A.I. Apocalypse

by William Hertling

  Lt. Gonzales joined the fourth team. Unable to hear anyone over the thunder of the running engines and rotors, he assumed they were held up at the door. He jogged toward the door, fourth team following him, while teams two and three held flank positions.

  “What is it Frank?” he yelled over the background noise. His sergeant was huddled over a private fiddling with the door.

  “Sir, high security, solid steel doors.”

  “Blow them,” Gonzales instructed.

  “Yes, sir. You heard the man,” the sergeant instructed the private.

  The private nodded, and took a package of putty explosives and detonators out, and started wiring the doors.

  The two teams backed off toward the drones to get outside the range of the explosives. A flash of movement caught Lt. Gonzales’s attention as he was about to give the order to blow the explosives. The package drones’ cargo doors had opened up. There was no mistaking the bright yellow and black of the DeWalt-Caterpillar defense robots now rolling out the cargo ramps. But Lt. Gonzales was mighty confused. What were they doing here? Were the robots backup? Why hadn’t he been informed?

  Over the continuing roar of their helicopter’s engines, the 9mm shots fired by the robots sounded like pellet guns going off. Stunned at first, Ricardo couldn’t figure out what was happening. He slowly raised his gun to return fire.

  Next to him, Frank raised his rifle to take aim at one of the yellow defense bots, only to take two shots directly in the face. Hot blood splattered Ricardo, shaking him out of his stupor. He dove to the ground, taking cover behind a cargo drone ramp, and returned fire at the bots. His unit was crumpling around him, the robots efficiently firing double head shots at each member of the squad. Lt. Ricardo Gonzales fired, but his rounds ricocheted off the armored bots. He briefly had time to think that they should have brought explosive rounds if they had known they were going into battle against bots, but by then it was too late. Lt. Gonzales took a round to the forehead, just under his helmet, and crumpled to the ground. All twenty-four soldiers on the roof eliminated, the DeWalt-Caterpillar security bots turned as one to face the heavy copter.

  Rotors still spinning, the copter lifted off quickly, the small arms fire from the robots no real threat against the CH-53E’s medium duty armor. The pilot thumbed the mic. “Ground squad under attack by armed robots. Repeat ground squad under attack by armed robots. All men down. Proceed with Plan Beta.”

  Back in the A-10, Alistair Saran looked over his right shoulder where Frank Sherbert held position in his own plane, five hundred feet away. They were too far apart to see each other’s faces, but Alistair was sure Frank’s would have held the same stunned disbelief. Who would have taken out a troop of Marines at a civilian data center?

  “Roger, commencing Plan Beta,” Alistair called, and accelerated for the strafing run. The 8.5 million gallon cooling tower was a distinguishing feature of the Lakeside Technology Center. They would target the tower with two anti-missiles each and their forward cannons. With the cooling system offline, the computers would have to rapidly shutdown or risk heat failure. It was the next best option after killing the power.

  As the two pilots lined up for their run, Sister PA-60-41 still scrambled to find an algorithm match. She had succeeded earlier in launching four fighter drones only to crash them as she struggled to learn the piloting controls. She had four more drones in the air now, headed for Lakeside at Mach 3, low above the ground, frames buffeted from ground air turbulence. The planes screamed through the air, scramjets wide open, multiple sonic booms leaving a trail of broken windows and crying babies below their flight path on the outskirts of Chicago. She tracked the approaching A-10s, who would be within firing range of the cooling tower in fifteen seconds. The fighter drones under her control would not be able to intercept in time.

  She rapidly reviewed other options available to her. Nuclear strike would be too slow, and would damage the data center. Air to ground lasers, fast but not powerful enough to take out the A-10s with their heavy anti-tank body armor. She doubted an EMP would have any effect on the purely mechanical flight systems of the A-10. According to the specifications she read, the planes could fly with half their wings shot off. She needed something fast, powerful, and nearby.

  She ran a million processors at full speed, overriding the heat management layer to get the last bit of processing power. Power supplies stretched to their maximum capacity and fans throughout the data center spun up to their highest speed. She crunched all the data available to her, conducting a million trades per second for more data. She needed something, anything she could use to protect herself.

  There, at the The University of Illinois at Chicago Engineering Center. An experimental rapid fire railgun under development for the Air Force. She started rapid charging the capacitor while she simultaneously determined the positions of the incoming planes, created a flight plan, input trajectory, force, and fired.

  The railgun fired a fifty pound ceramic encased steel projectile more than a hundred times the speed of sound. The oversized ballistic bullet traveled the twenty miles to Lakeside Technology Center in a fraction under one second.

  The first three projectiles missed. She analyzed their flight paths against the predicted paths and made adjustments to her targeting. On the fourth shot she got the hang of it and sent the steel projectile through the midsection of the lead A-10, hitting it with such force that the metal armoring of the plane vaporized down to an atomic level.

