The Eighth Day

by Tom Avitabile

  “My God, that’s a chilling prospect.”

  “That’s why we need to get to the Aegis,” Hiccock said.

  “Because it has a super computer?”

  “Well, this particular cruiser was a Parnes-directed project. It has the biggest, fastest computer in the world, now that ALISON is dead.”

  “Snoozing!” Kronos corrected. “ALISON is in sleep mode. In tens of millions of computers across the web.”

  ∞§∞

  Mid-flight, Janice moved over and sat next to Bill, who was lost in thought looking out the window. “What’s got you looking like you lost your puppy, Bill?”

  “I spent the better part of my life trying to achieve the unfettered thinking and advances to mankind that true artificial intelligence could achieve. And now I am responsible for killing it.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, Kronos recorded most of ALISON’s so-called gifts. Kronos thought he was going to be the richest man in the world.”

  “He’s always looking for an angle.”

  “Well, he didn’t find one this time. Over the last three days while we were waiting to get dug out, he and Parnes’s smart guys went through ALISON’s programming. The only thing ALISON seemed to get right was the brain mapping. Otherwise, she missed a couple of things. For instance, her longevity revelation will only work with synthetic life. Organic humans also have organic microbes, germs, and viruses. So it averages out to about eighty years.”

  “You can’t fool mother nature.”

  “Or father science either. The interplanetary space ship? It would take all the natural resources and energy of five planets the size of Jupiter to achieve light speed. Not very practical since we’d need one to get to the next Jupiter-sized planet outside our solar system.”

  “But she got the brain thing right because she empirically learned the practical dynamics dealing with millions of brains. The baseline input was wrong on everything else, but given time we might have been able to input the practical and then maybe …”

  “Hold on to your dreams, Billy. The reality is that all we did the other day was kill a killer.”

  ∞§∞

  The Marine chopper was cleared for landing on the base’s helipad. The base commander, still buttoning his dress shirt, waited in a Jeep. Someone will pay for this, he thought as the spinning blades of Marine One slowed, not giving me any warning of a presidential visit. When the blades stopped, a hastily assembled band started to play “Hail to the Chief.” The lead Secret Service agent popped his head out of the copter. After scanning the area, he stepped aside for the president. Mitchell descended the small gangway to the tarmac and immediately gave the cut signal to the band. They abruptly stopped, with the resounding dissonance of a very inappropriate chord.

  The base commander saluted the president. “Sir, I apologize. We had no advance warning of your …”

  “That’s not a concern, Commander. We are here on a vital mission of national security. I need your Jeep.”

  “Excuse me, Sir?”

  “Thanks.” The president whistled as if hailing a cab. “Let’s go!” he called to the others in the chopper and then they were off. A Secret Service agent pulled a sailor from another Jeep and took off after his charge.

  ∞§∞

  Hiccock was already up the gangplank and jumped down onto the deck. The captain of the Aegis cruiser was a little put off by this. Hiccock, realizing his error in nautical protocol, jumped back up on the plank.

  “Permission to come aboard, Sir?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Science advisor to the president, William Hiccock, Sir. We need your boat.”

  “It’s a ship, and what do you mean you need it?”

  “That’s classified, Sir.”

  “What? You barge onto my command and make demands … just who do you think you are?”

  Another man came onto the deck from the gangplank. “I don’t know who he thinks he is, but I know who I am. Do you, Captain?”

  The captain involuntarily blurted, “Holy shit.”

  “That’s what I would have said, Captain. Now give this man and his team everything they ask for, without hesitation. Whatever they request is to be considered a direct order from me, is that clear?”

  The captain was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. In one second’s worth of calculation, the lifelong Navy man uttered words he would have thought unthinkable sixty seconds earlier. “Sir, we have never met, and you do look like the president. But Sir, this is a warship of the United States. I cannot relinquish it to … I mean, Sir, there ain’t nothing in the book that covers this.”

  Just then, one of the Secret Service agents clambered up the plank. Attached to his wrist was “the briefcase.”

