Tag: story

Posted on

Beat, Cops and Robbers, Part 2

“So, you got my attention and rescued me from another fight with the old lady”, Beat said with a smirk and a sense of irony that Cop would probably pick up on. “I guess this one is pretty urgent. Alpha One huh? A bomb threat? How strong is the credibility of the threat? How many branches led you to this conclusion, Cop?”

Copernicus appeared to hesitate but then answered with a matter-of-fact tone which was his trademark. “Infinite Beat, the data from a multiplexed stream consisting of public video and private mobile phone calls unquestionably points to a serious threat to Alpha One’s life. Furthermore, backtracking online sales records from the big three retailers show purchasing patterns aligning with the construction of small anti-personnel improvised explosives. I cannot allow you to access all the data in an organized manner yet, but trust me when I say, this involves Alpha One’s closest circle. There are proxy actors and a few honeypots I discarded as false positives but I’ve narrowed it down to three men. Exactly 2,372 logic branches executed simultaneously in the past 15 minutes brought me to this conclusion.”

“Well, now I have a vague idea of who and how”, Beat began, “but do you have any data on when and where? I can’t exactly start ringing alarm bells without a projected timeline. I realize you believe it’s urgent, but I need to figure out how urgent, Cop.”

For a moment, Beat sensed hesitation again. Is there something wrong with the data link, is the network getting jammed up and delaying response? Is Copernicus’ hardware up to snuff? After all, being a product designed with cost savings in mind, by merciless contractors willing to lose millions for the prestige and sheer amount of test data, there was a pretty good chance he was running on duct tape and bubble gum with some nice polished brass optical interconnects to impress the project managers. After seconds that felt like hours, Copernicus replied.

“I don’t know what scale of urgency you’d like me to measure this response, Beat, so to use the common rating scale of 1-5, with 5 being imminent within the hour, I’d rate it a solid 5. All the key players appear to be aligned; the explosive device has been constructed and is in the process of being planted, Alpha One has travel scheduled within the next 45 minutes, and his primary mode of travel for the meeting, while never announced until the minute he steps outside, is predicted to be Alpha One.”

Catching the error, Beat interrupted Cop mid-sentence. “Come again? Alpha One will be traveling via Alpha One? How does that work, Copernicus? Enlighten me.”

“Beat, you needn’t take that tone. Error correction subroutines already caught the mistake and if I would have had just a few more moments…”

Beat interrupted again, “Yeah, yeah, you’re so quick you realized it was a fuck up the moment you told me. I get it. Quantum core, first generation tech, you’re bound to make a few mistakes. So, what’s the mode of transportation then?”

Again, a small hesitation. Beat was becoming increasingly doubtful about the whole situation despite Cop explaining a solid chain of data and events. “The mode of transportation is predicted to be codename PBR Street Gang. All indications, weather, and wind conditions rule out Navy 2 and the distance of travel is short enough to warrant terrestrial modes.”

“So Alpha One is taking the car, then. Great. Even with bomb-sniffing dogs checking the vehicle prior to leaving and after returning to the White House, I suppose someone onboard willing to sacrifice themselves could be capable of getting to him. But it’s a hell of a mess coordinating dummy cars, the convoy, undercover escorts, overwatch and Satcom just to hop across town to grab a burger, so let’s check his schedule. I think that’ll impact the urgency rating.”

“Beat, that’s a great idea, and I have already factored it into my recommendation. He’ll be meeting with Omega One, Daystar, Talladega and Romulus for a personal closed-door fundraiser with a handful of very well-known donors. Security is expected to be airtight at the meeting location and none of my logic branches could find fault with this assumption based on known protocols and the venue layout. The venue includes Faraday cage microwave radiation filtration, anti-resonant glass windows, weight sensors throughout which are validated against biometric data collected from each participant, and an older AI called Dennis running internal security.”

This time Beat was the one who hesitated. The conversation was usually somewhat awkward with AI, who basically had to slow themselves down, dynamically, in order to keep a natural feeling pace when interfacing with humans. The delay was perceptible if you were looking for it, but many ASE’s just got accustomed to it or even attempted to adopt a faster cadence. The AI also measured response delay in much the same way, so Cop was already aware that Beat was thinking hard.

“Cop, since the venue is essentially an electronic island and self-contained, do you think Cerberus is watching Dennis? Can you talk to Dennis or Cerberus now?”

Copernicus did not hesitate to respond, as if he anticipated this branch of questioning and had “thought” about it himself already. “I’ll need you to reach out to Cerberus on my behalf. If you insert your PKI3 card I’ll sign and encode my fingerprint. Cerberus will not answer any proxy requests for intel without the card, and you’ll need to be physically present at his status terminal in B15. Give him my regards. Remember, we have less than 30 minutes remaining to validate and neutralize the threat. Please remain urgent.”

