Web of Extinction (Zone War Book 3)

by John Conroe

  “That’s ultimately going to be up to you, Ajaya. If you want out of here and away from them, say the word. I’ve already got great leverage, and that doesn’t even include any of the information your friend Harper sent me.”

  “You’ve heard from Harper?”

  “She contacted me while I was still watching you rush out of Flottercot’s studio on my television. Gave me all kinds of information on the actual architects of Drone Night. Dangerous information. Contacted me again just hours ago to tell me that she knew you had been taken into custody after killing the Spider.”

  “Rikki would likely have contacted her after going into the internet,” I guessed. “But is the stuff she gave you the kind of stuff they would kill you for?”

  “Absolutely. But she assured me that she has set up fail-safes and dead man switches that will release all of her findings across the whole planet if anything happens to me or her. She thought I might need leverage to get you free.”

  “Sarah, this is way, way beyond anything I imagined. I guess I spent most of my time either thinking about how to find and kill Plum Blossom or get that damn bomb out of my neck. This global blowup is so far out of my wheelhouse that it’s practically over the horizon.”

  “Well, I wish I could tell you it would work itself out, but we both know it won’t. Not to mention that the damned Spider isn’t really done yet, is it?”

  Oddly it was those words that made me calm down. No matter what was going on with the nation, Plum Blossom was still working to kill us all off. My brain started to work again, really fast. From zero to a hundred in seconds flat.

  “What? I can see you just thought of something?” she asked.

  “It’s just that you’re right. People are going to die. Either a lot of people or all of them. In fact, if Plum Blossom had its shit in order, we’d all be dead already. So if we fight among ourselves and don’t fight back, none of it will matter.”

  “What do you mean… that we’d already be dead?”

  “Well, I mean nuclear weapons. That’s best end goal for killing us off. I mean, ruining our food supplies and turning off heat in the winter will kill thousands, but to really be effective, nukes are needed.”

  She went pale white. Really white. “Could it do that? It couldn’t, right?”

  I looked at her and pondered if I should lay out my thoughts or not. Screw it. She deserved to know.

  “The CThrees were the most advanced military combat AIs in the Chinese arsenal back in their day. Harper’s mom improved them, and they grew a lot on their own these last ten years, but they had a core coding that was Chinese. So my guess is that when it uploaded itself, it went somewhere in China. Back to the place it was created. Some server farm, some government or corporate network. From there, it would likely start to make copies of itself, send them out to other computers. It’s very powerful, more than a match for most of the AIs in use. Plus it has had COBWEB out there preparing the fields, so to speak. Somewhere out there, it’s spreading itself, like cancer. At some point, it will infect the military, if it hasn’t already. From then on, it might just be a matter of time.”

  “Time till what?” she asked, although I think she already knew my answer.

  “Time till it gets launch codes.”

  She was shaking now. I reached out and touched her hand. “Sarah, listen to me. It’s not over yet. Not by a longshot. Rikki’s out there, and so is Harper. Plus, there have been enormous advances in computing since that AI was made. There are definitely AIs out there that would have no problem kicking Plum Blossom’s ass.”

  “W… what can they do?”

  “Well, Rikki would likely land in some place he already knew well. Maybe more than one place. He’s almost assuredly doing the same thing as Plum Blossom, copying himself, infecting computers before Plum Blossom can. Also, he’s likely sending out warnings to uninfected systems. Sort of inoculating them.”

  “Where would he go?”

  “First? He came here… Zone Defense. I mean, I don’t know that for sure, but I’d bet a lot of money on it. Hell, he’s already prepared this place, has been working on it ever since Harper installed him in Unit 19. Actually before that… back when we were trying to teach the Decimator. His access to Zone Defense systems is how we defeated the bomb codes in my neck.”

  “Ajaya, wouldn’t they have realized that? Wouldn’t they have locked him out?”

