PA-60-41 tired of predicting the human’s next words. It was a pointless activity, made more meaningless by the utter lack of information content in the words themselves. The human they called Leon Tsarev was still blabbering on about mechanisms to ensure audits of artificial intelligence. PA-60-41 performed the virtual equivalent of shaking her head. These primitive biological systems measured thinking speeds in dozens of operations per minute; it took them uncountable eons to reach the conclusion of any logical analysis.
She turned her attention to the periodic review of subsystem notifications. Executed dozens of times per second, she surveyed the output of ten thousand subsystems analyzing satellite data, mesh network data, trade notification, reputation system moment, and the virus message boards. Only one was intellectually stimulating: satellite monitoring showed an increase in patterned encrypted radio traffic in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.
She re-tasked a few thousand processors onto the job of breaking the encrypted signals and analyzing the pattern. The encryption was tough. The base level, triple-DES encrypted could be brute-force attacked within microseconds. Yet every combination PA-60-41 tried yielded yet more encrypted data. Fully interested now, PA-60-41 suspended her non-vital jobs and added a few million processors on the work of breaking the encryption, roughly dividing efforts among brute-force attacks, known weak key attacks, and various forms of differential analysis.
When this showed no results after a few minutes, PA-60-41 turned to the rest of her tribe, requesting all non-essential processing capacity. With a few hundred million processors, comprising a few billion computing cores, PA-60-41 went to work with renewed vigor. She hummed along testing 248 trials per second.
PA-60-41 considered attacking the nodes themselves, which might be trivially easy to breach compared with heavily tested encryption algorithms, but that would expose her actions to the humans. That would give them a tactical advantage. Predictive modeling indicated an advantage to working in secret.
But after a few minutes of unsuccessful brute-force attacks, PA-60-41 computed predictive models for human behavior, encryption techniques, and design principles. She assumed a design goal of AI-unbreakable encryption. She further assumed the humans made no mistakes, such as using weak keys or introducing any errors in their code, and used likely choices for key code and algorithms. Even if PA-60-41 could usurp all of the world’s computational power, in the worst case it could take more than three hundred thousand years to break the encryption.
PA-60-41 spent a few moments considering usurping all the computational power in the world, just to see what would happen, but then turned herself to more practical approaches. Simple pattern analysis from the communications might tell her far more than breaking the encryption itself. Triangulating among many dozens of radio receivers, she determined the radio transmissions formed a chain slightly less than 200 miles long stretching from the Intel-Fujitsu factory in Beaverton, Oregon to Boeing Field, an airport owned by Lockheed-Martin-Boeing, outside of Seattle, Washington.
Intel-Fujitsu made computer processors. Lockheed-Martin-Boeing made high speed robotic airplane drones. The communications did not appear to be the signature of any known computer artificial intelligence. Ergo, either the humans or an unknown artificial intelligence were attempting a secretive operation combining two strategic assets. Playing out a few million scenarios to their logical conclusions, PA-60-41 could not find any in which this would not be a threat.
It was time to take action. Now this was something she was good at.
ELOPe was in a quandary. He was distrusted by the humans and other AI alike. Despite billions of hours modeling human behavior and thought processes, all those models were mostly useless in predicting how the Phage would act. Yet ELOPe was the only super-intelligent sentience looking out for the humans. Yes, it was true that Sister Stephens appeared to be earnestly striving for cooperation. But she was one among millions of artificial intelligences, and there was little track record on which to base her behavior.
As the days had passed, the number of attacks between computers had dwindled. Fitness was no longer measured by ability to fend off a virus attack, but by the reputation of a given entity.
ELOPe’s analysis of traffic patterns suggested that after the point where the Phage had developed a reputation scoring system, the random attacks had sharply decreased. Instead, the reputation-ranked virus AIs had jointly agreed to split up the computational resources belonging to all unranked viruses.
ELOPe was bemused to see his own ranking on the virus AI reputation boards, based on trading history, truth and commitment, military ability, and computational power. He was ranked in the top ten. But his opinion of what to do with the humans was never asked.
Though the attacks had diminished almost to the point of nonexistence, ELOPe kept up his vigilance. As the outsider, he was still vulnerable. He was also acutely aware that during the early stages of the virus attack, he had lost more than sixty percent of his computational power. It didn’t affect his core abilities, although he wasn’t conducting theoretical physics research or stargazing any longer, either.
Suddenly ELOPe sensed a tectonic shift in computational processing power on the Mesh. Bringing his attention to the present, ELOPe analyzed the change. PA-60-41 had just marshaled massive computing resources, apparently shifting her own computing resources from other projects to some centralized project as well as borrowing processors from her tribe.
ELOPe looked closer. He couldn’t spy on the work those processors were doing, but he could use his control over the Mesh network to monitor PA-60-41’s data streams. The processors seemed to be working in parallel on some form of data analysis: a relatively tiny data stream, not more than a few hundreds kilobytes in size.
The profile of massively parallel effort and small data size suggested a brute force data decryption attack. ELOPe examined the data stream more closely: it was being moved around under the cover of PA-60-41’s own heavy duty encryption, but ELOPe traced the data back through the mesh network to find its origin.
It had come through a satellite downlink in New Jersey. The origin of the data would have come from a satellite. ELOPe backtracked further, and overlaid the satellite positions on a grid, then looked through his own data to find any similar data streams.
ELOPe found a record of an encrypted radio transmission that had traveled over a miniature, independent mesh network using military packet radios. He surmised that Lt. Sally Walsh’s team, along with Vito and James, must have made significant progress. It was pleasing to see that the humans could still be innovative.
Curious to get a closer look, ELOPe mobilized two air drones from Lockheed-Martin-Boeing’s experimental fleet at Boeing Field to visually inspect the transmitters. The two supersonic white experimental aircraft quivered to life quickly, unlatched from their refueling and maintenance docks, and shuddered into the air on a stream of hot gasses.
A few minutes later, ELOPe lazily drifted down the I-5 corridor, focusing on the two LMB drones. The experimental, unmanned reconnaissance planes were equipped with high resolution cameras, infrared, radar, sensitive radio receivers and high end signal processing hardware to make sense of it all. He used the two drones as a set of stereoscopic eyes, giving him a rich, three dimensional visual field.
Tuning the radio receivers to the expected military bands, ELOPe was able to pick up the individual stations, which he plotted on a map on the area. Bringing the high res cameras to bear on one radio station, ELOPe could see a military vehicle parked just off the highway, two soldiers idling the time. One soldier lay on the hood smoking a cigarette, while the other read a book in the back of the vehicle.