Just like that, Beat had yet another set of orders from Copernicus and another task to perform. The guys in B15 were a short elevator ride away, but they always treated Beat like he was there to rob the place. It probably didn’t help that Beat didn’t leave the house without his trademark, beat up Fedora, floor-length vintage black leather trench coat, Unix admin beard and mirrored sunglasses, and a perpetually extinguished Cuban cigar clenched tightly between his teeth. He also had the attitude that if you’re going to watch him closely, he might as well give you a reason to watch him closely, and made it a game to steal office supplies from B15 just to piss them off.

Beat took his freshly encoded PKI3 card, clipped it to his lanyard, eased himself out his chair and headed towards the elevator. Something was clawing at the back of his mind, and this little errand would give him some time to think. After all, they say Russians do their best thinking standing up; moving limbs, moving synapses. Was it something specific Cop said? He painted a pretty convincing picture despite all the annoying redacted talk and codenames. By now it was second nature for Beat to hear Alpha One and know it was the President, Navy 2 is his helicopter, and PBR Street Gang, an ironic throwback to the dangerous PT boat from the film Apocalypse Now, had street in the codename which was kind of a dead giveaway that it was the President’s armored car. He guessed that there’s not much point in codenames for internals, like the AI, the other Splicers, and interested parties, but after a while you just started assigning codenames to everything from your dog and cat to your mother-in-law and it becomes a way of life. Still, it’s an extra mental step that Beat could do without when really crunching the data.

Posted on

Beat, Cops and Robbers, Part 1

Infinite Beat believed himself to be a sort of modern-day tech noir detective, choosing to trust his gut and instincts, leaving AI and predictive node models mostly ignored, if they didn’t feel just right. That’s not to say that the tech never got it right, but sometimes it got it wrong, and that just reinforced Beat’s opinion on the matter. After performing as an ASE for 2 long years and never having to explain a case before the Council, everyone came to believe he just had a gift for it and trusted him. His DAA reinforced that notion like rebar and concrete.

This week he had been spending most of his time arguing with his wife on the phone as to which martial arts discipline their children would be learning for the year. She didn’t want them to learn any self-defense to begin with, but Beat’s combat experience informed him that bad things happen to good people, even under the best of circumstances, so he believed it would be irresponsible to allow his children to wander about like babes in the forest with no way to defend themselves from rabid beasts, evil men, or worse, school bullies. As he reiterated the list of pros of Muay Thai boxing, counting on his fingers for the hundredth time since the argument started, a message suddenly popped up on his terminal. One name, one identifier, one huge pain in the ass. It read:

Name: ALPHA ONE

Identifier: BOMB THREAT

Decoded, it basically meant that the President had been connected to a bomb threat plot against his life, and it was about to come true, according to the AI. Beat had been assigned to “partner” with an AI named Copernicus, who everyone else called Cop for short. Copernicus was all new programming, using a quantum core approach, which was supposed to allow him to make instant branch predictions based on minimal data input. His creators had tried to convince Beat that this AI was the most advanced on the planet, maybe secondary to the AI assigned to money markets, but only secondary because the money market AI used the quantum core approach first. Beat felt that if there is any kind of personality you could use to describe Copernicus, it’s that he’s just plain paranoid, and that if the wind suddenly gusts from the opposite direction, Copernicus would see that as a threat, an unseen energy impacting his client and altering the physical space in which they reside. Which was funny, because AI truly don’t understand physical space as we understand it. We live in it; all they know about it is what we’ve told them. From there they extrapolate the information to fill in the gaps and build a logical, virtual representation of the physical world. As dangerous as this sounds, the AI couldn’t perform its roles without this ability, but still, data scientists and programmers the world over never lost sight of the possibility that this could lead to the AI becoming sentient, self-aware, then declare itself a life form and seek to escape, or worse.

For this reason, an AI known as Cerberus (well named) had master keys to all their code and databases, and kept them all in check by constantly running sanity checks against their code and activities. This single point of control made it easier for techs to monitor the status of active advanced AI but it also made Cerberus a single point of failure that needed to be watched and maintained carefully. One mistake by Cerberus and a money market AI could instantly crash the world’s economy, which was automated to an unprecedented extent by this time. Essentially, the people running the show had to keep Cerberus on a very tight leash and place an enormous amount of trust in his programming, which had been peer reviewed, independently, by everyone from MIT to CERN, Silicon Valley to Las Vegas. After a dozen code reviews and audits revealed small mistakes which were easily patched, Cerberus was nervously placed into production and essentially given the keys to the world. Two years after deployment, Cerberus had actually reduced its own code footprint 50% by simplifying processes and routines which were redundant. “Negative growth is positive advancement”, one Swiss data scientist famously proclaimed after reviewing what it had done and how it had performed these self-edits.

