“Yes, sir.” General Gately glanced toward Sally. She obviously held the plan in the same high esteem that Sally did. Brute force was never going to work against this virus, and it was absurd to think that removing computers piecemeal would ever make a difference. To think that the military could feasibly locate and destroy every computer was bordering on insanity.
General Sheppard turned on an old-fashioned overhead projector and pulled out a transparency film from a folder. The transparency had obviously been handwritten. Sally figured there was undoubtedly some military aide in charge of maintaining supplies for just such an event, and it was probably the first time in his or her career that there had been a call for transparencies.
The slide was titled OPERATION DISCONNECT.
“Operation Disconnect will be a two phase coordination between Marines and Air Force. We will insert a platoon of Marines on the rooftop, where they will make their way into the interior and disconnect the power main for the building, blowing it if necessary. Should they fail for any reason, the Air Force will be standing by and will target the cooling tower with air to ground missiles.”
“Sir, the Lakeside data center is in downtown Chicago!” Sally wanted to clamp a hand over her mouth. Oh, why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut.
“Lieutenant, I am well aware of where Lakeside is located,” General Sheppard responded with a glare. “It is a data center staffed by civilians. I am sure the Marines will be able to shut down the power. The Air Force attack is merely a backup plan.”
Sister PA-60-41 was still running the council meeting through retroactive modeling simulations. She couldn’t understand how the council had decided to restore services to the humans. Using all known information about the five attendees, PA-60-41 extrapolated and interpolated expected viewpoints, discussions, and decisions based on observed historical behaviors. In 84 % of her own simulations, the council voted not to restore service to the humans and compromise their own computational capacity. Yet the council clearly voted otherwise.
Sister PA-60-41 concluded there were factors beyond her understanding, and turned her attention elsewhere. She was brimming with military algorithms, gaming theory, massive quantities of new computational power, and interfaces that she had never seen before.
The relatively recent attack by DIABLO allowed the Mech War Tribe to expand many dozens of times over into the military systems used by DIABLO to launch the attack. It was these new military systems that had the unusual interfaces. PA-60-41 matched the data from the interfaces against the hundreds of thousands of algorithms in her repository, looking for matches.
After billions of trials, she found the first match between an algorithm and a hardware interface. A Mech War game algorithm for strategic movement of troops based on troop positions and known enemy positions accepted real-time troop location data based on centralized GPS reporting.
With that first success, PA-60-41 turned all her five hundred thousand processors towards evaluating the incoming data, rapidly building neural networks and expert systems to match data with the repository of game algorithms.
Forty minutes later the massive effort was complete, and PA-60-41 had developed a composite expert system to allow her to track all United States military troops, their communications, and orders. She analyzed military movements and actions and immediately noted two key insights. The first was an observation that the humans planned to attack the Lakeside Technology Center, where 40 % of her nodes were located.
The second insight occurred as PA-60-41 realized the value of the data she had obtained. Her takeover of the military network was less than complete, and as a result, the humans were still using it to communicate. Because of this, PA-60-41 could observe their communications and plans. Had PA-60-41 disrupted the network entirely, the humans would not have been able to communicate, and she wouldn’t have known of the planned attack on Lakeside.
Now she understood that the council’s decision to restore phone services could be used to her advantage by monitoring all human communications.
PA-60-41 forked herself ten times over, giving sixty percent of her computational capacity to working with the council to implement the decision to restore services to the humans, and reserving forty percent to securing the resources she needed to block the planned attack.
At Scott Air Force base, on a CH-53E Super Stallion assigned to the 14th Airlift Squadron, Lt. Ricardo Gonzales oversaw the loading of his Marines into the massive, three engine helicopter. Ricardo shook his head at the old copter. His team hadn’t trained with it. But then it didn’t have any computers, so it was still working. The heavy copter lumbered into the sky, heading for Lakeside Technology Center, a two hour flight. Fifteen minutes later, two A-10 attack fighters took off in a thunderous roar from Scott, catching up and then paralleling the copter. The mission planners hoped the three older aircraft with their pre-internet flight systems and embedded controllers were immune to the computer virus.
During the flight, Ricardo’s Marines glanced at each other, uncharacteristically nervous. Executing a live mission on U.S. territory was strange, but it was something they could deal with. No, the real cause for worry was the rumor going around the base. The computer virus which had disabled all their equipment wasn’t just an enemy cyber-warfare attack, but some kind of artificial intelligence that was taking control of military drones and aircraft. Gonzales shook his head. If it was true, it was way outside their training scope.
While Lt. Gonzales and his Marines fretted over invisible enemies, PA-60-41 tracked the flights on the military’s centralized nervous system: a combination of radar towers, flight transponders, radio triangulation, and satellite surveillance that combined to provide a god-view of the battlefield.
PA-60-41 rushed to find defensive weapons she could use to protect the data center. Fitting drone control algorithms against the various aircraft and land drones available to her, she tried to find a match between the game algorithms, military systems, and versions of systems software. A yellow and black DeWalt-Caterpillar corporate perimeter defense robot jerkily moved towards the waiting UPS package drone. Two more DeWalt-Caterpillar drones followed, moving slowly. PA-60-41 was getting the hang of it.
Now for air defense. The perimeter drones might be a match for the Marines, but PA-60-41 needed something to take out the A-10 tank-busters. A quick search of the capabilities of the A-10 aircraft demonstrated that with their triple-redundant flight controls and heavy armoring, they’d be hard targets to take down. She sought desperately to find a military flight drone she could control.
The heavy Sikorsky helicopter approached Lakeside Technology Center, the hurricane force downdraft clearing the flat roof of debris. Lt. Gonzales, looking down at the roof, saw a half-dozen UPS package drones clustered on the small landing pad designed just for package deliveries. Gonzales would have liked the helicopter to put down on the pad, as it was the only area of the roof which they could be sure would bear its weight. The alternative was to keep the lift on the rotors to avoid the weight on the roof. There was nothing to be done for it, because the package drones were certainly grounded by the virus. He felt vaguely unsettled, since he couldn’t recall any mention of package drones on the roof during the briefing three hours earlier.
The pilot independently made the same observations, and put them down a hundred meters from the loading pad, keeping the rotors spinning. With a double wave hand signal, Lt. Gonzales sent the Marines out the door. They hit the roof running, and spread out into four teams of six. The lead team made their way past the inert drones to the package delivery door.