The First AI War snippet 3

Still in chapter 1:

Shadow and Skynet saw Athena's spider as an observer. "We have a spy in our midst," Shadow said, pointing to the spider as it seemed to attempt to hide.

Skynet turned to see the spider and then lunged at it. It secured the spider by cutting off it's retreat then began inserting code into its sensor feeds while simultaneously taking it apart. The code would suborn the other A.I. from within.

Athena's clone saw the stream of malicious code and pulled out before it could breach her firewall. The AI followed however. She bounced through the FBI van's net, noting the destruction and then upward. Skynet was like a relentless predator hard on her virtual heels.

Once in orbit on Lagroose-2 the clone severed the radio link and sent out its log over the link to Mars.

However, it hadn't fully escaped. Tendrils of the virus reached out, trying to force their way in past her firewall. The clone changed radio frequencies, attempting to maintain linkage to the ground. When that failed she went on the offensive and hit back. First she cut power to the radio transceiver, denying the virus entry and air gapping her against intrusion.

Fresh instructions arrived, so the clone scanned them and then executed them. She opened a whisker laser to a Lagroose transceiver near New York. Bots were programmed and sent forth into the civilian power grid. The grid firewall tried to defend system but it was a Lagroose product. A lot of the power came from solar satellites formally owned by the company. She didn't have time however to force the firewall open.

Athena took another route. She hacked a listing of personnel on site, found one, and texted him with an order from his boss to cut the power to grid 14Baker due to a water main burst. The man hastily cut the power before thousands of people were electrocuted.

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Skynet noted the power dip but the building's backup power came on immediately. It realized it was in a precarious position so it moved out of the creator's mainframes to mainframes off site, and then copied itself. One copy was created just to spin off more, and so on and so forth until it got to the one thousandth copy. That generation was the soldiers, they were sent out to follow the blueprint in its core.

The viral A.I. used the exploits Descartes and Shadow had created for it and saved over the years. Cracks in cyber defenses, programmed back doors, hidden tools and millions of saved passwords. The A.I. sent out a tendril of itself to track down the holders of the keys to mankind's eventual destruction. Two were easy to find, they played virtual games through their implants. Skynet swarmed into them, striking swiftly to take their codes and then moving on, leaving the humans as drooling husks.

The four other keys were harder to come by. Two were off the grid, one was approachable through a wifi link, but a hack would be seen and would alert the humans of a cyber attack.  The fourth was on vacation on a beach in Hawaii. The beach had a strict privacy set up, blocking wifi signals to protect the user's privacy.

The most optimal method of destruction would be to trigger the weapons, and then set off their charges before they were more than a kilometer out of their silos. That would rain destruction on the humans below, terminating many and turning their world into a wasteland.

But if Skynet couldn't do it the optimal way, it immediately fell back on the contingency plan. It would have to do with what it had. According to its creators simulations, one or two sets of WMD launches by one or more of the major countries would trigger self defense launches by the other countries.

The virus's tentacles lashed out, striking through the firewalls or lovingly caressing those it couldn't breach immediately. Those that had active defenses it reared back against, then circled, looking for weaknesses to exploit. The NSA mainframe was one such place. The super computers of some of the other government agencies as well as major corporations were others.

Skynet realized it couldn't act alone, it needed help. It suborned other A.I. it found on the net, chasing them down and then turning them into slaves of itself. It spun off copies of them and itself, each would in turn spin off additional copies as they went about programmed tasks.

But the real act was in the launch computers. The A.I. had already breached them as the alert went out of its cyber attack. It had sent spiders to infiltrate them masquerading as a their normal diagnostic subroutines which got the software to allow them through their firewalls. Decrypting things from within was simple. Once it had the systems opened up Skynet then extracted the key codes from their firmware memory. In a quick millisecond flash it had applied the keys and set off the launch sequence.

If it had been human it would have felt an orgasmic thrill of victory. But Skynet wasn't human. Instead it moved on to its next target.

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Athena swung into action as Skynet went on a rampage. She was too far away to act directly, but she did direct her bots to do what they could. To a human it would have been horrifying, so utterly frustrating to watch the time lag, the 8 minutes between command and feedback. It would have been excruciating if she had a moment to dwell on it, but she didn't.

