A.I. Apocalypse by William Hertling

over the course of minutes, he saw the viruses subtly changing bit by bit. It was clear that the viruses incorporated built-in mechanisms to evolve themselves. By evidence of the number of different propagation mechanisms, it was also obvious that they were incorporating algorithms from other, non-virus software. That would make it exceedingly difficult to stop the virus: he couldn’t just block traffic on certain protocols without interfering with legitimate traffic.  
    ELOPe watched as the virus saturated the high speed Internet backbones. Only the massive parallel capacity of the Mesh allowed traffic to continue to propagate, routing around the congested backbones.
    Ultimately ELOPe decided he would need to filter each stream of data, analyze it to see if it contained a virus, and only after analysis, forward it on to the intended machine. ELOPe had one and a half million cores under his direct control, and, as he was technically a business consultant to Avogadro Corp, he could co-opt as necessary up to ten percent of Avogadro’s forty-million cores. That gave him a peak processing power of five and a half million cores - a massive amount, but insufficient to analyze the traffic generated by the world’s twelve billion computers. He would need to triage the world’s computers. He’d start by putting a firewall around himself and Avogadro, then expand to key government and research sites. He’d   reserve a hundred thousand cores to run his core logic algorithms.
    *   *   *
    “General Gately, thank you for coming, ma’am,” Lieutenant Sally Walsh welcomed the General into the command center. Sally glanced at her watch. The general was her usual spit and polish self, despite it being two hours before she normally came in.  
    “What’s up, Sally?”
    “At 0200 hours we first spotted a virus on the civilian networks, ma’am. We don’t monitor civilian networks in detail, as you know. But the virus was banging up against the milnet firewalls in sufficient numbers to get our attention.”
    “Which ones?” The general took a cup of coffee from an aide. She drank absent-mindedly as she looked at the tablet Sally had given her.
    “All of them, ma’am. Private DeRoos first noticed the pattern of attacks, and we began monitoring the virus. At 0215 hours we sent a report off to USCERT and CERT/CC. By 0315 the virus was expanding rapidly. I tried USCERT again, and they told me they were on it. At 0340 we received an incursion alarm from Turkey Air Force base. While we were segmenting, we received a second incursion alarm from Okinawa Combined Forces base. And before we dealt with either, we received a third incursion from Columbia Army base. Ma’am.” Sally knew that General Gately was reading the same information in front of her on the tablet.
    “And since then?”
    “We’ve detected the virus at thirty-four bases and quarantined them. I called in reinforcements from the day staff two hours early, but they haven’t shown up yet. In fact, the day staff should be showing up by now for their regular day shift. Then about fifteen minutes ago the virus stopped hitting the milnet firewalls, ma’am,” Sally paused. “We don’t know why.”
    “Sally, you and the staff haven’t been out of the control room since last night, correct?”
    “That’s correct, ma’am.”
    “Why don’t you stretch your legs and take a walk out to the main gate. Mind you, don’t leave the base.”
    “But ma’am, the infected networks, we have to address them.”
    “They’ll keep, Lieutenant, and your staff knows what they’re doing. Go take a walk, and then come back.”
    General Gately clearly wanted her to do more than take a walk. “Should I be looking for something in particular, General?”
    “You’ll know it when you see it.” The General didn’t look up from the tablet.  
    It wasn’t like her to be mysterious. Sally couldn’t imagine what she was getting at. She put on her overcoat and took the elevator to