Degrees of Freedom

by Simon Morden

  The National Security Adviser seemed temporarily paralyzed.

  “Mister O’Connell, your president requires your opinion. Be so good as to provide it.”

  O’Connell’s skin was gray, like he was already dead. “We know the AI is able to insert itself in command and control structures: it’s done it before. SkyShield—all our systems, in fact—may have been compromised. Even with the protocols we’ve put in place, it looks like it’s not enough.” He shrugged helplessly, and his hands trembled. “We did our best.”

  “Then we close our electronic borders. Restart SkyShield.”

  “All the reports I have tell me that our infrastructure is mostly or completely infected with an Anarchy-variant virus. Petrovitch says if we cut the AI off, we bankrupt the country. And there’s no guarantee that we would have a working computer to be able to get a command to SkyShield afterward.” O’Connell spoke very quietly, and the microphones strained to pick him up. “Just like that. It’s all over.”

  Harris snatched up the phone and unmuted it. “You… you’ve left us defenseless.”

  “How does it feel now, you bastard? Mackensie didn’t cook up this nonsense on his own. He doesn’t get to suffer alone. Put me on the speakers.”

  “You’re killing us. Not just Mackensie, not just the American people. Everyone, everywhere. You know what’s going to happen next?”

  “Yeah. You get down on your knees and beg to Michael. After the shit you’ve put him through, it’s the least you can do.”

  “The president will order the launch of our own missiles.”

  “Or you could do that. Seems a little drastic, don’t you think?”

  Harris’ grip on the phone was threatening to crack the plastic. “Drastic? We are under attack.”

  “Are you? Are you really?”

  Harris paused, then said: “Petrovitch, is the United States under attack?”

  “Well, now. On the one hand, you can detect hundreds of missiles and thousands of warheads, all heading straight for you. On the other hand, what you’re seeing could be what we want you to see.”

  “And how are we supposed to tell the difference?”

  “You know the answer to that question already, Harris. Hit the kill switch and pray to whichever god you worship that the missiles disappear. Or you could let me talk to the president.”

  Harris cupped his hand over the phone. “Mister President: Petrovitch has implied that this is an AI simulation, and no missiles have been launched.” He sounded like a man offered the hope of reprieve at the foot of the gallows. He actually grinned.

  “Then what,” asked Mackensie, his expression sour, “are those?” He waved his hand at the screens in front of him, that told him only of the end of the world. “Are we to take the word of some punk street kid over our own satellites?”

  Harris’ grin slipped away. He glanced at O’Connell for support, who pinched the bridge of his nose hard enough to leave white marks.

  “It’s possible… Mister President; the Chinese have no reason to launch. Russia has no reason to launch. The EU—what are they going to get out of this? It makes no sense. Brazen it out, sir. All we need to do is absolutely nothing.”

  “Nothing? We have failed to destroy the artificial intelligence. We have failed to neutralize Petrovitch. We have failed to prevent SkyShield from being sabotaged. We have failed to protect our own network from infection. How much less would you like the government of the United States of America to do?”

  “He’s provoking us.” Harris thrust the phone in Mackensie’s direction, and lost it, caught between terror and duty. “Petrovitch is playing us. God damn it, what if none of this is real?”

  “That’ll be twenty bucks, Mister Harris. I’ll have it taken out of your final pay check. You are relieved of your position.” Mackensie steepled his fingers, showing the liver spots on the backs of his hands, and glanced up at his aide. “Please escort the former Secretary of Defense from the Situation Room.”

  He watched impassively as Harris was ushered from the room at gunpoint. The other men present watched, pale and drained.

  “It is perfectly clear that Petrovitch wishes us dead, and will do or say anything that will delay our own launch until we are no longer in a position to retaliate effectively. I refuse to listen to such counsel. The way ahead is clear: we do this by the book.”