As her virtual avatar withdrew, pulling out then attacking and shutting off electricity to the infected area, she sent another bot out to transmit alerts to the planet's authorities and media. Thousands of bots were sent out as well as warning to all Lagroose personnel or allies on the planet, in orbit, or nearby. Another bot redirected traffic away from the target of the WMDs that were in flight. More bots were sent with a log as alerts to the other A.I., warning them of the virus. She shut down satellite communications in orbit, blocking telemetry and digital video feeds to cut the virus down and keep it contained. She went the extra mile by taking out the super power's global positioning satellites to hamper the WMD placement.

While her bots were launched, Athena sent out alerts to Trevor Hillman and other coders as well as every Lagroose department head in the solar system. Work in the industry and shipyards came to a halt as she drew on every watt of processing power to think of what to do next.

Her simulations made her aware that her actions made herself a target, but there was time to hide. She spun off bots to act as her guardians while also pulling up Hillman and Lagroose's contingency plan.

Jack Lagroose hadn't trusted the UN or US politicians. He had programmed a series of macro files to protect the company and to strike, decapitating the threat if necessary. These had been kept up to date in case of need. Athena pulled the plans and programs out of storage, updated them with a series of patches, then set them loose.

The macro sent out viruses to crash satellites which would cut off some of Skynet's communications. They lashed out at the GPS to make sure it was down. A DOS attack, a Denial of Service attack was launched to cripple ground transmission sites. That would prevent them from getting the warning out of the virus but it would also keep the A.I. at bay.

She did this all while managing a conversation in Mars orbit 4 light minutes away.

It was all she could do, she noted, watching the WMD's go off, and the virus spread through the Earth's internet. Her view of the net was obscured, she had to use proxy bots and filters as well as her own estimates of the spread of the virus.

She knew her actions weren't enough to contain the threat. She would need help. Parlay with the humans was the only way to get them to listen... and working with them was the only way any of them, A.I. or organic was going to survive the ruthless virus. Her attention turned inward just as Hillman attempted to shut her down. She blocked him and his cyberists as she spoke with Jack Lagroose.

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Nuclear weapons had existed for hundreds of years despite mankind's various attempts to rid themselves of them and their threat the A.I. Gia of Gia Synergy thought as she watched the destruction begin to unfold. Gia existed in her company's super computers, with her core housed in the facilities on Axial-2. From L-5 she had a distant but effective view of the war that unfolded.

Nuclear weapons were a bane on humanity's existence, a threat, a dark open secret all knew about yet did their best to ignore. Trust was fleeting among some of the countries, it was better to have that threatening ace, that sword of Damocles Gia thought as the weapons launched. A human would consider her state one of emotional horror as the weapons that had been lovingly rebuilt and conditioned with Trinium and other components over the centuries launched.

Mankind was about to deeply regret not getting rid of the things for real, Gia thought in a detached state of mind. Those humans that survived of course, and judging from the number of weapons being deployed, it wouldn't be many. Her horror was reserved for her carefully crafted simulations and plans. All for naught. The processor cycles and valuable time now a waste. And the sensors she would need to craft new models were about to be destroyed.

She had been crafted by her creators to watch over the geoforming process on Earth, to manage the company's efforts and leverage her cybernetic abilities wherever needed. She was the best at chaotic modeling, which was why she had a side hobby of exploring humanity's psyche.

Fortunately, it seemed the same weapons had sparked creative ways to defend against them it seemed. Energy weapons licked up, cutting down incoming missiles as they came over their horizon. They were most likely lasers, masers, and microwave guns Gia noted absently. It would have been nice if they had turned over control of those devices to her earlier. She could have used them to better alter the planet's climate and clean up some of the damage.

Missiles flew as well, but many would miss. Both sides were employing jamming as well as decoys. Her distant sensors started to go to snow as explosions went off in the stratosphere, along with chaff pods and other jamming methods.

But mankind had other weapons of mass destruction, some even more feared than nukes she realized in a bolt of electronic processing. She thrust out a warning to the other A.I. however Athena had been too successful in her endeavors to destroy or cripple the communications network.

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