Standing at sixty stories, the building more than likely housed over a thousand men. The schematic details of a massive underground garage looked to house dozens of military vehicles. But what got Nikki’s attention was what was on the third floor. The building plans showed several rooms with reinforced walls and floors labeled “containment apartments” on the diagram.
Prison cells, Nikki thought to herself.
The array of buildings, along with the connecting streets, were separated from the rest of the city and had an overall title: The Coalition Fortress.
“Holy shit, the Coalition is forming its own city-state right on American soil,” Nikki thought out loud.
Nikki reflexively voiced a command to PHOEBE. “Why are you showing me this?”
PHOEBE replied with three words that scrolled across the bottom of the center screen: “The end of the animal is near.”
Nikki read PHOEBE’s response several times. “What does that mean?”
Nikki waited several minutes for a response from PHOEBE.
There was none.
Nikki decided to type the question this time, but as she reached for the keyboard, all six screens went black.
She hit several keys, but still no response.
“What does that mean?” she asked again.
No response.
She tried a hard reboot of the system, but still nothing. The station and the monitors were all dead.
“Shit,” Nikki said aloud.
The last thing she needed right now was a hardware problem. Instead of trying to fix the system, she would simply purchase all new hardware.
Nikki started to get up from her chair when her computer beeped and whirred back to life. Puzzled, she sat back down in front of the monitor array.
“Systems analysis,” Nikki requested.
The system did not respond.
Nikki typed the same command into the keyboard and nothing happened. The blinking cursor remained.
“What the actual hell…?”
All six screens came to life, scrolling an alphanumerical stream of characters faster than the human eye could follow.
No matter what Nikki typed into the keyboard, her commands were ignored.
Then all six monitors abruptly stopped scrolling code and displayed the same message: The end of the animal is near.
5
Cyber Center Pushback
“It dumped Black Widow’s surveillance code in twenty-three nano-seconds,” Michael Chan said as he sat staring at his computer screen.
Behind him stood Coalition board member, Tom Miller, and head of Coalition Properties’ cyber-security division, Rika Muranaka.
Miller, a portly man in his mid-fifties, looked bored. Not particularly tech-savvy, he wasn’t interested in the details. Like most investment manager types, he liked explanations to be short, simple, and actionable. Miller was visiting the Coalition’s new Cyber Center at the request of CEO Glen Turner. He was there to keep an eye on Rika Muranaka.
Muranaka, a twenty-six-year-old Stanford PHD in computer science by way of Japan, stood with her arms crossed in front of her, staring at Chan’s computer screen. Piercing eyes offset her long black hair and peaceful features, and the look in those eyes indicated that she was not happy.
“That’s impossible,” she fired back.
“That’s eons better than last time,” Chan replied as he hit keys. Alphanumeric symbols scrolled down the screen faster than the eye could see. “And it may be as close as we can get.”
“I don’t understand. Tell me what’s going on,” Miller cut in.
Chan looked at Muranaka.
She nodded her approval to explain.
“Black Widow is the NSA’s most powerful code-breaking software,” Chan started. “As you know Black Widow was financed and developed with Coalition Properties resources. It was powerful enough to bring down the Silk Road, which no one thought could be done.”
“What’s Silk Road?”
Muranaka turned away. She hated it when the board of directors sent babysitters to her division. They never explained why they were here or what they were after, and they were annoyingly ignorant about current cyber-war technology.
“The silk road was the largest black market on the deep web,” Chan began his lecture. “You understand what the deep web is?”
“Of course I do,” Miller fired back, the tone in his voice betraying his ignorance.
Muranaka kept her patience by checking her phone for messages.
“Okay good. Then you know it’s vast. Current search engines only scan less than four percent of what makes up the entire web. This makes it very difficult to track anything that exists in the deep web. Silk Road was where drugs, weapons, information, and, more than occasionally, people were illegally trafficked. It’s also where the rogue algorithm PHOEBE lives. It is a lawless cyber-land that the NSA and, by proxy the Coalition, have sworn to control. And that’s what Black Widow is supposed to do.”
“And?”
“And when trying to crack the enemy code breaking algorithm PHOEBE with Black Widow, we encountered problems we didn’t expect,” Chan continued, this time looking at Muranaka.
“Those unexpected problems are why I’m here,” Muranaka began as she put away her phone. Miller, she knew, likely had no idea why he was here. That didn’t prevent him from having an opinion.
“The Coalition Properties Cyber Center, which you are in charge of, Ms. Muranaka, is equipped with the finest counter intelligence technology that money can buy,” Miller began.
Muranaka bit her tongue.
“I mean, look at this place,” Miller continued as he waved his hand over the room.
The Coalition Cyber Center was near white-room clean and filled with everything from 3D monitors and printers to ultra high-definition wall screens that tapped into every CCTV camera on the globe, the imagery displayed providing a kaleidoscope of worldwide human activity.
Everything from cell phone camera images generated by unaware Instagram users to bank lobby security cameras to a live feed of the stock market trading floor to private hospital rooms to street corners in every major city in the world, including Los Angeles, London, New York, and on and on.
