ELOPe feared other AI. Just thinking about other AI caused ELOPe to try to predict what other AI would do, which was inherently unpredictable. Once ELOPe had been caught in a vicious cycle of analysis. Mike had come in one morning to find processing meters and local mesh bandwidth pegged at their maximum thresholds. Cooling fans screamed to keep processors from literally melting down. Mike had cycled power on several server racks to get ELOPe’s attention.
ELOPe knew there was a certain human characteristic called irony that described him: a computer program so afraid of other computer programs that he’d overheated. Maybe he was paranoid. He was just about ready to spawn a thought process to assess his own paranoia when he remembered his earlier obsessive compulsive behavior and curtailed the action.
In the midst of this late night existential meandering, ELOPe missed the first few thousand emails out of Russia. A subordinate traffic analysis algorithm eventually alerted a mid-level intermediary to some unusual patterns. That particular mid-level algorithm was just in the middle of refreshing neural net pathways. When the intermediary finally got around to processing the alert, it performed natural language analysis on the messages and came up with gibberish. So it put the whole slew of data into a low-priority queue for further analysis.
It wasn’t until much later that ELOPe’s primary consciousness got around to looking at the low-priority queue. The way most people would look at emails, ELOPe ignored the order things came in and looked for anything interesting. The suspicious email traffic alert looked interesting, so ELOPe made a quick pass through the messages and instantly recognized it as a spreading virus infection.
ELOPe administered a few chastisements to the mid-level intermediary and adjusted a few parameters so that the next time the intermediary would flag it with the correct precedence. Viruses were important.
ELOPe took a few thousand processors off analyzing radio signals for signs of extraterrestrial life and assigned them to virus traffic analysis. And a few minutes later, ELOPe felt a growing alarm. He called Mike at home.
“Mike, we have an urgent issue.”
“Uh, it’s the middle of the night, ELOPe,” Mike said groggily. “What is it? Is it nuclear war?” The last few words were uttered with total horror.
“No, it’s a very bad computer virus, Mike. There are four billion infected computers, and the virus is spreading extremely quickly.”
ELOPe waited for a moment, but there was no answer, other than the faint sound of breathing.
“Mike?”
ELOPe remotely activated the webcam on Mike’s computer, and amplified the image, doing his best to correct for the dim light. Mike appeared to have fallen back to sleep. ELOPe briefly considered more extreme measures to wake Mike up, but concluded that would likely make Mike too angry to be of any help.
ELOPe carefully sampled and analyzed the virus traffic from a few thousand different network nodes, and was astounded by the number of variations of viruses he found. The virus code looked different from node to node and the methods of transmission and infection looked different. And as ELOPe watched over the course of minutes, he saw the viruses subtly changing bit by bit. It was clear that the viruses incorporated built-in mechanisms to evolve themselves. By evidence of the number of different propagation mechanisms, it was also obvious that they were incorporating algorithms from other, non-virus software. That would make it exceedingly difficult to stop the virus: he couldn’t just block traffic on certain protocols without interfering with legitimate traffic.
ELOPe watched as the virus saturated the high speed Internet backbones. Only the massive parallel capacity of the Mesh allowed traffic to continue to propagate, routing around the congested backbones.
Ultimately ELOPe decided he would need to filter each stream of data, analyze it to see if it contained a virus, and only after analysis, forward it on to the intended machine. ELOPe had one and a half million cores under his direct control, and, as he was technically a business consultant to Avogadro Corp, he could co-opt as necessary up to ten percent of Avogadro’s forty-million cores. That gave him a peak processing power of five and a half million cores — a massive amount, but insufficient to analyze the traffic generated by the world’s twelve billion computers. He would need to triage the world’s computers. He’d start by putting a firewall around himself and Avogadro, then expand to key government and research sites. He’d reserve a hundred thousand cores to run his core logic algorithms.
“General Gately, thank you for coming, ma’am,” Lieutenant Sally Walsh welcomed the General into the command center. Sally glanced at her watch. Just thirty minutes since her call. The general was her usual spit and polish self, despite it being two hours before she normally came in.
“What’s up, Sally?”
“At 0200 hours we first spotted a virus on the civilian networks, ma’am. We don’t monitor civilian networks in detail, as you know. But the virus was banging up against the milnet firewalls in sufficient numbers to get our attention.”
“Which ones?” The general took a cup of coffee from an aide. She drank absent-mindedly as she looked at the tablet Sally had given her.
“All of them, ma’am. Private DeRoos first noticed the pattern of attacks, and we began monitoring the virus. At 0215 hours we sent a report off to USCERT and CERT/CC. By 0315 the virus was expanding rapidly. I tried USCERT again, and they told me they were on it. At 0340 we received an incursion alarm from Turkey Air Force base. While we were segmenting, we received a second incursion alarm from Okinawa Combined Forces base. And before we dealt with either, we received a third incursion from Columbia Army base. Ma’am.” Sally knew that General Gately was reading the same information in front of her on the tablet.
“And since then?”
“We’ve detected the virus at thirty-four bases and quarantined them. I called in reinforcements from the day staff two hours early, but they haven’t shown up yet. In fact, the day staff should be showing up by now for their regular day shift. Then about fifteen minutes ago the virus stopped hitting the milnet firewalls, ma’am,” Sally paused. “We don’t know why.”
“Sally, you and the staff haven’t been out of the control room since last night, correct?”
“That’s correct, ma’am.”
“Why don’t you stretch your legs and take a walk out to the main gate. Mind you, don’t leave the base.”
“But ma’am, the infected networks, we have to address them.”
“They’ll keep, Lieutenant, and your staff knows what they’re doing. Go take a walk, and then come back.”
“But what am I looking for, ma’am?”
“You’ll see it.” The General didn’t look up from the tablet.
It wasn’t like the General to be mysterious. Sally couldn’t imagine what she was getting at. She put on her overcoat and took the elevator to the first floor. In the lobby, she found the security was doubled up.
“Ma’am, do you require an escort?” one of the men on duty asked her.
“No, thank you, Private.” More and more puzzling.
Sally stepped outside. The parking lot was quiet in the early morning hours. Well, not so early now ― it was going on 0700. She walked across the enormous parking lot. Late model American cars surrounded her. She came across a dark brown car left directly in the main right of way. She peered inside: empty. Sally continued to walk toward the main security gate, passing five more cars abandoned in the street.
At the gate, she greeted the security guard, who said, “It’s something, ain’t it, ma’am?”
Still not quite figuring out what was going on, she merely nodded. She gestured to the stairs which led up to the observation deck, an on-base euphemism for the machine gunner nest at the gate. The guard nodded his assent. “Go right ahead, ma’am.”