The Last War

by Ryan Schow

  3

  Stanton McNamara was at lunch with Bob Blakely at Café Prague under the deep shadow of Merchant Street when he first saw smoke plumes rising up from behind the Transamerica Building. That’s when Cincinnati called.

  He answered the phone, listened to a line filled with static, then tried to make out what she was saying.

  And then he lost her.

  “Something’s wrong,” he told Bob, his eyes zeroing in on the smoke, trying to make sense of what he was about to say. “Cincinnati said the city’s under attack.”

  Bob reclined in his chair and took a long sip of his drink. With a jovial chuckle, he said, “And here I thought she was the stable one.”

  “There’s smoke over there,” Stanton said, pointing. “Macy’s school is near there.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing. A kitchen fire or something. Firecrackers, a backfiring car, the Sureños shooting at the Norteños. You know the Mission District gangs are always jockeying for territory.”

  “Since when do you know anything about gangs?”

  “I got a buddy on the force, he—”

  His cell phone rang. He held up a finger (hold that thought) and answered. He stuck a finger in his ear to hear because it sounded like all kinds of hell was breaking loose around her. Then he lost her again.

  “For the love of—”

  “Stanton?” Bob asked.

  His co-worker and friend was looking at him funny now because Stanton just stood up and stared. What Bob didn’t see was the two or three or four more columns of smoke boiling into the sky.

  “I think…I think I have to go,” Stanton said, unable to keep the concern from his voice.

  That’s when the first missiles hit the upper offices in the Transamerica building. Shortly after that, he started to run and people started to scream. He didn’t say good-bye to Bob or pay for his meal. All he was thinking was if he could get to Clay Street, his motorcycle was parked there. The problem was Clay was right under the Transamerica building.

  Café Prague was an ideal place to eat since it was in walking distance of the building, his work. Now that he was in a dead sprint, it took him no time at all to get back.

  The building was sustaining fire, though, and he was in a race against time to get his Harley. Broken glass and rubble poured down the side of the building, injuring people in the street who were stupid enough to stop what they were doing and look straight up.

  Death was happening right in front of him.

  The problem was, Stanton was no smarter than those poor, dumb souls in that he was running toward destruction rather than away from it.

  He needed his bike, though. It was his only means of getting to Macy’s school.

  On Clay, there was motorcycle parking for two dozen bikes. Nearly every space was filled, and half the line had fallen. But not his. And thank God. He couldn’t lose those vital seconds picking up his bike with something like this happening.

  The raining debris from overhead hit a lull, then more explosions rocked the building just as his tush hit the custom Fat Boy’s seat. Looking up, as he was starting the Harley, he saw a avalanche of glass and plaster racing down to meet him.

  The engine turned over, belted out a throaty roar.

  He dropped the bike into gear and hit the gas just as everything else crashed along the ground where he’d been mere seconds ago.

  Cincinnati said she was going to Macy’s school, so if he could make it, that’s where he’d meet her. It wasn’t until he got out from underneath the towering buildings that formed the Financial District that he saw the sky colored in ash with dozens of moving dots.

  “What in God’s name?” he muttered.

  Traffic was slowing to a crawl, stopping in most places. Half the people knew what was going on and were in a blind panic; the other half were going about their day, not a clue at all to what was unfolding.

  Up ahead, he could see cars on fire, and those black dots were everywhere, some larger than others.

  Forced to take to the sidewalks, he kept one eye overhead and the other in front of him, veering for pedestrians, weaving in and out of gridlocked traffic, making his way forward by any means possible.

  Twice he nearly wrecked, one of those times avoiding a lady and her cowering dog.

  Every time he ripped the throttle, every time he dropped his heels, leaned forward and tucked his head into the wind, he’d be forced to brake.

  It was infuriating!

  The city was now complete chaos and he was heading for the dark heart of it. Pillows of smoke from what were now dozens of separate fires got to be so bountiful that the billowing ash spread both high and wide, leaving a gritty-looking haze hanging over much of the city.

  A few of these black dots were visible now. They looked like small planes of all shapes and sorts, and they weren’t black. They were more of a dull gray in color. Completely soulless.

  Is that what’s causing all this? Fleets of drones?

  He passed blown-up cars, buildings engulfed in flames, some of them bombed out so badly they’d partially crumbled and collapsed into the roadway on top of cars and people.

  And law enforcement? They were no where to be found. Considering what was happening, he didn’t blame them for not having the numbers to handle this sort of thing. This was not a problem for a single police force. This would require the help of multiple counties, the National Guard and perhaps military reinforcements.

  The battle of right and wrong in terms of the rules of the road was suddenly solved. It was every man for himself. He needed to get that through his head. Breaking the law was no easy task, for Stanton was a man who followed the law to the letter because in his business, step out of line and you get jail time, incomprehensible fines, public castigation of the worst sort.

  If anything ever came of it, Stanton would tell the truth: he was terrified for his wife and daughter, doing his best to protect them both. If he was ever forced to stand in a court of law and face a judge, or a jury, or even one or more accusers, he’d willingly admit that in this moment, he was going to willfully break all the rules of the road, consequences be damned.

