Mike Ryan followed MPS-Ali as it skipped from ISP to ISP with no apparent logic, sometimes backtracking, then going sideways, but eventually reaching the next Internet Service Provider.
Ryan was amazed at how his expert system had adapted to the communications disaster plaguing not just the United States but the entire world. Over a period of just under six hours, the rogue military assembler had managed to disable the majority of communications and navigation satellites in orbit, nearly halting all phone and video links and also air and sea traffic heavily dependant on GPS technology.
But the rogue construct had not disabled all of the communications links. It had left just enough of them operational for it to maneuver unhampered—and anyone or anything else with the capability to recognize the complex algorithms required to go from Point A to Point B. Fortunately, MPS-Ali possessed such capability, and it was this AI engine that now allowed Ryan to reach the very first one of the traps that he had laid out for the rogue military construct.
Ryan had been somewhat surprised that it had taken the rogue construct this long before finally going for the nuclear plants, but he now realized the methodical approach of this cyberdemon. It had first taken out the communication and transportation infrastructure before attacking its primary objective.
MPS-Ali got them to the core of the Temelín Nuclear Power Plant, where he verified that the Turing inhibitor filming the AI remained undisturbed. The flagship nuclear plant of the Czech Republic continued to generate two thousand megawatts of electricity, two-thirds being consumed by its own country and the rest sold to Austria and Italy.
But beyond the operational limits of Temelín’s network, past an outer shell designed by Ryan to look like the Temelín network, operated another artificial intelligence engine, which Ryan had programmed to react just like the original.
Floating among a sea of stars, Mike Ryan watched with satisfaction as the rogue military construct, represented by a charcoal cloud, alive with sheet lightning, interfaced through a lavender funnel to the blue-green glow of the Turing code filming Ryan’s decoy AI, which was currently feeding the rogue assembler misinformation regarding the status of the plant.
The cybersword cuts both ways, he thought.
While the rogue military construct was fully engaged with the decoy AI, the core of its system became directly exposed to an attack that its logic could never have predicted based on the way it had disabled the Internet. All of its systems informed Assy that it was impossible for any Homo sapiens to have predicted this attack and thus it failed to take any preventive measures, dedicating its entire digital self to triggering a nuclear meltdown at Temelín.
And it was at this moment, as the false nuclear core reading exceeded two thousand degrees centigrade and threatened to crack an imaginary containment building, that MPS-Ali infected it with a virus.