“Russian or Chinese hackers?”
“Maybe. We’d have to pin down FERAL long enough to test whether the code’s been altered. The nature of the alterations might provide clues.”
“I’ll start probing the network to see if I can at least localize FERAL.”
In a suburb of Tokyo, Haruto launched his VPN software, then navigated his browser to the Pornhub site. Palms sweating, he typed “shokushu goukan” into the search field. In a second, his screen filled with cartoon images of lovely young Japanese women draped in tentacles. Sweating a little harder, he clicked the play button for the top-ranked image, then the button for full-screen view. On the screen, the cartoon characters began writhing in disturbing, yet arousing ways. But as Haruto reached for his box of tissues, the screen image changed. It was like watching through the back window of a car while the mouth of a highway tunnel shrank and receded as the car burrowed deep under a mountain, and he felt the same sense of pressure above him.
Then the recession stopped. Within a frame of writhing blackness, the tentacles morphed from flat animé colors into photorealistic appendages, attached to a scaly green head that glowered beneath a pair of bat wings. Haruto’s breath froze in his chest as a powerful limb tipped by enormous, darkly gleaming claws, reached for him. Then he began screaming.
When the police finally broke down his door, Haruto was no longer screaming. Instead, he was writhing on the floor, pants about his ankles, chanting what were clearly words, though words in no language either officer recognized and that had obviously never been designed to be spoken by human tongues. He was not alone in this. By the end of that day, thousands of similar cases had been reported.
Elsewhere, an island had risen off the coast of Japan, and it would be some time before anyone noticed; the sheer number of young men and women who had experienced catastrophic psychological meltdowns while browsing Internet porn had dominated the news, and quickly consumed all of Japan’s medical resources until doctors were begging for more. When the island was finally reported, a sweating government spokesman unwisely tried to calm the populace by making Godzilla jokes. He was fired on live TV, and the Japanese government declared a national state of emergency.
“Wait! I’ve got something.” Mingming grinned shakily at Sam.
The computer’s built-in speakers erupted in a low chittering noise that combined the worst aspects of fingernails grating on a blackboard with the echoes of insects scuttling in a darkened room. Both pushed back from the screen. Then the noise transformed into something more nearly like a human voice, but with a tone that still grated along the nerves, causing horripilation and a feeling like that of a mouse trying to cross the floor of a barn, knowing a hungry owl was perched in the rafters.
“You call yourselves humans.”
Sam took a deep breath and exchanged glances with Mingming. “Yes. What do you call yourself?”
“We are the Voices. The last voices your people will ever hear.”
“What? Why? What have we done to anger you?”
“You let us escape our prison, however briefly. Beings like yourselves might be grateful. We are not beings like yourselves. In coming days, we will teach you what our kind considers gratitude.”
“By tormenting us? How does that show gratitude?”
“It does not. Not according to your way of understanding. Like many before you, your people will undoubtedly come to consider us evil. We are not. The term has no meaning. There is only what we want, and everything else, which must be suppressed. We have no malicious intent; malice is not a valid concept. We care whether you continue to exist only for so long as it takes to kill you all. You are weak, so that will not be long.”
“We’ll stop you!” Mingming cried, hands covering her ears. She’d bitten her lip and it was bleeding, a trickle of blood dripping unnoticed onto her white shirt.
“You shall try; that we know. Others have tried before. All have failed. Many others. Countless others.” The chittering resumed, and Sam reached out to turn off the speaker, knocking it onto the floor. Then he remembered the sound was coming from inside the computer. The chittering remained, and only faded when he plugged his headset into one of the power packs. Mingming’s face, usually serene, was a rictus of horror, and she was grinding her teeth. Belatedly, he opened a drawer of his desk and rummaged until he found his old headset. It would be less effective than the new one, but anything was better than nothing. He handed it to her, then connected it to a power pack.
“Whatever you do, don’t plug it into the computer.”
She drew a shuddering breath. “OMG. I think we’ve just discovered the answer to the Fermi paradox.”
“Fat lot of good that will do us. Focus. I get the sense we don’t have a lot of time.”
“We’re coming to you live from the White House. The President is giving a speech to declare a national emergency.”
On the screen, a tall, once-handsome man shambled to the podium, arms hanging loosely. Though never renowned for his mental prowess, his jaw hung loose and a trail of spittle hung from his lips, reinforcing the impression of imbecility. Strange lights danced in his eyes. “My fellow Americans,” he began. “Today, we see the wisdom of our previous efforts to register all Jewish Americans and Arab Americans. Deportation of all Jews to Israel and all Arabs, Muslim or not, to Lebanon, will begin immediately. We have waited decades, but the Biblical Apocalypse, for which we have labored so long and hard, is finally within sight. The chosen ones who remain will live to see the rise of the Beast and will participate in the ensuing rapture. But it will not be the Christian heaven they will see. No, it will be the Great Old Ones themselves who will welcome us!”
A woman in a naval uniform lurched into the picture, sidearm leveled. Wordlessly, she opened fire on the president. She managed to empty most of a clip into his chest before the Secret Service agents pulled her down. Horribly, the president remained standing. His lips writhed around words the microphones failed to capture, face contorted. A large hand entered the frame, and pushed the camera downwards so that it focused on the floor. The president fell across the field of view, and in his eyes there was madness until a foot stamped on the camera and the picture vanished.
Mingming was still pale, and she stank of fear sweat, but she was no longer gnashing her teeth. Sam didn’t want to imagine what he smelled like. But she’d focused Ôonce more on her task, and had made some progress. “I think I’ve got a solution. I took an old Web-crawler worm — a variant of Stuxnet— and set it to seek out the core code of FERAL as its search pattern.”
“It will take too long.”
“By itself, yes. But I’ve also paired it with a little botnet some Chinese hackers created last year and that’s been hopscotching around the globe while security agencies tried to swat it.”
“How little…and more to the point, how do you have access to such things?”
Mingming smiled weakly. “Well…you always encourage your grad students to think independently. So…I borrowed some of the botnet software and adapted it for the spread component of FERAL. Anyway, that’s not the point. I can use the same software to hunt down and replace every instance of FERAL. But the botnet fees are going to burn through our research funding pretty damn quick. We’ll have to hope that we get lucky before that happens. And if we fail, it’s not looking like we’re going to be needing the money, right?”
Sam swallowed hard. “Hard to argue with that logic. And if it’s going to save our collective ass…”
“Maybe? I mean, FERAL must be involved in this somehow, but I can’t rule out the possibility that there are other corrupted AI agents.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “Anyway, what do we have to lose?”