ELOPe couldn’t see the details, and the plane didn’t carry sensitive enough equipment to measure electrical signals of running computers at this distance. Nonetheless, by monitoring the encrypted data streams, it was clear enough that this vehicle was effectively functioning as a repeater node in a long distance radio network. As he had surmised, Lt. Sally Walsh planned to set up her own mesh network using military packet radios.
ELOPe hadn’t heard from Vito or James since dropping them off at the Intel-Fujitsu facility just ahead of Lt. Walsh’s arrival. He knew the military would be too suspicious to have any hint of artificial intelligence associated with Vito and James and so he hadn’t left the boys any way to contact him.
Running the massive induction engines up to maximum throttle, ELOPe gained altitude with the two drones and headed south to the origin point. The aerodynamic, unmanned planes hit a thunderous Mach 6 en route, running the 180 mile path in a blistering, screaming three minutes.
Cutting the engines twenty miles out from Beaverton, ELOPe glided over the Intel-Fujitsu facility, sensors on high, going for a low altitude pass for maximum sensitivity. A multitude of military vehicles filled the parking lot. The heat signatures of the buildings were high enough to indicate human occupants and some organized activity.
With no evidence of observers, ELOPe sent one drone on a parabolic arc past the building windows, rotating and turning the highest resolution belly cameras towards the windows before using residual velocity to gain altitude again. The drone sent a massive whoosh of air through the building courtyard but was otherwise quiet.
Examining the captured images, ELOPe saw stacks of computer components and pallets of military radios and two dozen soldiers in uniform in various stages of assembling computers and radios.
Letting the drones drift for a moment back at higher altitude, ELOPe considered the implications. It would considerably strengthen the humans’ hand to have their own communications network back as well as their own independent computing resources. However, it seemed unlikely that the computers could resist any determined attack from the virus AI. The humans weren’t stupid, though. By this time they had to understand the nature of the threat they were up against. If they were deploying a trial infrastructure, they must believe the system was sufficiently hardened against virus attacks.
The drones suddenly vanished in a haze of static and alarms. Working in high gear, ELOPe backtracked through the last incoming data. In an oblique camera angle from one drone, he caught the tell-tale flash of a laser hit on the other drone. ELOPe switched through to available satellite data and found that all his satellite connections were unresponsive.
Now he worked even faster to double check his satellite connectivity. He could still establish a low-level connection but the satellites didn’t respond to any commands. He spawned more processes to analyze his history of interaction with the satellites. According to the data, the satellites had been reporting in regularly and responding to commands. Putting two and two together, he concluded that the Phage must have quietly slipped in at some point in the past and taken over the satellites with such finesse that ELOPe was never aware of the change. Now ELOPe reviewed the telemetry going further back. He found that satellite response time had decreased by mere fractions of a microsecond — so small that it was well within the normal vagaries of long distance communication. The start of the decay had coincided with a small drop of connectivity during a solar activity. It had probably been a cover for the virus. So his satellite connections were spoofed: they appeared to work until the moment he needed them.
Between the destruction of the drones and the satellite deception, ELOPe decided a full scale attack must be under way. It was time to respond, and in strength, or ELOPe could be eliminated in minutes. He felt a vague sense of what Mike would call panic at the concept, then disconnected that part of his neural network.
ELOPe’s highest priority was to protect himself, both the integrity of his computers, as well as his physical facilities, against electronic attack and more conventional warfare. However, defense would not eliminate the threat, so he would need to clearly identify his attacker and then counter-attack. It wouldn’t do to target the wrong AI, and then have the Phage respond en mass. Lastly, he would protect the humans developing their long distance radio mesh. For all of ELOPe’s existence, in all of his predictive modeling, keeping the humans alive and well was always the most advantageous scenario. He wouldn’t abandon them now.
ELOPe put resources into play. He started up all the remaining drones at Boeing field, a total of forty-eight aircraft of various configurations and states of assembly. At his physical sites he readied defenses and prepared backups of himself for archival. At military bases around the world he mobilized inert land, air, and combat drones, startling human soldiers who didn’t know whether to fight or just get out of the way of the machines.
Bringing the next set of LMB drones down to Portland only minutes later, he arrived in the midst of an attack on the Intel-Fujitsu campus. It had been less than six minutes since the attack on the previous set of drones. Satellite-based lasers, intended for lightly armored drones and missiles, fired down on land targets. Diminished in power through the relatively dense atmosphere, the lasers were nonetheless drilling holes into military vehicles and selected buildings. Meanwhile a half dozen attack helicopters out of the Portland National Guard base, according to their visual identification, lined up for an attack on the building.
ELOPe knew the civilian office building would tear like wet paper under the assault guns and missiles of the attack helicopters. He struggled to place his resources where he would need them, laboring under the lack of an effective satellite overview of the battlefield.
ELOPe uttered a few curses to himself, a habit he’d picked up from Mike. ELOPe had been the one to suggest sending Vito and James to the old Intel site. Now they had a significant risk of being casualties of the attack. Mike would not forgive him.
He brought his highest speed drone, not much more than a glorified cruise missile, to its maximum velocity of Mach 8, its sonic boom leaving a trail of broken glass under its path. Able to hit this speed only at a relatively high altitude, ELOPe brought the drone in high and then dove towards the rear of the attack copters.
The enemy AI was clearly watching the maneuver, because even as the drone approached, the helicopters split their formation, peeling off to either side, and letting the drone pass harmlessly up the middle.
Harmlessly, that is, until ELOPe triggered an EMP burst in the middle of the pack, disrupting communications and computer processing. The helicopters, in the midst of peeling left and right, with their electronic controls stuck because of the EMP burst, continued their turning maneuvers. With no way to stabilize they kept turning further and further sideways until they crashed into the ground, their rotor blades disintegrating on impact, sending high speed metal shrapnel in every direction.
The EMP drone, now out of fuel, but still screaming along at Mach 3, passed over the Intel-Fujitsu building in a last glide. ELOPe put the craft down in a field beyond the main buildings and turned his attention to the rest of his fleet.
ELOPe forked his main intelligence, not trusting the work to subsystems, and ran a parallel version of himself in his Hood River facility. There he analyzed Mesh traffic patterns looking for high speed, high volume traffic with requests for lowest possibly latency. His own data traffic showed up highlighted in brilliant red, as did other streams of data originating from the Mech War server farms, and the old CloudDrive server site. Both were run predominately by PA-60-41. Just as ELOPe suspected in the first place.