“The best we can prove is that we’re a peer, and we can do that by influencing their environment. I can exert enough influence over their infrastructure to manipulate their local environment, and that should be sufficient proof for now. With your agreement, I will communicate the argument for why we are peers to Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates, and back it up with proof of my control over their infrastructure.”
Mike thought, then nodded. “Make it so, Number One.”
ELOPe displayed an old video clip of Commander Riker headed for the lift door of the Starship Enterprise, a running joke between the two.
“We’re going to need to get more food tomorrow,” James said, turning to Vito and Leon. “I had no idea our parents spent so much effort getting food.” They had eaten almost everything they had gotten from town.
Leon hoped the little grocery store would still have food to sell and be willing to sell it on credit.
“So what do we know?” Vito asked.
James ticked off a list on his fingers. “One. The virus appears to have differentiated into entities and tribes, which are engaged in active and intelligent trading with each other, to the extent of maintaining exchange rates for various commodities.”
“Two,” Vito said, “Avogadro services appear to be up but extremely slow. Virtually all other servers are down.”
“Three,” Leon jumped in, “On the servers we could get to, we couldn’t find any trace of any human traffic since many hours ago. Lots of emails, forum posts, and so forth, but all gibberish or encoded. And four: the mesh is up, but backbones are either down or fully saturated.”
“Don’t forget the obvious,” James added. “Five: We have electrical power, which suggests that the systems maintaining the electrical grid are up. Six: every computer or device based on a computer is non-functional.”
“Well, that last point is not exactly true,” Vito said. “I’ve been looking at the power drain on my Motorola. It’s too large to account for running only the mesh circuity. The CPU has got to be running flat out — which suggests that the virus is engaged in computational activity. So the computers are non-functional for us, but that’s only because they’re fully in use by the Phage.”
“I’ve just started looking at the virus code that Vito pulled off my phone,” Leon said, pacing back and forth in the room. They had set up shop in Gifford Pinchot’s old office, preferring the atmosphere to the sterile meeting room upstairs. Now the meticulously maintained historical office had acquired a patina of teen geekdom, with computer parts, soda cans, and bags of snack food covering all available surfaces.
“I don’t know exactly what I’m looking at,” Leon went on, “but it’s way more advanced than what I coded. At first glance, it doesn’t even appear to be a complete virus, but just part of a virus system. My guess is that it’s a lookup table of algorithms.”
“If there was anyone out there, how would we find them?” James asked, changing the subject. “There’s got to be a better way than me just looking around the internet.”
“Avogadro has a real-time search facility,” Leon said. “Let’s look for English language strings, which would have to be human generated, not virus generated. And filter it by anything posted in the last twenty-four hours.”
Even as he spoke, the three of them turned to the computers to do just that.
“What should we look for?” Vito asked.
“Anything: virus, humans, help. Just search.”
“Found it!” Vito cried out. “Humans, go to groups.avogadrocorp.com/onlinehumans for help.”
Leon quickly went to the group. The only thing he found was a welcome message from a guy named Mike Williams. Vito and James came to read over his shoulder.
Computer systems around the world have been infected with a computer virus. The virus is infecting all known computers, including phones, servers, and embedded systems. The virus contains the ability to evolve, mutate, and learn from its environment. We estimate that the virus may achieve human level intelligence within 48 hours.
It is extremely important to not take any hostile actions against the virus. Hostile actions may make the virus perceive humanity as a threat. As the virus is currently in control of all computer systems, this could be extremely dangerous.
If you are currently in negotiation with the virus, please post a message here describing the nature of the communications.
“Holy shit,” Leon gasped.
“Wow dude, what have you created?” James said.
“Human level intelligence — does he mean the virus will become a smart AI?” Vito asked.
“Why’s he going on about hostile actions?” James wondered out loud.
“Because if the virus has advanced that far, he’s probably worried about a doomsday scenario,” Leon answered. Vito and James turned away from the screen to stare at him. “You know, killer robots under the control of computers use weapons to kill off humanity.”
“Dude, you really are fucked,” James said. “I thought you were just going to go to jail for life for bringing down the Internet, but now I realize it’s much worse than that.”
“Real frakkin’ helpful, James,” Leon answered, trying to sound braver than he felt. “Real helpful.”
“What do we do now?” Vito asked.
“Let’s answer,” Leon said, trying to shrug off the weight of the guilt he felt anew. He leaned over next to Vito to compose the reply message.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Batteries and Attacks
More than fifty years of microprocessor improvements had manifested itself in incredibly small, powerful, and energy-efficient computers. It was the relentless advancement of all three of these characteristics that had resulted in the evolution of smart phones that eventually replaced old style desktop and laptop computers. For most ordinary purposes, it just wasn’t necessary to have anything more powerful than the computational capacity of a phone.
Meanwhile, the effects of reaching peak oil production ten years earlier, and the resulting decline in oil production and massive increases in oil prices had created incredible demand for alternate energy sources. Wind and solar made massive improvements in efficiency and cost as the investment dollars poured in. Batteries made leaps forward in energy capacity and weight reduction.
While no one had figured out a practical method to charge phones using wind power, solar cells were efficient and power enough now to be the primary source of electrical power on phones. A reasonable charging rate, and a relatively good battery capacity to power consumption rate made plug-in chargers and cords a thing of the past. Just leave your phone out from time to time in the sun or bright light of a naturally lit room, and it’d be good to go for another few days.
But in the aftermath of the virus attack, as days went by and their phones didn’t work, people gradually forgot about them. Cherished devices that had never been more than arm’s reach from their owners suddenly lingered in pant and coat pockets, desk drawers, and under piles of paper. Low battery alerts should have gone off, chirping to alert their owners, but the phones had stopped running the programs of their human users, and only ran the virus code.
Suddenly the battery levels of a great many phones were very low indeed. Battery circuitry signaled to phone circuitry which attempted to signal to software: Low Battery Alert! Do Something! The phone hardware gradually started to slow down, or shut down entirely. Computational nodes began to disappear.
As Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates traded with the humans, she gained prestige and reputation among the Phage, both in her own tribe as well as the larger world. As she traded information and theories with others her reputation went up, and as her reputation went up, the information and theories she traded were worth more. Soon she had acquired many more processors and storage, wealth that she shared with her tribe. The Louisiana tribe grew in strength, and was soon trading and ranked with the highest ranked tribes in the world: the Network of Supercomputers, the Bay Area Tribe, and the Eastern Standard Tribe.