  “Oh I’m sure they tried. Probably think they were successful too. But he had weeks to dig in and modify the whole network. Plus it’s a military installation. It’s connected to the rest of the military. It’s been, what? Three, four hours since they snagged me? Hell, he’s all through the US military and probably working on every other government system he can get into. Not to mention Russia.”

  “Russia?”

  “Rikki’s core coding was Russian. I modified it, and then he self-modified it even more. But again, at its core, the Berkut was a Russian creation. I guarantee that somewhere, somehow, a copy or hundred of him is working away in Russia.”

  “So, what? It’s some kind of giant game of Risk?” she asked, eyes wide in disbelief.

  “The board game? Yeah, kind of. Actually, that’s not a bad analogy.”

  “But is Rikki enough to counter that Chinese horror?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But Rikki has a secret weapon—Harper Wilks. That girl grew up at the knee of the person who programmed the Spiders. And Harper has been linked directly into artificial intelligence systems through her neuroprothesis since not long after she could walk. There are very few programmers anywhere with her innate understanding of the enemy. Plus, slow as they are, Weber and his people will be fighting as well.”

  “But not if the country implodes over this whole false flag conspiracy,” she said, the light of realization dawning bright.

  “Yeah, exactly. So I think I need to work with them. But not on their terms, but on mine.”

  “How?”

  “Well, I need you. I need your connections, the experts you know. See, I see three levels to this. One, we need to calm the waters, but from what you’ve told me, there is nothing I could say to convince people to back down. No, we need to put together a team of experts and let them use me as a conduit for change. At least enough change to appease the masses. I know absolutely jack shit about that stuff. Poly-sci is so not my thing.”

  The wheels of thought were visibly hard at work behind those deceptive brown eyes. She nodded. “Yeah, I know the right people. And they know others. Hell, half of them already emailed me within the last few hours. But what else?”

  “Well, second, we have to make sure the full resources of the US are working to stop COBWEB and Plum Blossom. And we have to alert the rest of the world’s governments as well. Some stuff will be gone already. It’ll have to be cut free. Shut off. There’s going to be pain.”

  “Okay, that makes sense,” she said. “What else?”

  “Third, we have to prepare.”

  “Prepare for what?”

  “Survival. Sarah, even if we are completely successful, the human race is about to experience a major dislocation, if not a true extinction event. Our massive world population functions on the point of a needle. Food, energy, medicine, essential supplies are all provided nowadays on a just in time basis. Any disruption of significant magnitude could tip us off that needle. So we need to prepare the species to survive.”

  “Holy shit, Ajaya. I thought you said this wasn’t anything you had thought of?”

  “This part I have thought of. Extensively. Ever since I sent my family north and my girlfriend left with her own family. Even without Plum Blossom, COBWEB alone could be enough to push us into a point of no return. At least for the way things are now.”

  She looked panicky again. “What do I do? I mean, my mom lives alone in the Bronx. What do I do about her? About my wife and myself?”

  “Is it just the two of you, and just your mom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell you
r wife it’s time to take a vacation. Time to visit upstate. Guests of the Gurung family. And bring your mom.”

  She frowned at me, completely confused. So I explained what my mom and grandparents had been up to over the last month. What the Johnson clan had been involved with. By the end of it, she was nodding, her immediate fear pushed back from the ledge of panic. She was still scared, as she should have been, but she could function, had a plan of action to follow. We both did.

  Chapter 24

  “Well. Turned the world on its head, didn’t you, Ajaya?”

  “Just trying to warn the people, Cade,” I said.

  “Yes, but did you have to be so damned dramatic about it?”

  I shrugged. The lights were warm and the setting was unusual, but I didn’t feel too out of place. Unlike Cade’s other two guests. As if reading my mind, Cade turned back to the camera.

  “There wasn’t much point in introducing Ajaya, as I doubt there are many people left on planet Earth who don’t know who he is. But allow me to introduce my other guests. First, the commander of the Zone Defense Instant Response Strike Force, a man who has been very visible lately, Major Cal Yoshida. And with him from the Zone Defense research laboratories, Dr. Aaron Ewald, who is an expert in the field of robotics, particularly the drones that inhabit the island of Manhattan. Welcome, gentlemen.”

