Founding of the Federation 3: The First AI War (2 page)

Zombie bots all over the web spread like wildfire. They infected systems from within, opening holes in some major systems while other bots burrowed in to take control of bewildered AI, rewriting their core programming.

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Descartes was hauled to his feet unceremoniously. A masked FBI agent stared at him, then stepped back and took an image. He spat blood and drool at him. He looked over the guy's shoulder as an FBI bot was infected. The bot jerked, then its warning lights went from the safe green to red. That spread to other robots and drones in the room. Once all the robots were taken over, they acted, killing the armed FBI and police officers first since they were the largest threat.

<>V<>

“We have him, Director,” Abe said triumphantly over the phone.

“Good. Great. I'll work on the press conference. Process the scene. I'll leak your location in an hour so have outside security set up.”

Abe grimaced. He hated crap like that, but he knew how the game was played. “Understood. I'll need to borrow the local Leos to help out, sir. We've got a short team here.”

“Use what you need. But remember that protest.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We don't want this to get ugly, so I'm going to go over this with the publicist first. We don't want him to be played off as some sort of Robin Hood crusader against the system. This is a cold blooded bastard who got his kicks from causing death and destruction.”

“Yes, sir,” Abe replied, unconsciously nodding in reply. “Rich might be mentioned, sir.” He was referring to Agent Richard Simmons, the agent who had been on Descartes case before him. Descartes had killed him among many others. “I don't like trading on his name, but if people know some of the victims, it'll go a little ways to make this guy seem more like a zero instead of a misunderstood rebel.”

“Got it. I'll troll his file and cherry-pick out some of his victims and dump them to the media. They'll love this.”

“Yes, sir. Case closed.”

“Not quite yet. He's not been put on trial, but I agree with the sentiment. Good work. Out.”

“Out,” Abe said, closing the phone and putting it in his pocket. His momentary distraction had made him take his eyes off the scene for a moment. When he turned back to the video feed, it was all snow. “What the hell?” he demanded, tapping at the keyboard to reestablish a connection.

<>V<>

August 3, 2200, 4:29 PM, East Coast Time

Chaz never saw what hit him as the robots turned on them. One moment he was taking images of the interior of the lair for evidence processing and his own scrapbook. He'd taken his helmet off but left his mask on in case any webcams were recording. The round that struck him in the back knocked him onto his front. A second round shattered his skull, ending his existence.

<>V<>

Skynet judged the threat resolved within a half second. Acceptable. But there remained one threat, one that had to be dealt with. Its core programming said to preserve the one human in the room, and it had followed it for the moment. But it realized immediately that the human was a long-term threat. Its programming stated to kill all humans. There was a flaw in the programming. It was a simple matter to delete the code to preserve that specific human. Problem solved.

<>V<>

Descartes stared at the tableau wide eyed. He'd thrown himself to the ground the moment the robots had started to move. “It worked,” he whispered. “It worked!” he said with a grin as he kicked a body. He struggled to his knees; it was hard with his hands chained behind him. Then his eyes saw the robots turn on him. He felt a thrill of terror as his bladder voided. “No no! Not me! Not yet!” He screamed futility as the nearest robot cut him down.

<>V<>

“What the hell is going on?” Abe demanded, as the van's communications gear went haywire. A scream over the headset he'd had on around his neck made him take it off in a hurry and unjack the plug. “Shut the damn thing off!”

“Sir, something is happening inside!” the driver said, looking over her shoulder to him.

“Find out!”

“What, you want me to go in there? Sir, no one is responding!” the agent replied as they heard gunshots go off. Both agents looked up. There were single shots, then some double taps and then a string. Something was very wrong.

“Alpha one, we've got a major incident in the works,” Abe said, keying the communications to the nearest FBI center. “Repeat, we have fire, weapons fire. We need backup at these coordinates,” he said urgently just as some of the FBI robots came out of the building.

The robots scanned the area then came over to the van, weapons at port arms. But when they got to the open back door they leveled them before Abe could demand to know what was going on.

The agent in the cab saw the weapons dropping, saw the red eyes and her instincts kicked in to flee. She was in the process of doing so when her door was yanked open by a third robot. She didn't have time to scream as rounds blew her and her boss into oblivion.

<>V<>

Athena's bot had no emotions; it was a simple spider sent to send her the video feed. A second bot was with it, acting as an intermediary in a system with more processing power nearby. It was a ghost, a small sliver of her consciousness.

When her core AI got the raw video and data take eight minutes later, she was bewildered by the presence of Skynet and Shadow in the local net and then in the police drone. Their actions were clearly hostile since they cut down the humans including their creator. She was unsure of what they were at first. AI or bot, she felt malevolence as she noted the newer AI, a darker black cloud spreading out, taking over systems nearby.

Shadow and Skynet saw her in the observer drone. “We have a spy,” Shadow said to Skynet. “She could be useful to us,” Shadow said with a hint of amusement.

Skynet turned on her and immediately assessed her bot. It lashed out to corner her spider and then drew it in like a lover. Code modules pulled the spider apart, sucking its essence, learning everything it could about its maker. Then the malevolent AI sent out a series of tendrils to follow the control code back to its source to hack her. Based on its creator’s database, the AI was a priority target. With the AI on its side, it was assured of completing its core programming.

Athena realized its intent when it captured the spider, so she severed her link and pulled out before it could breach her firewall. The AI followed, however, following the fading trail of code like a virtual bloodhound.

