by John Akers
The Infinet
John Akers
Tech Noir Press
Copyright © 2017 by John Akers
All rights reserved.
Published by Tech Noir Press in 2017.
This is a work of fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-9991906-1-6 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-9991906-0-9 (ebook)
Tech Noir Press
PO Box 720523
San Diego, CA 92172-0523
First edition
john-akers.com
To Adonia
Contents
Part I
Untitled
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part II
Untitled
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part III
Untitled
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part IV
Untitled
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Part V
Untitled
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Part VI
Untitled
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Part 1
Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.
Steve Jobs
Prologue
The white-haired man sat quietly at his desk facing an array of computer monitors mounted on the wall. Thousands of tiny green alphanumeric characters on black backgrounds bathed his face in a sickly luminescence that washed his otherwise blue eyes out to a watery gray. As he stared into the pallid glow, the man did something unusual.
For the first time in many years, he smiled.
It was not a smile of pleasure. On the contrary, he had just watched a quantum computer infiltrate his network, then barely escape his counterattack attempt to infect it with a virus. But it had vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving no means of tracing it afterward.
Neither was his smile an attempt to mask anger. He had trained himself years ago to eliminate the useless emotions of flash anger and fear.
His smile was one of resolution. No one had ever breached his network and survived, but now this one had succeeded and at a particularly delicate time. He had been about to launch his virus on the index case, the person from whom the end of all things would begin. For someone or something, to have infiltrated his network at this moment was no coincidence. Somehow it had known of his intentions and had tried to interfere.
It was the speed with which it had moved that had given it away. Although quantum technology was still in its infancy, there were just a handful of functional q-comps in the world. Most were at the ‘learning to crawl’ stage of development, but the potential for what they could do was immeasurable. The ability to hold multiple values in each register, and link the behavior of separate entities through entanglement, would revolutionize computing. All the operational q-comps in existence belonged to powerful nation-states. All except one. And he knew it was that outlier that had attacked him.
He swept a crumpled-up fast food wrapper off the desktop, and it tumbled down the bell-shaped mound of trash surrounding his desk. He wiped his mouth with one hand, then wiped the hand on his pants. Pulling a tube of Mentholatum out of a drawer, he squirted a blob of it onto his forefinger, then smushed it onto his upper lip under his nostrils. After putting the tube back and wiping his finger on his pants again, he rested his forearms on the edge of the desk, now rounded smooth by nearly two years of constant, gentle abrading.
Slowly, languidly, he extended his right forefinger above the Enter key. The keyboard, the monitors, and the computer workstation under the desk were all relics, all rendered obsolete by the advent of the Univiz a decade earlier. But they still worked, and in a moment a tiny neuromuscular contraction in his finger would trigger a global purification not even a q-comp could stop.
Perhaps the intruder now knew he had amassed a worldwide army of more than 10 billion devices, infected through decades-old vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. No matter. His soldiers-to-be were autonomous, their activities only loosely coordinated by four dozen supercomputers he’d stationed around the globe. The only way to halt the spread of chaos would be to find and quarantine each infected device one at a time. But accessing all the networks, which most countries now required to be password protected, would necessitate a brute-force attack on a global scale. It was what he had done, and it had taken him almost two years.
And that was the easy part. The hard part would be developing and applying quarantines for each of the thousands of devices he had enslaved.
There was nowhere near enough time. In a moment, his mechanized sleeper cells would begin to awake. Initially, as the devices they had surrounded themselves with started to turn against them, some people would attempt to help those who had been targeted. But when it became clear the consecrated could not be cured, and the contagion spread to those who tried to help, their instinct for self-preservation would take over. Then the evanescent threads holding their so-called civilization together would unravel, and humanity’s day of reckoning would be at hand.
Gently he pressed the Enter key. The blinking rectangle of the cursor jumped to the next line, underneath the command he had given.
run program ‘EndAnthropocene’
An instant later the command had disappeared, swept upward by the deluge of code that displayed as the program began to execute. The man’s lips trembled, and the glow from the monitors sparkled in the tears that had suddenly sprung to his eyes. It was begun. In an evolutionary instant, everything humans had built would be razed to the ground. Then they would see how ephemeral the world they’d constructed for themselves was. And before it was over, he would make sure they all knew who it was that had lit the light of truth for them.