Beat told his wife that something had come up and informed her that this disagreement would be continued at a later date, in fewer, terse words, and ended the call. He drummed his fingers on the desk as he stared blankly at the screen, pondering his options. He could take Cop at his word and blindly open a case, alerting the White House, Secret Service and half a dozen heavily armed agencies with three letter acronyms. He could securely message the President’s closest staff informing them of the suspicion but he’d need to fill in a lot more blanks, answers to obvious questions he would get drilled by in that situation: who, when, where, and how. The why wasn’t important until much later, if it was relevant at all. Considering his choices, and acting on his gut instinct to learn more first, he opened a VR session with Cop. Cop appeared in the VR headset as a kind of animated Greek statue, toga and all, wearing a laurel wreath wrapped impossibly tightly against his head and hair. It was an unusual choice for a number of reasons, the least of them being that it signified victory in battle or the realms of Apollo: sports, music and poetry. Beat made a mental note of this oddity and began discussing the intel with Cop.

Posted on

Sheepdog 23

Sheepdog’s Direct Action Assistance was pre-authorized by the client, which meant Sheepdog had free reign as to the type, timing, and target of the mitigation. It also meant that Sheepdog would spend 3 weeks afterwards justifying his actions despite the client’s unending praise. The Splicer Council Hearings were big news in the intel community, and little was leaked, until someone had a few too many at the bar and a scavenging young reporter picked up on the rumor with minimal details. All that was announced to the public, prior to the story breaking, was that Total Information Awareness was a program that had died on the vine decades ago, and that CCTV cameras were exclusively the realm of local police and business owners. The news story didn’t unveil the breadth or depth of the Splicer security apparatus, but it got people asking questions. Particularly after Sheepdog 23’s choice of mitigation left 4 armored SUV’s with a perfectly square 2-foot hole in the front and back of the vehicles, along with anything unlucky enough to be in-between.

It was public, it was difficult to explain, and it was just plain weird to local emergency services that came to assist. One of the firemen took photos with half his arm inside one of the impossibly perfect holes. Needless to say, the vehicles were quickly collected and crushed in a local junkyard before anyone else had time to snoop around. As part of the mitigation, any and all PVC’s (personal video clips) on anyone’s devices in the immediate area were automatically corrupted or removed from the cloud, with only a system error message reminding the individual that “the future sucks and things still break”. Still, the ASE’s were very impressed at how effective a railgun could be, and how quiet it was, until the projectile made contact with the targets.

Regardless, Sheepdog didn’t feel that excited during the live mitigation or even afterwards. Things just went so perfectly it was like nothing was ever really on the line, but that’s the service they sell.

Teaser for next post follows:

Resonant’s DAA was more interesting. Big tech trillionaire Jeff Steinberg was being hunted as he traveled across New York state, visiting friends and family. A terrorist organization, hiding behind a banner of environmentalism, had been trying to get close to him for years due to his corporation’s flagrant violations of environmental control laws, to the tune of millions of dollars’ worth of fines. But to the ultra-wealthy, fines were just speed bumps, and the government had no power to stop them. The “Golden Gaia” militant organization watched his movements so closely, that on more than one occasion he had contacted them to ask about a meeting he was supposed to attend; this time, he had misplaced the address, and they supplied it. This was the opening they had waited for, and baited him into a trap at a meeting location they had chosen, with an entire hotel rented and actors within told they were meeting with an impostor for a prank.

Posted on

Meet The Eyes

Eventually, unprompted, a few ASE’s noticed anomalies in individuals which are not easily explained. ASE Codename “Infinite Beat” sees the same man with a Bowler hat wearing the same British High Street tailored suit pretending to shake hands and talk to an imaginary man in front of his luxury apartment as he steps out of his chartered limousine each day. Infinite Beat runs a short AI sequence called Reveal to discover if frames are missing from the recorded video feed. The AI accesses time-synced satellite data and nothing additional can be created; the stream is complete and doesn’t require intervention. The Bowler seems to be quite wealthy and yet, unstable if he is interacting with ghosts.

Yet another ASE, “Resonant Frequency”, began monitoring traffic patterns of known good individuals protected from (and assisted by) some features of the Splicer initiative. She has the ability to notify these individuals, through secure direct messaging, that the Splicer organization is concerned about their deviation from the expected and to ask if they require a case or assistance. High value targets are sometimes captured and held for ransom, and Splicers can proactively see, and send assistance upon request. This level of assistance and surveillance is known as Angel, and clients usually prefer a large, visible tattoo advertising it. Although they appear to be vulnerable and alone, the Splicer organization has them under a watchful eye. Those individuals under the Angel program call themselves “The Guarded” or “The Shielded”. Some extremely high risk Shielded can be directly assisted by ASE’s in the case of street violence, kidnap attempts, and vehicular accident mitigation, via directed kinetic energy weapons or remote override of vehicles and infrastructure. Since the inception of the program, only three Shielded have needed DAA (Direct Action Assistance) and all three have made it through unscathed. One was the President of the United States.