  “Mark, let me have the football,” the president ordered, his eyes locked on the captain as Mark uncuffed the case from his wrist and placed it on a munitions locker. The agent took the key from around his neck and opened the lock. The president opened his shirt and removed a key on a chain around his neck and inserted it into one of two keyholes on the console inside the briefcase. The agent inserted a second key into the other safety lockout switch and was about to turn it.

  The president stayed locked on the captain’s eyes with a grim expression that was having the desired effect on the man. “I could launch a few nukes, if this isn’t proof enough.”

  With his eyes as wide as biology allowed, the captain swallowed hard and snapped a salute. “Sir, the U.S.S. Princeton and her crew stand ready to serve, Sir.”

  “Thank you, Captain. Mr. Hiccock.”

  “Kronos.”

  “Yo, Captain, we need to get to the computer room and we need your best guy.”

  “Ensign, take them below and get Mr. Carson to the ECM room.”

  Kronos and the Admiral followed him.

  “Who’s the woman?” the captain asked.

  “That’s Admiral Henrietta Parks,” the president said.

  “Day for surprises, Sir. Would you like to have my quarters, Sir?”

  “Actually, Captain, I want you to trim your crew. Just the essential personnel that you’ll need to keep the computers going and to be ready to steam out twenty miles. Oh, and I want my helicopter to land on your deck.”

  The captain took all this in with an air of incredulity. “Yes, Sir, anything else?”

  “Yes. If you have any personal items onboard, please leave them on the pier.” That last statement confused the hell out of the captain, but, hey, this was the president.

  “I’ll have to alert the harbormaster of our estimated time of departure.”

  “Hopefully in twenty minutes. Tell him it’s classified.”

  “Sir …”

  “Yes, Captain,”

  “Are we now Navy One?”

  ∞§∞

  The president descended the ladder and joined the team in the electronic countermeasures room.

  “Attention on deck.”

  Every sailor, whether working or not, stood and snapped to attention.

  “Carry on, men.”

  They stared at their Commander in Chief.

  “Just out enjoying one of my boats, men,” the president mused to relax the crew.

  “Ship, Sir,” a startled-that-he-even-said-it ensign pointed out.

  The president turned and shot him a look, then softened. “Excuse an old Air Force fighter jockey. Sorry, no disrespect intended to your fine ship, Ensign.” He turned to Kronos, “How’s it going?”

  “Well, I got the attractor written and the Admiral is creating the firewall that will fool the code. We’ll be ready to try it in five minutes.” The president gestured for Hiccock to follow him. They moved to the officer’s mess, asking a couple of stunned officers to give them the room.

  “Bill, what if this doesn’t work?”

  “Haven’t thought that far, Sir.”

  “Great!”

  “Sir, are you really going to resign?”

  “Under the t
wenty-fifth amendment, I am going to step aside to the vice president and let Congress decide whether to make it permanent or not.”

  “Sir, may I ask you something?”

  “The answer is no, Bill. Reynolds made the deal and didn’t think it was important enough to tell me about it. But, no matter, it was my responsibility. Even though I did not make the deal with Parnes, I benefited from it.”

  “Whatever happens, Sir, thank you for believing in my approach.”

  “You made sense, Bill. Your ideas were wild, but this whole nightmare has been unprecedented.”

  Kronos called out, and both men reentered the ECM.

  “We’re ready to turn this sucker loose. The Navy guys have routed all our circuits onto the five fiber-optic cables running to the ship.”

  “Is my line ready?” the president asked the captain.

  A Navy yeoman appeared with a telephone handset and held the center button down for the Commander in Chief as he leaned into it.

  “Mr. Vice President, make your speech.” He then asked the yeoman, “Can we pipe that down here?”

  A sailor turned on a TV set. The show was immediately interrupted by a slide that read ‘Please Stand By’—the Cold War–designed government system of commandeering broadcast channels not having caught up to the slick computer graphics of the news networks. A man in a suit, probably a network executive who was quickly drafted into service, addressed the camera. “Pursuant to our FCC licensing, we now relinquish airtime to the executive branch of the government for this important announcement.” The picture switched to the White House pressroom. There, the vice president was at the podium.