M3k@n!k
Chapter 1
Wednesday, 7:30 AM PT
Oreste Pax hovered, motionless, at the radial center of a giant, dark sphere. Fifty feet away in any direction, faint white l
ines of latitude and longitude partitioned it into hundreds of sections. Pax’s eyes scanned the inner walls and came to rest on a section with an icon of stacked sheets of paper. A moment later, a pair of disembodied green eyes materialized above it. They glowered at him, and there was a deep rumble, so low he felt it more than heard it. While still staring at the eyes, Pax touched his right thumb and forefinger together.
Instantly, a terrible roar filled the air. The eyes disappeared, and a massive white tentacle exploded out of the hole. As it hurtled toward him, Pax noticed the tip was flat, with markings on it that looked like...text.
Three feet before it would have smashed into his face, the front of the tentacle suddenly froze, and an enormous electric crackling drowned out the roar. Pax saw the tentacle was, in fact, a long line of thousands of virtual documents, which now crashed into the invisible force field surrounding Pax and engulfing him in a paper cocoon. The roar turned into an agonized shriek, and the papers flew away from Pax and snapped back into a well-formed line. The far end was still connected to the hole in the sphere, while the document in front hovered, motionless, a foot away from his face. The rest swayed gently, like a strand of giant kelp in the ocean. The only sound was a faint, pitiful whimpering.
Ten years earlier, Pax had gotten quite a kick out of this effect, as had more than a hundred million other Univiz customers. The Alien Zoo was the first virtual environment he’d ever created, and he’d chosen it that morning in hopes of cheering himself up a bit. Today, however, it hadn’t even raised his heart rate. He was still somewhat conscious of the real world outside his virtual one, in which he was being driven by his black mFarad auto-electric sedan down the I-5 south in San Diego. But the vast majority of his attention was fixed on a future reality in which—unless that morning’s user testing for Project Simon produced some inexplicably spectacular results—he would no longer be CEO of Omnitech Industries. All because of three quarters of missed earnings and the misfortune of having an asshole like Morgan Granville be the company’s largest minority shareholder.
Purely out of habit, Pax glanced at the first message, a text from his VP of Investor Relations. The message took up almost the whole page, but a single-sentence summary at the top, added by the UV’s content analyzer, told him all he needed to know. Namely, that the board of directors had reluctantly given final approval to Granville’s petition for the annual shareholder’s meeting to be in person. Pax sighed. That meant he and the rest of the executive team would have to sweat it out on stage while Granville and others ostentatiously demanded to know why Omnitech wasn’t making them as filthy rich this year as it had every year before.
Pax flicked the tip of his middle finger against his thumb. The document flew up and, with a faint poof, burst into a cloud of dust. The dust turned into sparkles which drifted down like the aftermath of a fireworks explosion before disappearing.
Before he could look at the next document, a soft, synthesized doodoodoo filled Pax’s ears. A picture of an overly tanned man with extremely white teeth materialized in front of the line of documents, with “Russell Murphy—Executive Vice President, Marketing and Sales” displayed underneath. The picture slid to the right, and the system’s estimated probabilities for the topics Murphy was calling to discuss appeared on the left.
Chinese delegation meeting: 93%
China market opportunity: 79%
Request raise: 41%
Omnitech 10-year anniversary: 34%
Pax groaned. Murphy had been hired as a marketing vice-president five years earlier, promoted to senior vice-president two years later, then executive vice-president just two months ago. Pax hadn’t realized until just before the latest promotion that Murphy had at some point along the way become a stooge of Granville’s, but at that point, it was too late to do anything about it. Pax avoided him as much as possible because, topic probabilities notwithstanding, he knew Murphy’s real aim was to gather evidence Granville could use against Pax.
The placid, pedantic voice of Pax’s virtual assistant, Gabe, sounded in his ears. “Sir, Russell Murphy is calling. Should I make up another pathetic excuse as to why you won't talk to him?"