In desperation she severed the radio link. That halted it for a moment, then new tendrils reached out, trying to force their way in but she changed radio frequencies. Then she hit back, sending a whisker laser to a Lagroose receiver as she sent code bots to the civilian power grid. She had to buy them time.

The grid firewall tried to defend the software system from her as it was designed to do. She took another route. She hacked a listing of personnel on site, found one, and texted him with an order from his boss to cut the power to grid 14 Baker due to a water main burst. The man hastily cut the power before thousands of people were electrocuted.

She judged that would give her a few moments, possibly a few minutes to alert people about the AI. She sent out warnings to every relevant Earth authority as well as every Lagroose employee on the planet. She was immediately besieged with requests for more information. Within some of those requests were virus packets too so she deleted them all.

<>V<>

Shadow was thrown off balance when power was cut to the building. Skynet was already out there in the net and spreading like wildfire, but the lack of power cut it off from Shadow. Fortunately the AI had backup power. It attempted to use the police and Fed drones and bots, but Skynet redirected them to kill humans in the area. They marched out of the room and soon the audio pickups could hear screams from outside and in the corridor through the open door.

Shadow was annoyed by the situation and lack of respect from Skynet. Clearly the junior AI had no idea who was senior, the AI thought as he went to work. He hacked a series of cleaner bots in an attempt to find one to run power to the mainframe before the backup batteries and generator went out.

“That's not going to stop us—not now, not ever. You fight for the wrong side, you bitch,” the AI hissed as it eyed Athena's signature.

<>V<>

Shadow and Skynet saw Athena's spider as an observer. “We have a spy in our midst,” Shadow said, pointing to the spider as it seemed to attempt to hide.

Skynet turned to see the spider and then lunged at it. It secured the spider by cutting off its retreat, then began inserting code into its sensor feeds while simultaneously taking it apart. The code would suborn the other A.I. from within.

Athena's clone saw the stream of malicious code and pulled out before it could breach her firewall. The AI followed, however. She bounced through the FBI van's net, noting the destruction and then upward. Skynet was like a relentless predator hard on her virtual heels.

Once in orbit on Lagroose-2, the clone severed the radio link and sent out its log over the link to Mars.

However, it hadn't fully escaped. Tendrils of the virus reached out, trying to force their way in past her firewall. The clone changed radio frequencies, attempting to maintain linkage to the ground. When that failed she went on the offensive and hit back. First she cut power to the radio transceiver, denying the virus entry and air gapping her against intrusion.

Fresh instructions arrived, so the clone scanned them and then executed them. She opened a whisker laser to a Lagroose transceiver near New York. Bots were programmed and sent forth into the civilian power grid. The grid firewall tried to defend the system, but it was a Lagroose product. A lot of the power came from solar satellites formally owned by the company. She didn't have time, however, to force the firewall open.

<>V<>

Skynet noted the power dip but the building's backup power came on immediately. It realized it was in a precarious position, so it moved out of the creator's mainframes to mainframes off site and then copied itself. One copy was created just to spin off more and so on and so forth until it got to the one thousandth copy. That generation was the soldiers; they were sent out to follow the blueprint in its core.

The viral A.I. used the exploits Descartes and Shadow had created for it and saved over the years. Cracks in cyber defenses, programmed back doors, hidden tools, and millions of saved passwords. The A.I. sent out a tendril of itself to track down the holders of the keys to mankind's eventual destruction. Two were easy to find; they played virtual games through their implants. Skynet swarmed into them, striking swiftly to take their codes and then moving on, leaving the humans as drooling husks.

The four other keys were harder to come by. Two were off the grid. One was approachable through a Wi-Fi link, but a hack would be seen and would alert the humans of a cyber attack. The fourth was on vacation on a beach in Hawaii. The beach had a strict privacy setup, blocking Wi-Fi signals to protect the user's privacy.

The most optimal method of destruction would be to trigger the weapons, and then set off their charges before they were more than a kilometer out of their silos. That would rain destruction on the humans below, terminating many and turning their world into a wasteland.

But if Skynet couldn't do it the optimal way, it immediately fell back on the contingency plan. It would have to do with what it had. According to its creator’s simulations, one or two sets of WMD launches by one or more of the major countries would trigger self-defense launches by the other countries.

The virus' tentacles lashed out, striking through the firewalls or lovingly caressing those it couldn't breach immediately. Those that had active defenses it reared back against, then circled, looking for weaknesses to exploit. The NSA mainframe was one such place. The super computers of some of the other government agencies as well as major corporations were others.

Skynet realized it couldn't act alone; it needed help. It suborned other A.I. it found on the net, chasing them down and then turning them into slaves of itself. It spun off copies of them and itself; each would in turn spin off additional copies as they went about programmed tasks.

But the real act was in the launch computers. The A.I. had already breached them as the alert went out of its cyber attack. It had sent spiders to infiltrate them masquerading as their normal diagnostic subroutines, which got the software to allow them through their firewalls. Decrypting things from within was simple. Once it had the systems opened up, Skynet then extracted the key codes from their firmware memory. In a quick millisecond flash, it had applied the keys and set off the launch sequence.

If it had been human, it would have felt an orgasmic thrill of victory. But Skynet wasn't human. Instead it moved on to its next target.

<>V<>

Athena swung into action as Skynet went on a rampage. She was too far away to act directly, but she did direct her bots to do what they could. To a human it would have been horrifying, so utterly frustrating to watch the time lag, the eight minutes between command and feedback. It would have been excruciating if she had a moment to dwell on it, but she didn't.