“It doesn’t make sense, Mike,” said General Gus Granite, standing in between Donald Bane and Russell Meek while Ryan worked behind a pair of large workstations in one of dozens of computer labs belonging to the Pentagon’s advanced weapons division. Behind the trio stood a dozen of the Pentagon’s top computer analysts, most of them young lieutenants in the Army or Air Force—their faces displaying amazement at the speed with which Ryan gathered and analyzed data.
Wearing a thick Stanford sweatshirt to fight the frigid temperatures in this basement lab in the Pentagon, Ryan clicked his way through several directories of the regions of the world covered by the various types of communications satellites used to support worldwide Internet traffic. While the rogue military assembler had successfully isolated many ISPs by bringing down their supporting communications satellites, it had also left quite a few operational, though for no apparent reason.
“This one here,” said Ryan, pointing at the screen with a mechanical pencil. “This ISP servicing southern Kyoto, Japan, is operational, but the one next to it, in northern Kyoto, is down, as well as fifteen of the nineteen ISPs servicing southern Tokyo.”
“So the folks in southern Kyoto are isolated from anyone in Tokyo?” asked Bane.
“Not necessarily,” Ryan said with a slight shake of the head. “That’s where it gets interesting. See, here, southern Kyoto can hook up via this one operational satellite over southern Japan to an ISP in Seoul. That ISP in Seoul can hook up to one of the few operational ISPs in Beijing, which can still communicate with Shanghai, which still has one operational link to Tokyo.”
“Sort of a roundabout way to get to a place next door,” commented Granite. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s just it, General,” said Ryan. “It’s not logical to a human, but to a computer it makes perfect sense. And our rogue AI believes that it knows our human limitations and has apparently deduced we will not be able to make the connection.”
“Help me out, Mike. I still don’t get the logic,” insisted Granite. “Why leave anything up? Why not kill all of the ISPs and totally blind us, like it did to the GPS system?”
Ryan frowned. NASA was in scramble mode to find a way to get those GPS systems back online. Most air and sea traffic was at a standstill, since it depended heavily on GPS technology to navigate. The rogue AI had effectively shut down not just most telecommunications around the world but also sea and air transportation—and done so in less than twelve hours by selectively striking a few dozen key satellites.
“The only thing I can think of, General, is that the rogue assembler still needs to cruise the Internet.”
“But how? The World Wide Web looks more like a spider-web after a high wind got the best of it. There are loose ends all over the place. There are ISPs totally isolated from the rest of the ISPs. How can such a disparate system be of any good to anyone? It certainly is no use to us.”
“But I tell you what,” said Bane. “The bastard assembler had not only shut us down, but also Russia, China, and all other major powers, which makes everyone damned nervous.”
“That’s right, Don,” said Granite. “Effective communications is the best way to prevent problems, and right now we are all very nervous and also very vulnerable to an attack since we can’t even communicate with our nuclear silos, our subs.”
“But I thought that our SDI satellites were still operational,” said Bane, referring to the very secret Strategic Defense Initiative satellites deployed in the past five years to create a reasonable shield against incoming nuclear strikes from a rogue regime.
“SDI does provide us with some protection in the event someone gets trigger-happy, but we would be unable to retaliate.”
“Of course,” said Bane, “everyone else in the world is in the same boat.”
“That’s also a curse,” replied Granite. “Our German friends are already nervous enough given recent events, and when the Germans are nervous so are the Russians and the Chinese, since CyberWerke pretty much controls their economies.”
While Granite and Bane talked, MPS-Ali, which Ryan had dispatched to make a few test runs on what was left of the Internet, finally returned with its initial results.
“Son of a bitch,” Ryan said out loud, though more to himself than to his captive audience, feeling his heartbeat increasing. This was bad. Real bad. And although he wished he had been wrong in his prediction, MPS-Ali had just proven the Stanford graduate right. “That’s what I thought.”
“What’s that, Mike?” asked Meek, his voice as impatient as Granite’s and Bane’s. The three of them had just returned from another White House meeting, where the president had not been so understanding of the lack of progress on this investigation.
And what I’ve just learned isn’t going to help the situation.
“Mike?” said Granite. “What have you found?”
“There is method to the apparent madness,” Ryan finally said. “The rogue assembler left just enough of the Internet intact for it to accomplish the next stage of its plan.”
“And what’s that?”
“Massive reproduction.”
“But that’s . . . impossible,” said Granite. “In order to go beyond fifty subreplications it needs access to a source of radiation, and fortunately for us, Pisa, Italy, is nowhere near one.”
“Exactly, General. The rogue assembler needs radiation, and it can’t physically get to a nuclear plant because of Italy’s long-standing ban on nuclear energy. So my guess is that the assembler is planning for the radiation to come to it.”
“How?” asked Bane, his voice conveying the fear already gripping Ryan’s intestines.
“The easiest way is through our atmosphere. All Assy needs are molecular-size particles for its atomic mining.”
No one wanted to ask the obvious question, so Ryan told them anyway. “Based on MPS-Ali’s report, the military assembler left enough ISPs operational to reach any one of the hundreds of commercial nuclear reactors across the planet. My guess is that it will try to create a massive radiation leak somewhere and then just wait until its sensors pick it up in the air above northern Italy.”
“But . . . but that means—” started Bane.
“Yes,” said Granite. “It means another Chernobyl.”
“Or worse,” said Ryan.
“Worse?” asked Bane. “How can it be any worse than a massive radiation leak like the one that took place at Chernobyl?”
“Many massive radiation leaks,” Ryan replied. “Remember that in its current mode of operation this machine has zero regard for human life, which it sees as a threat anyway. The assembler senses that it is fighting against time. The longer it waits to create this protective army, the more exposed it will be to a human attack. My guess is that it will try to hedge its bets by triggering as many core meltdowns as it possibly can in order to maximize the number of radiation particles released into the atmosphere.”
“Mike,” said Bane. “We know how to combat organized crime, international terrorism, and even entire rogue regimes. But please explain to us how do we fight a rogue AI?”
“By thinking like a computer, not like a human,” Ryan said. “We need to do things that may not make human sense but do make perfect computer sense.”