“Well. Turned the world on its head, didn’t you, Ajaya?”
“Just trying to warn the people, Cade,” I said.
“Yes, but did you have to be so damned dramatic about it?”
I shrugged. The lights were warm and the setting was unusual, but I didn’t feel too out of place. Unlike Cade’s other two guests. As if reading my mind, Cade turned back to the camera.
“There wasn’t much point in introducing Ajaya, as I doubt there are many people left on planet Earth who don’t know who he is. But allow me to introduce my other guests. First, the commander of the Zone Defense Instant Response Strike Force, a man who has been very visible lately, Major Cal Yoshida. And with him from the Zone Defense research laboratories, Dr. Aaron Ewald, who is an expert in the field of robotics, particularly the drones that inhabit the island of Manhattan. Welcome, gentlemen.”
“Thank you,” Yoshida said, very formal. Like he was getting ready to face a battlefront.
“It’s a pleasure,” Aaron said, smiling. I could see a light sheen of perspiration on his forehead.
“So, before we get back to Mr. Big Shot—and I mean that literally, Ajaya—let’s talk, Major, about what’s currently happening inside the Zone.”
“Sounds good,” Yoshida said, a little wary.
“So the last Spider CThree is dead, killed in a major battle, which this show was excited to participate in, at least to the extent of sending in the drone swarms of our contestants. What happens to the remaining Zone drones now that their leadership is dead?” Cade asked.
“Without a CThree to direct them, there is immediately much less coordination among them,” Yoshida said, somewhat more visibly comfortable now that he was on familiar ground. “They can work in small groups and will communicate information across their network, but there isn’t any single model that can replace the strategic capacity of the CThrees.”
“Which should make them much easier to kill, one would hope?” Cade asked, leaning forward a bit.
“Yes. And in that vein, Zone Defense has launched a new initiative. The drone you witnessed Mr. Gurung shoot off of over the streets of the Zone was a prototype for a new, state-of-the-art model known as the Decimator. Yesterday we sent thirty-five brand new Decimators into the Zone to hunt down and kill off the remaining drones. The world saw what just one Decimator was capable of. Imagine thirty-five.”
“Exciting, Major, but as they say, it’s worthless without pictures. You have pictures?”
Yoshida actually allowed himself to smile. “We have pictures.”
All of us turned to the monitor on the wall behind us. Immediately, high-quality video showed multiple Decimators zipping through the concrete canyons of Manhattan, shooting UAVs out of the air and destroying ground bots with precision e-mag shots or, in the case of Tigers and at least two Tank-Killers, air-to-ground Goliath micro missiles.
“Impressive, Major. How long will it take to eliminate the remaining drones?” Cade asked.
Aaron jumped in and took the question. “We estimate less than eight thousand drones remained active when the final CThree was disabled. The Decimators work around the clock and, according to our metrics, they are destroying, as a group, an average of two-hundred-plus drones a day. At that pace, we think the Zone will be effectively cleared within two months.”
“That’s an estimate based on initial success rates,” Yoshida hastened to add. “We expect the kill rate to decline as the remaining drones begin to favor survival mode over attack mode.”
“They have a survival mode?” Cade asked.
“Certainly,” Aaron said, eager to get the stage. “Unless deliberately programmed out of a unit, virtually all drones have a survival mode. Even your news drones,” he said, waving a hand dismissively and without any concept that he might be denigrating their professional equipment. “Military drones have a fallback survival protocol that kicks in when the odds are greatly against achieving their mission. The whole run away and live to fight another day concept.”
“So you’re saying that the drones will go to ground, so to speak, as they compute ever-decreasing probabilities of winning against your Decimators?”
“Exactly. Well put,” Aaron said.
“But will we even still be here in two months?” Cade asked, his question directed at both Yoshida and Aaron.
“What do you mean?” Aaron asked, suddenly uncertain of himself. Yoshida, on the other hand, had gone to his poker face.
“I mean exactly what I said. Will the human race even be here in two months? Ajaya has endured enormous personal pain and threat to his life to bring us warning of what’s happening. Now that he has, the signs are impossible to miss. Let me read a few to you: all eight desalinization plants in Abu Dhabi just stopped functioning two days ago. Those plants provide almost all the drinking water that the country uses, although it does have ground water wells. In India, a maintenance bot went rogue inside the country’s biggest solar farm, wiping out almost all of the plant’s electrical production. In a similar vein, an automated Russian submarine drone erroneously launched a torpedo into the Nord Stream natural gas lines, blowing both of them to pieces. It will take well over eight months to fix. There is no way that vital heating energy will be back in place when winter hits Europe. People will freeze to death. See what I’m getting at here?”
