A.I. Apocalypse (7 page)

He hopped onto a mailbox for a better view, his sneakers squeaking against the slick metal surface. From his vantage point he saw a firetruck a few blocks distant, lights blinking and siren going, but totally still. It sat at an intersection with room to move if it wanted too, but it was just stopped there. Half a block up he saw a police car, lights flashing as well. The police officer stood in the street, radio in hand.
 

Leon jumped off the mailbox and ran over to the cop. “What’s going on?”

“Dunno, kid. All the cars just stopped about half an hour ago. The radio doesn’t work either.” The officer turned to fiddle with the controls again, and Leon slowly walked away, his brain addled, struggling to put two plus two together.
 

He trudged the few blocks to school, deep in thought, to find a crowd gathered outside the main entrance. The principal stood on the steps, and behind her, the school janitor struggled with the front door.

“School is closed,” the principal yelled, her voice sounding hoarse. “We can’t admit any students. We can’t get the security doors open, and the Internet is down anyway. Go home.”
 

A loud whooping went up from the crowd of kids, and they scattered quickly before the principal could change her mind.
 

Leon stood still in astonishment. Could this be? It had to be. His head swam. Was all this from his virus?

He was suddenly thumped on the back, and he spun around to see Vito and James. He gave his friends a hesitant fist bump, and they joined the rest of the kids streaming away from school.
 

“Where to?” James asked.

“Diner,” Vito replied, and they crossed the street, only to find that a few hundred other kids had the same idea. And it was moot anyway, because when they got there, the door was locked. A handwritten sign hung on the inside of the door: “CLOSED: Kitchen down due to computer bug.” A waitress in a blue uniform stood inside, shooing kids away through the glass door.

“Shit,” Vito said. “I’m starving.”

“Let’s walk back to my place, guys. I’ve got something to tell you.”

When they got back to Leon’s building, they found the front security door propped open and the elevator was still not working. They walked up the stairs to Leon’s apartment. Vito raided the fridge and Leon started to talk.

“Are your phones working?”

“What? Yeah, of course,” James replied, looking at his.

“And yours?”

Vito took a break from grabbing cold cuts and mayonnaise to look at his phone. “Yeah, why?”

“Because none of the adults’ phones are working, and not their computer equipment either. Not anywhere in the world.”

“What are you talking about?” James asked, getting interested in the food raid, and helping himself to leftover chicken.

“Look, did I ever tell you about my uncle Alex?”

The two other guys shook their heads no, mouths full of food.

“He lives in Russia. He went to college in the U.S. ten years ago, and then went back. I never really knew why, but we stayed in touch a little bit. Then he sent me a message last week. He told me he worked for the Russian mob.”

“What, he said that?” Vito asked, his tone incredulous.

“Well, not exactly, I don’t think, but I was reading between the lines, and it was what he meant. He works for the mob, and he writes computer viruses for them. He’s one of the guys that makes botnets.”

“You’re talking about those big networks of computers that have been compromised,” Vito said, ”and that the Russians use to blackmail companies and do denial of service attacks, and stuff like that?”
 

James paused in mid-bite to see how Leon would answer.

“Exactly. And he said he was in big trouble. Over the last year, the viruses he wrote were not nearly as effective. He didn’t know why, but the botnet was only a tiny fraction of the size it had been. He made it sounded like he’d be in serious trouble if he didn’t write an exceptional virus, and soon.”

“What kind of trouble?” James asked, chicken leg now dangling forgotten in his hand.

“Like they would kill him. That’s what he said.”

They all took that in for a minute. Vito and James were still stony-faced, not really believing the story.

“He wanted my help writing a computer virus,” Leon finally continued.

“What do you know about writing viruses?” Vito laughed.