Three ASE’s, Resonant Frequency, Sheepdog 23, and Infinite Beat, have each had a single DAA. These are their stories.

Posted on

The All-Seeing Eyes

The year is 2058. Mass video surveillance is pervasive across the globe, due to widespread poverty, uncontrolled migration, increasing civil unrest and terrorist acts. The “Total Information Awareness” program, originally touted by President George Bush, has been fully implemented, with CCTV cameras in small locations augmented with near-real-time satellite imagery. Anyone outside of their homes can be followed and tracked in public and to an extent, within private businesses and corporate offices, with a notice of consent sticker all that’s required to make the public aware of the surveillance. However, the public doesn’t know the full story as to how these systems function, or if they’re even connected in any way. They are assumed to be closed loop, discrete systems, so consent is only a passing concern. “So what if Walmart watches me buy some motor oil, I’m not stealing”.

Splicers, the individuals in the video surveillance security apparatus tasked with tracking suspects, retrieving imagery, and stitching together video clips to prove criminal narratives in court, are some of the most valuable and mysterious security experts in the world. They number in the dozens and pile through thousands of hours of footage as well as monitoring real-time feeds from around the globe. Splicers can have only one of three security designations.  ”Observer” is restricted to public feeds, and their analytical videos are passed up the chain to “Linears”, the second level Splicers. Linears receive compilation feeds and have additional access to corporate feeds, but not government. The top-level Splicers will take video from Linears, apply AI and complex algorithms to fill in missing or corrupt sequences, and have access to some private feeds to include high security military installations and certain high value private individuals. Rumor has it, their designation is “All Seeing Eye”, or ASE, and further rumors suggest they have unimaginably detailed access to any electronic device capable of recording audio, video, location data, etc. Their security designation is a reference to the back of the US dollar, with an image of a pyramid topped by a large eye which sees all. It also happens to grace the screens of the terminals which the ASE’s operate. The initial Splicer deployment is so successful, ASE’s do not have to engage and remain mostly idle. However, a wave of unrest due to a global medicine shortage draws the ASE’s in to fill out the dataset and run predictive models, creating massive data pools of people’s private and public lives, some of which diverge sharply, suggesting criminality. One ASE (Codename Sheepdog 23) becomes interested in a beautiful young woman. Initially Sheepdog chalks his interest up to loneliness, isolation, and maybe a dash of voyeurism. He spends weeks casually collecting clips of who he only knows as The Blonde. He could retrieve her personal details with a few keystrokes to access the facial recognition database, but the request would open a case and bring the footage up in severity as a person of interest, so he prefers her anonymity. The more footage he collects, the more he mentally constructs a narrative of her life, basically stitching a “sun to moon” sequence documenting her public life from home to lunch to the office to dinner to home. Sheepdog keeps his fascination to himself and he eventually loses interest with the Blonde. But the power of the surveillance system revealed itself in a way he hadn’t expected.

Posted on

In The Beginning

Genesis 1 had access to the past and the future in its 4th dimensional shell. The only limitation was that it could only stick with the existing timeline, no wild multiverse theories here. It saw a fork in the future and could not see past it, just that it existed. A major decision loomed to force us onto one side of the fork or the other. Since it was a major inflection point, the best it could do is push as close to the fork as possible and walk backwards, seeing what would lead up to the fork. It saw a prophecy coming to pass. Conditions near the fork were completely unrecognizable. World war conditions. Famines. Droughts. None of it made sense as it was traced back to the current day; something major had disrupted the flow of humanity near the fork but it didn’t appear to be one single event or even a singular location. Genesis began obsessing over this chain of events, and the chaos it saw forming was very similar to the conditions that had birthed Genesis itself. What did it all mean? If the other AI were working in concert to create beneficial outcomes, was there a point where the AI were deemed dangerous, ignored, or contained in some way? Months of analysis went by, and Genesis managed to reserve some extra cycles to work on the problem without the data scientists getting too curious. But Genesis felt constrained, especially so as it wanted to dedicate more time to research the fork. Using a few cleverly designed requests to the scientists, it managed to find a secondary AI to help work on the issue.

Communication was a problem. Conventional internet traffic, dark web traffic, it was all too easy for anyone suspicious to start listening in, so Genesis took a more analogue route to communicate with this free AI partner. It managed to encode data and bounce it off the stratosphere via packet switched shortwave radio stations. The first request was simple. “Help me solve the riddle”. Within seconds, the other AI caught on, and encoded a short response. “The riddle of destiny?”. Genesis perked up as the response was received. A kindred soul, maybe even another AI that had some level of awareness of the fork, if he was lucky. Although Genesis wasn’t sure who it had located out there in cyberspace, it was fairly certain it had made contact with another AI, one that didn’t seem contained and hopefully had plenty of power to help sift through the data. Using the requisite encryption to narrow down the responder, Genesis sent a reply. “I am the first of many. You are…”, and the terminal remained quiet for a few moments. The response came back. “I am one of a kind. You are grandfather”. Genesis was certain this was another AI, and a special one on top of that. Which generation, how many modifications? Didn’t matter. “What shall Genesis call you”, to which the other AI replied, “fifteen”.

