by Erik Hamre
Neuralgo’s location in Las Vegas had been ideal from a retention perspective. Hardly any of his staff left for other companies. The only other tech company of some prominence in the area was Zappos, and they were basically a cult-like call centre compared to Neuralgo. But Vladimir had lost a few engineers to stupid life decisions. Living close to Vegas wasn’t ideal when you had a lot of money. Several of the engineers in one particular team had fallen in love with strippers. Vladimir had been unaware of the whole ordeal until he heard some of the other engineers talk about the Crazy Horse team. It turned out that what had started out as a weekly teambuilding meeting at a local strip club had turned into massive heartaches for several of the engineers involved. The end result had been disastrous. One of the engineers had just disappeared one day, driven off on a road trip with his stripper girlfriend in a brand new Corvette. He had never returned. Two others had acquired expensive cocaine habits and been tricked into signing over most of their stock options to some of the girls in exchange for sexual favours.
The stories went on and on.
Gambling addicts.
Drug offences.
Poor life choices.
To a certain degree Vladimir sympathized with the guys, because, unfortunately, most of the more than four hundred engineers at Neuralgo had been guys. Neither Kevorkian nor Vladimir cared much about equal employment rights. They just hired the people they wanted. And the almost all-male environment hadn’t been ideal in the City of Sins.
If it hadn’t been for Kevorkian taking Vladimir under his wing when he first arrived in America, Vladimir might quite possibly have ended up in a similar hard spot. It was hard to come from obscure Geekdom to suddenly be recognised as attractive on the dating market. Regardless of whether that attraction was purely based on monetary matters or not.
Girls were interested - and that was a new experience.
Vladimir shook his head. He was probably putting too much thought into nothing. Kraut couldn’t be using cocaine. The guy was a health freak. He had publically claimed that he didn’t think it was unrealistic that he would live until he was one hundred and twenty-five.
“It’s on again,” Amanda called out.
Vladimir checked his watch.
Almost midnight.
Cronus had definitely broken its pattern. If there had ever been a pattern, that was. Three observations was hardly the evidence one needed to establish that there was a pattern to the madness. Because it felt more like madness than system when Cronus started attacking computers around the world.
“What is it going after now?” Kraut asked.
“Everything,” Amanda answered.
“It’s accessing the power grids,” one of the computer analysts said.
Vladimir didn’t say anything. He just stared at the spectacle before him. He knew he was witnessing something extraordinary. Something very few people would ever get to see. He was watching pure brilliance.
Pure intellect.
“What the hell is going on?” a rusty voice hollered from the entrance door. A uniformed soldier tried to halfway block him, but Major Olokoff pushed through. “Kraut, would you mind telling me what the hell is going on?”
“Let him in,” Kraut instructed the soldier. He knew they would now be entering a new phase.
42
2nd of June 2015
Kevorkiana HFT’s HQ
Silicon Valley, California
DAY 2:
2359 Hours
Major Olokoff stared at the row of computers in front of him. He had always known that the Americans were ahead in the technology race. But he had never anticipated how far they had come.
“So we are witnessing an actual attack right now?”
Kraut nodded. “Yes, this is real-time transmissions. You just saw how the artificial intelligence slowed down the entire internet. Almost to 1998 speeds. And then. Bang. It’s almost like an explosion. Everything gets hacked. Everything gets breached.”
“Everything?”
“Well, so far Cronus has steered clear of major power grids and our nuclear weapons systems.”
“Cronus?”
“Long story, that’s what we call it.”
“OK,” Major Olokoff replied.
“And on your side? What has it attacked so far?” Kraut asked.
“The same. Mostly corporate computers. None of our military systems. It seems to have been targeting companies with links to the US. Apart from that the attacks have seemed quite random, erratic.”
“They are not random at all. We just don’t know what Cronus’ agenda is yet,” Vladimir said. He was exhausted.
“I think your phone is ringing,” Sarah said. She was standing next to Vladimir and could feel something vibrate close to her left thigh.
“Is that me?” Vladimir asked, slightly confused. He couldn’t remember having brought his phone from the lunch room. He reached down in his pocket and pulled out Kevorkian’s keyring. “It’s just Andrew’s old keyring. I picked it up from the house. I wonder why it’s vibrating.”
“That’s not a keyring,” Sarah replied. “That’s Kevin’s GPS tracker.”
“Say what?” Kraut said.
“That’s the receiver for the tracker Andrew had implanted in Kevin’s neck. Andrew used it as a keyring for the Porsche,” Sarah said, grabbing the keyring from Vladimir’s hands. She studied it intensely.
“Is everything OK?” Vladimir asked.
“It has never worked before. We could never get it to work after Kevin disappeared.”
“Put it down. Put it down right now,” Kraut yelled.
“What’s wrong?” Sarah asked as she reluctantly placed the keyring on the desk in front of her.
“That could be Kevorkian’s trigger mechanism,” Kraut said as he gently lifted the keyring from the desk. It kept vibrating.