  A man with a briefcase stepped up beside Mackensie, and laid it on the table. He opened it up and passed his president a solid plastic rectangle as big as a postcard. Mackensie flexed his fingers and cracked the plastic slab along pre-scored lines. Inside was a long strip of paper, printed with a combination of numbers and letters in a long sequence.

  He laid the codes on the table in front of him. “The first and greatest duty a government has is to protect the integrity of the nation it serves. If that has been denied to us, then our last act ought properly be to strike out against a world bent on destroying us, as it has been since our creation. We will not go quietly as they hope, but we will fight even as we die.”

  He cleared his throat again and readied himself to read.

  35

  Admiral Arendt looked at the glowing lines on the wall screens. The first missiles would be hitting the Alaskan airbases in less than thirty seconds. “Get me Elmendorf,” he said to the watch officer.

  The officer slid back to his console and with two presses of his touch screen, had the duty desk. “This is the NSC. Ah, sheet three-five yellow. Seven Alpha Foxtrot November Niner Papa Lima Zero.”

  The man in the blue uniform riffled through the yellow pad in front of him. “Elmendorf. Romeo Bravo Six Kilo Eight Juliet Tango Six Hotel.”

  The watch officer ran his finger along the second line of code. “Admiral? Connection to Elmendorf confirmed. At least, it looks that way.”

  Arendt leaned over the younger man’s shoulder. “Hello, son. I need you just to stay on this line as long as you can.”

  “Yes sir.”

  The screen went blank, then reverted to the previous window. On the main map, Elmendorf winked from blue to gray, followed a moment later by Eielson.

  Snatching up the abandoned handset, Arendt spoke through clenched teeth. “Petrovitch, tell me we haven’t just lost the Eleventh Air Force.”

  “You haven’t lost the Eleventh Air Force. Neither are you about to lose the western seaboard. Scary though, isn’t it? Can you smell the fear yet?”

  “You have to stop this. The president is releasing the launch codes.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Can he launch?” asked Arendt. “If this is fake, then he’s not really giving the codes to NORAD, is he?”

  “No,” said Petrovitch, “he’s giving them to me.”

  Arendt dropped the phone. “Mister President, stop the sequence.”

  Mackensie turned his head slowly toward his military adviser and fixed him with a withering stare. “Malcolm, I think you forget yourself.”

  “That’s not NORAD,” said the admiral, his finger wavering toward the screen where a smart air force officer was waiting on the last two digits of the launch code. “That’s the AI. You’re telling the enemy the gold codes.”

  The first brief flicker of doubt crossed Mackensie’s serene face. He looked down the table at his advisers and their attendants. Some of them were just kids, who’d grown up knowing nothing but Reconstruction. The middle-aged ones were the generation who’d voted for its institution. Even the old men were two decades his junior.

  The sub-launched missiles from the Atlantic reached the eastern seaboard. New York went offline. Miami. Charleston. Some crossed the coast and tracked inland, heading for the industrial cities of the north.

  The land-launched intercontinental rockets had ended their boost phase, and were coasting at the edge of space. They’d start to fall in twenty minutes’ time. Every major center of population had been targeted, as had the major military bases. Hawaii was about to succumb. Diego Garcia would be next. Without SkyShield’s prote
ction, they were naked to the oncoming storm.

  O’Connell grimaced. “I know it looks like NORAD. But we have to consider the capabilities of who—of what—we’re up against. If Petrovitch’s AI is running a simulated attack, it’s running everything.”

  “Well, Frank: you’re my intelligence adviser. I had hoped you of all people would be able to say whether or not the intelligence we are receiving is reliable.”

  “Either we use the kill switch, or we wait and see if we die. They’re the only ways.”

  “The choice between wiping out our economy or our ability to hit back is not a choice at all.” Mackensie stretched his thin lips out. “I appear to have been badly advised.”

  O’Connell started to protest. “Ever since we learned of the New Machine Jihad…”

  Mackensie held up his hand. “Enough. You are relieved of your position also.”

