often than not, and after months of ongoing repairs, the superintendent replaced it with a brand new model. Leon shook his head as he went for the stairs. This was the first time the new elevator had been broken. He walked down the six flights.

As he emerged onto the side street where his apartment was located, something just didn’t feel right. He looked around curiously as he slowly walked toward school. The streets were crowded with people like usual. People walking to work, people waiting for the bus, people driving. But their voices were loud, almost strident. Suddenly it hit Leon: there were no car noises. None of the cars in the street were moving. He peered down the street. Maybe one up front was broken down?

Leon continued his walk, ignoring the adults, and turned onto Flatlands Avenue, a big multilane street. And there he stopped, mouth open in astonishment. As far as he could see, Flatlands Avenue had turned into a giant parking lot. He looked in both direction. Strangely, it didn’t appear to be a traffic jam. The cars were spread out. A few were stopped at unusual angles. Adults milled about in the street and on the sidewalks, leaving their car doors open. City buses sat just as quiet and motionless as the cars.