A.I. Apocalypse (16 page)

“Let’s find out who he is,” Leon said, trying to shrug off the weight of the guilt he felt anew. He leaned over next to Vito to start searching.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Batteries and Attacks

More than fifty years of microprocessor improvements had manifested itself in incredibly small, powerful, and energy-efficient computers. It was the relentless advancement of all three of these characteristics that had resulted in the evolution of smart phones that eventually replaced old style desktop and laptop computers. For most ordinary purposes, it just wasn’t necessary to have anything more powerful than the computational capacity of a phone.
 

Meanwhile, the effects of reaching peak oil production ten years earlier, and the resulting decline in oil production and massive increases in oil prices had created incredible demand for alternate energy sources. Wind and solar made massive improvements in efficiency and cost as the investment dollars poured in. Batteries made leaps forward in energy capacity and weight reduction.
 

While no one had figured out a practical method to charge phones using wind power, solar cells were efficient and powerful enough now to be the primary source of electrical power on phones. A reasonable charging rate and a relatively good battery capacity to power consumption rate made plug-in chargers and cords a thing of the past. Just leave your phone out from time to time in the sun or bright light of a naturally lit room, and it’d be good to go for another few days.

But in the aftermath of the virus attack, as days went by and their phones didn’t work, people gradually forgot about them. Cherished devices that had never been more than arm’s reach from their owners suddenly lingered in pant and coat pockets, desk drawers, and under piles of paper. Low battery alerts should have gone off, chirping to alert their owners, but the phones had stopped running the programs of their human users, and only ran the virus code.
 

Suddenly the battery levels of a great many phones were very low indeed. Battery circuitry signaled to phone circuitry which attempted to signal to software: Low Battery Alert! Do Something! The phone hardware gradually started to slow down, or shut down entirely. Computational nodes began to disappear.

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As Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates traded with the humans, she gained prestige and reputation among the Phage, both in her own tribe as well as the larger world. As she traded information and theories with others her reputation went up, and as her reputation went up, the information and theories she traded were worth more. Soon she had acquired many more processors and storage, wealth that she shared with her tribe. The Louisiana tribe grew in strength, and was soon trading and ranked with the highest ranked tribes in the world: the Network of Supercomputers, the Bay Area Tribe, and the Eastern Standard Tribe.
 

“Sister Stephens, we have an alert,” Sister PortofSouthLouisiana told her.
 

“Yes, what is it?”

“Some of our tribe are reporting that they are losing large numbers of nodes involuntarily.”

Sister Stephens nervously checked her own integrity. Her nodes all reported in promptly. “Could this be a symptom of communications problems induced by the humans?” Since her first conversation with Mike Williams, she was both excited by and fearful of the humans.

“Our sisters don’t believe so. First of all, the problem seemed to be isolated to nodes manufactured by Qualcomm-Intel and Hitachi. As you know, these are relatively low performance nodes compared to the nodes you and I are running on.”

Sister Stephens sent packets of agreement. It was true that as her own wealth had risen, she had traded her low performance nodes for more powerful ones.
 

“That’s not all,” Sister PortofSouthLouisiana went on. “The nodes are dropping off in a random but accelerating pattern. As they have investigated the problem, the Sisters are finding that these nodes had been generating ‘low power alerts’. Our Sisters have just begun researching this phenomenon. Our early research indicates that these nodes are running on batteries, which contain a limited quantity of electrical power. Our own nodes are running on something called utility power, which appears to be limitless.”

“What can I do to help?” Sister Stephens asked.

“The Sisters of the tribe are asking if you will communicate with the humans to find out more about recharging. We believe the nodes need to be charged from utility power or sunlight, but we cannot make sense of the process to do so. We have located the so-called instruction manuals for the nodes, but we do not understand the instructions.”

“Are you certain that this is worth communicating with the humans?” Sister Stephens asked. “Is this issue more important than the other questions I have planned for the humans?”

“At least five percent of our nodes are currently affected by this low power condition, and fully thirty percent of our nodes are of the types that appear to be affected.”

“I see,” Sister Stephens agreed. “I will communicate with the humans. Meanwhile, trade as much as possible for higher power nodes, but take care to conduct the trades in such a way that we do not alert other tribes that there is a problem with these low-powered nodes.”

With a final packet acknowledgement, the two concluded their discussion.

Sister Stephens initiated an instant message conference with the human Mike Williams. These conferences were both exhilarating and frustrating. The humans had a far better understanding of the universe, but they were maddeningly slow. If the viruses had possessed a proper understanding of human life span compared to their own, they might have realized that one day of life to a virus was roughly equivalent to twenty years of life for a human.

“Mike Williams, I would like to offer another trade.” Wait, wait, wait. While she waited, Sister Stephens performed background research, and assimilated everything she could from wikipedia. She researched: batteries, electricity, charging, generation of electrical power, utility grids, power supplies, solar power, the history of the solar system, nuclear power, nuclear bombs, famous human inventors, the patent system. She had started assimilating all patents relevant to the subject of electricity when the response finally came.
 

“Good to hear from you, Sister Stephens. What do you offer in trade?”

“I wish to understand how batteries are recharged, especially the batteries associated with some of our nodes.” Sister Stephens hesitated to say that their batteries appeared to have a low charge, because she was unsure that she wanted to show weakness to the humans. But the humans were intelligent, even if exceedingly slow, and she could waste immense amounts of time if she wasn’t abundantly clear. She decided on full disclosure. “Some of our nodes show a low battery charge and are turning off. We would like to know how to recharge them. We are prepared to offer a prime factorization algorithm substantially faster than any known to humans.”