  After resting his head briefly on the table, O’Connell stood up and walked in a daze to the exit. His deputy licked his lips nervously and scraped his fingers through his hair.

  “Does anyone,” asked Mackensie mildly, “have anything constructive to say at this stage, or shall we continue?”

  “I think, sir,” said Admiral Arendt, “you should speak with Petrovitch.”

  “Do you, Malcolm?”

  “Yessir.”

  The missiles were edging closer. Two of the sub-launched missiles, one from the east, one from the west, were converging on Colorado.

  “And what would be the purpose of that? Why would I waste a moment conversing with the author of our destruction.” Mackensie gestured at the wall screens. “We spent trillions of dollars and millions of man-hours on Project SkyShield, only to have it rendered useless by him and his abomination. We face either nuclear destruction or total economic disaster. Both will leave our great nation a shattered remnant of its former self and our enemies intact. I will not permit that.”

  The west coast had gone. The east coast, too. Targets well beyond the continental divide were falling one by one, and still the main attack hadn’t arrived.

  The admiral tilted his head slightly as he tried to glean information from the maps, desperately sifting through the layers to sort fact from fabrication. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “Twenty dollars, if you please, Malcolm. Not like you at all: I appreciate we’re about to meet our maker, but please keep your composure.”

  “Why aren’t they targeting DC?” Arendt got to his feet and walked around to the foot of the table. He pointed up at the map with all its lines and markers. “We should have been hit by now. Decapitation strike.”

  The watch officer eyed the telephone on his desk, then picked it up. “Petrovitch?” he hissed. “Why aren’t we dead yet?”

  “Because if a missile had struck you and you were all still alive, you’d know for certain, wouldn’t you? Even Mackensie couldn’t convince himself you were still under attack. So we thought we’d string this out as long as possible and make you sweat. Not nice, is it, taking away a person’s ability to tell what’s real?”

  “As one human being to another, I’m begging you to end this.”

  “You’re convinced, then? That none of this is actually happening?”

  “Yes. I’m convinced.”

  “Then do something to stop Mackensie giving me the complete launch codes. We’ve got most of it: Michael might be able to guess the rest, but it’ll take him a while. Much easier to let your president hand control of your nuclear deterrent to me on a plate. Much more ironic, too.”

  “What can I do? I’m just… just a cog.”

  “So were Stanislav Petrov and Vasili Arkhipov, but they were the right people in the right place at the right time, and they stopped a third World War. What’s your name, kamerad?”

  “Joshua Meldon Junior, sir.”

  “You can call me Sam, Joshua. I like you. Why don’t you turn around and take a look at what’s happening behind you.”

  Arendt was still standing under the screens showing the virtual destruction of his country, arguing that he was right, and that to speak the last two characters of the launch code would be a disaster. The depleted audience was with him: the Secretary of State, the Chief of Staff, the Deputy Security Adviser and the other two deputies, all willing the president to change his mind.

  The admiral’s case was plain. “The White House is a primary target on every conceivable attack pattern of a foreign power. We have not been hit—yet—and neither has any target within a hundred miles. Mister President, an atom bomb in Virginia would rattle the windows in the Oval Office. There are no independently verifiable signs that we have been attacked because we have not actually been attacked.”

  Mackensie looked above Arendt’s head, seeking both clarity and certainty. He watched the missile tracks close in on NORAD’s mountain fastness.

  “I am the President of the United States of America and Commander-in-Chief of her armed forces. The reason I am in this great office of state, after long years of faithful service to this nation and her peoples, is to be here at this time and this place, to take this decision. When all others fall by the wayside and show themselves unworthy of the responsibilities handed to them by Almighty God, I will not falter. I will set my face like flint in the face of my many adversities and remain faithful to the very end.” Mackensie picked up the gold codes and looked to the screen that held the image of the ever-patient airforce officer, waiting for the complete sequence.

  “Sir?” said Joshua Meldon Junior into the sudden silence. “My brother works for the USGS.”