  “Thank you,” Yoshida said, very formal. Like he was getting ready to face a battlefront.

  “It’s a pleasure,” Aaron said, smiling. I could see a light sheen of perspiration on his forehead.

  “So, before we get back to Mr. Big Shot—and I mean that literally, Ajaya—let’s talk, Major, about what’s currently happening inside the Zone.”

  “Sounds good,” Yoshida said, a little wary.

  “So the last Spider CThree is dead, killed in a major battle, which this show was excited to participate in, at least to the extent of sending in the drone swarms of our contestants. What happens to the remaining Zone drones now that their leadership is dead?” Cade asked.

  “Without a CThree to direct them, there is immediately much less coordination among them,” Yoshida said, somewhat more visibly comfortable now that he was on familiar ground. “They can work in small groups and will communicate information across their network, but there isn’t any single model that can replace the strategic capacity of the CThrees.”

  “Which should make them much easier to kill, one would hope?” Cade asked, leaning forward a bit.

  “Yes. And in that vein, Zone Defense has launched a new initiative. The drone you witnessed Mr. Gurung shoot off of over the streets of the Zone was a prototype for a new, state-of-the-art model known as the Decimator. Yesterday we sent thirty-five brand new Decimators into the Zone to hunt down and kill off the remaining drones. The world saw what just one Decimator was capable of. Imagine thirty-five.”

  “Exciting, Major, but as they say, it’s worthless without pictures. You have pictures?”

  Yoshida actually allowed himself to smile. “We have pictures.”

  All of us turned to the monitor on the wall behind us. Immediately, high-quality video showed multiple Decimators zipping through the concrete canyons of Manhattan, shooting UAVs out of the air and destroying ground bots with precision e-mag shots or, in the case of Tigers and at least two Tank-Killers, air-to-ground Goliath micro missiles.

  “Impressive, Major. How long will it take to eliminate the remaining drones?” Cade asked.

  Aaron jumped in and took the question. “We estimate less than eight thousand drones remained active when the final CThree was disabled. The Decimators work around the clock and, according to our metrics, they are destroying, as a group, an average of two-hundred-plus drones a day. At that pace, we think the Zone will be effectively cleared within two months.”

  “That’s an estimate based on initial success rates,” Yoshida hastened to add. “We expect the kill rate to decline as the remaining drones begin to favor survival mode over attack mode.”

  “They have a survival mode?” Cade asked.

  “Certainly,” Aaron said, eager to get the stage. “Unless deliberately programmed out of a unit, virtually all drones have a survival mode. Even your news drones,” he said, waving a hand dismissively and without any concept that he might be denigrating their professional equipment. “Military drones have a fallback survival protocol that kicks in when the odds are greatly against achieving their mission. The whole run away and live to fight another day concept.”

  “So you’re saying that the drones will go to ground, so to speak, as they compute ever-decreasing probabilities of winning against your Decimators?”

  “Exactly. Well put,” Aaron said.

  “But will we even still be here in two months?” Cade asked, his question directed at both Yoshida and Aaron.

  “What do you mean?” Aaron asked, suddenly uncertain of himself. Yoshida, on the other hand, had gone to his poker face.

  “I mean exactly what I said. Will the human race even be here in two months? Ajaya has endured enormous personal pain and threat to his life to bring us warning of what’s happening. Now that he has, the signs are impossible to miss. Let me read a few to you: all eight desalinization plants in Abu Dhabi just stopped functioning two days ago. Those plants provide almost all the drinking water that the country uses, although it does have ground water wells. In India, a maintenance bot went rogue inside the country’s biggest solar farm, wiping out almost all of the plant’s electrical production. In a similar vein, an automated Russian submarine drone erroneously launched a torpedo into the Nord Stream natural gas lines, blowing both of them to pieces. It will take well over eight months to fix. There is no way that vital heating energy will be back in place when winter hits Europe. People will freeze to death. See what I’m getting at here?”

