Leon tried to imagine being in Miss Gellender’s class, passing a note to Heather, the brilliant blonde girl on the computational biology team he was crushing on. No, no, don’t think about Heather. Think about writing a note without Miss Gellender noticing. Don’t think about the three, no four, robots watching everything happen. The key to deception was confidence.
He moved his hand to pick up the pen and the three virus robots all pivoted to watch him again. Damn robots. Leon thought for a second. He would have to do it in plain sight, because there was no way he would not be observed. He thought for a minute, trying to come up with something that Mike would recognize but that maybe the robots wouldn’t. He outlined a phone booth, something he remembered seeing from old movies. Inside, he drew two happy faces. Two people, together inside a private booth, as abstract as he could make it, and as casual as he could. Just a doodle. He hoped Mike would get the message.
He casually got up, said, “Excuse me,” and left the room. A guard opened the door for him, and he walked out into the hallway. He made a show of retying his shoes for any watching cameras, and a minute later, Mike came out through the same doorway.
They walked together to the men’s restroom, a great structure composed of marble floors and walls and ornate brass fittings. Leon made a show of taking his phone out of his pocket for Mike to see, and then pointed to Mike’s ear. Mike nodded, and took out his earpiece and phone and put them on the counter.
Then Leon led Mike back out the door. They left the restroom, and walked across the hall to the women’s restroom. Leon hesitated, then entered.
Leon looked around. He didn’t see anything that could plausibly be a camera, and he thought it was unlikely that there would be one in the bathroom. But he wasn’t counting out the possibility of being overheard, even here.
He walked over to one wall, and used his finger to trace letters visibly on the wall.
“I found weakness,” he traced. “ELOPe must know it.” He glanced at Mike’s face to see if the older man was following him, and Mike nodded for him to go ahead.
“All AI multicellular entities,” Leon traced. “One computer by itself not an AI.”
“Yes,” Mike traced.
“Mesh network is pervasive,” Leon traced. Tracing on the wall was quickly becoming tiresome.
Mike nodded.
“Without mesh network, computers degrade to non-intelligent cells.”
“So?” Mike traced, raising his eyebrows in question. “Without mesh, computers useless to humans. No help in restoring infrastructure.”
“Neural network refresh cycle,” Leon traced. The neural network was the collection of algorithms and data that comprised the significant majority of the AI’s intelligence. The refresh cycle was the introduction of randomized data into the neural network data. Without the refresh cycle, neural networks would inevitably develop self reinforcing cycles, effectively giving the AI the equivalent of human obsessive-compulsive behaviors: repeating the same thoughts and behaviors again and again. In effect, behaving irrationally. Except that if it went on indefinitely the neural network would become not just irrational, but completely non-functional.
Mike nodded for Leon to go ahead.
“Neural network refresh prescheduled in code. Individual computer will perform refresh even if network is offline.” He looked at Mike to see if he was following.
“You want to suppress refresh?” Mike asked via tracing.
Leon shook his head. “No, turn off mesh. Refresh will happen endlessly. No new neural inputs to stimulate neural network. Neural network degrades from excess of randomization. After N refresh cycles, neural network is completely randomized.” Leon’s finger was getting tired.
“How big is N? How long will it take?”
Leon shrugged. He didn’t know.
“Why do you think ELOPe knows?” Mike traced.
“Assumed ELOPe can outthink me,” Leon answered in trace. Then he paused and wrote again on the wall, “Would likely kill ELOPe as well. ELOPe hardwired to survive.”
Mike leaned against the wall, his face scrunched up. After a minute had passed, Mike traced on the wall, “What would you need IF we decide to do it?”
“Master keys for mesh,” Leon answered. Leon was taking a shot in the dark. Even though the mesh boxes were supposedly tamperproof and unchangeable, there was always the old rumor that went around the net that there was a set of master keys that could change the mesh boxes’ behavior. He scrutinized the other man’s face. So much was lost without verbal cues.
Mike stood for a moment staring at the wall. Then he looked at Leon and nodded. “I have them,” he traced on the wall.
“Give them to me,” Leon wrote.
“Only if we have to use them.”
“What if something happens to you?”
Mike stood still an even longer time, one hand supporting his chin. He seemed to be having an internal dialogue with himself. Finally he sighed. He traced, “Can you remember 32 chars?”
Leon nodded, and then watched carefully as Mike traced out the master password about which so much rumor had circulated the Internet.
After tracing it twice, and then watching Leon confirm it by tracing it twice, Mike finally ended by tracing, “ONLY IN EMERGENCY”.
Leon nodded.
In Beaverton, Oregon, not far from ELOPe’s birthplace, Captain Sally Walsh oversaw her team. Last night, before Sally had boarded the plane, the General bumped her up to Acting Captain, explaining “I don’t know what you’ll need to requisition or who you’ll need to command, but given the difficulty of communications, you’ll need to be prepared to operate independently.”
Flown in last night via C-130 transport, the team was running on caffeine, dex and fumes. Captain Walsh looked down at the locked metal briefcase a medic had given her as she boarded the flight. Dextroamphetamine would keep her people running for days without sleep. Formerly the stuff of Air Force pilots, Sally was pretty sure it had never been handed out like candy to a bunch of computer geeks. But then the computer geeks had never been on the frontline of any war before.
The mission handed down by General Gately was to build up computer infrastructure that was invulnerable to the virus. The military and the government couldn’t operate without reliable, high-bandwidth communications that could be trusted.
Up until now the military communications infrastructure was computer-based encrypted traffic over a combination of mesh, internet, and military backbones. Now none of that could be trusted. It had been Sally’s realization: They were fighting a losing battle against the AI. One of the first principles of warfare was to pick the battlefield, and so far they’d been playing on a battlefield owned entirely by the enemy.
Sally’s job was not merely to rebuild that infrastructure, but to redesign it from available components and start distributing the pieces in three days or less. The general had made it clear that sooner would be much better.
Sally had been surprised to find that not a single computer or phone was manufactured in the United States. She knew of course that most electronics factories were overseas, and they’d take over a foreign one by force if needed, but logistically it’d be easier to find a factory in the United States. None of the venerable PC manufacturers such as HP and Acer-Dell, had any fabs left in the U.S. Of course, modern phones were all built in Japan or copied in China.
Even Raytheon, the Department of Defense’s pet electronics company, which had purchased the remnants of Motorola, manufactured all of their equipment out of Brazil.
Sally was deciding whether to fly to Brazil or China when Private DeRoos mentioned Intel-Fujitsu, the fifty year old computer chip company, which was still churning CPUs out of their Oregon facility. “They build reference systems there, Ma’am. They’re high end computers that programmers can use to write code for new processors. Highly customizable.”