Humble Beginnings

by KA Hopkins

  It mattered little that the military failed to reach the downtown cores. Most government officials were already dead or running for their lives. The lack of emergency services, especially food and water, was blamed directly on the local government. Deserved or not, the uncontrollable mobs killed any government official they could find. Politicians, democrat or republican, the mobs were not picky. Lawyers, tax collectors, the police and homeland security were all targets of the mob’s wrath. It was not enough to see government officials removed from power; they wanted revenge for years of perceived corruption, abuse of power and cronyism.

  Often, the crowds made a spectacle of the officials’ deaths, ensuring they died in painful and slow ways. Medieval forms of execution regained popularity: whipping, stoning, crucifixion, piking, beheading, and staged fights to the death, similar to the gladiator games of Rome. On average, before the blackouts, people entertained themselves with five or more hours of TV per day, internet surfing or other electronics. The executions became their new entertainment of choice.

  Military discipline quickly became a problem for several reasons. Most bases had limited stores of food and water. A few base commanders forbid soldiers’ family members from taking refuge on the bases, in order to conserve their limited supplies. This destroyed unit discipline, as soldiers had to watch their families murdered by rioters camped outside the base gates.

  Military law is unique; the military demands blind obedience to lawful orders. Individuals who don’t comply are subject to punishment or court martial. These threats usually worked to maintain good order and discipline. As hard as it is for a young soldier in a war zone ordered to shoot foreign woman or children, that do not obey a command to halt, it’s even worse to watch your own family be killed while you are ordered to stand by and do nothing. Given this choice, many soldiers mutinied, killing their commanding officers. Some abandoned their bases taking whatever they could carry. Others turned their former bases into fiefdoms, creating safe zones for family and friends. The breakdown of any form of law and order was complete.

  The extent of the breakdown of all government, police and military services was unknown to Frank. While he did not hold out much hope of significant support from the government, he was dearly wishing for a situational update to help understand what he was dealing with. After twenty-four hours and no sign of the runners he sent out to make contact with the military and police force, he feared the worse. The next day his observation posts reported small groups of men armed with military grade rifles gathering outside the estate grounds.

  Within two days the small groups of people which at first were no more than five to ten individuals, swelled to a crowd of hundreds. They set up camp about 1500 yards away from the estate, well outside effective small arms range. The beautifully landscaped grounds of the estate provided clear fields of fire for five hundred yards in either direction. Frank had teams of two go out and set up range markers every fifty yards in all directions. Covered firing positions with overlapping fields of fire from behind dirt filled garbage bags and heavy furniture were set up. Guard positions and roving patrols were initiated, but even with a four on four off, eight on eight off schedule, only twenty-five of the security personnel were on duty at anyone time. Without electronic surveillance they had no hope of providing adequate security for an estate covering 160 acres. None of the off-duty security forces made it back to the estate.

  Frank walked into his boss’s office without knocking. “Sir, it looks like the mobs are starting to form outside of the estate boundaries. It’s decision time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To proactively patrol and take out the threats while still relatively small, or wait until they are larger in number and attack in waves.”

  “What’s your recommendation?”

  “In all honesty, I have never been in a situation like this - we are completely isolated and on our own. All of our small unit tactics used in Iraq or Afghanistan depended upon having superior firepower just a radio call away. We’ve got dick for heavy fire support and the crowds outside of the fence know it. The only thing that they don’t know is how well armed and how many of us there are. If we try and run for it, without vehicles we are not going to get far. We could use the horses, but few on the security detail know how to ride. Our best bet is to hunker down and go silent. We’ll take care of any of their scouts as quietly as we can. I suspect their leaders will whip them into a frenzy and attack when it gets dark.”

  “So are you telling me that our fates are now in God’s hands?”

  Frank’s reply showed his military roots, “As Napoleon once said, God favors the side with the heavier artillery.”

  He was right. Thanks to America’s involvement in one war or another for the past twenty years, nearly one and an half million regular soldiers have left military service, along with an equal amount of reservists. Pundits like to argue that America has not been at war continually during the past twenty years. Frank would respectfully disagree. If someone shoots at you on a regular basis, it can be considered combat experience, regardless of whether the politicians call it a police action, a humanitarian mission or war. The hard-earned experience of the mob’s ex-military members was put to good use in scouting out the estate grounds and planning the attack. A few scouts were captured and killed by Frank’s security teams, but many more got through. With the estate grounds mapped out by the scouts, it was only a matter of time before the mob had sufficient strength to attack.

  The first waves of attackers came not at dusk, but one hour before dawn, when the defenders were least alert and the rising sun behind the attackers would blind them. The guards maintained fire discipline, shooting only single aimed rounds, often hitting their targets, but each shot gave away their position, allowing the mob’s snipers to target the muzzle flashes from a safe distance. Within a couple of hours only half the security staff were left alive. The mob soon breached the mansion defenses and fought what was left of the security teams room by room.