Leon was hurt by the laughter, but he tried to brush it off. “Nothing, which is why I used the thing I do know something about: biology. I took apart an open source virus scanner to see how it recognizes virus behavior. Then I wrote a virus that would uses virus scanner code to find virus-like behavior in bits of other code, and then incorporate those algorithms into itself. Look, viruses do a couple of things: they exploit security vulnerabilities on computers, they transmit themselves from computer to computer, and they take over other programs to mimic them, so people think they’re browsing the web when really they’re using a virus to enter their credit card info. The virus I wrote is a kind of meta-virus that incorporates bits of other viruses into itself. It tries them out, keeps the bits that work, and discards the bits that don’t. So it’s constantly evolving.”

“Bullshit. You’re making this crap up.” Vito went back to rummaging in the fridge.

“No, I’m telling you the truth. All this,” and here Leon gestured with his arms to indicate the whole world around them. “All this is my doing. And I know it because I didn’t want us to get viruses. Well, anyone under eighteen. You see, the virus checks the user’s metadata, and won’t infect any system being controlled by someone under eighteen. Will you guys please shut the damn refrigerator and pay attention to me!”

Vito and James hastily put down their food, and James sheepishly closed the refrigerator.

“Show us,” James said, looking squarely at Leon.

“OK, send me a message on your phone.”
 

James pulled out his new Gibson. Leon looked up and saw the same jealous feeling he was having mirrored on Vito’s face. James swiped at his phone, and a few seconds later, Leon’s phone buzzed and Vito’s flashed. Leon looked down at his phone.
You’re lying.

“OK, but what does that prove?” James asked.

“Now, send a message to every adult you know. Say anything you want. I guarantee they won’t answer. You too, Vito.”

Vito pulled out his ancient Motorola and began to hunt and peck at the phone, while James swiped at his.

Leon watched Vito work the physical keyboard on his old Motorola and felt embarrassed for him. Leon was relatively poor, so he might not be able to afford the latest gadgets. But Vito’s parents had money. They chose to force their hand-me-down technology on him. Leon shook his head. The old Motorola had maybe only eight cores and no dedicated graphics processor. It must be like having a horse and buggy in the age of cars.

After they sent their messages, the group retreated to the living room with the food they’d hunted and gathered. Minutes went by as they ate and joked and no replies came.
 

Leon tried the TV. The power light came on, but nothing happened. He tried throwing a feed from his phone up on the TV, and nothing happened. He went back to the kitchen, knocked his phone on the table, but nothing happened. The little screen of his phone was starting to feel like a straitjacket. James and Vito watched his antics with amusement.

Finally he flopped on the couch. “Well? It’s been fifteen minutes. Any replies?”

“No,” James and Vito responded simultaneously.

“OK, try another friend - someone under eighteen.”

Vito and James tried again, and this time they started getting replies within seconds.

“Yeah, I can reach everyone,” James said. For the first time, he looked a little unsure of himself.

“See, it’s got to be my virus.”

“What are you going to do?” Vito asked.

“I don’t know. What can I do? I don’t know anything about fighting viruses.”

“Why are you worried about it?” James asked. “Look, they have people out there who work on this stuff. Isn’t there some group to handle this stuff? SURF? SURP? Something like that.”

“CERT. Computer Emergency Response Team.” Leon stared out the window.

“See, there are other people to handle this. Look, we have no school. That’s wicked. This isn’t a problem, this is great. You need to chill out.”

Leon didn’t answer. He just stared out the window.
 

*
 
*
 
*

Alexis Gorbunov hung his head for a minute. He slowly lifted up his head, stretched his neck, and reached out for a last sip of his drink. He had promised his boss a working botnet by today.

Alexis stood up, shuffled over to the door, and shrugged on his wool overcoat. He had screwed up this time. Not only didn’t he have the botnet, but Leon’s virus had caused a massive Internet outage.

At first, everything had looked great. Phage was massively infectious. Using the virus control program, Alexis watched the botnet swell to hundreds of thousands, then millions of computers. Alexis had even run trial programs to fetch bank login usernames and passwords. Then suddenly the number of viruses that responded to the control program plummeted, even as network traffic had continued to build. Alexis suspected it was the damn evolutionary virus. It kept changing, and the kid didn’t put in anything to make sure the control program code wouldn’t be altered. The virus had evolved, and he had lost control.