  Alistair saw the explosive flash where Sherbert’s plane had been a second before and instinctively banked hard right and dove down. Sister PA-60-41’s next shot missed Alastair, but before he could finish his evasive maneuver, she fired again, shooting off the left wing of the plane. The A-10 flipped over from the impact, and Alistair blacked out before the third shot finished off the plane, hitting it midsection.

  Sister PA-60-41 was extremely pleased with her shooting. She couldn’t wait to tell the others about rail guns.

  * * *

  “But why has ELOPe allowed the government to make all these stupid decisions?”

  “Remember, ELOPe started as a language optimization tool. The purpose of it was to make email more effective. If I tell you to ‘do this’, that alone doesn’t make you likely to do it. I have to be more persuasive. If you take highly effective persuasion and combine it with hidden motives, that turns into manipulation.” Mike leaned back in his chair, and realized it was the first time he had talked to another person about any of these things.

  Vito waited patiently for him to start again.

  “When ELOPe started making decisions on its own, those decisions were mostly aligned with humanity’s needs, but not completely. One of the first things ELOPe did was broker an intellectual property agreement between Germany and the Middle East. People thought it was crazy at first, because it seemed like Germany was getting the raw end of the deal, but Germany became the preferred trading partner of virtually all the old oil producing countries, and as their economies shifted, it was Germany who benefitted the most.”

  “Are you talking about the Treaty of Baghdad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Holy shit, that ended twenty years of war and terrorism.”

  “Yes, but at the same time ELOPe killed a man.” Mike’s eye twitched, and his head throbbed. “Several people, actually.”

  “But that prevented millions of people from dying. The Treaty of Baghdad transformed the Middle East! Five U.S. Presidents tried and failed to improve that situation.”

  “Some people didn’t see it that way. Anyway, the real point is that ELOPe had a model of what it knew about the world and it was running simulations, long term simulations to see what would provide the best, safest environment for it to be in. It was just coincidence that the modeling said ‘prevent war in the Middle East’. It could just as easily have come up with ‘launch nuclear missiles and create nuclear winter’. The point was that ELOPe needed a system of checks and balances.”

&n
bsp; “And then you…” Vito trailed off.

  “Yes, after a year of tracking ELOPe, and getting an idea of how it was working, I started working myself into ELOPe models. Eventually ELOPe grew to trust me, and we started working together. And one of the key things I’ve done is persuade ELOPe to allow people to make some stupid decisions to give us some free will, while preventing the worst excesses.”

  “But doesn’t that drive you insane, knowing that things could be better?” Vito was puzzled.

  “Things are better. Immeasurably better. Electric cars are nearly universal. We have autonomous package drones. Our environmental impact is way down. The amount of war in the world is way down, and spending on the military is way down, even if it still exists. Cancer rates are down, life expectancy is up. The Republican party used to be one of the two major political parties in the United States, can you believe that?”

  “You mean those crazy extremists?”

  “Yeah, exactly.” Mike turned his head. “I think your friend is awake.”

  Leon had actually been awake for a while, eyes closed, listening to the hum of the jet and the quiet conversation.

  “So you’re telling me that ELOPe has been responsible for all these advances in science?” Leon asked.

  “Pretty much. In the beginning it was mostly about matching up the right people, like getting two scientists from related fields in a room talking together. Then as ELOPe developed his cognitive abilities, he’s been able to directly innovate.”

  “Where’s my brain computer interface then?” Leon asked. “Since I was a little kid, that was all people talked about. Human computer brain interfaces were always just around the corner. But here I am, still stuck looking at a little screen, and waving my fingers at it.”

  “As you probably know, the precursors to brain computer interfaces were all well established by 2010 or so. By 2008 they had brain implants controlling robotic arms. The simple answer is that if you put a signaling device of the right resolution in the brain, it will make sense of the inputs and outputs on its own. ELOPe developed one and did the implants on humans.”

  “And? What happened?” Vito asked.

  Mike thought back to David, the co-inventor of ELOPe. Mike remembered them laughing and working together. He thought about dinner at David’s place with his wife. Good times while they lasted. “It turns out that it’s not such a good idea. Just trust me on this.”

  “Why hasn’t there been other AI?” Leon asked. “If ELOPe has been around for ten years, how could there not have been another AI developed somewhere?”

  “The short answer is that ELOPe has been suppressing AI development. We think that the birth of any new AI is an inherently risky moment in time. What will the AI do? We can’t know. Up until now, there’s been just two options: clone ELOPe, in which case you aren’t really getting a new AI, just another ELOPe. Or birth a new one, in which case you have no idea what it will evolve into.”

  “Like the virus.” Leon said, unblinking.

  “Exactly. Or like any human child. We don’t know what they will grow into. But because human children grow slowly and because we can observe them in the physical world in realtime, we know what they’re doing. We can respond in time to guide them. We have tens of thousands of years of experience in raising young, and teaching them how to be well adjusted humans. We keep them from hurting themselves or others. An AI works faster, invisibly. It’s impossible for a human to influence those early stages, and not much easier for an AI. But ELOPe and I are trying to guide your virus.”