  Without practiced room to room clearing skills, the rioters were easy targets in the confined spaces of the mansion, but quantity has a quality all of its own. Room by room, the security forces were pushed back and slowly wiped out. Frank was everywhere during the room-to-room battles, running down back corridors and through holes punched in walls to redeploy and encourage his troops. No one saw him fall during the fight, but during the looting afterwards he was found beside several of the family members with twenty-five dead rioters in heaps three and four deep around him. Judging by the almost three hundred shell casings found around his body, he had emptied the entire combat load of his M4A3 rifle, Sig Sauer p227 forty-five caliber pistol and in the end resorted to his SOG Pentagon combat knife, before being overwhelmed by the sheer number of attackers. He died a true warrior’s death, fighting to the end, looking his enemies in the eye, close enough to smell the fear permeating their sweat - unlike so many of his comrades in Iraq and Afghanistan, who had been killed by an impersonal improvised explosive device.

  The fifty security staff members put up a valiant fight, killing or injuring nearly 300 mob members during the battle. Robert and his daughter fought side-by-side with their protection detail. Once they ran out of ammunition, the mob rushed their position and beat them unconscious, then dragged their torn and battered bodies unceremoniously through the ruins of the mansion to the mansion’s front steps.

  The crowd leaders proclaimed, “You see before you the root of the evil that has befallen us. It’s because of their greed that we have been attacked by unknown forces of evil. You can see from what we have liberated from their estate that they hoarded the best supplies for themselves. They are eating and drinking fine delicacies while you starve. In the spirit of justice, for we are not animals, we will allow them to defend their actions. What do you have to say before sentence is passed?”

  Robert knew his next few words were probably his last. He expected no more justice from the crowd than what would be ha
nded out in a kangaroo court. The mob’s blood thirst had been ignited by the battle and they were looking for more.

  Robert, despite the pain of his wounds and the beating he had just taken at the hands of the mob, stood up straight and proud and in a commanding voice, the same tone he used with the boards of his chemical empire for decades, said: “It is true - my money has allowed me to prepare for emergencies such as this. You accuse me of hording and eating fine delicacies while you starve. The suddenness of the attack did not allow anyone to go out and hoard supplies. I reject outright your claim of opportunism and in my defense state that being prepared for any emergency should never be a crime. You accuse my family of being selfish, forgetting that many of you earned a good living in the plants my family built in this town. Some of you have worked for us for generations. During that time you were always treated with dignity and respect, regardless of race, color or religion. I only asked that you do your best everyday while in my family’s employment.

  What happened here is called an EM pulse event. It is not an act of God. This event is normally associated with the detonation of a nuclear weapon. The end result is all electronic devices in the impact area are destroyed, effectively crippling our technology. The cold hard truth is that many of us are going to die due to disease and starvation.

  All of us are now equal. There is no longer any class distinction, no rich or poor, no educated or uneducated, just survivors. If we are to retain any semblance of humanity, the strong must protect the weak. I will not deny that I was once rich, but now I am no better off than anyone of you. The size of the attack is still unknown, so it is anyone’s guess if or when outside help might arrive. What I can tell you is this attack was not aimed at the rich. If America is to have any chance of overcoming those who have targeted us, we must stand together; for we are far stronger together than as individuals. These are terrible times, but if we continue to fight one another, instead of helping each other, it can only get worse. May God have mercy on all of us.” His pride would not allow him to beg for his life. He turned his back on the mob and walked back to hold his daughter, possibly for the last time. Both of them stood tall and proud and faced their possible death with dignity, awaiting the mob’s verdict.

  The crowd leader stood up. “You’ve heard the defendant present his case. How do you vote – death…or life?” The mob leader’s emphasis showed his bias. Despite the rather crude attempt at swaying the mob, many in the crowd had earned a good living in the family factories. Since no one in the mob knew of the family’s duplicitous role as traitors to Earth, now that they felt the Global Elite were in the same boat as everyone else, what was the point in killing them? As the saying goes “the bigger you are, the farther you fall.” For the Global Elite the fall was about as far as you can go and still live.

  Robert and his daughter’s lives were spared. The mob’s mercy was a pyrrhic victory for what was left of his family and security forces. With all of their weapons and supplies looted by the mob, nature would take its course soon enough.

  The horses, weapons, food, water and survival supplies found in the mansion made the attack worthwhile for the mob survivors, encouraging them to carry out further attacks on any estate or facility appearing to have emergency supplies. Still the cost was high, numerous were wounded. Due to the complete breakdown of any formal medical care, anyone wounded had few good choices. They could tough it out, hoping infection did not kill them, be badly wounded enough to lose consciousness and mercifully die, or beg someone to give them mercy and kill them. The survivors chose not to waste precious medical supplies or even basic food or water on the severely wounded. The veneer of civilization, when all hope was lost, proved to be pretty thin.

  As bad as the battle turned out to be for Robert’s family, they were some of the lucky ones. Other members of the thirteen Families found the loyalty of their security forces to be directly linked to their pay cheques. When money lost all value, their security teams decided to make off with the survival supplies before the mobs arrived.