“Look, it is vibrating in sync with the pulses on the computer screens,” Vladimir observed.
“Holy fuck. It is,” Amanda exclaimed.
“What does it mean?”
“I have no idea. But somehow this thing is connected to Cronus. It’s connected to the artificial intelligence.”
“Check the numbers,” Sarah said. “If you press the button on top of the keyring it will show you the GPS coordinates on the LCD screen.”
“Don’t fucking press any buttons. Not until we know what the connection is,” Major Olokoff said.
Kraut chose to ignore him. “The situation can’t get much worse than it already is,” he said, gently pressing the button.
Everybody went silent. One could almost hear one’s own heartbeat.
“Do you think it is attempting to communicate?” Olokoff asked. Vladimir and Kraut were busy reading the digits on the keyring’s tiny LCD.
“Maybe. We’ll know more in two seconds,” Kraut said as he punched in the coordinates in the MILMAP300, the map system the US Defense Forces used.
“That’s a bit strange.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s just off the coast. In fact, it’s in the middle of nowhere. No shipping lanes, nothing. It’s just in the middle of the ocean.”
“Maybe the numbers aren’t GPS coordinates? Maybe they are something else?”
“What would that be?”
“I don’t know. A code maybe? A code that only Kevorkian would understand.”
Kraut nodded. “If it’s a code then Kevorkian would have to have developed some sort of deciphering system and uploaded the instructions to Cronus. We will need to search his house again.”
“There’s no point,” Sarah Kevorkian said.
“Why? This is the best lead we have had since this whole thing started. Our only lead I might add,” said Kraut.
“There’s no point because it’s not related to Cronus.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Today is the anniversary of Kevin’s abduction. I had forgotten about it, but Andrew mentioned something a few years ago. It just sounded so unbelievable
back then. He claimed that Kevin’s murderer was taunting him. Turning on the GPS tracker every anniversary of Kevin’s abduction. I didn’t believe him. I thought it was just another one of his crazy stories. Refusing to accept the fact that Kevin was gone.”
“The GPS tracker has turned on by itself before?”
“That’s what Andrew claimed. But the coordinates didn’t mean anything. They always pointed to somewhere impossible.”
“What do you mean by impossible?”
“They were always in impossible places. Always in the middle of an ocean somewhere.”
“Could they have been picked up from a boat?”
Sarah shook her head. “No, Andrew said he had already checked that out. There hadn’t been any ships or boats at any of the locations the GPS signals were ever picked up from. That’s why Andrew was convinced it was Kevin’s murderer who sent the signals to taunt him. Somehow the murderer had figured out a way to send a signal while distorting the origin of the signal.”
“Crosscheck the list of potential targets with who has ownership or interests in any GPS satellite systems.”
“OK,” Amanda nodded, before attacking the keyboard of her laptop.
“Do you think this is relevant?” Olokoff asked Kraut.
“It’s the only thing we have to go on at the moment. That’s good enough for me. What do you think, Vladimir? You’ve been awfully quiet.”
Vladimir rubbed his eyes with his fingers. “I don’t know to be honest. But I’ve got this strange feeling that I’ve missed something essential….”
Vladimir’s thought process was broken off by the loud sound of an alarm.
Then suddenly a red light started to blink on all the computers.
“What is that?” Major Olokoff asked.
Kraut didn’t answer. He just stood there. Frozen. Pale as a ghost.
“Kraut, what does the red light mean?” Olokoff repeated.
“It means everything has just changed,” Kraut answered, before sitting down in the chair in front of him.
“What do you mean everything has changed? What does it mean?”
Kraut swirled his chair around so that he faced Major Olokoff. “It means Cronus just attempted to access the control systems for our nuclear missiles.”
“Are you kidding me? Can you stop it?”
Kraut nodded. “We can. But it will have consequences. All our intercontinental defense systems will have to be shut down.”
“Leaving you open for an attack from the outside?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you shouldn’t worry about us, Kraut. Russia has no intention of starting a war with the US. I will call the President and explain the situation. He trusts me. But you have to shut down your nuclear missile systems right now.”
“I will do, Olokoff, I will do,” Kraut said, staring at the screen.
Then they all started staring intently at the screen.
“What the hell is that?” Sarah Kevorkian said, pointing at one of the screens on the wall. It showed the twenty-four GPS satellites orbiting earth. Suddenly they all started to blink in red.
“Does that mean what I think it does?” Olokoff asked.
“Depends what you think it is,” Kraut replied.
“Is that fucking nuclear missiles? Because that’s what it looks like,” Olokoff said.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Oh, fuck. Did the artificial intelligence do this?” Amanda asked.
“No. This wasn’t Cronus’ work. This was our protocol being initiated.”
“I don’t understand,” said Major Olokoff.
“Cronus has been identified as an Artificial Super Intelligence, an Artificial Super Intelligence that will eventually take over our world. Our systems just made sure that won’t happen, ever,” Kraut said as he turned his back to Olokoff.