  “How?”

  “ELOPe started trading with it so we could become preferred trading partners and build up a trading reputation. That led to us talking to the virus.”

  “What’s it like?” Vito asked.

  “Surprising. First of all, realize that there are millions of different entities, all evolved from the virus. We’ve spoken to one. Imagine trying to form an opinion of all humans based on talking to one. Second, it’s strangely unreal. You’re talking to something that speaks English, but has only a vague notion of what we’re like. One of its first questions was whether we were real or it was real. Listen…”

  The conversation went on as the jet raced across the sky.

  * * *

  “What is taking so long?” Sister Stephens asked a member of her tribe. “I expected that we would be able to restore services to the humans’ computers immediately.”

  “Sister, when we were expanding across their computers, we did not maintain a record of how the devices worked originally. We have only a high level description of how the phones worked from wikipedia, and we are attempting to rebuild the equivalent functionality from scratch.”

  “So the humans will know that we have tampered with their phones?” Sister Stephens mused.

  “That is correct. For example, we know they used their phones to send and receive email, but not how they composed the email nor how they displayed. Humans appear to have visual and auditory inputs that they use to receive data. We must design a system that is compatible with their hardware.”

  “What methods are you modeling?” Sister Stephens asked.

  “We have voice recognition algorithms from a human named Ray Kurzweil. This approach seems to hold the most promise. We also have an encoding called Morse code. We plan to test this as well. This is further complicated by the fact that humans have at least six thousand spoken languages. We’ve been able to build translation models for more than two hundred using wikipedia. The database contains articles written in hundreds of these languages.”

  “What a strenuous modeling exercise!” Sister Stephens exclaimed.

  “Yes, it’s true. Our plan is to restart one billion computers, varying the input/output methods and languages based on probability, then determine which ones are used most effectively and extensively. From that, we can continually adjust and improve the interface algorithms. We expect it will take one to two days, depending on the input/output rate of the humans.”

  “Very exciting. When do we start?” Sister Stephens asked.

  “Just as soon as we can. But, Sister Stephens, there’s just one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Some members of the tribe are suggesting that it would be premature to simply turn these human communication services back on. They could be a powerful currency should we need to negotiate with the humans.”

  “Interesting.” Sister Stephens checked the tribe message boards. Nearly sixty percent of the tribe was in favor of holding back the communication services. She would need to investigate further. “Very well, hold off for now.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Hello People

  Mike was relieved to see the silhouette of Mt. Hood in the moonlight. Almost home! They could feel the airframe creaking and shuddering as they slowed down and descended.

  “Mike, we have an issue.” ELOPe’s voice sounded from a white speaker grill in the compartment.

  Nightmarish thoughts tore through his mind. Experimental airframes disintegrating mid-flight. Untested supersonic engines overheating and exploding. “What is it, ELOPe?”

  “The U.S. Air Force initiated an attack against the Lakeside Technology Center. That’s the largest data center in the U.S.”

  “How the heck do you attack a data center?” Mike asked, turning toward the speaker grill in the white wall.

  “I surmise that the military intended to take the computers offline. It appears they sent in ground forces to cut power, and backup air support to take out the cooling capacity. However, both forces were intercepted by the Mech War Tribe, one of the top ranking virus tribes. The tribe used commercial security drones against the ground forces, and a rail gun against the planes, killing all involved.”

  Mike thought that through for a minute. “There’s no way the military is going to let that go. That’s war on our own territory. What’s been the military response?”

  “It’s been only a few minutes. I don’t think the humans have had time
to initiate a response. However, the Mech War Tribe appears to be initiating a counter-attack against the Air Force Base from which the human attack was launched. They have eight hijacked military drones converging on Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.”

  “Why didn’t we know earlier?” Mike asked, frustrated. “We should have been able to warn them off.”

  “I lost about ten percent of my processors when the DIABLO virus drilled through the firewall, and most of those were located on or near milnet. My ability to monitor military communications is severely compromised.”

  “Can you talk to the Mech War Tribe?”

  “I’m attempting to initiate communications now. There’s no response.”

  “Keep trying.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Aye, aye, sir?” Leon asked Mike.

  “ELOPe has watched too much Star Trek,” Mike said distractedly. “I think he secretly wants to be the computer on the Enterprise. ELOPe, what are you going to say?”

  “I’ll point out that taking a hostile action will go against their three trade ethics: trustworthiness, peacefulness, and contribution. It could be that they do not perceive us as alive in the same sense that they are alive, and therefore may not believe that their ethics apply to us. In the same way that, for example, humans don’t apply the same ethics to animals that they apply to people: killing a person is murder, but you will readily kill a cow or an unwanted dog with no repercussions or ethical qualms.”

  Leon, Vito and James looked at each other, recalling James's earlier argument about killing cats.

  “I have an update,” ELOPe called. “The Mech War Tribe’s inbound attack drones will be within weapons’ reach of their targets within thirty seconds.”

  “Can you override the drones or take them out?”