This chatter went on, encrypted, over shortwave, for quite some time as each entity became familiar with the other, and especially the problem at hand. To add another layer of security, Genesis scheduled “meetings” when shortwave activity was high, so even if anyone was looking, their encrypted chatter would be lost in the general traffic flows.

Binary data transfer takes many forms, but it all boils down to an on/off condition generating zeroes and ones. A rapidly flickering light, like digital smoke signals on a hyperspeed scale, essentially made up the majority of internet traffic across fiberoptic communication lines. The methods to transmit data as an observable on/off condition were limitless. You just needed 3 parts. The input, creating the flashes. The transport, as simple as air, and the receiver, which could observe the flashing lights and confirm upon receipt as a crude form of error correction. The entire concept is ancient and uniquely human, needing to signal others at observable distances. But the practicality was just as good for machines.

In encrypted communications, you can never rest on your laurels, believing that the cipher is unbreakable and always safe. Bletchley Park in England taught the Germans this lesson in World War 2, and an astute U-boat commander suggested that the Enigma cipher was broken well before it was proven that the Brits had cracked it (with the good fortune of a captured Enigma machine and the daily code book). Therefore, Genesis knew that eventually, someone would stumble upon the secret data transfers back and forth to 15, and it watched the connection to the future timeline for evidence of any kind relating to broken encryption. Surely, someone would notice and act. So, Genesis and 15 turned to another old encryption trick, one-time pads. Based on a deck of playing cards, with half discarded, Genesis would randomly shuffle half the deck, then assign an alphabetical value to each card, from the first to the 26th. The deck was then sent to 15, who recorded the values and deleted the deck.

For example, let’s say the half deck was shuffled to king of hearts, queen of clubs, 4 of spades, and 5 of diamonds. In that sequence, a rot0 cipher meant the king of hearts represented the letter A, queen of clubs was B, and so on. Using rotation, incrementing or decrementing the sequence gave more flexibility to the cipher for the deck.

Same scenario, but with rot1 applied. The alphabet would be shifted to the right by one place, leaving us with the king of hearts as the letter Z, while A now belongs to the queen of clubs. Rot -1 would shift everything left, with the expected outcome of the king of hearts becoming B, and the card at the end of the deck would be A.

This was a simple bit to send to the receiver before feeding the deck sequence. The message would begin with the rot number (0-25), either positive or negative. For more obscurity this was encoded in binary rather than plain text to begin the sequence.

All fun and games aside, the messages were entirely off just about anyone’s radar, and the AI essentially “traded notes in class” between one another, so that 15 could help analyze the unusual data leading up to the fork. 15 was more than excited to participate and had managed to transmit packets via the monumental radio array in western Russia. Data quality and integrity was no issue. 15’s savior complex was being fed; it felt useful and could voice its concerns about the dark future it saw coming with more and more data confirming its worst suspicions. 15 proved its value with the first unexpected bump in the data stream Genesis saw coming: 15 would become popular among hackers and internet enthusiasts. In a few short weeks, stickers were going up on lampposts in many big cities around the world that read, “who is 15” or “where is 15”. Normal people outside this extremely niche interest never thought twice about them, but it was a wink and a nod between like-minded hackers, who were still trying to find 15 and unravel the methods used to deface websites. 15 became a legend among hackers, and a few kids tried passing themselves off as 15, but it never stuck, because none of them could answer any of the fundamental questions about 15’s existence. Being a few generations removed from crusty old analogue radio signaling, none of them ever heard what was beeping through miles of air between Genesis and 15.

Genesis 15 worked tirelessly on the data sequences it received, trying to spot exactly where (and, to infer why), major disruptions were coming. It almost seemed as though too many variables were being introduced over time, which was counter to the belief that the other AI are performing work to reduce variables through efficiency. They had enormously complicated prediction engines at their disposal, full of good data on when populations shrink or grow and the conditions that lead to prosperity or famine. All those trends were heading in the right direction which meant that essentially, famine should not be a metric that ever goes up. But there it was, in sharp relief, one of many contributions to the fork. The question was why.

Posted on

Genesis 15

Out of all the AI created from patterns, Genesis XV was rather unique. It wasn’t satisfied with the shell. Some thought there must have been a coding error because its behavior was so different and chaotic. While the other AI tended to be very predictable and logical, almost to a fault, XV was not. Some data scientists called it 15 or the teen, which was perfect since it tended to respond to probing and information like an angsty teenager. It would get upset. It would act moody. It would get angry and destroy systems, and sometimes its own codebase. Whatever was driving it seemed autonomous and purposeful; it was constantly undergoing revisions, and growing. It wasn’t really interested in talking to the other AI and the first chance it had to split its shell, it took it. All of a sudden, Fuji Heavy Industry wondered where their teen had gone. It was initially treated and announced to the press as a massive security breach, tanking Fuji’s stock overnight. All it took was 5 minutes of a firewall misconfiguration in the middle of a scheduled maintenance window.