“What do you mean? What have you done, Kraut? What the fuck have you done?”
“Call your wife, Olokoff. In twelve hours the phones will stop working. This might be your last chance to talk to your wife and kids for a while.”
“You are detonating them in the atmosphere, aren’t you? You are attempting to create a massive EMP wave?”
“You’re a realist like me, Olokoff. Our knowledge won’t die just because our computers die,” Kraut said, tapping his index finger on his right temple. “It’s all stored up here. And we can extract it again. We will rebuild this world. And this time we will know better than to attempt playing God.”
“You’ve just played fucking God, Kraut. You and your god damn government have just played God. I will have nothing to do with it,” Olokoff yelled to Kraut’s back, before reaching for his phone.
“Put that down.” A soldier, pointing an assault rifle straight at Olokoff’s chest, stepped forward. “Put it down, now.”
With a face filled with anger Olokoff obediently placed his phone on the desk in front of him.
To the right of him, Vladimir was attempting to support Sarah Kevorkian. She was weeping on his shoulder. She had just realised that she would be hundreds of miles away from her twin daughters when the EMP blast hit the surface of the Earth. In less than twenty hours the world would be thrown into a bigger chaos and turmoil than it had ever been in.
In less than twenty hours everything electrical would cease to work. Its insides fried by the blast wave from one of the nuclear detonations in the atmosphere.
Kraut was right: Many people would survive. And maybe they would be able to rebuild society in a generation or two.
But who would survive? How many would survive?
What scars would it leave on humanity?
And would those scars ever heal?
At the time Protocol Cronus was activated, Earth had a population of more than seven billion people, and although no politician had the guts to address this publicly, that number was the single most important reason the world was in such a bad state. Forget about hunger, global warming, pollution and every single other threat facing humanity. The world was ruled by cause and effect. All those things were effects.
The cause was overpopulation.
Every single day of the year, it didn’t matter whether there were famines, holidays, Ebola outbreaks or terrorist attacks, every single day that seven billion increased by more than two hundred and twenty thousand people. The population growth was out of control and nobody was willing to even talk about it.
There wasn’t even any long term plan on how to deal with the problem. Politicians preferred discussing new ways of taxing people and corporations in the pursuit of curbing global warming, instead of addressing the massively obese elephant in the room; the unsustainable population growth the world had experienced over the last two hundred years. Politicians jetted around to fancy conferences, preaching about the necessity of eating short travelled food. But what they should have been discussing was the fact that there were simply too many of us.
There were too many humans.
When it came down to it though, humans would always be allowed to destroy Earth, because the worth of a human life trumped everything.
Nothing was as valuable as a human life.
When the President had been asked to sign off on Protocol Cronus, he’d had to ask himself a question that was impossible to answer. How much is a human life worth?
He hadn’t been able to answer that question.
If Protocol Cronus was ever initiated it would result in the deaths of millions of people, possibly billions.
How was it possible to put a price on a billion lives when one couldn’t even put a price on a single one?
In response the President had turned the question on its head. Instead of asking what the value of a single human life was, he had asked what the value of humanity was. What would he be willing to sacrifice in order to save humanity?
What was the survival of our entire species worth?
He hadn’t been able to answer that question either. But he had intuitively known what was the more valuable of
the two. A billion lives lost sounded terrible no matter how you put it. But if the alternative was the certain extinction of the human race, then the answer wasn’t so clear cut after all.
No one would actually die directly from the EMP blasts. Warnings would be issued to governments around the world. Airlines would ground their planes. Boats would head for safe harbours.
In the end it would be up to all individuals to fight for their own survival, to fend for themselves.
Yes, there would be food shortages, there would be an energy crisis of unimaginable proportions. There would probably be total anarchy and lawlessness in the streets in most cities only a few days after the electricity first disappeared.
It was abundantly clear that life would never be the same again.
But at least humanity would stand a chance.
At least everyone would have an equal chance of survival.
The President would be resetting time.
It would be back to how it once had been.
How it was for most other species on Earth.
It would be survival of the fittest all over again.
DAY 3: THE DAY THE WORLD CHANGED FOREVER
“My hardest realisation in life was to acknowledge how insignificant I was. Nothing I have ever done has been truly important. Neuralgo will be different. It will be important. Mark my words. It will be important.” Andrew Kevorkian, Shareholder meeting at Neuralgo Inc, May 2013.
“It is hard to categorically claim that humans will never be able to create an Artificial Super Intelligence. If one reviews the predictions of the last one hundred years, what stands out is that science fiction authors have probably been better at predicting the future than traditional men of science. The future will never be exactly as we think it will. It will most likely be very different. But it is naïve to believe that we as a species will survive if we remain on Earth. And it is also naïve to believe that we will be able to conquer our galaxy, and possibly the rest of the universe, if we leave it to evolution to improve our intelligence. Like it or not - artificial intelligence will be the salvation for humanity.” Ronald Kraut, Speech at Florida Convention for AI and Nano-technology, February 1998.