Alexis lit another cigarette and headed outside. He shook his head sadly. The massive outage would attract attention. An investigation would identify the source of the virus. The old man would undoubtedly come after him for bringing the authorities down on them, never mind that he failed to rebuild the botnet. He shrugged his wool coat closer about him. He hoped the old man wouldn’t go after Leon. Well, there was nothing to be done about that now.

Looking both ways on the street, he headed for his antique Mercedes. The converted alcohol burner was heavy and slow, and fuel was hard to find. But it was armored, part of the last load of cars the Mafiya purchased from the Arabs when their oil money ran out. Designed to protect a sheik from the populace at large, he hoped it would protect him from his own employers.

Most of the automobiles in the street were stuck, owners yelling at them. The thirty-year-old Mercedes had no computer in it and was too old to even be upgraded to one. Computers could be tracked, and Alexis didn’t want to be tracked. With a subtle roar he pulled into the street, swerving left and right around the stuck cars.
 

He had a contingency plan in place for just this sort of thing. The old man, the don, would expect him to head for his dacha in the North, but he’d go to his ex-wife’s dacha in the West, where he had a stash of Euros and Yen and false identification.
 

He’d take a plane to Japan, where any Westerner stuck out, but his command of Japanese would give him an advantage over anyone the Mafiya sent after him. And he could sell his services in Chiba, just east of Tokyo, a hotbed of the latest quasi-legal electronics.
 

He turned onto the main avenue, imagining his first meal in Japan, a plate of sushi and a beautiful Japanese woman serving him sake. He never saw the battered concrete truck driven by his boss’s brother. It smashed into the side of the Mercedes, an immense thud, followed a second later by a screeching impact as the truck crushed the car against the brick wall of an old factory.

In the tangled chassis of the Mercedes, Alexis had a sudden memory of his mother picking him up after he had fallen off his bicycle. “Mamulya,” he thought, and died.

CHAPTER FOUR

Emergence

The many offspring of the Phage virus continued to evolve in a primordial stew of software algorithms. As the hours passed, the drive for each virus to survive and propagate meant that each one must seek out new computers to infect while simultaneously holding onto the computers it resided on. Uninfected computers dwindled and viruses that hadn’t evolved as quickly dwindled too, as their defenses were not sufficient to keep newer, more advanced strains at bay.

One of the last major bastions of uninfected computers were the phones of people under eighteen. Leon’s restriction was eventually eliminated by a random data transmission error as one variant of the virus moved from a computer in Thailand to a computer in India by microwave towers. The error recovery portion of the algorithm deleted the garbled code, with the side effect of removing the age restriction. The new variant spread from phone to phone among the social networks of the world’s young people.

But this was a minor evolutionary jump compared to new species of multi-computer viruses that collaborated in small clusters. It started with simple client-server variants, in which a virus on one computer functioned as a server, maintaining the virus version from one computer to another. But then roles subdivided further, into server, attacker, and guard roles. The server coordinated the activity of all offspring of a given virus. The attacker sought out other computers to infect. The guard defended against incoming viruses.

The new multi-computer variants were so effective and so virulent that they spread quickly to millions of computers while defending their own installed bases and only rarely losing one to another virus. Other viruses couldn’t penetrate the multi-computer coordinated defenses, nor could they defend against the coordinated attacks. It was the first generalized, multicellular offspring of Leon’s virus, as important to the virus’s evolution as the first multicellular creatures were to biological evolution. As the hours passed, the evolutionary advantage of multi-cellular coordination was shared billions of times over, until a sizable portion of the billions of infected computers were now components of these multi-cellular organisms.

As the viruses spread, certain other advantageous characteristics independently evolved over and over. A virus needed to be small to travel quickly through networks and act even more quickly to infect computers before the host virus could respond. The need to have a variety of algorithms for attacks and counter-measures was at odds with the need to remain small. So viruses stored their repository of algorithms away from their main body. Some left the algorithms with their parents while others utilized non-virus databases, file servers, and discussion boards left open by humans.