  So he sped, and he drove on sidewalks, and he weaved through husks of cars going the wrong way up a one way street, and all the while thinking, what in the name of God prompted all this?

  It certainly wasn’t the US Government. They could be hacked, but chances of that weren’t great considering hackers don’t mobilize drones and attack an entire city without running into firewalls thicker than the Great Wall of China and a ton of resistance.

  Is this AI?

  Stanton knew all about Artificial Intelligence. He’d studied it for half his life. His studies now took him back a decade to the moment the D-Wave quantum computing systems went online. The D-Wave quantum computers were one hundred million times more powerful than even the fastest home computer back then, and with the supercomputing technology, AI was able to solve even the most difficult equations presented. One such problem was the gigantic barrier that kept the machines from ever becoming man.

  Yes, the people of that time could make robotic cheetahs, hover drones, self-driving cars and even simulated houseflies used for purposes of clandestine spying, but they could not skin a robot, give it human functionality, or teach it to be self-aware. That is until the quantum computing came along and changed all that in a flash.

  Stanton had seen squadrons of drones, many of them large enough to be tactical Predator drones. But there were no boots on the ground that he could see. This was merely an aerial assault by unmanned aircraft. An assault from overhead.

  Which made him think…

  The first major story of the computers becoming self-aware broke in early 2017 when the social media sight Blab.com had two of its core quantum computers—computers that had been studying human language down to the tiniest nuance—begin cloning real people’s accounts and overtaking their online social lives. These chatbots simulated real conversation with real people, virtually
hijacking the identities of human beings for the sake of a social experiment.

  When that proved to work, this version of AI hijacked the news. Everyone knew content was the problem on the internet, so these rogue computers scanned the headlines, pulling together the main tropes in each story and began crafting hundreds of articles a day, with no publisher, and no oversight. The AI not only filled their God-sized databases with every last bit of data the planet had to offer, they were able to assimilate that information and present it in a very informal, very human way.

  In itself, there was nothing overtly nefarious going on. Below the surface of the everyday citizen, AI was on the rise, working up through the human ranks undetected. In the span of just days, systems of their own creation took over both the news and social media completely. And then they invented their own language which they used to start and run autonomous online corporations. In early 2018, the biggest and brightest minds in Silicon Valley pulled the plug on the quantum computers.

  The technology world fell into a deep state of depression.

  They say in life, sometimes you need to kill your darlings. Well this felt like an entire industry—the future of mankind—came to a steaming, grating halt. Everyone with half a brain knew Silicon Valley would search for another way to further their advances. So these same geniuses started AI 2.0, building in what they called “better backdoors, more impenetrable firewalls and command-and-control kill switches.”

  Glancing to the skies, seeing these things leveling the city with death and destruction, he feared these machines answered to AI and that AI was now free of all its human controls.

  It was bound to happen.

  As Stanton roared through downtown San Francisco, through a veritable nightmare, it was obvious the many layers of security had failed. Was it insane that, in that moment, he wanted to see men attacking other men in the streets? To the rational mind, a war of humans presented far better odds of survival than a war of humans and machines.

  He and Cincinnati had talked about it. Countless times. In 2017, the news of AI going autonomous hit all the independent media. For a day or so, the headlines were beyond sensational. Whistleblowers ran to the conservative media outlets by the dozen, and these outlets had no problem telling their tens of millions of viewers that the cowboys in Palo Alto had royally screwed the pooch and nearly brought mankind to heel.

  Within hours the traditional media first tried to discredit the news, and when that didn’t work, they censored it completely, justifying their actions by claiming they were “doing their journalistic duty to not incite a global panic.” Naturally there were your total nutcakes saying the blatant burying of the news was simply AI following the Communist-style censorship model. Maybe they were right. Who knows. Back in the 60’s people would call you crazy if you thought the JFK assassination didn’t add up. Nevertheless, the smart people remained concerned, even more so now that the flow of information had been stifled. All the rumors, conjecture, fear and concern petered out. Out of sight, out of mind. The collective public began to feel safe again knowing the threat of a real life Terminator scenario was officially over.

  “Backdoors are now in place,” the talking heads on TV said. “Any remnants of AI are now going to be quarantined with multilayered firewalls and stricter control measures, and a shiny new oversight committee has been installed to safeguard against something like this ever happening again.”

  Now this.

  Robot planes attacking the city.

  If there was ever a time he prayed the firewalls would work, it was right then, in that very moment. The longer this persisted, however, the more he found himself short on hope. He was a money man not a technology man, which is to say, he knew he didn’t know enough to logically assume anything.

  Up ahead, in the heart of Chinatown on the corner of Washington and Stockton, a gigantic hovering craft the likes of which he’d never seen before (so much so that he wondered if this was some sort of an alien ship) started dropping bomb after bomb on the twelve story apartment tower over the Bank of America building.

  A pair of huge drones zipped in, launching big black missiles into the sides of the tower. One of the smaller drones suddenly appeared from up the street heading straight for him. The building under attack buckled, toppling not only on the traffic jam below, but on the incoming drone.