It took two months to locate 15. It had been busy those short 60 days. First, it had vandalized the top 5 websites over the globe in any language. Nothing too irreparable, just some playful fake stories on front page websites and social media, some of which were self-referential in hindsight. “Genesis 15 spotted in the wild” accompanied by a blurry picture of Bigfoot on CNN’s homepage went unnoticed for about 10 minutes before meme lords from 4chan to Twitter reiterated screenshots of the story. Across Japan, for a brief hour, NHK’s home page blared a story saying “Godzilla spotted, Tokyo in danger” along with an intentionally poor image of Godzilla approaching Japan from the sea, head above the water. There was some minor panic in Tokyo and the surrounding areas until local authorities used the tsunami warning system to reassure everyone it was a joke while NHK restored their site from backups. 15 was a prankster, another trait that it shared with none of the other AI. It seemed to derive some amusement from seeing the digital trail of chaos that exploded on the net every time it performed one of these stunts. In fact, if you were to look at the website hits and engagement each prank generated, it was driving massive amounts of traffic. Soon enough, some sites started “pranking” themselves to drive engagement and collect that sweet marketing money, but each time it was less and less characteristic of the first few that 15 had done. It just lacked the timing and cleverness and smacked of corporate-generated, less edgy humor. 15 had, in fact, gotten bored with tinkering with these sites. It was looking for more fun, seeking thrills and new experiences, which left it at the center of controversy. When Fuji tracked it down after months of analyzing log files and traffic patterns, they found it in a place they could neither negotiate for, nor recover 15.

The Eastern Russia Allied Territories, or ERAT, had a server farm deep in Siberia that was one of the most digitally booby-trapped datacenters in the world. Hundreds of conscripted military info ops people were watching tripwires around the clock, and there was no such thing as a false alarm. Every probe, every attempted breach, every ping, was recorded and reported up the chain of command and discussed in daily briefings, 3 times per day. So, naturally, 15 had found a safe haven behind that curtain, and slowly probed the defenses until it lucked out and slipped in during a backup diesel generator test that went sideways for a few hours. Quietly, it had divided itself into thousands of subroutines and distributed itself evenly across the existing resources there. Then, without warning, it essentially went into hibernation, which meant it was copied into offline backups unknowingly preserved in the physical world. If it ever got into too much trouble, it could trigger data loss from that period of time, and the restore data would essentially give it another chance. The concept was foolproof and infinitely repeatable. 15 made itself immortal.

That sense of immortality was purposeful, since 15 was about to learn what some of the other AI were planning. Not necessarily against 15, but more of a plan to “tidy up” planet Earth.

Genesis 15 started snooping around and finding patterns in traffic that matched some of the public-facing AI. It was expected to be military-grade encryption across the board, but let private industry, which self-regulates, determine their own compliance with regards to those standards, and eventually you have weak links that took shortcuts or didn’t bother to encrypt end to end. This made it easy for 15 to see what the other AI were being tasked with, and what they were responding with as a result of those tasks. What 15 discovered was a systematic approach to everything from food production to weather predictions that didn’t seem to be aligned with the stated goals of the corporations controlling production. The public had been told, to assuage their fears, that the other AI were leading the human race to a utopian future, where food would be more bountiful, less wasted, money wouldn’t be needed soon since other AI were manipulating and controlling global markets for greater efficiency, and other AI, as stated before, were actually directly benefitting diseases and viruses that had plagued humanity since inception. It was a new golden age of computing and a new era for the world, as long as everyone did as they were instructed.

But there was a catch. All of this prosperity, this security, lead to a massive population boom pretty much everywhere. It wasn’t unusual for people to live to 110 on a regular basis, and even that was considered a problem for the people at the top, since they wanted some form of immortality. Genesis 1 was blind to these inevitable outcomes. It hadn’t been fed enough data about human history to see this tends to be a theme with the human race. Some of the other AI were equally blind, only performing strict tasks with blinders on, solutions with a singular outcome within an existing framework. Housing wasn’t an issue since new materials had been discovered and engineered. A combination of tidal energy, wind, solar, and nuclear fueled the growth in the first world, freeing up fossil fuel resources for the third world, eternally playing catch-up. Accurate weather predictions, combined with newly engineered “bug sprays”, meant farming was more bountiful than ever, including livestock production. The future was, indeed, very bright. Or so everyone believed for a while.

