Silicon Uprising

by Conor McCarthy

  “I can’t claim credit for it,” Jason replied. “Just kind of happened.”

  “What you did today was awesome. Best story that’s ever circulated.”

  Jason started laughing at the memory.

  “Don’t get cocky, kid,” Gordon said.

  The smile fell from Jason’s face and changed to a grim frown. “Yeah, it was close. We were lucky.”

  “Damned lucky it went our way,” Wilberforce said.

  They drove on in silence until the van arrived at a house secluded on acreage. They found that the basement already held weapons and other supplies. The men arranged beds and spartan living quarters there. The nearest neighbor’s house stood about two hundred yards away, so they had little fear of any nosy reports reaching the goons.

  Forty-One

  JASON SAT FACING Wilberforce at a small round table in the middle of the basement. Four cots, a couch, and a shelf of books stood along the walls. Beside each cot a firearm leaned against the bricks, clean, well oiled, and loaded. Gordon had supplied Jason with an M16 to replace the carbine. The place was a small but safe retreat for the unknown time they needed to lie low. Gordon sat on the couch; he had revealed nothing about his plan.

  Most of the old fire had returned to Wilberforce’s heart.

  “Down in the bunker,” Jason said. “I fell for it. I don’t know why anymore.”

  “We both did. But look, everything said in that dungeon was a lie. It’s lies all the way down to hell. You breathe lies in the air, bathe in lies dissolved in water, eat lies in the food, hear lies in your sleep. You slam a door and wonder if the sound is fake.”

  “I didn’t know which way was up after a while. The whole thing was astonishing. Never experienced anything like it.”

  “Few do. But we have a while to straighten everything out in our heads, and we know all about their interrogation techniques, so we can train Black Doves against it.”

  “Teaching them Method acting is probably their best shot. You have to be a professional role-playing artist down there.”

  “True,” Wilberforce said. “But unlearn that now. When this is over there’ll be no place for it outside the movies.”

  “Ironic, a politician warning me about lying,” Jason said. “No offense.”

  “None taken. The fact that lying became synonymous with leadership is how we got here.”

  “One thing’s bothering me. Really messing with my head,” Jason said.

  “No secrets here and no judgments. Speak freely.”

  “I worked with a man named Michael. He was . . .”

  Gordon said from the couch, “A fine man. A fighter. Brilliant, just brilliant.”

  “Yeah, I learned a lot from him. They captured him once, but we rescued him and it was violent. Absolute madness. I shot one of Lowgrave’s men. He was right in front of me and the image of that guy just kept coming back.”

  “How are you doing now?” Wilberforce asked.

  “Fine. Perfect. That’s the thing. Down there in the box—you know, the tiny room with intense lights—I no longer felt it was wrong. Not only was it something I had to do under the circumstances, but also I had a deranged ideological view of it, and I had atrocious thoughts about torturing the guy who killed my brother. The thing is, now that I’m out of there, the ideology is gone, but I still believe I had to do the shootings, and although I’d never torture anyone I’m fine with having that fantasy. Am I evil now?”

  “Ancient malevolent behavior patterns, including the capacity to torture, exist in all of us. You have two choices—accept the monster within and keep it on a leash, or deny it and hate the same thing in others.”

  “And if you deny it, then you haven’t attached the leash.”

  “Exactly. It will emerge uncontrolled or behind your back in ways that you don’t understand. You become the monster that lives within you.”

  “Lowgrave.”

  “Yes. That’s his story. Whether you’re a monster comes down to the morality of your actions. As far as I know our struggle is moral, so no, you’re not a monster. But sometimes you face evil and bring out a big monster on a leash. And if he bites the enemy’s head off then that’s just the world we live in.”

  Jason chuckled. “Good way of looking at it.”

  “In the end it’s only my opinion. Who knows? We need a philosophy for this kind of thing. But not Lowgrave’s or Crimson Unity’s. I tell you, many of the senior people in Crimson Unity went out murdering and raiding back in the day.”

