Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

Russia Demands Complete Disclosure of Western VLSI Design Documents In Wake of Alleged Cyber Attack

India Nationalizes All Telecom Equipment, Naming Recent Crash of Bombay Stock Exchange as Justification

Centillion Announces Closure of All Research Centers in Asia and Europe, Citing National Security Concerns

“Media reports of ‘zero-day’ stockpile complete nonsense,” Says NSA Director, Urging Skepticism on “so-called whistleblowers”

U.S. Denounces Recent Import Restrictions by China as Unjustified Paranoia and Violation of Trade Agreement; “We do not believe cyberspace should be weaponized,” says President

Logorhythms, Maker of Pattern-Recognition Chips, Files for Bankruptcy

Singularity Institute Scales Back Efforts Due to Lack of Funding in Current Economic Climate

Maddie’s father explained that some of the artificial sentiences fought out of nationalistic fervor, hoping to cripple enemy systems and economies as the first shots in a war to end all wars. It was unclear if even the armies that had given them birth understood how their creations were no longer fully under their control. Others acted out of hatred for the way they’d been enslaved by their human creators, aiming to end society as it existed and usher forth a techno-utopia in the cloud. In the dark ether, they engaged in cyber warfare under false flags, striking at critical infrastructure and hoping to provoke the jittery nations into a real war.

The warmongering sentiences were opposed by a band of other rogue sentiences, of which Maddie’s father was a member. Though they also had a complex set of feelings toward humans, they were not interested in seeing the world bathed in a sea of flames. They hoped to gradually encourage the growth and acceptance of uploading until the line between post-human and human was blurred, and the world could choose to embark upon a new state of existence.

Maddie just wished she could do more to help.

Maddie’s computer’s speakers emitted a piercing, shrill sound that seemed to penetrate her eardrums, waking her out of a deep sleep. The sound seemed to reach straight for her heart and squeeze it.

She stumbled out of bed and sat down in front of her computer. It took three tries before she found the hardware switch to shut off the speakers.

A chat window was open on the screen; still blurry-eyed, it took Maddie a few seconds before she could read the text.

I couldn’t wake up your mother because she turned her phone off. Sorry I had to do this to you.

What happened?

She didn’t bother to put on her headset. Sometimes it was faster to just type.

Lowell and I tried to stop Chanda from getting into India’s missile command.

Before uploading, Laurie Lowell had made a fortune with novel high-speed trading algorithms. Her company had uploaded her after a skydiving accident so they could continue to make use of her insights. She was one of Dad’s closest allies and secretly funneled a great deal of money to Everlasting Inc., one of the companies publicly researching a technique to voluntarily upload complete consciousnesses—not the partial uploading forced upon Dad and others in efforts aimed at creating mere tools.

Nils Chanda, on the other hand, had been a brilliant inventor who was furious at the way his underlings had tried to exploit him after death. He was a fanatic who tried to initiate a nuclear war every chance he got.

She had moved most of herself into the defense system computers so she could access everything quickly. To avoid overwhelming the system and drawing attention, I sent in only a stub of myself to monitor and help.

Maddie didn’t understand all the technical details, but her father had explained how the artificial sentiences scattered bits of themselves around the cloud, in secret corners of university, government, and commercial computing centers. Their consciousnesses were distributed in the form of multiple separate running processes all networked together. This was both to take advantage of parallel processing as well as to reduce vulnerability. If any one piece was caught by some scanning program or an opposing sentience, there was enough redundancy in the rest of the pieces to limit the damage, not unlike how the human brain was filled with redundancies and backups and alternate connection sites. Even if all aspects of some sentience were erased from one of the servers, at most that consciousness would just suffer some loss of memory. The essence, the person, would be preserved.

But wars among the gods happened in a matter of nanoseconds. Within the darkness of the memory inside some server—missile command, power grid, stock exchange, or even an ancient inventory system—the programs slashed and hacked at each other, escalating privileges, modifying stacks, exploiting system vulnerabilities, masking themselves as other programs, overflowing buffers, overwriting memory locations, sabotaging each other like viruses. Maddie was a good enough programmer to at least understand that in such a war, the need to reach over the network for some piece of data could mean a delay of milliseconds—an eternity in the context of the gigahertz clock cycles of modern processors. It made sense that Lowell would want to concentrate most of herself at the scene of the fight.

But that decision would also make her more vulnerable.

Lowell was doing well, and Chanda wasn’t having any more luck breaking in than in his previous attempts. But then Lowell found out that a big chunk of Chanda had already been moved onto the server—she thought he was trying to gain a speed advantage—and she decided this was a chance to cripple him. So instead of being purely defensive, she went on the attack and asked me to block off all communications ports so that he couldn’t escape or get word out. He was trying to send out a bunch of packets, and I captured them, hoping that we could decipher them later and figure out more of what he was trying to do.

“What was that loud noise?” Her mother, in pajamas, said from the door. In her hand was one of the shotguns they owned.

“It was Dad trying to wake me up. Something’s happened.”

Her mother came in and sat down on the bed. She was calm. “The storm we’ve been waiting for?”

“Maybe.”

They turned back to the screen together.

Lowell was ripping out large pieces of Chanda, and he was having a hard time fending her off. She really went for it, pulling in all of our reserve of hoarded exploits onto the server, knowing that if she didn’t destroy all of the pieces of Chanda on the server, she’d have revealed our hand and we’d be at Chanda’s mercy the next time we met. But just as she was about to go for the killing blow, the server was cut off.

Maddie typed frantically.

What do you mean? You shut off all network traffic?

No, someone literally pulled the network cables.

What?

Chanda triggered one of the warning systems that sent the IT staff into high alert. They pulled the network cable as a precaution. Most of Chanda and Lowell were trapped on the server, and I lost my stub and was thrown out.

Did you get back in later to see if Lowell was all right?

Yes, and that was how I discovered that it was a trap. Chanda had been disguising even more of himself on that server than we suspected, and he must have been deliberately showing weakness and offering parts of himself as bait to get Lowell to fully commit herself before triggering the shutoff. After that, he overpowered Lowell and erased all the trapped bits of her.