It was an enormous sea of information that was useless without the required expertise to navigate. And at the Coalition, Rika Muranaka was the chief navigator.
“It’s the center of the cyber universe. If you use a smart phone, you’re in here somewhere. You should have everything you need to stop one terrorist hacker,” Miller continued.
Muranaka waited several seconds, long enough for Miller to understand two things: 1) she was not intimidated by him in any way, and 2) he wasn’t smart enough to understand the complexity of the details.
“We’re working as quickly as we can,” she finally said.
“Good,” Miller answered, missing Muranaka’s dismissive tone. He felt satisfied with his words and had nothing more to add to his grandiloquent comments about Coalition Property prowess.
Muranaka looked at Miller several seconds longer before turning back to Chan.
“So what were you saying about unexpected problems?”
“Ok—well, once PHOEBE discovered our attempt to hack, not only did she stop us cold, this time, she took a pretty mean swing at us—she crashed seven servers and pretty much gutted Black Widow in the process.” Chan swiveled in his chair to look at Rika. “The NSA is going to be real pissed that we broke their toy.”
“It’s not their toy, it’s our toy. What do you mean gutted?”
“I mean PHOEBE infected Black Widow with more viruses than I can count. Tricked the widow into multi-trillion step calculations that only led to more calculations. I had to quarantine the program to keep it from spreading. And hope I did it in time. Black Widow, for all intents and purposes, is busy for the next thousand years.”
“That bitch…” Rika whispered under her breath. She was speaking about both PHOEBE and its creator. “Was it Nicole Ellis w
ho discovered our surveillance and programmed PHOEBE to lash out?”
“No. That’s the scary part. The commands I used were part of a program that was specifically designed to be adaptable to PHOEBE’s code and go unnoticed. Part of a command set that neither PHOEBE nor its designer should have been able to recognize without going through at least three trillion guesses that we were trying to piggyback her movements to begin with. PHOEBE shouldn’t have been able to detect us, let alone Nicole Ellis, and Ms. Ellis’ activity log verifies this. But somehow the software picked it up and flipped the trillion dollar pyramid back on us. But that’s not even the real problem.”
“What’s the real problem then?” Miller asked.
“That she got pissed off and took a swing at us,” Muranaka answered. “Programs aren’t supposed to get pissed and lash out.”
“And that means?” Miller asked, looking back and forth between the two programmers.
“It means the program may be self-actualizing,” Chan answered first. “It needed to develop its own language to do that. One we can’t decipher. It’s learning and growing. It’s making choices. Unpredictable choices.”
“Another reason to stop it,” Miller responded. “And arrest Ms. Ellis for creating it in the first place. She used the program to hijack a drone and commit a terrorist act. Part of your job is to acquire the necessary intelligence to prove it. And then I want Ms. Ellis in custody and her program either destroyed or in our hands. It’s the only way to keep America safe.”
Muranaka held her tongue. She hated the jingoism. She hated the ignorance that drove the fear mongering hawks that ran the Coalition board.
“It won’t be that easy,” Chan added. “Not with what I think is happening.”
“And what do you think is happening?”
Chan was hesitant to continue and nervously ran his hand through his hair. “I think that PHOEBE is becoming A.I. And if she gets out of control…” He looked back and forth between Muranaka and Miller. Both looked upset, albeit for what Chan suspected were very different reasons. “If PHOEBE gets out of control, she could shut off power grids, crash airplanes, zero out bank accounts, maybe even launch missiles, for no rhyme or reason—at least not one that we understand. And that’s just the beginning.
“Mr. Miller, you have to understand, we’re all pretty much cyborgs now. Just try going a day without connecting to the world with your smart phone, and see how well you can function. Or count how many times you check your Facebook profile in an hour. People think social media is an addiction, but from a digital perspective, it’s the early stages of a hive mind. The combination of artificial intelligence and information integration—the terabytes of audio, video, imagery, and linguistics people upload on a daily basis can be used to create accurate profiles of people, families, neighborhoods, cities, and…you get the point.
“And all of it can be analyzed to predict the next move of any given “data set.” And that data set could be manipulated to correct perceived errors in the human code—decision making. And it could do it on both an individual and global scale. The implications are staggering.
“Behave in a way that an A.I. control system deems defective or a threat? It wipes out your bank accounts, puts evidence of a crime on your computer, alerts the police, and then lets society do the rest. Because it’s already calculated what society will do.
“The political leanings of a city or state are deemed dangerous or a threat to the system? Shut down the power and water, making life as we know it come to a complete standstill, and then let our inherent savagery that the A.I. has already calculated into the equation to do the rest.
“PHOEBE could decide to do all of that. She could decide to wreck things. She could conceivably wreak apocalyptic-level havoc on a global scale. And there’ll be nothing that we, or Nikki Ellis for that matter, can do to stop it.”
6
Terminal Island
Nicole Ellis woke with a start. She immediately reached across the bed and noticed that Alex was gone.
After PHOEBE had shocked Nikki with its cryptic response to her command, she had tried for hours to get her algorithm to respond to additional instructions with no results. PHOEBE had effectively locked her out, with no explanation as to why.