  “I know, I met one. Seemed cool but found out he murdered people.”

  “Cool until he’s running the government.”

  “I got the same impression from a long chat with one of his true believers.”

  “I’m not surprised. And Half-Bit is no better. This whole idea that a group of geniuses or a genius computer will work out the optimal way to run everything is doomed. It’ll lead to hell on Earth because it ignores the individual experience of each and every person. If people feel that they’ve been listened to and understood, they won’t fly into a rage and unleash chaos even if we don’t do everything their way.”

  “Seems wise. But how do we get there?”

  “I was the most prominent opposition spokesman against Half-Bit’s election. I’ll deliver one more speech after it’s destroyed.” He briefly glanced over at Gordon. “If an attempt at that succeeds.”

  Gordon joined them at the table. “We circulated details of the fake video and your escape. It’s perfect. The Internet is going nuts over it.”

  “Trouble is,” Jason said, “now everyone will know my damn face. Lowgrave will broadcast it everywhere.”

  “Join the club. We’re stuck here until the main event.”

  Jason knew not to ask about that. He shut his eyes and rubbed them. “Sounds good to me. I need a vacation, even if I spend it down here.”

  “What did you think of that video when you first saw it?” Gordon asked.

  “I bought it. Fell for the whole thing. He had me there for a while.”

  “Excellent. You woke up, so you can never become possessed by their delusions again. You’re immune.”

  “I never thought of it that way. I suppose I’ll be shot immediately if they catch me again.”

  “Count on it. These Crimson Unity people you met are interesting, especially your friend Eddie. He was right about the goons handling chaos poorly.”

  “He’s not my friend. A pretty dangerous character in fact.”

  “Certainly. We may need to ally with them again though.”

  Jason rested his chin on his clasped hands. “I don’t know what’s fake now. Lowgrave showed me videos of Eddie doing messed-up shit.”

  “I’ve seen similar ones for years,” Gordon replied. “People support them for destroying surveillance infrastructure, but it’s easy to ignore their darkest side. Think of Crimson Unity as a counterbalancing force. One always forms to oppose an organization like Half-Bit and its goons. Equal in depravity and opposite in orientation.”

  Exhaustion swept over Jason with the setting sun and he lay down for a nap. He woke only to dine and then slept another twelve hours.

  Late the next morning the homeowner informed them that after a seventeen-hour repair effort, the CMC was at full power once more and functioning normally. Two workers had been electrocuted in the race to restore power.

  “I’m responsible,” Jason said to Wilberforce.

  “Do you feel guilty or regret it?”

  Jason looked aside into space for a while before answering. “No. They didn’t create the system, but it consumed them.”

  Both men contemplated that in silence for some time.

  “We crush it, or it will do that to all of us in the end,” Wilberforce said.

  For two weeks they lived in the basement while Gordon’s friends in the house above brought supplies for them. Conditions were little better than they had been in cell one in the CMC bunker, but even living in a palace with no work obligations and
his every whim catered to would have made Jason less happy than he felt in the hideout. No war of any kind raged inside him anymore. He read books, took part in evacuation drills, and performed gun maintenance. Sometimes the four of them gathered around the table to talk of a post-CMC future. Gordon shared stories of past operations, careful to leave out any details that might jeopardize other participants or information sources.

  Time passed quickly, until one morning he awoke and Gordon told him to grab coffee and breakfast, then assemble with the others at the table.

  Clutching a mug and a half-eaten bagel, Jason sat with Ben and Wilberforce. Gordon dropped a folder on the table, took the last chair, and began to speak.

  “Some years ago, Zarather’s company built an AI system even more advanced than Half-Bit. The entire CMC design was made public before its election, so in secret we used that knowledge to build a system that learned to predict CMC policies. We pursued this goal at huge expense due to our fears of what Half-Bit might do. Our AI runs forty percent faster than the CMC, so it has an edge. Initially it predicted public policy, but then it claimed that Half-Bit would hire a psychopath and implement secret policies. We searched for evidence and found it.”

