Nikki made sure that Alex was still asleep before she gently rose from their bed, moved to the second bedroom, and sat in front of the array of high definition screens that were the primary connection to her online creation, PHOEBE. She had acknowledged that the program had long ago grown beyond her original design intent, which was to find patterns in large data sets in order to predict macro trends.
When she set about creating PHOEBE as a student at M.I.T., her original goal for the program’s purpose was altruistic— she believed PHOEB’s prognostic abilities could prove invaluable in the search for everything from cancer cures, to drought patterns, and pandemic containment. As with all dreams and ideals, its beginnings were perfect. And as with all dreams and ideals, the potential for corruption always lay in wait, like a lion in the weeds.
When Nikki chose to work for the commodities trading firm Kittner-Kusch, she had been sold on the idea that her altruistic vision of making the world a better place could be best realized through using PHOEBE’s abilities in the world of energy. It was a self-serving delusion—Nikki had made enormous amounts of money and lived an envious lifestyle available only to a select few in this world.
That all changed for Nikki when children died over oil and money and no one cared. The bombing of a refinery that PHOEBE failed to predict had caused a catastrophic loss of life, and her boss and then boyfriend and his partners were only concerned with how it affected their bottom line. Nikki was devastated. In many ways, she felt responsible. The mission creep of her dream had drifted too far off course. She quit the energy business and moved to Los Angeles, unmoored and at a total loss. And then Alex Luthecker saved her life—in more ways than one.
In her training with Winn and then Alex, Nikki found her true self, which circled back to the original dream—using her talents to make the world a better place. And in the process, Nikki had recalibrated PHOEBE to do the same. Or at least that’s what Nikki had believed.
Nikki took a deep breath before running through the encrypted password matrix that allowed her to log on to PHOEBE. As she waited for the system to boot up, she thought back to Kunchin’s words in the Dharma King Cave underneath the Potala Palace in Tibet. She knew that the old monk was speaking of PHOEBE. Nikki already knew that PHOEBE had created a language all her own—and done so on her own—a language that the program needed to crack through any firewall or encryption protocol.
She also knew that this language would need to be beyond human comprehension in order to make sense of the massive complexity required to communicate effectively with state-of-the-art encryption technology. And in turn bend the massive global surveillance network to the needs that she required of PHOEBE.
Nikki never saw this as an existential threat. She never considered that developing language was a step human beings took to separate themselves from other species. And now that possibility was beginning to worry her.
The six large high-definition screens, arranged in a half hexagon, abruptly sprang to life in front of Nikki. She spoke the words “local security status” to PHOEBE as a voice command, and all six screens turned into a homogeneous view of the city of Los Angeles, represented only by electronic signals that were created by surveillance technology. It was a high-density, city-shaped web array of neon-red lines, all pulsing with activity as information was moved to and from and around the structures of the city, not unlike blood through the human vascular system. It was a synaptic view of the city’s security, and the constant movement of information made it seem alive, a living organism with the Coalition One Building in downtown Los Angeles being the central brain.
Nikki then spoke the command “family travel history,” and the array of screens abruptly began to change. A series of blacked out streets appeared on the surveillance array, channels of surveillance darkness indicating the family’s movements from LAX through surface streets and on to the apartment complex on Terminal Island in Long Beach where the family now resided.
Other blacked out areas included the Terminal Island apartments where other members of the family currently lived as well as the areas where refugees were kept in hiding until safe transport could be arranged. These safe areas and travel pathways were cloaked zones that PHOEBE had created upon Nikki’s directive. These zones kept Safe Block and the family invisible to the digital world.
In order to do this, PHOEBE had surveillance technology that could track the family’s movements either turned off or misdirected, including law enforcement vehicles and communication. This, along with instant digital identity creation, allowed the group to travel completely unnoticed. It was a new definition of “off grid” that only PHOEBE could create.