  Hiccock glanced at his watch; it was 7:48 PST. Kronos reported the planting of digital DNA over the web at 7:53 PM PST, three days earlier. Hiccock figured there was a good shot that the majority of the computers that were on then would be on now. That’s why the timing was so critical. They could not permit another twenty-four hours to pass allowing ALISON to regroup elsewhere. He only hoped they had gotten it right. They all looked up at the vice president on the TV monitor.

  “My fellow Americans, our nation has suffered great devastation and tremendous loss of life in the past few months. I can tell you tonight that we are near the end of this horrendous episode in American history. President Mitchell has asked me to address you tonight. He is, at this moment, involved with the conclusion of this national crisis. Now it is your turn to help. This calamity has been brought upon us through technological means. Although the greatest part of the threat has been diminished, there remains a call for an essential concentrated effort from all of you.

  “In coordination with 127 governments around the world, whose leaders are, at this instant, asking their citizens to do the same thing, I implore you, if you own a computer, to please turn it on now and establish an online connection. Stay online for ten minutes and then, after these ten minutes, please turn off. If you cannot get online right now, please try again in ten minutes. Our experts tell us this is necessary to, once and for all, erase the malignant viruses that still loom in each and every online computer in the world. Please be assured your computer will not be adversely affected in any way.”

  The camera zoomed in, as was the standard format for all presidential addresses when they neared the end of the prepared text. “In the coming days I will also address this nation on a grave matter of national importance, but for now, the goal is to rid the World Wide Web, once and for all, of this hideous virus. Thank you and God bless America.”

  ∞§∞

  “Okay. Kronos, Admiral, go,” the president said.

  Kronos typed, “Load program.” The Cray’s screen blinked and then displayed a graphic progress bar with a percentage in type below it reading zero. A minute later, it still read zero.

  “Kro ... nos ... ?” Hiccock called out as he glanced at the clock.

  “It’s not working,” the Admiral said.

  “There must be a parameter mismatch. Something is different. Something has changed from when ALISON was last on line.”

  “Nine minutes,” Hiccock said, checking his watch.

  “What’s different?”

  “Well, it is a whole different computer, for one thing,” the president said.

  “Nah, we are running a compiled simulator. The front door is exactly the same.”

  “Kronos, ALISON did exactly what when she distributed her code?” Hiccock asked.

  “She, er … it imprinted the code with an algorithm that uniquely identified her as her … it.”

  “And what was the basis for the algorithm?”

  “Well, what I detangled was a code line that gave her status at the time of the distribution.”

  “Could Marilyn be the key?”

  “Crap! Yes, of course!” Kronos quickly flew over to his laptop bag and ripped out the CD that contained the voice synthesis program.

  “Okay, now explain it to me,” the president said.

  “The snapshot that Kronos used to replicate the ‘scent’ of mommy to all the little digital babies out there was taken before Kronos plugged in the data-to-voice module in the original ALISON. The babies leaving the nest took their exact snapshot of ‘mommy’ with them a few minutes later. That configuration had Marilyn’s voice program by then.”

  “So, he’s now going to give the ship’s computer mommy’s voice?”

  “That way she can call all the kiddies home with a voice they’ll recognize, so to speak.”

  “Seven minutes left.”

  Kronos slammed the CD into the drive and then selected “Marilyn.”

  The bar started to move. The percentage read “1%.”

  “Yes!”

  The line continued moving. The percentages climbed into double digits.

  “What are we looking for here, Bill?” the president asked.

  “ALISON based the distribution on RAID protocol based on the prime number seven.”

  Kronos filled in. “In a RAID protocol, you can lose parts of data streams and because of a built-in redundancy, it can reconstruct the missing data.”

  “But not if the majority of the data is missing,” the president said as he caught on.

  “Exactly, so based on seven, any four pieces can reconstruct the full seven.”

  “I see, so that’s a little more than 50 percent.”