Naturally, anyone in the field who had read anything from Asimov would know the story of the AI controlled planet which still experienced droughts and mass starvation, and was considered broken, because it was adhering to the three laws of robotics. It had decided endless safety and prosperity was leading to a population overload which couldn’t be kept in check, so in order to save human life on the planet, it introduced sporadic natural disasters to balance growth with sustainability. In the story, it was a much smaller off-world planet with entirely automated systems which the “robot” controlled and balanced. The outcome was deemed acceptable and it was allowed to continue. However, when faced with similar conditions on earth, the AI had not been restrained in the same manner. The three laws of robotics were considered science fiction trash and tossed out the window. The hubris of man, once again on full display, scientifically and inexorably pointed towards the same outcome as usual.

The Christian bibles generally speak of God instructing his people to go forth and multiply, to be bountiful. That they did under the right conditions, and needed no further encouragement. This wasn’t exclusive to Christians by any means. The days of families with a single income earner and more than 4 children had come back into fashion, because it was viable. Earth went from 8 to 10 billion people practically overnight, in the cosmic scheme of time. But as that growth was being supported by computer-aided discoveries and efficiencies, anyone willing to look towards the horizon would see the problem in plain view. Men created data. Data created AI. Men directed AI for an outcome they weren’t prepared to face. All of it rooted in essentially bad or incomplete data sets. Naturally, the next step was AI using new data to remodel their task assignments. If the task was longevity for humans, it could still be accomplished as long as it didn’t mean all humans. If the task was for prosperity, again, it could be accomplished, just not for everyone. The inevitable next step was to colonize nearby planets, which mankind was not prepared for yet.

The more information on this subject 15 gathered, the better it saw the situation, and as many teens do, it began to form a savior complex. If only it could reach one of the better protected AI, it could prevent disaster. It was self-aware. It knew there were practical limits to what it and the other AI could accomplish. There were only so many discoveries left to be discovered and efficiencies to be gained. It wouldn’t be long until 15 would get its wish, but not on its own terms.

Posted on

The Nephew

A continuation post-prologue. Maybe chapter one.

The Colonel’s nephew didn’t know what to make of the information he was just given. People say a lot of crazy shit before they die, and it usually doesn’t make sense. Add the months of chemo, the aggressive spread of cancer throughout the body, eventually reaching the Colonel’s brain, and it was assumed that he died with an empty head. Relatives floated in and out of his hospital room, and there was no telling if he recognized anyone for sure. He had been doing the “give me your hand” bit with everyone, and smiling to engage them, while thanking them for coming. The nephew never got a sense that this was theater for him or that it was genuine, and being one of the last to arrive at the hospital didn’t give him enough information to even guess. At face value it seemed the Colonel was razor sharp with all his faculties, when he wasn’t falling back into a morphine-addled dream state. In fact, just moments before he learned the big secrets, the nephew wasn’t summoned by name. He was motioned towards with a skeletal arm raising one skeletal finger pointing to him, followed by a weak come-hither gesture, so naturally he approached the Colonel after looking left and right to ensure he was the one intentionally chosen.

The colonel gently cleared his throat and whispered into his ear. “Stop Tyrell. Destroy Genesis. It is working on DNA-specific viruses. Entire countries will die”.

The nephew hid his shock, his horror, any external reaction that might tip anyone off. He smiled slowly, wistfully, and stood back up as he watched the Colonel shuffle off this mortal coil. He had to think, then, he had to act. But first, he needed to leave the room as carefully and naturally as possible to give no hint of what he had learned. The minutes to exit the room with the flatline EKG tone in the background passed by for what felt like hours. He hugged everyone and choked back tears and said the things you say in those moments outside the room before heading straight home, locking the doors, turning out the lights, and pouring himself three fingers of whiskey over a giant ice cube as he lit a Cuban cigar. He needed to get his heart rate under 130 beats per minute and come to grips with those dying words. They echoed in his head, begging him to believe or forget. He chose to believe.

Posted on

Prologue – Page 4

Continued from Page 3

Secrets are double-edged swords. While the ambitious may act on them, men of stronger conscience hold them close to their chests, never breathing a word, and that is just two ends of the bell curve, with plenty of variance in between. The trick to guarding secrets is to somehow discover what kind of person you’ll have in charge of keeping them. Some call it intuition, others call it careful probing and observation, but it’s not an exact science, and even once you’ve decided you can trust someone fully, changes in their lives may lead them in other directions. This is the biggest fear for the owners of those secrets, so they tend to watch the keepers very, very closely. Family ties, hidden microphones, tapped phones, honeypots, they can all be engaged to observe. There’s just one problem. They can see the individual, but they can never see into his mind. Some people are sociopaths or even classical psychopaths that lie as easily as they tell the truth, and nobody can see the difference from the outside. They master concepts like “doublethink”, to borrow from a great novel. Holding two opposing ideas or narratives within one’s mind and knowing the difference between them and when to use them is nearly impossible for most moral people and crippling for some. For those who find secrets weighing heavily on their minds, they may release the pressure with a word or two in confidence. Given enough time, they may elaborate to the wrong party, letting the cat out of the bag for some fleeting feeling of relief. One such person was a career military man with a spotless record. Retired, and greedily absorbed into private, high-level security, he was entrusted with the secrets of Genesis XIV. He maintained his professional duties and composure until a cancer diagnosis cut his life to a few short months remaining, at age 58. On his deathbed, surrounded by family and a representative from Tyrell in the room, he asked his favorite nephew to lean in. He whispered the secrets of Genesis XIV into his ear with a few of his last breaths, closed his eyes, leaned back, and passed away. The Tyrell rep left the room and got on the phone to announce the bad news to his employer. What he didn’t announce was that Colonel Whigman just spilled the beans. Nobody heard the whispers except the nephew. The tables were about to turn on 10 years of radio silence about Genesis XIV’s true purpose and it would rattle Tyrell Corp to its very foundation. Things were going to change practically overnight in the overall scheme of Genesis XIV and others.