“You are implying that Mr. Gurung’s theory of viral malware disruption of expert systems is the cause behind these unrelated events,” Aaron said, leaning forward to take up the challenge.
“Oh, I’m not implying it. I’m saying it. Can you look me in the eye and tell me you’ve no knowledge of the COBWEB virus?”
Aaron blinked.
“So you do know about it? And the fact that the final Spider uploaded its own core programming into the internet as it died?
“Just a few days ago, although it seems like a lifetime, Ajaya was in the act of explaining a concept when the bomb in his neck almost killed him with a pulse of pain,” Cade said. “He didn’t get to finish his thoughts, but we got the message—loud and clear. So we dug into it. Ajaya, you were just about to talk about system tipping points, as in societal and economic systems reaching a point where they collapse, correct?”
“Yes, Cade, exactly,” I said.
“At this stage, we have almost nine billion people on the planet. All of our systems of agriculture, energy, medicine, and water supply are based on expert AI technology. Oh, and all of these vital supply systems have almost no excess capacity. If we have large crop failures in the US, people will die in other parts of the world. Oh look, here’s a story about US crops being erroneously sprayed with a pesticide that contained herbicide. People will die. The gas pipelines? Winter will come and people will die. Almost two billion of the earth’s population don’t live near potable water sources. If Abu Dhabi’s desalinization systems have failed, do you suppose others have too? Dying of thirst is a horrible thing.”
“You are correct,” Aaron said. “Those things are horrible. People will die. It’s even possible that the COBWEB malware was the cause. But as you just mentioned, we have a population of almost nine billion. Those events, while unimaginably tragic, are not enough to make us extinct, or even close to extinct.”
“By themselves? No. But they are continuing. And with each one, we get closer to a tipping point. One where society collapses and we take ourselves out. Starving people don’t just lay down to die, they fight for food. They pick up weapons and fight. If their leaders get in the way, they overthrow them. Then they seize what they need to survive. But the people they take it from fight back. Dr. Ewald, we’ve had two World Wars. We won’t survive a third. And that’s not counting if the malware disrupts two opposing militaries’ communications and precipitates an incident of war. Or, heaven forbid, if this rogue artificial intelligence finds some way to activate major weapons of mass destruction on its own.”
Aaron’s mouth was open but no words had yet come out. Yoshida spoke before the scientist could find his voice.
“Those are far-flung possibilities, Cade, but yes, they are possible. Which is why we are fighting back,” the major said.
“What are you doing to stop this?” Cade asked.
“First, despite any allegations to the contrary,” Yoshida said, glancing my way, “we’ve been working on COBWEB since it first appeared. A collaboration between various government organizations has resulted in an effective security software patch to guard against the virus. That patch is being disseminated around the world as we speak.”
“But what about already infected systems, Major? How do we identify them and clean them before they wreak havoc?”
“That’s an issue we are currently working on,” Yoshida said.
“Hmm. That’s not reassuring, is it, Ajaya? What do you suggest?” Cade asked, turning to me.
“Well, we should be taking expert systems offline as fast as we can. Go back to before we had widespread AI. Then we can test, clean, and re-activate them when we have the proper fixes,” I said.
“Easier said than done, Ajaya,” Cade admonished. “Some of those old backup methods are either gone completely or extremely difficult to put back in place.”
“Oh, it’s going to be painful, Cade. Just like those two World Wars you mentioned. People had to face sacrifice for the greater good. Think of this as a world war against hostile AI,” I said.
“What about fixing the problem? And what about the rogue Spider’s programming, out there spreading itself all over?” he asked.
“Cade, as I’ve mentioned before, I just kill drones. You need to talk to an expert in the field,” I said, nodding toward Aaron.
Cade looked at Aaron. “Great idea. Let’s do just that,” he said, shaking his head and holding his hand up in Aaron’s face when the scientist opened his mouth to speak. “We have a special guest on the line. Harper, are you there?” he asked, looking up toward the ceiling dramatically.
“Hi, Cade. Yes, I’m here. Thanks for having me call in,” a familiar voice said.
“Harper Wilks, everybody, the young cyber expert Ajaya has mentioned a time or ten,” Cade said.
“She doesn’t even have a degree in the field,” Aaron protested.