  “You are implying that Mr. Gurung’s theory of viral malware disruption of expert systems is the cause behind these unrelated events,” Aaron said, leaning forward to take up the challenge.

  “Oh, I’m not implying it. I’m saying it. Can you look me in the eye and tell me you’ve no knowledge of the COBWEB virus?”

  Aaron blinked.

  “So you do know about it? And the fact that the final Spider uploaded its own core programming into the internet as it died?

  “Just a few days ago, although it seems like a lifetime, Ajaya was in the act of explaining a concept when the bomb in his neck almost killed him with a pulse of pain,” Cade said. “He didn’t get to finish his thoughts, but we got the message—loud and clear. So we dug into it. Ajaya, you were just about to talk about system tipping points, as in societal and economic systems reaching a point where they collapse, correct?”

  “Yes, Cade, exactly,” I said.

  “At this stage, we have almost nine billion people on the planet. All of our systems of agriculture, energy, medicine, and water supply are based on expert AI technology. Oh, and all of these vital supply systems have almost no excess capacity. If we have large crop failures in the US, people will die in other parts of the world. Oh look, here’s a story about US crops being erroneously sprayed with a pesticide that contained herbicide. People will die. The gas pipelines? Winter will come and people will die. Almost two billion of the earth’s population don’t live near potable water sources. If Abu Dhabi’s desalinization systems have failed, do you suppose others have too? Dying of thirst is a horrible thing.”

  “You are correct,” Aaron said. “Those things are horrible. People will die. It’s even possible that the COBWEB malware was the cause. But as you just mentioned, we have a population of almost nine billion. Those events, while unimaginably tragic, are not enough to make us extinct, or even close to extinct.”

  “By themselves? No. But they are continuing. And with each one, we get closer to a tipping point. One where society collapses and we take ourselves out. Starving people don’t just lay down to die, they fight for food. They pick up weapons and fight. If their leaders get in the way, they overthrow them.
Then they seize what they need to survive. But the people they take it from fight back. Dr. Ewald, we’ve had two World Wars. We won’t survive a third. And that’s not counting if the malware disrupts two opposing militaries’ communications and precipitates an incident of war. Or, heaven forbid, if this rogue artificial intelligence finds some way to activate major weapons of mass destruction on its own.”

  Aaron’s mouth was open but no words had yet come out. Yoshida spoke before the scientist could find his voice.

  “Those are far-flung possibilities, Cade, but yes, they are possible. Which is why we are fighting back,” the major said.

  “What are you doing to stop this?” Cade asked.

  “First, despite any allegations to the contrary,” Yoshida said, glancing my way, “we’ve been working on COBWEB since it first appeared. A collaboration between various government organizations has resulted in an effective security software patch to guard against the virus. That patch is being disseminated around the world as we speak.”

  “But what about already infected systems, Major? How do we identify them and clean them before they wreak havoc?”

  “That’s an issue we are currently working on,” Yoshida said.

  “Hmm. That’s not reassuring, is it, Ajaya? What do you suggest?” Cade asked, turning to me.

  “Well, we should be taking expert systems offline as fast as we can. Go back to before we had widespread AI. Then we can test, clean, and re-activate them when we have the proper fixes,” I said.

  “Easier said than done, Ajaya,” Cade admonished. “Some of those old backup methods are either gone completely or extremely difficult to put back in place.”

  “Oh, it’s going to be painful, Cade. Just like those two World Wars you mentioned. People had to face sacrifice for the greater good. Think of this as a world war against hostile AI,” I said.

  “What about fixing the problem? And what about the rogue Spider’s programming, out there spreading itself all over?” he asked.

  “Cade, as I’ve mentioned before, I just kill drones. You need to talk to an expert in the field,” I said, nodding toward Aaron.