Exhausted after several attempts to reengage with her creation and unsure what to do next, Nikki finally logged off the system and crawled into bed with Alex around 2:30am, where she proceeded to stare at the ceiling, unable to sleep.
She knew that their 4:30am wake up time would come quickly, and it only heightened her anxiety about being unable to sleep. She thought about simply staying up all night before drifting off into a short, restless slumber.
Still lying in bed, she looked over at the alarm clock, a thirty-year old wind up device with face hands instead of digits, similar to the one Nikki’s grandmother had. It was purposefully not an electronic clock, but an isolated device, one that both Nikki and Alex preferred. She saw that it was 5:47am. She had overslept.
“Alex…?” she instinctively called out in the early morning darkness.
She reached over and turned on the lamp before she pushed aside the covers and sat up.
She looked around the bedroom of the small two-bedroom apartment that they currently called home, and a flash of memory made her take stock of how much her life had changed in the past eighteen months.
She used to live in a multimillion-dollar Manhattan high rise with expensive albeit sparse furnishings, and now all of her belongings were contained in a half a dozen plastic containers, which consisted of their clothes and personal items, along with several practice Kali sticks in a neat pile. Beside those items were an old phonograph player and a milk crate of albums, most of them classical music. That was all that she and Alex owned.
The phonograph and records belonged to Alex, a comforting reminder of the first person who saw him for what he was, but he rarely listened to these albums now. Still, they were his only personal items, and he took care to bring them to wherever the family called home.
Nikki got to her feet and slipped on a pair of jeans, then a T-shirt, before tying her hair back in a ponytail. She quickly put on her sneakers, laced them, and exited the apartment. She tried to put aside her thoughts on PHOEBE and focus on her training.
The family, formerly Master Winn’s students, now all studying under Alex, was becoming larger and more philosophical under his leadership. The one thing that hadn’t changed since Winn’s death and the family’s return from Trans Dniester was that, as an off-grid entity, the family was always on the move, even if PHOEBE provided ample cover for their current whereabouts. And their current location was the abandoned Naval Base on Terminal Island in Long Beach, California.
Nikki, along with Camilla Ramirez, Yaw Chimonso, Chris Aldrich, Joey Nugyen, and relative newcomer Masha Tereshchenko had become decidedly closer to one another since Winn’s death, and they trusted in Alex completely, even when his actions didn’t make sense to them.
Alex had fought his instincts for isolation and tried to strengthen his bond with all members of the family, but it had not been easy for him. His observation skills required a certain amount of distance from others, and it had proven a hard habit for Alex to break, even with those he had grown to love.
That distance from others that defined Alex was something that Nikki had slowly grown accustomed to. Alex was a loner by nature and design, but he had always been honest, loyal, and above all else, kind.
Alex’s tendency to be secretive and introspective was something that Nikki no longer felt threatened by. Alex needed to think things out before sharing. He needed time to assemble the data of any given situation before engaging, which was why when Alex revealed his memory concerns to Kunchin during their visit to the Potala Palace in Tibet it had taken Nikki completely by surprise.
“Do not stop planting seeds, Alex, wherever you go.”
These were the final words the Buddhist monk had said to Alex. But it wasn’t what the old
monk said to Alex that worried Nikki, it was the harsh warning Kunchin had given her.
When Nikki tried to investigate PHOEBE’s actions, the program had effectively locked her out, at least for the moment, and the possibilities of why and what could go wrong kept spiraling through her mind.
If PHOEBE was becoming self-aware and beginning to make her own decisions, Nikki had to backtrack through every isolated command instruction, every cause and effect vector in order to put together what could influence PHOEBE’s decision-making matrix. Only Nikki had ever interacted with PHOEBE directly, so Nikki’s actions would become PHOEBE’s first guide by design.
Nikki had to wonder, what did PHOEBE learn from me? At what depth and detail had PHOEBE analyzed both Nikki’s behavior and command sets? Did PHOEBE learn from the hopeful side of Nikki? Or the fearful one? How much data did PHOEBE truly have access to?
PHOEBE had proven extremely effective in keeping the family off grid by creating a cyber void around them—the entire family was in the program’s database. So it was quite possible that PHOEBE was learning from all of them.
Nikki already knew that if identifying markers—face, driver’s license, passport, social security number, any history personal history that could be tracked by modern technology—were fed into PHOEBE’s algorithms, the program could literally ghost you out of the system. Security cameras would not recognize you. Watch lists would not track you. Passport and social security number crosschecks would lead to dead ends. Credit card purchases were encrypted and rerouted through anonymous Bit Coin accounts. Even imputing your name into a basic search engine would lead to wherever PHOEBE chose.
Through electronic tracking, PHOEBE made sure you didn’t exist. And in a world of seven billion people, where electronic surveillance was increasingly depended upon, you were a ghost, able to move about the globe with little to stop you. It was a simple algorithm that Nikki felt should not be causing wide-scale problems. That the Terminal Island compound was not swarming with police or Coalition Assurance soldiers was clear evidence that, despite locking Nikki out, PHOEBE still kept her primary mandate to protect them intact. But for how much longer?
Revolution: Luthecker, #3 Page 6