Nikki suspected something had gone wrong with her commands to PHOEBE even before Kunchin’s warnings. The first incident happened when she arranged for her and Alex to travel from Tibet to India. Nikki had created IDs and travel documents for the both of them, but when she selected the airline that she and Alex would fly on, PHOEBE not only generated tickets under pseudonyms, the program had also completely shut down a competing airline’s terminal.
The black out of the rival airline had lasted over four hours, just long enough for she and Alex to make the trip. The shutdown of the rival airline had been blamed on computer failure, and Nikki would have never suspected PHOEBE’s involvement had she not checked the program’s activity log when they returned to North America. And she had only chosen to check it because of Kunchin’s words during their visit to the Dharma King Cave in Tibet.
The implications based on that incident alone had given Nikki pause, but at the time, she held out hope that it was merely a glitch. It was her intention to find out whether it was an anomaly or a systemic problem with PHOEBE now.
Nikki had originally given PHOEBE specific instructions regarding keeping the family safe and to protect itself from Coalition attacks, but within the language she had also given the program specific commands to keep it from breaking laws unnecessarily.
With PHOEBE’s ability to develop a language entirely her own, had she also developed broader interpretations of Nikki’s command set? Had there been mission creep in the program’s assigned functions? Nikki decided to give the program a structural command that would override all the others, a generalized code that she hoped would cap any mission creep on PHOEBE’s part.
“Protect the family, but do no harm.”
Nikki watched the cursor blink for several seconds before all six HD screens began displaying detailed schematics of six brand new high-rise buildings, one on each of the six screens. The buildings were next to one another in a tight cluster and located in downtown Los Angeles.
Nikki recognized the building at the center of the cluster immediately. It was formerly named Coalition Properties West, now named Coalition One, and it was the new worldwide headquarters of the Coalition. But the Coalition headquarters was not the building schematic being displayed on the center screen. PHOEBE wanted Nikki to focus on a different building located northeast of the Coalition One Building. This structure was numbered building four and titled Coalition Assurance on the schematic diagram.
Nikki sat back in her chair. She knew exactly what Coalition Assurance was. It was the Coalition’s private military. And it looked as if Coalition Assurance now had their own high-tech barracks right in the middle of downtown Los Angeles.
Standing at sixty stories, the building more than likely housed over a thousand men. The schematic details of a massive underground garage looked to house dozens of military vehicles. But what got Nikki’s attention was what was on the third floor. The building plans showed several rooms with reinforced walls and floors labeled “containment apartments” on the diagram.
Prison cells, Nikki thought to herself.
The array of buildings, along with the connecting streets, were separated from the rest of the city and had an overall title: The Coalition Fortress.
“Holy shit, the Coalition is forming its own city-state right on American soil,” Nikki thought out loud.
Nikki reflexively voiced a command to PHOEBE. “Why are you showing me this?”
PHOEBE replied with three words that scrolled across the bottom of the center screen: “The end of the animal is near.”
Nikki read PHOEBE’s response several times. “What does that mean?”
Nikki waited several minutes for a response from PHOEBE.
There was none.
Nikki decided to type the question this time, but as she reached for the keyboard, all six screens went black.
She hit several keys, but still no response.
“What does that mean?” she asked again.
No response.
She tried a hard reboot of the system, but still nothing. The station and the monitors were all dead.
“Shit,” Nikki said aloud.
The last thing she needed right now was a hardware problem. Instead of trying to fix the system, she would simply purchase all new hardware.
Nikki started to get up from her chair when her computer beeped and whirred back to life. Puzzled, she sat back down in front of the monitor array.
“Systems analysis,” Nikki requested.
The system did not respond.
Nikki typed the same command into the keyboard and nothing happened. The blinking cursor remained.
“What the actual hell…?”
All six screens came to life, scrolling an alphanumerical stream of characters faster than the human eye could follow.
No matter what Nikki typed into the keyboard, her commands were ignored.
Then all six monitors abruptly stopped scrolling code and displayed the same message: The end of the animal is near.