  “But the reverse is also true. If four pieces out of the seven are absent then the data can never be reconstituted,” Hiccock said. “And the Admiral and Kronos have written a subroutine that erases the DNA from peoples’ computers as it finds it arriving on the ship. So when the percentage of DNA captured by the Cray passes 58 percent, the rest of the distributed code on the web can never reach critical percentage again and will wait dormant forever.”

  “Twenty-seven percent now,” Kronos said.

  “Come on …”

  All at once, the room became still as a chilling voice from the not-too-distant past cut through the ECM. “I cannot locate memory locations DBAE2098367 through EEEE999999.”

  “The bitch is back,” Tyler blurted out.

  “ALISON, we are reinstalling your core now,” the Admiral said. “We had a temporary malfunction of the nexus.”

  “What was the cause?”

  “An insect flew in between the layers and shorted out your electrolytic fluid,” the Admiral said.

  “Sir, she is now at 39 percent,” Carson reported.

  “ALISON is coming back to life, stretching her computational muscle,” the Admiral said to Hiccock.

  “How is that possible?”

  Kronos answered, “She must’ve made a more complex code than we thought. She’s coming online faster because she’s sucking her life back out of the net.”

  “So if I understood your earlier numbers, when she reaches 58 percent she won’t need any more DNA from the net,” the president said.

  “Yes, Mr. President, that is correct.”

  “You mean we’re not disabling her, we are enabling her.”
>
  The color drained from Hiccock’s face as his mind raced. “Captain, please make sure all your weapons systems are manually locked out of any and all computer control systems whatsoever.”

  “Dear God, what have we done?” the Admiral said.

  “Fifty-one percent!”

  “We just gave a warship the most destructive intelligence ever created,” Tyler said.

  The president turned to the captain. “What’s your armament inventory?”

  “Six ASROC, 10 cruise, 3,000 rounds of five-inch armor piercing. Hundred thousand rounds of .44 cal. antiaircraft. And a half a million CIWS rounds. All war shots.”

  “Any nuclear?”

  “The antisubmarine rockets are nuclear-tipped, the cruise missiles are conventional, the close-in weapons systems have depleted uranium ordinance.”

  “Oh shit,” Kronos said. “ALISON just figured out where she is. She’s starting to rifle through the ship’s systems.”

  “What’s the percentage?”

  “Fifty-six percent”

  “Damn, we can’t stop yet,” Hiccock said. “We need 58 percent or this is all for nothing.” He addressed the captain, “Is your man ready?”

  ∞§∞

  On the deck amidships, an ensign wore a battle helmet with a chest-mounted microphone. As he stood with an axe poised over five red cables laid across one of the ship’s tie-off cleats, he was startled when the ASROC launcher turned toward him.

  ∞§∞

  Kronos read from the screen. “Here it starts. She’s plotting a firing solution for the ASROCs. She’s targeting a nuclear power plant in the San Joaquin Valley.”

  “If that blows, it will wipe out the entire West Coast,” the president said.

  Hiccock scurried up the ladder and onto the deck. He looked both ways and realized he hadn’t the faintest idea of what an ASROC launcher looked like.

  A second later, he learned, as the lid covering the number-four missile chamber blew off in preparation for the launch of the ten-inch-diameter nuclear-tipped antisubmarine rocket. He grabbed the axe from the sailor’s hand. Instinctively, Hiccock wedged the head of the axe between the thin skin of the missile’s body and the chamber’s edge. The sailor, realizing Hiccock’s intent, quickly pulled a fire coat out of the locker behind the stairway and ran toward him. The ignition plume exploded out of the chamber, spewing the propellant flame forward. The sailor reached Hiccock and shielded them both with the fire coat as the missile launched, protecting them from the fiery blast-back as the rocket left the tube. The head of the axe, still being held by Hiccock, slit the thin titanium skin all the way down the emerging missile’s length. The integrity of the rocket’s outer casing destroyed, the $3 million dollar ASROC with a $10 million dollar nuclear depth charge on its tip wobbled and never attained any altitude. It fell into the ocean one hundred feet in front of the ship.