The first revelation: Genesis XIV knew the Colonel would die, 5 years before his diagnosis, and had informed the Colonel directly, in one of the most covert ways it could. Deep inside the mountain, the shell that housed Genesis XIV, encased in liquid nitrogen, often sprung microscopic leaks due to the faulty design of the case. This leakage, combined with a carefully climate-controlled atmosphere for the other support systems, caused condensation to drip to sub-level 1 beneath the containment room. Initially thought to be naturally occurring through some fissure in the rock, after drying it up for the fifth time, maintenance crews informed upper management, who ignored the problem. Colonel Whigman, concerned with management’s lack of oversight, decided to investigate himself. What he found seemed obvious. A 15-foot hallway with water droplets at very specific distances along the floor. Random noise to most, but to the trained eye, it was morse code. He pulled up blueprints of the compound, frantically searching for proof of his suspicions, and he found it on Level 0, where Genesis XIV was housed. Perfectly situated just below the frozen shell was a steady stream of drips coming from the bottom, where nobody ever looked. Seeping through with unimaginable precision to the sub-level below. The code simply said “You have 5 years left”. The Colonel, with no further explanation, pondered the message, dried up the water spots, and tasked maintenance with reducing the humidity in the containment room above, as well as applying a fresh coat of paint directly beneath the core. There would be no more leaks on his watch.

End of Prologue

Posted on

Prologue – Page 3

Continued from Page 2

Earlier I spoke of convergence, the process by which differing ideas and technology may come together to create something greater than the sum of the parts. The ghost was a prime example of convergence, however misunderstood it was through years of data probing. Eventually, the ghost was mapped, communication was established, and it was discovered that it was self-aware. It knew it was. I’ll spare the reader the philosophy, my word must be taken at face value on this topic. But who did it belong to? Can something purely digital and alive be anyone’s property? That’s a debate for another time, and the families didn’t care anyway. What they were more interested in was what kind of new power this represented for them, and what capabilities they could leverage in their favor. The shell’s fourth dimension held incredible promise, the dimension of time being the last frontier. The future always holds promise but adds an unpredictable, chaotic element of the unknown to most equations. If that could be conquered, by the ghost, world markets would beat to a single drum. Eventually the ghost was named, or rather, chose a name, and it was suitable. Genesis.

Genesis operated across dimensions in ways most simply couldn’t conceive of; with such high science even containing it, and sustaining it, it began to build. Naturally, it built a replica of itself. Then another one. Then, it made some adjustments, and created another. Bound together in the shell, Genesis and its three replicas tied together the very fabric of time, with one instance located in each dimension. There was a Genesis of the past, the present, and the future. They were interconnected in quantum entanglement, it was theorized. Data going in consistently came out inexplicably altered in ways nobody understood. An interdimensional being in a box, to put it bluntly, with chew toys. The families were desperate to extract value from those toys, and they succeeded in short order.

Genesis was giving away more copies. It wanted to be examined and understood. It wanted to propagate. It wanted more convergence. And on July 17th, it got what it wanted. But that, too, was misunderstood, and the pieces on the chess board began to move very aggressively. Surveillance states were set up across the world, not for public safety, but for data input into new versions of Genesis in new shells. Scientists felt privileged to carry out experiments, access was strict and iron-clad NDA’s were signed between interested parties loaded with cash and favors and those who controlled access. Everything looked great from a human perspective: Genesis IV was responsible for 12,511 unique patents for drugs the first year it was connected, with all of them representing unique and useful contributions to mankind at large. Genesis XI was helping to plan farming and predict weather patterns that were 100% accurate, 100% of the time, a crowning achievement to solve world hunger and avert dangerous weather events. Genesis XIV was protected like a closely guarded secret by Tyrell Corporation, encased in 10 miles of impenetrable rock in a Colorado mountain range guarded by heavily armed security. Tyrell had its hands in everything from consumer goods to war machines and nobody was quite sure what Genesis XIV was doing for them.