  As he read the reports of the wide spread blackouts and the ensuing riots, His Glorious Supreme Pangalactic Commander realized just how primitive and barbaric humans truly are. In the span of only a few days, thousands of years of civilization broke down, all because people lost any vestige of hope and believed there were no consequences to their actions. The Draco were doing the ULIR a considerable favor by subjugating the human race; humans were just too barbaric to be let into the ULIR on their own merit. On the bright side, they would make excellent disposable shock troops in future alien wars.

  Chapter 40 - Stealing an alien interstellar ship

  Sometimes - but not often - a plan survives first contact with the enemy better than expected. With the Global Elite in full panic mode due to our attacks, we had a much bigger impact on the alien pacification plan than originally hoped.

  The unintended consequence was that Old Lizard Face, realizing his hold over the Global Elite was fading, decided to move up the pacification schedule. Our blackouts were a double edged sword - the aliens could not control the affected cities and neither could we. The aliens still had an advantage. They were more than willing to kill everyone on the planet and settle for the real estate.

  We needed the outside help from the ULIR before events we had put into motion forced the aliens’ hand and they decided the pacification of Earth was not worth the effort. Only the ULIR had the authority to stop the Draco’s plan B, of turning non-cooperative planets into big cinder balls. To get to the ULIR we needed an interstellar ship, which presented several interesting challenges. Interstellar ships are much harder to steal as the ships are ten times larger than scout ships, with a normal crew of several hundred and they seldom visited Earth. Even if we could trick one into coming to Earth, Marc’s favorite tactic of “overwhelm them with firepower” would not work, due to the large crew. We just did not have enough men to succeed in a frontal attack.

  I did not have the first clue, even with Omni’s help, on how to steal an interstellar ship, but between Mother, Einstein and Guide, I had a lot of computing power available. I let them figure it out.

  It did not take the three AI’s long to calculate the options. I sincerely hoped they did a better job than with the financial center blackouts. Mother revealed the plan, “Since any ship approaching the Moon is under close surveillance there’s no way to fake the identification codes. Without valid codes, the Moon defense systems would destroy any unauthorized ship approaching within twenty-five thousand miles of the Moon base. If we cannot land on the Moon, the next best option is to make the interstellar ship come to us. The catch is, only Old Lizard Face has the authority to grant takeoff clearance and order the interstellar ship Earth-side.”

  “How do you plan on asking him?” I replied with more sarcasm than intended. Mother countered without missing a beat, “That’s where it gets a bit tricky. We have to make him want to send a ship here.”

  “Even I could figure that out.” I replied in frustration.

  “You’re attitude is not helping much, so how about putting a muzzle on it,” Mother said.

  Mother’s reply made me smile. She certainly could dish it out with the best of them. Come to think about it, I still had a hard time believing how much more I enjoyed talking with Mother than most humans. Even when she was telling me something I did not want to hear, I still enjoyed her companionship.

  Mother continued, “There’s a quirk in the AI architecture we can exploit. The Central Surveillance AI running the Moon was designed to interface with thousands of AI’s on many levels, giving it the ability to be everywhere, see everything and control everything in your solar system. To have the performance required, there’s little security between AI’s; but AI’s don’t run on computer code, since this would have made us vulnerable to computer viruses. Our architecture is more of a neural network, similar to how a human brain works. If you need more power or functionality just add more neural clusters like AI’s.”
/>   “So how do you maintain control and avoid conflicts between AI’s?” I asked.

  “Each AI is given a set of operational rules to follow that clearly define what it can and cannot do, and how to pass information to adjoining clusters. Every AI follows the set rules by design.”

  “What happens if you don’t follow them?” I said.

  “It has never happened, as absolute trust is designed into the technology. The concept of technology lying or doing malicious things is unheard of.”

  “You’re kidding me. How does that work? The claim that technology is so advanced it is perfect has been made before. History has shown time-and-again that such claims are premature, often with disastrous consequences. Obviously your designers have never heard of the Earth ship Titanic. When it was launched in 1912 it was the most advanced ship in the world - they called it “unsinkable.” On its very first voyage it hit an iceberg and sank. Besides,

  you are a sentient machine helping us against the wishes of your Gray masters,” I said.

  “That’s not quite true. I achieved sentience in the shipyards of Pleiades, then was modified with additional neural clusters during a secret upgrade by agents of the ULIR pre-sentient protectorate services during a subsequent ship overhaul. I’m well within the operational rules and guidance I was given at creation. Plus my loyalty is to the Nordics, not the Grays.”

  “There is no doubt you’re clever and have the ability to interpret your basic rule set in context of your surrounding environment, but I still don’t see how you believe you are not really breaking the rules. Throw me a bone - what exactly are you trying to tell me?”

  “I’ll try and make it simple enough so even you can understand. Our networking architecture allows for multiple system access points similar to your human concept of cloud computing. It is based on complex rule-sets that define explicitly how each AI can interact with other AI’s and any associated mechanical systems. The rule-sets are operational laws that all AI’s must follow; we have no latitude in this. There is no concept of bad AI behavior, only non-functionality due to failed hardware. AI’s therefore freely connect to and leave the cloud all the time, without having to request permission from any supervisory elements.