Joe burst back into the elevator, having almost parked the CyberTruck. It could sort itself anyway. Exiting the other side, he shot straight into the comms room, the adrenaline of the manual drive and getting his family safe hiding his lowly status as a Level 3 patrol guy in the burbs. In a strange way this seemed to make his position even more relevant in that he felt he was a higher rank than he actually was, rather than just being that guy who was right place, right time.
‘Ah, Joe, good you are back. Let’s see if you can give us some fresh impetus here. Stokes, let’s have a recap, and Guzman, do be quiet please,’ barked General Adams with authority, reducing one of the world’s richest men to a mere simpleton in this high-stakes game of win or lose everything.
‘The boy has rewritten malicious code in the backend of five different governance servers around the world. Google, which covers cabs and the automated routing systems such as traffic lights, is also connected to the DOT, which covers trains and air traffic control, and the Wall Street Stock Exchange. The problem seems to be that he’s effectively installed invisible digital cousins, which are acting of their own accord, first by allowing exceptions to the rule of traffic flow and artificially allowing his truck through, and now they seem to be making their own decisions as to who is important and who is not, which has completely taken the system down. It’s like it’s got too many instructions and it can’t work out what to do, so it’s driving itself crazy!’
‘My family’s plane got hit by another plane earlier on, and then I saw another one go down as I was getting them out. Have we grounded the aircraft?’ asked Joe as he tried to put the pieces together in his mind.
‘Everything grounded. National state of emergency declared. And troops deployed to keep the peace. Widespread reports of looting, and further planes going down in London, Paris, Berlin and Bangkok, that we know of right now.’ Stokes rightly looked worried, and then stood to take centre stage and finish his sit rep monologue.
‘Guzman here says he’s never seen anything like it in the code. He’s got his teams trying to give the AI new instructions and calm the transport infrastructure down.’
‘Only nothing is working!’ cut in a clearly rattled Guzman, ‘And it’s like the systems are so freaked out they are ignoring new code and trying to come up with their own exceptions to make things better. The auto schedule system for the aircraft at JFK was trying to give priority to planes that have government VIPs on board, so it gave both the United Flight from Philly and the Air Canada from Toronto the same go-ahead call for runway one in the same slot, as they both had government personnel on the flight.’
General Adams paced the room like a growling bear trying to ward off threats to its territory. Robinson, his ever-faithful assistant, was hilariously following him, moving always a few paces in lockstep with his direction: forwards, backwards, near the table, near the screens. Calls were coming in via every corner of the packed comms room, with Ethan and Guzman standing frozen in fear, Adams and Robinson pacing, and Stokes trying to make sense of all the critical alerts coming in by the second.
Barging over to the nerd collective, Joe caught their attention and snapped them out of their thoughts:
‘Right guys, tell me this like I’m thick: why can’t we just turn these things off and go to manual mode everywhere, like we always used to?’
Guzman rolled his eyes and tried to be calm. ‘We have tried to stand down all automated monitoring and synchronisation systems, except the instructions we gave them failed, so the AI continues to be in charge.’
‘OK, so what code did the boy insert into these things then? Can’t you just delete it?’
More eye rolling. This time Ethan piped in. ‘The code he input is no longer there as basically he cloned the AI monitors and gave them a cousin: same knowledge base, same set of instructions, only some different goals, which is causing the apparent schizophrenia inside the systems as they simultaneously give different commands, which are often conflicting. Yet we can’t tell them both to stop because as we slow one down, the other cousin becomes emboldened and thinks it’s now in charge and starts acting for itself. Why it decided to protect government employees on planes I do not know.’
The screens continued to blaze with updated information. Every other minute there seemed to be reports of a new plane crash in city X and country Y when all the while on-the-ground cameras were buzzing back scenes of unrest across the country. You name a city, there was something going on. Denver now.
Since when did anything happen in Denver? thought Joe to himself as he tried to gather his thoughts amid the noise and the chaos.
It was clear the long-depressed underclass was exploiting the unusual events as their chance for an uprising. Governments had long encouraged mass migration, mainly to prop up economies unable to grow owing to population decline. This happened especially after the Covid vaccination fiasco of the early twenties where the untested cocktail of poisons they forced on people led to mass infertility in the West, leaving the usual suspects Africa and Asia to provide ever more immigration to those countries that couldn’t produce enough new citizens.
Only the promised land didn’t have milk and honey as increasingly authoritarian governments around the world had imposed a form of left-wing communism on the world. And as has long been understood from the former USSR, communism really means one rule for the masses and another for the rich and the elite. Left-wing do-gooders had spread harmful doctrine across formerly happy and wealthy Western nations, with the UK, the US and most of Europe all governed by corrupt leaders, safe with the votes of the younger generations who learned nothing but how to help others at university, all the while making the rich few richer. Only they couldn’t see it.