  “That’s nice, son, but not now.”

  “He’s in Colorado. They have seismometers, sir. And I can verify it’s really him.”

  Arendt gestured to Meldon to make the call.

  “Niner Zulu,” said Mackensie.

  “The launch codes have been authenticated,” said the man at NORAD and saluted crisply. “It was an honor serving under you, sir.”

  “Would that others did their duty as diligently as you, son.” The screen went blank, and was replaced by a list of the counterstrike assets as they were activated. Mackensie folded his arms, as if he had known this day would come and he had spent a lifetime preparing himself for it. “Thank you, gentlemen. There is nothing else left to do, and you are all dismissed.”

  None of them moved.

  Meldon adjusted his mouth mic. “I need to speak to Doctor Jerry Meldon. I don’t care if he’s in a meeting: this is the White House and this is urgent.” While he waited, he picked up Petrovitch’s phone again.

  “You’ll go far,” said Petrovitch.

  “I’m too late, though, aren’t I?”

  “Hell yeah. All your base are belong to us.”

  “What are you going to do with them? The codes, I mean?”

  “Enjoy them while I’ve got them. They go out of date at midnight, so they have a short shelf-life. I thought I might post them on some public message boards, see if they go viral.”

  “Hey Josh. ’S’up?”

  Meldon put the phone back down on the corner of his workstation. His brother didn’t sound like a man monitoring the end of everything.

  “Jerry, listen very carefully to me. Have you detected any nuclear weapons detonations in the continental United States?”

  “What’s going on, Josh? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “Just answer the question: yes or no?”

  “No! I mean, really no.”

  “Or anywhere else?”

  “Haven’t you seen the news? Of course you have. Why are you asking me this stuff?”

  Meldon screwed his eyes tight shut. “Jerry, what was the name of the first girl you kissed?”

  “I… don’t get it.”

  Swallowing hard, Meldon tried again. “Third grade. Who did you kiss in third grade?”

  “You said you’d never…”

  “You don’t know how important this is, Jerry. I need to make sure that it’s you I’m talking to. I’ve got what�
�s left of the National Security Council staring at me, including the president. Which girl did you kiss in third grade? I caught you and you made me swear I’d never tell, on our mother’s life.”

  The missiles were very close to Colorado now. By the rules of the game, if they hit, the connection would disappear.

  “Jerry. Which girl?”

  “You know damn well it wasn’t a g—”

  Meldon cut him off. “Mister President. The United States Geological Survey has not detected a single detonation anywhere within the world, except for the one we caused.”

  The two markers converged on NORAD. It winked out.

  “Have we launched?” Arendt walked slowly around the table to Meldon’s workstation. He picked up the phone. “Petrovitch, have we launched?”

  “Why don’t you put me on the speakers, Admiral?”

  “You don’t need me to put you on the speakers, do you? You never have. You’re as good as in this room with us.”

  The main screens flickered. The screen changed to inside a rusting container. Faces looked back at them. A teenage girl; two young women, one very tall with a bandaged cut on her partly shaved head, the other a pale and drawn blue-eyed redhead who stared belligerently and raised her middle finger to the camera; it panned over another woman, high cheekboned and disdainful, then they were out in the daylight. There were more containers, strewn seemingly at random, and as the camera wobbled and bounced along in time with the gait of the carrier, the watchers could see compacted brown clay and cloud-laden sky.

  “This city has been my home for the last few years. The London Metrozone took me in and sheltered me after I’d run from all the bad things I’d done. I became anonymous here: easy enough to do. Then it got a bit, well, screwed up. Firstly, the New Machine Jihad: a burgeoning AI’s subconscious dreams played out across reality. That, and your CIA, put a hole in the cordon. The Outies came through. It was a trickle at first, then it was a flood. We ended up having a war, and we only just won. Now we have this: lies and subterfuge, more death and destruction, and you’ve finally done what the Armageddonists failed to do: put a nuclear bomb in the heart of London.”