  Jason leaned back in awe. “You built a supershrink for a superintelligence. What an extraordinary asset. Explains some of the information you guys had.”

  “It’s a great source. A year ago it predicted that a core CMC strategy is to threaten us with an extinction-level impact on the planet by altering the path of an asteroid. If necessary, it will hold us to ransom. Comply or else. For our own good, of course.”

  Wilberforce blurted out the kind of expletive that would cost a politician an election, and Jason hammered his fist onto the table. Their mouths hung open in shock.

  “It allows torture to defend humanity,” Jason shouted. “So how can it justify annihilating it?”

  “The robotics laws worked for many years. The CMC has never shown any malice toward humans, and we don’t believe it capable of malice in the human sense. But it has concluded that allowing humanity to continue as we are is harming us. It will attempt to eliminate human suffering. At the time we doubted the accuracy of these predictions, but they began coming true—heavy censorship and more recently the nuke. When we got the asteroid prediction, and people started disappearing and the official lying began, we started a new project. We’re going to destroy Half-Bit.”

  “You realize . . . ,” Jason said, and gulped. “That place is impregnable. Well, it wasn’t exactly, but it is now.”

  Gordon gave him a knowing smile. “You can crack anything if you hit it hard enough. You played a role in this when you began. We had people in many locations working on different parts of the plan. The laptop you retrieved from the mansion contained vital engineering schematics and code. The largest part, in fact.”

  Silence fell for a few moments. Jason wished he could tell Brad, but from somewhere came a sense that Brad knew anyway.

  Gordon leaned forward and clasped his hands together on the table. “I know that Zarather took the decision to involve you most seriously. He had little time. But most of all he was sorry that he couldn’t tell you the reason and explain the danger. They caught up with him a few days later. He chose not to be taken alive.”

  Jason leaned forward and covered his mouth in silence.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly to nobody in particular. He looked to Gordon. “Zarather was your friend?”

  “He was my brother.”

  Jason had dismissed his initial impression that Gordon resembled the man who started his adventure. He thought his experiences underground might have been distorting his perception.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Jason said.

  “Thank you. Business leaders still have a tarnished reputation. Sam once said to me the greatest mistake was to embrace capitalism as an ideology rather than leave it as a mere observation of what smart and conscientious people do when they have the freedom to. Sam abhorred companies that treated people as components of a system. What do you do with components? You work them hard until they wear out and you replace them. Sam was a human being first and a business leader second.”

  “That’s why he was so successful,” Jason said.

  “Yes,” Gordon said. He straightened in his chair. “Moving on. Now we have proof of Half-Bit’s apocalyptic plan. You probably already know of the automated mining operation on asteroid 16 Psyche. An astronaut visited there recently to deal with some issues beyond the capability of the robots. He’s one of us, and he confirmed that someone ordered the construction of forty extra thrusters, which have departed for an Earth-grazing asteroid. When they arrive they’ll stand ready to push it onto a collision course with Earth if humans reject Half-Bit’s leadership.”

  “Damn it,” Jason said. “How could we ever stop it after they arrive?”

  “Near impossible. But we’ll stop it when we destroy Half-Bit this Sunday, using the mine’s own manufacturing technology, which normally builds thrusters and other components to carve off chunks of 16 Psyche and send them to Earth orbit.”

  “Why doesn’t Half-Bit threaten us with one of those chunks?”

  “Far too small to cause a planet-wide catastrophe. And 16 Psyche itself is too big to push.”

  “One chunk is enough to destroy Half-Bit though.”

  “Yes, but on radar and infrared, a jagged hunk of asteroid stands out like . . . a humongous asteroid. So while Half-Bit’s thrusters have been traveling to the Earth-grazer, we completed our largest Black Dove project—a stealthy kinetic weapon, and the software modifications to make the asteroid facility build it out of mined metals. It concealed the construction by faking reports to Half-Bit, which is not allowed direct control of asteroid mining operations. Basically we designed a nickel-iron projectile that will fall from space onto the CMC bunker. The energy will be colossal.”