“Oh? It’s my understanding that Harper grew up actually inside the Zone. That she was trained by her genius mother and that she’s had more time interacting with computers through advanced neuroprothesis than maybe anyone alive. Is it true, Doctor Ewald, that she just simply got up and walked out of a secure and guarded cell inside Zone Defense itself? And that no one in the entire Homeland Security or national intelligence apparatus has been able to track or find her since she left? Those are pretty good credentials, if you ask me,” Cade said.
“Thanks, Cade. Hey Ajaya, what’s up?”
“Hi, Harper. Thanks for my gifts.”
“Well, you sent one of them right back to help me, so you’re welcome and thank you too.”
“You do know that you’re hosting an FBI Most Wanted felon on your show, right?” Yoshida asked.
“Sure. Freedom of speech, Major, freedom of speech. You’re welcome to try to track her signals, but she doesn’t appear worried,” Cade said.
“Actually, they’ve gotten close a time or two, Cade, so kudos to them. But yeah, good luck pushing this signal back to me.”
“So Harper, do you have any answers for the questions I asked the major and Dr. Ewald?”
“As the old adage goes, sometimes you gotta fight fire with fire. If you’re facing a rogue AI and its algorithmic codes, use another AI against it. I’ve been doing just that from out here. I borrowed some code from Ajaya’s pet drone when we were inside the Zone. After a lot of work, I have isolated and enhanced a subroutine that may be the answer to COBWEB. At least, I think it is. As we speak, it is being sent across the world to every major IT department pretty much everywhere.”
“What about Plum Blossom itself?”
“Well, Ajaya sent his Rikki into the system after it. I’ve been working with Rikki to track and counter it.”
“Will it work?”
“Cade, I would love nothing more than to reassure you and your audience that everything is well in hand, but I can’t. Nobody’s ever had a battle like this before. As Ajaya said, we need to remove computers from the networks, isolate them from contamination, cut the phone lines, so to speak. And Cade, Plum Blossom is a mean motherfucker, sorry for the language but there it is. I will say, however, I’ve never come across an AI like Rikki. Fast and adaptive like nothing I’ve seen before. More adaptive than the Spiders, even. So there’s hope.”
Cade, Yoshida, and Aaron were looking at me. Cade wore a smile, Yoshida was unreadable, and Aaron was shooting lasers with his eyes.
“One thing, though,” I said. “We have to keep it together or we’ll do Plum Blossom’s job for it. Right now, the average American is up in arms for change. I get it. I’m pissed too. I mean, there’s already been, like, seventeen members of Congress who’ve resigned their offices. But we can’t turn the whole thing over a hundred percent or we won’t get anything done… and we’ll lose.”
“So what are you saying, Ajaya?” Cade asked.
“I think we should continue the investigations and find those people at fault, but we also need to do everything in our power to stop the extinction of our species.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I know nothing about the political sociological stuff, so I’ll leave that to the experts. But I know about survival. We’ve already talked about the first step: take the AIs out of circulation and move our vital systems back to more primitive tech. And harden food storage sites, medical facilities, the power grid, and our other vital energy supplies. A runaway self-driving tractor trailer could utterly ruin a power station or a hospital.
“Next, we need to stockpile supplies and create a distribution system that doesn’t rely on AI to get food, water, and medicine to the areas that need it most.
“And third, every citizen of the world needs to prepare for disruption and sacrifice. I don’t mean hoarding supplies and hunkering down in an every-person-for-themselves scenario. That will kill most of us faster than anything. No, we need to prepare ourselves and our families, be ultra-mindful of any kind of waste, be ready to lend a hand to our neighbors, invest in independence.”
“That’s all fine to say, Ajaya, but what the hell does that look like?” Cade asked.
“Cade, I’ve spent more time inside the Zone than anyone alive. Do you have any idea of how many people died on Drone night and in the days after because they were helpless to save themselves? People ran each other over, people walked right into kill zones because they were so focused on their phones and their technology that they couldn’t think for themselves. A Crab bot, Cade, is smaller than an old-fashioned toaster oven. I can kill one with a fire extinguisher or a garbage can. Yet I found multiple bodies of people who were killed together by a single Crab because they froze or panicked, or most commonly, weren’t aware of their surroundings. We need to reach back and remember our ancestors’ mindsets. The people who lived off the land and weren’t always at the top of the food chain. Because, Cade, we’re not at the top of this food chain and it’s our own damned fault.”