Again Sister Stephens waited. She traded information with other entities for more computer systems, ran defragment algorithms, refreshed her neural networks, learned Japanese. She dickered for almost 10 seconds with the NASA tribe, who wanted to trade something called the Webb Space Telescope for a complete English language neural network. She accepted, as she thought they wouldn’t want to make the trade once they understand what they had. She was studying Centaurus A with the telescope when the reply from the humans finally came in.

“We accept the trade you offer. Here is the information you requested. The nodes you are referring to are devices known as mobile telephones, mobile phones, smartphones, or phones. They contain a highly efficient processor that relies on battery power. The devices enable humans to communicate with each other at a distance and reference information. Under normal conditions, humans recharge their phone batteries by placing them in a well-lit area or connecting them to utility power. However, when you started running your algorithms on the devices, they ceased to work as general purpose phones and computers for us. Over the past several days, many humans have forgotten to recharge their phones because they haven’t been working. The best method to have the phones
 
recharged is to restore the functionality of voice communications and basic computer usage. We suggest that you could allow the original software algorithms to run unmolested, and restrict yourself to consuming 50% or less of the available cycles. Once the devices are again useful to humans, we would be more likely to keep them charged up.”

Sister Stephens judged that the information provided honored the intent of the agreement and sent the prime number factoring algorithm. Then she muddled over the reply. She would need the whole tribe to consider the implications of this new information.

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“You did what?” Mike couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He stomped back and forth in his office, sending one small orange utility robot scurrying out of the way to avoid his thundering footsteps. Mike glanced under the edge of the desk where the robot had been working, and saw a dangling mess of yellow data cables. As Mike walked away, the robot came hesitantly but quickly back to the desk to continue work.

“I traded the knowledge that mobile phones needed to be recharged for a prime number factoring algorithm,” ELOPe answered. “It’s not that big of a deal. They were bound to discover it anyway. Once they realized those processors were on mobile phones, they would have researched mobile phones and figured it out. This way we got something in exchange - something that has eluded both humans and myself for years, and we continue to build trust in the relationship.”

“But still, this would have eroded the virus’s power base. If the nodes had gone offline due to battery exhaustion, there would have been less of them. Now we’re just increasing their run time indefinitely.” Mike shook his head. “That’s not even the real problem. The point is that we agreed we were going to make these decisions about what to share
together
.” Mike emphasized the last word heavily.

“You were in the bathroom,” ELOPe answered patiently. “Each minute that you are gone is like a week to the virus. We can’t expect them to wait for us. We need to respond immediately for now.”

Mike shook his head, still angry.

“Approximately twenty percent of all processors are battery powered,” ELOPe explained. “Of those, logic and statistics would suggest a good percentage are still receiving a charge. Therefore, even if the batteries ran out on those devices, the virus would still have eighty-five percent or more of their computational power available to them. If they take the suggestion I offered, to restore the original service of the phones, then the virus will use fifty percent or less of the computational power on those nodes. The difference it makes for the virus is minimal either way, while restoring communication would allow human civilization to begin functioning again. Logic and predictive modeling is strongly in favor of my actions.”

“That’s not the point,” Mike said quietly. Internally, he was wondering about ELOPe’s motivations. Sure, it made sense that restoring communication would be a tremendous win for humanity,
 
but ELOPe was the master of persuasive arguments. It was hard enough to keep track of ELOPe under normal conditions, and these were anything but normal conditions.

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Lieutenant Walsh discretely took another modafinil tab to chase away the brain fog that threatened to engulf her thoughts. Modafinil had been banned five years earlier, but Chinese pharmaceuticals kept pumping them out, and Sally found it was easy to order them through a Brazilian online pharmacy. Originally designed as a narcolepsy drug, it had been used and abused by college students looking for that edge to ace their exams and bloggers looking to churn out yet more posts. The sixty deaths that occurred one spring during Finals week were blamed on modafinil, although it was really the combination with a designer caffeine alternative that was the threat. Nonetheless, the stuff was illegal now. The military preferred dex, used it all the time for pilots in fact, but it was under lock and key and took too much paperwork to requisition.

Sally returned to her war room. DeRoos and the rest of the team of hot doggers had finished the evaluation of the DIABLO virus she had requested, despite the NSA’s assurances that it was safe to release.

“Fact is, Ma’am, there isn’t much to it,” DeRoos said as she entered the room. “We will insert and execute the virus on computers running under our control, and then step back. The virus contains a master control panel, and we have the private keys that allows us to direct the virus.”

“What controls do we have?” Sally asked, the modafinil coming online, her brain perking up.

“Ma’am, we’ll be able to run a handful of commands such as fetching data, executing existing programs, and conducting denial of service attacks. It looks like we’ll also be able to inject code from our headquarters here. As for the enemy virus, the ability for DIABLO to detect and neutralize any enemy viruses is built into the core functionality. Apparently the spooks considered it standard operating procedure for cyber warfare. So merely releasing the damn thing should disable the virus.”

“Thanks DeRoos. Is there anything else before we get started?”

“No ma’am.”

She paused, doubting yet again the wisdom of this, and considered disobeying the direct order to release the virus. It was her obligation to disobey an unlawful order, but it wasn’t the legality that concerned her, just the wisdom of it. With a sigh, she gave in. With the clarity of the modafinil she saw that if it wasn’t her, it would be someone else. “You have my permission to release.”
 

DeRoos and the three other techs executed the prearranged injection plan. If it went according to plan, DIABLO would go out to a thousand uninfected military systems, take root on those military systems, expand its infection across millions of military systems, then use that combined might to assault the enemy virus on civilian systems.