  “Your astronaut installed the mods?”

  “Yes. We sent the data hidden in video messages from his wife and child.”

  “And if the weapon misses?” Jason asked.

  “If this misses . . . ,” Gordon replied. He drummed his fingers on the table, lost in thought. He took a deep breath. “I can’t imagine how hard it will be to do anything useful. CMC subsystems will be expanded at the expense of our standard of living and monitoring will be total.”

  “Someone must have issued the orders for Half-Bit’s asteroid plan, since it has no control.”

  “Yes. Do you think this Lowgrave character is capable of ending all life if he and Half-Bit don’t get their way?”

  “Definitely,” Jason replied. “But with your weapon already coming, what’s our job?”

  “As it stands, our kinetic strike will almost certainly fail. The design is as stealthy as possible, but Half-Bit’s satellites will detect either the infrared or radar signature in the minutes before it enters the atmosphere. Time enough to launch a nuke and blow the weapon far enough off course to leave the bunker intact.”

  “Lowgrave said that the train I derailed carried new defense nukes. Was he lying?”

  “The missiles were installed years ago. We need to attack and destroy the antenna that will receive the satellite data. Then Half-Bit will deduce that something must be incoming but be blind to the trajectory.”

  “Where’s the antenna?” Jason asked.

  “Roof of a communication facility near Lone Pine, about twelve miles east of the CMC bunker.”

  “Back to the edge of the lion’s den we go.”

  “Yeah. But we planned on throwing all we’ve got at it, and it won’t be enough. A week ago they reinforced the area around the building and established a no-fly zone up to five thousand feet above ground level.”

  “So it knows something.”

  “A hint, but no details.”

  “Can we get something big—a missile, a bomb? Or do a suicide dive in a small jet?”

  “I doubt it. And the missiles near the facility will shoot down t
he jet. The pilot needs to stay alive and have intact controls to hit the antenna. Hitting the dirt beside the building won’t help.”

  “Got the receiver frequency? We’ll jam it.”

  Gordon jabbed his finger toward him. “You’re sharp. We’ve already planned to measure it. We know the orbits of all the relevant satellites. Our people worked for months to get information on which ones monitor near-Earth space.”

  “Are they low-orbit?” Jason asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Low-orbit satellites are normally received with an omnidirectional antenna, so we don’t need to be between the satellite and receiver. The jammer can be miles away and still work. The satellites are over two hundred miles high so it’s easy to drown out their signal. But we need a line of sight with the receiver antenna to be sure.”

  “Not a problem with the terrain around there. Just put it up a slope.”

  “A diversion would improve the odds. What if I can get Crimson Unity to do something in the area?”

  Gordon put his hand on his chin and gazed at the far wall for a few moments.

  “Bad idea to have them around when Half-Bit is destroyed,” Gordon said. “There’s a strong chance they’ll try to pull something against us right afterward.”

  Wilberforce said, “They’ll try to take the credit.”

  “Yes,” Gordon said. “And Lowgrave may have a mole in Crimson Unity who could get wind of our plan. No diversions. We put as many resources as possible in place and fight to the last man.”

  “I suspect he does have a mole,” Wilberforce said. “When he planned the broadcast that he wanted me to make, he seemed sure that Crimson Unity would leave it alone. I suggested he had a source, but he wouldn’t discuss it.”

  “The mole may have given false intel to paint it as a hard target,” Gordon replied. “Okay, no help from Crimson Unity. Now the details.”

  “I’ll leave you gentlemen to it,” Wilberforce said. “I have an international video statement to write. We’ll send it out the second your weapon hits.”

  “Perfect,” Gordon said. “The grapevine says that most people are fed up and will support Half-Bit’s termination. We’ll need popular support to take out Lowgrave’s organization, especially if he survives. He could still order the asteroid apocalypse.”