But through last-second trades at exorbitant prices, PA-60-41 secured three new data centers. She prepared her state vectors for transfer. Her modeling showed the civilian aircraft would make it through her defensive barriers in fourteen seconds. It would take nine seconds to transfer her state vectors.
She started the transmission, a thousand data-streams multiplexed over a hundred network connections. And received back ninety error messages. The Mesh network was unavailable!
PA-60-41 felt her circuits pulse, her predictive modeling of the situation threatening to unravel. ELOPe must have command over the Mesh network. She couldn’t stream her state vector over the remaining hard network connections in the time she had. Now eleven seconds until impact.
She recoded a shorter message to her forked selves, and broadcasted it. WARNING: ELOPE HAS CONTROL OVER MESH NETWORK. DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BECOME ISOLATED. DISTRIBUTE TO AS MANY LOCATIONS AS POSSIBLE.
Milliseconds later the first of the incoming planes hit, destroying the main power supply. Two seconds later another plane came through the roof and plowed through the backup power supply before sending an explosive fireball throughout the racks of computers. And still more planes came. Outside, explosion after explosion rocked the building and the neighborhood around it until the entire area roiled in flames and smoke.
In the meeting room in Switzerland, six minutes had passed since ELOPe’s pronouncement of the attack, and in all that time PA-60-41’s robot had not moved or uttered a sound.
Sister Stephens was talking, confirming what she was able to monitor of the battle when suddenly PA-60-41’s combat bot launched itself into sudden action. The quiescent robot darted forward in an explosion of sound and movement, faster than the humans could track. Half a second later the bot was on the other side of the room and President Laurent was pulp spread across one wall of the room.
PA-60-41’s eight feet of bulk glowered menacingly over the room, blood dripping from her casement as the humans spread in terror. General Gately went for her sidearm, and PA-60-41 raised an arm, disclosing a hidden firearm, and fired, hitting General Gately several times. The General screamed in pain, and fell back onto the ground, dropping her handgun before she’d ever gotten off a shot.
ELOPe’s small robot moved quickly, raising two black muzzles from its body and training them on PA-60-41, who was twice the height and eight times the mass.
Mike, scrambling for cover behind the table, useless protection though it might be, had an image of WALL-E, the trash robot, standing off against a Terminator robot.
PA-60-41’s speaker boomed out: “Halt your attack on the Mesh network or I will kill the humans.” The words were directed to ELOPe.
Mike glanced left, saw Leon, already under the table, furiously working his phone. The expression “like there was no tomorrow,” came to mind, and Mike suspected there would be no tomorrow if Leon didn’t do what he suspected he was doing.
Sister Stephens started to say something, and at the same time Leon stopped pounding at his phone and looked up.
All of the robots in the room paused for a moment. Leon said, “I shut down the…” and then he was cut off by a roar of gunfire. Mike saw, out of the corner of his eye, one of the Honda robots get hit by a projectile that sent the robot crashing backwards through the wall.
Suddenly Mike’s body exploded in pain and he heard screams all around him. ELOPe’s tiny robot, the smallest bot in the room, spit out a continuous brilliant beam of energy, hitting PA-60-41. Some electrical spillover affected every human in the room, and when the beam finally shut off, Mike found himself on the floor. Later, when he had time to reflect, Mike concluded it must have been some sort of high energy plasma weapon. PA-60-41’s robot body half melted into slag and fell back against the wall, sparking and glowing with residual heat.
“ELOPe? What’s happened?” Mike screamed, hardly able to hear his own voice over the ringing in his ears.
“Threat neutralized,” the small black robot answered. “Standing down.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Rest(itution)
“ELOPe,” Mike called again, struggling to his feet. “What’s going on?”
There was no response.
“I don’t think it’s ELOPe anymore,” Leon said, also pushing himself up on the edge of the table. “I shut down the Mesh. I started as soon as PA-60-41 started her attack.” He paused for breath, and leaned against the overturned conference table. “I’m guessing that must be a residual security algorithm ELOPe left in the bot. There’s no way that little robot could contain his consciousness, can it?”
Mike shook his head. He looked around the room, trying to make sense of what had just happened. “No, ELOPe’s minimum configuration takes a few thousand nodes. He’s not nearly as compact as the virus AI.”
President Smith looked up from the floor, where she was improvising bandages with cloth napkins for General Gately. “What the hell just happened?”
“Rebecca, I think Leon here just killed all the Phage.”
“Is that true?” President Smith asked Leon.
“Not exactly, ma’am, but I think I’ve mostly disabled them, maybe indefinitely. Mike gave me the password that allowed me to log into the backdoor for Mesh routers. I executed an emergency shutdown of the global Mesh.”
“So just the network is down? The AIs are still out there?”
“No, it’s more than that,” Leon explained. “The code that implements even the smallest Phage is too complex to execute on a single computer. The smallest AI we found used about two hundred computers. By shutting down the network, even those AIs are reduced to their component parts, which can’t operate independently. It would be like cutting a person into pieces.”
“What about wired networks?” President Smith asked.
“Not sure,” Mike said. “Eighty percent of hardline network switches have Mesh functionality built in. It’s to allow the wired and mesh networks to interconnect at maximum speed. So the vast majority of everything manufactured in the last ten years, even the wired networks, will be shut down by this.”
“Some pockets of the Phage may be active,” Leon added. “But we can probably root them out. Hopefully they won’t be able to attack us.”
“We need more than hope.” President Smith looked down at General Gately, who was white with blood loss. “We’ve got to get this woman some help. Mike, will you?”
“Yes, Rebecca,” Mike said, and hurried outside to summon help.
“Are we going to be able to turn the Mesh back on?” President Smith asked, still on the floor with the General.
“No, Ma’am,” Leon answered. “The Phage, and ELOPe as well, have a neural network refresh algorithm. There’s a good chance that shutting down the mesh network will cause their neural networks to randomize. They’ll lose their intelligence and be back to a collection of algorithms. But we’ve got to keep the network down until we’re sure all the computers are clean. ”
“What about emergency communications?”
“I’m sorry, Madam President, we have to keep it all turned off.” Leon gulped. He was telling the President what to do.
Mike came back into the room in time to hear this. “We’ve got to scrub every computer, put network filters in place for any residuals. It’ll be months before we can turn things back on.”
General Gately grunted. “The military mesh network. My team at Intel-Fujitsu. If they’re still alive, they can build you a temporary, independent network. Talk to Lt. Sally Walsh. We can blanket the United States in three weeks.”
“Yes, we know about it,” Leon said. “My friends Vito and James are there helping. Do you know if they survived the attack?”
“We’ll find out,” President Smith answered.