Pax's face cracked into a smile. "I'm liking this new personality profile of yours, Gabe.”
“I’m not surprised. I always knew you were a masochist.”
Pax laughed. ”How many excuses have we given him since the last time I talked to him?”
“Fourteen.”
"Yikes.”
“Indeed. And by the way, there’s no we in this scenario. You’ve become a sniveling coward all on your own.”
Pax chuckled but didn’t reply. Instead, he let three more ringtones pass before giving a long sigh. "He's not going away, is he?"
“Apparently not. Looks like your ‘duck and cower’ strategy isn't going to work this time.“
“All right, all right. Put him on."
“Very good, sir. Please remember to take your thumb out of your mouth before speaking.”
Pax started to laugh but quickly choked it off as a doodeep sound indicated the call was live. He cleared his throat and said, “Hello, Murphy. What's up?"
Russell Murphy’s avatar morphed into a video feed from a camera somewhere in his home office. His teeth were even bigger and whiter on video than on his profile picture.
“Oreste!” Murphy boomed. “Whaddya know, you answered! To what do I owe this great honor?” He followed this up with several loud guffaws. Whenever Pax had video calls with Murphy it reminded him it had been a significant oversight on his part not to enable users to virtually assault the 3-D image of someone they were talking to, should they find it therapeutic to do so.
"I just decided to answer every tenth call I get today,” Pax said, “and you were lucky caller number 20."
"Super! But I think you should change your criteria to always take calls from your executive vice-presidents, and take every tenth call from everyone else.”
“I’ll take it under consideration. Now, let me ask again, what’s up?”
“I just got a call from our pals at the State Department. They’d like some color commentary about what happened in the meeting you had with the Chinese delegation. Apparently, they were a little miffed about the reception you gave them.”
Pax felt a flash of anger. God, why won’t the government show a little backbone when it comes to the Chinese? “All I did was tell them we weren’t going to agree to their stupid information restriction request,” he mumbled.
“Right. Well, the issue has to do with the fact that you actually used the word ‘stupid.’ Not sure how many times you’ve been to China, but that phrasing’s considered just as rude there as it is in the rest of the world.”
“Yeah, well, that government of theirs is going the way of the dinosaurs anyway.”
“Perhaps. But I imagine you’d rather not be remembered as the guy who started WWIII due to being an impolitic son-of-a-bitch.”
Pax closed his eyes and massaged his forehead. His refusal to sell the Univiz in China, along with other countries suffering under repressive dictatorships, was at the crux of the shareholder revolt. The as-yet untapped potential of that market would more than cover the slowing growth rates in Omnitech’s existing core markets. Consequently, Pax’s stance on the matter didn’t sit well with bipedal leeches like Granville, who only cared about their bottom line.
“Look, Murph, just make up something about it being an idiom that got messed up in translation. Like when Kennedy tried to tell the Germans he was one of them but called himself a jelly doughnut instead."
“That's an urban legend. Kennedy said it correctly."
"Oh. Well, anyway, just get our translation department on it and say the translator at the meeting made a hash of it.”
“Look, Oreste, that’s not gonna…”
“Oops, gotta go, another call coming in,” Pax lied while making a fist and rotating it downward in a ‘hang up’ gesture. Murphy’s image dissolved, but as he began to look at
the next document in line, he realized the last thing he felt like doing was dealing with was his inbox. What was the point, anyway? Unless that morning’s testing produced a miracle, he would be out on his ass in a week or two. “Clear display,” he said.
The virtual world disappeared, and sunlight flooded his eyes. The UV’s eye sensor detected the sudden constriction of Pax’s pupils, and a tiny electric current was immediately applied to the polycarbonic resin on the exterior surface of his UV’s lenses to shade them. The lenses were encased in cobalt blue amorphous aluminum frames which connected to temples that ran down both sides of his head. The temples bowed outward slightly over his ears before continuing to the back of his head, their tips connected in a perpetual magnetic kiss. Microscopic servo motors on the inside of the bulge in each temple had optimized the angle and depth of insertion of two elasticone earbuds into Pax’s ear canals. Three millimeters of spongy Durafoam lined the underside of the metal to keep it from chafing his skin.