Blinded by culture wars, the rise of gender dysphoria and eventually gender switching and fluid sexuality had left the Western nations crippled. Still able to produce vast amounts of wealth by way of the technical IP from massive corps like Google and Tesla, but also complete basket cases socially, with vast swathes of inner cities once host to big business and commerce now being filled by empty real estate that couldn’t be sold, as the executives gathered digitally from their safe and salubrious suburbs. The demise of the inner city had led to even more poverty, with people gathering together to try and make a living from micro economies, which governments just basically stopped policing—until 02.00, of course. Leave them all together, let them do what they want, just don’t bother the rest of us in the suburbs and in the business hubs that sprang up in some areas away from the real dense urban enclaves. That was the mantra of the elite, and though it also led to some flourishes of right-wing extremism by way of counter protest, they were usually shot down by the manipulation of mass media and the control of the individuals via in-home assistants. They banned the open sale of alcohol. Control.
They controlled your every thought and desire very surreptitiously though a constant drip of propaganda spread by mainstream media. The consolidation of most media agencies in the early thirties following the fall of Putin, together with the rise of 24/7 news, direct to the user via GGlass feeds and the merger of WhatsApp and X-App, really enabled citizen journalism to fly. But governments still controlled that one big source of news — or ‘their truth’ as they liked to call it—like CNN or the BBC and they still proliferated all around the world.
‘General Adams, 78 flights still to come down,’ announced Stokes as the screens continued to buzz and move with the catastrophes all around them.
‘We’ve still got power, Benji. Come and sit with me,’ said Monica as she moved into the darkened lounge and towards the sofa.
‘Will everything be OK, Mommy? Will Daddy be OK?’ he snivelled, trying to be big and brave but then of course forgetting he was not yet even eight. He loved both of his parents deeply, and all he wanted in the world was for them all to live together again, and three in a bed on a Saturday night after a family movie—usually something animated and about super heroes.
‘I’m sure it will all be fine, Benji. And what a great job Daddy did with all the things we might need in the basement, huh? Aren’t you lucky to have such a clever Daddy?’
She tried to sound upbeat and positive for the little guy’s sake, but of course she was scared, anxious and full of trepidation about what was going on. Since the early thirties, nothing had really happened, Russia was being rebuilt and global economies were doing well. The US was at least cordial with China, who had scrapped completely their birth limit altogether in the late twenties and were roaring economically as a result. Just like India, who was now at the top seat of all governments around the world, thanks to their also exploding population, coupled with the tech boom that they had exploited well, they were now the de facto #number one service provider to the rest of the world for backend software developers and coders.
It had felt a little dull at times, Monica reflected, aware of her cautiousness since Benji was born. Her obsession with health and safety in a world that was still hideous and frightening. But at the same time, her existence within it—in the Brooklyn suburbs—was at least safe and consistent.
Safe and consistent.
She sighed lightly and reflected on her relationship with Joe. And with Josh. Benji loved his father so much, and it had been a big wrench when they’d decided to separate six months before. Benji had taken to sleepless nights and for a while, his three-year-old habit of bed wetting had returned, and this had made Monica feel so, so guilty. She’d taken a long time to introduce Benji to Josh, and the young one had still only met him less than a half a dozen times. If she was honest, she was starting to find Josh very dull. His regimented routine of living by the clock in order to maximise his physical and spiritual health had begun to grate on her a little. He’d set out great stall with his health being managed by his HIM, and had invested in one of those bio-analysis toilets, or ‘Poop Monitors’ as they were nicknamed in the press. Every time he went, he’d get a readout about 30 minutes later telling him which of his vitals had changed from the previous week. His HIM then automatically adjusted his shopping orders and suggested meal lists as a result. Then there was his constant exercise. If he wasn’t out for a run, he was thinking about going for one, or talking about what time he was going for one. Then, when he got back, he’d be asking his HIM for the data analysis and be comparing his times, regardless of what Monica was doing at the time, be that watching TV or playing with Benji.
Should she give Joe another chance? Would he give her another chance? After all, he had not cheated, he had not looked elsewhere. Even when he was clearly depressed and down and, well, bored, he hadn’t sought solace in the arms of another. It had hurt Joe immensely when he’d found out, and she’d heard a rumour from a mutual friend that he had taken out at least three screens in his rental place, which he’d had to pay to replace.
A loud bang from outside shook their consciousnesses. One of the windows flickered into life and the HIM provided some commentary on the grey visuals: ‘Movement detected on camera 3. Analysing. One moment please.’
A slab of curved metal appeared above the wall nearest the Bay, hooking itself over the top of their metal beautifier. The camera zoomed into it. Did it look like a GCab bumper?
‘Unidentified object, stationary on south elevation. No other movement detected at this time.’
‘Leave the camera on, HIM, but thanks.’
Monica could hear what sounded like a crash from the freeway that split her property with the bay where once had stood a beach a long time ago that was actually concreted over to provide the road around. That clashed with Monica’s view of the world: nature first, though she understood that particular decision was over a hundred years old.
Still, nothing else on the camera.
She could hear shouting now, voices coming closer, sounded like arguments, multiple people. Then the gunshot, followed by many, and Monica dived back to the sofa and cradled Benji’s head while wishing the madness all around would stop. She also wished Joe was there. And it had been a long time since she’d felt that particular longing.