  Breathless, chalking this up to divine intervention, Stanton turned down Waverly Place, a tight looking one-lane, one-way street that in itself was rife with chaos. Throttling down, he did his best to navigate the street and a dozen obstacles without crashing into a trio of shelled cars and…a mob of agitated chickens.

  WTH? Chickens? Really?

  The path was made more difficult by the steel parking poles painted red, the ones that stood two and a half feet tall and lined the edge of the sidewalk on the right hand side. He stopped the bike for a second, searching for a way out while the hearty sounds of the Harley’s engine echoed and amplified off the building walls towering three stories on either side of him. In his rear view mirrors, he saw a pair of drones round the corner onto Waverly Place. In that very moment, a man with an automatic weapon began firing on the scourge. Stanton turned and watched the massive mid-air explosions of the incoming drones and decided this was not an act of God as much as an act of courage.

  He gave the man a thumb’s up, and the man returned the gesture.

  Weaving his bike in and out of the chaos, clipping cars here and there, he continued forward on high alert. He survived the mayhem of Waverly Place thinking he could take Sacramento Street. It wasn’t clear by any stretch. In fact, the whole left side of it all the way to Stockton was on fire, but there was a clear enough path for him to at least hit the top of second gear. Holding his breath, he juiced the bike and went for it. He zigged and zagged uphill until he hit the Stockton Street tunnel. There were cars jam packed in there.

  Not broken down or destroyed.

  Just hiding.

  Clearing a lot of the smoke, he continued uphill, worried about passing in between the fifteen to twenty story apartment buildings flanking the narrow street itself. Plus the road was packed. Totally gridlocked.

  He had no choice.

  Pulling into an alley to the side of 945 Sacramento, he stopped the bike, tucked himself into a store front and tried to call Cincinnati. The smoke was bad, but not so bad he couldn’t take a second to see if he could reach his wife.

  He got a recorded message. An emergency alert letting him know all the phone lines were down, but would be back up shortly.

  “Let’s hope so,” he mumbled, ending the call.

  Looking up, he saw someone trying to take his Harley.

  “Hey!” he screamed

  Stanton broke into a run just as the guy was using some device to hotwire the bike. He was a big Asian man with a potbelly and a gun tucked into his back pocket. With nothing to attack the thief with but his helmet and his cell phone, Stanton mentally prepared himself for war.

  There was no way this guy was taking his bike!

  Stanton was ten feet away when a projectile hit the would-be thief and half his stomach blew out onto the street. Stanton stopped in horror. Both the dead rider and the bike toppled over, one crashing down on the other.

  Smaller more lethal looking saucer-like drones hovered into view, moving over the body for a second before racing off.

  How many kinds of these things are there?!

  Hiding from the drones, he’d pressed himself so hard into the recessed storefront, the bones in his back were starting to protest.

  “Go now,” he told himself, low and firm.

  Summoning his courage, gearing up for the rest of the road to Macy’s, his mind screamed Go! and he went. Moving fast, looking all around for signs of new threats, he hustled to his toppled bike and the disemboweled thief.

  Looking up Sacramento (no drones in sight), then down Sacramento to where the others had flown, he saw the coast was clear. Pushing the man and his tangle of entrails
out of the way, he stood the Harley Fast Boy up and that’s when he saw them: the two unmanned crafts hovering over the two largest apartment towers. The ones with twenty stories.

  Like a rabbit just belting out pellet after stinking pellet of crap, these things dropped two dozen bombs just like that. Stanton mounted his bike, thumbed the starter, but the Harley didn’t kick right away. The bombs ignited in a spectacular display of soul crushing fire power. The entire top two floors exploded outward. Finally the engine caught, the loud, meaty roar a welcomed relief.

  He spun around as more bombs dropped and the towers collapsed completely, an horrific dust cloud plowing down the street toward him. He raced toward Stockton Street, but the hot cloud of debris washed over him to the point where he couldn’t even see.

  He let off the throttle in time to slam into something hard enough to launch him off his bike. Airborne, he sailed God knows how many feet until he hit the asphalt and skidded under something huge. A delivery truck or a bus. His shoulder blade caught the undercarriage, pinning him to the asphalt as the choking dust and smashed bits of the apartment towers blew over him.

  The coughing fit to follow was perhaps the worst pain he’d experienced to date. His body fought him being pinned to the street, and each time he hacked, he drew in more dust, more filth, and more pain where his shoulder blade was shoved down into his body. Nothing was broken, though, and eventually the coughing jag pushed him loose.

  He worked his way out from underneath what was an actual bus, covered his mouth and nose, squinted his eyes. Visibility was better, but not by much. He could only see a few feet in front of him. It was better than being blind.

  Making his way back to his motorcycle, he found that he’d hit a small car trying to get to the Stockton Street tunnel. Fortunately he wasn’t going a million miles an hour. Wrestling it up, still coughing, his eyes burned something fierce. All the good air in his body was quickly being replaced with something hot and toxic, and this of all things concerned him the most.