Gods and Monsters

By M.J. Harkins

Jane Thompson, Lt. Colonel in Cyber Command, admonished Ron Townsend about bashing the current administration while on duty. While yes, she agreed they wouldn’t be in this fighting war if the generalissimo hadn’t ordered a full-scale cyber response to verified evidence that his supposed frenemy had tweaked his social media venues, virtually taking over his bloated persona, making him more a laughingstock than he could stand.

“But Coronel, sir”, Ron loved adding the ‘sir’ part with emphasis, and Ron being a hacker conscript that faced real jail time forcing him to join the service, that was all he got out.

“Zip it, Townsend”. The colonel’s stare was very intimidating. She had planned a long leave on her grandfather’s ranch, tucked away in a corner of Montana, up against Glacier National Park and the Canadian border, when this conflict flared up. 

This conflict wasn’t going as planned. She watched as Ron, and scores of others, played out what seemed like versions of asteroids or centipede at their stations. Occasionally, one unruly clash would be brought to a larger board where more seasoned members of her staff would assist in the latest wave of AI assisted bots that attacked various corporate, civilian, or military infrastructures. 

The gamification of cyber-attack/defense in the past decade gained dominance, with teams of joystick jockeys and coders joining forces to either attack or defend an objective. Nobody thought it would come to this. Jane, having just choreographed the containment of a serious threat on the big screen felt like she had just beat the latest advancement in AI in a televised Go tournament, went to the breakroom for a coffee. She sipped the coffee, thinking only of her father’s stash of vacuumed sealed beans way in the mountains.

“Gods and monsters!”  She was remembering grandpa’s rants. He was always going on about WMDs and madmen destroying the planet. Here she was, playing out the latest scenario. Her grandfather, and her father, following in his footsteps, bought up every property they could find in the tiny corner of the world. Trucked in more supplies than even a small town could consume. They did that a dozen times over. She loved both men dearly but sometimes thought them unhinged. Not this time.

Her shift was ending in an hour. She reached out to James Thompson, a full bird colonel in Space Command, and arranged to have dinner. Jane and James had met while in officer’s training at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. She took off to do battle on the dark web, and he took off to the find the sky. But somehow they managed to keep it together long enough to raise two kids, Jamie and Jackie. 

“Remember my grandfather’s rants?” asked Jane.

“Gods and Monsters!” quipped James. They laughed. Then they felt self conscious. The situation didn’t call for laughter. 

“I know we’re not supposed to cross streams, but where is this going?” said Jane.

Jack replied, “Yeah, you must be way in the dark in the subterranean world of yours. How do you do it without coming up for air?”

“Oh, we come up for air alright. When we have to coordinate strikes,” she came back, but sighed, and said “but to little avail. It’s like playing ‘Whack a Mole’”

“Same here,” he said. “The latest balistic stealth drones are battering our satellite infrastructure.” He shook his head. “They knock’em down almost as fast as we put them up.”

There was a silence as they haphazardly pushed their food around on their plates. James continued, “Are these things conscious? I feel like they are anticipating us.”

Jane, who knew more about this than she could explain to someone not on her level, tried to give James the big picture. Consciousness is an elusive capability. It’s more like they are  trained dogs, really good at what they are trained to do, but not conscious like we’re conscious. Yes, there are anecdotes about dogs and bots, about how they can anticipate what we will do, like they’re reading our minds, but those are essentially human hallucinations.” Looking at James, Jane doubled back. “What we’re experiencing is the next phase of smart agent modeling capability using evolution.”

“They’re evolving!” James exclaimed. “Keep your voice down, babe.” Jane hushed him, scanning the restaurant to see how many people took notice. 

“Yes, they are evolving. Instead of sending out one kind of drone, and trying to figure out why they fail, before sending out the next version, they are sending out scores of different types of drones and allowing traits to survive. It’s a percentages game. The traits that survive get mixed and matched until they arrive at the best combination. Then they send out a big wave, while preparing the next set of improved traits.”

James shook his head, but Jane wasn’t about to stop. She continued, “We’re finding there is a new trend.” She looked around, and lowered her voice, knowing James was aware that she had lowered the ‘Cone of Silence’, and this was going in ‘the Vault’ ‘For His Ears Only’.

“Sleeper bots.” James made a scrunched face. “They incubate inside an infrastructure, worming their way in, as if knowing where they’re going, doing god knows what. We think they are figuring out how to disable the entire system at every point of vulnerability simultaneously.” 

James had a blank look on his face. “Why isn’t the whole system raining down?”

Jane shook her head. “We think these forays are tests. We're finding them scattered about. A subnet here, a water treatment facility there. I can’t say much more, but people are worried.”

James’s face took on a grim pallor. “Too much of this could escalate us into a shooting war.” 

Jane replied, “How is taking out satellites not a shooting war?!”

“We can’t pin it on any one operative. We don’t have conclusive proof. Yet.”

They finished their meal and drove to Jane’s place outside the city. “I’m glad the kids are up on your grandpa’s ranch.”

“We were supposed to go there nearly two weeks ago, but I got called in. I sent them up with my brother.”

*

Over the following weeks, wave after wave of microdrones were dispersed across the country by stealth drones. These insect-sized craft were a delivery mechanism for nanobots, microscopic machines that infiltrated everything mechanical or electrical. They were pervasive, and industrious. They were builders. The previous networks of discovery viruses fed them infrastructure data, and, in communication with the stealth network, began preparation to dismantle the world overnight. 

One night the lights went out. All communication ceased. All supply chains ground to a halt. There were numerous meltdowns, and a few ICBM exploded in their silos, but for the most part everything seemed to be in controlled demolition mode. It was like every technology was dismantling, self-destructing, or just plain falling apart. 

It was a wild trek, a thousand miles to Babb, MT, and another 30 mins northwest to the kids, but Jane and James made it. James had commandeered a biplane he knew about, it had been modified to use premium gasoline, flew it for as far north as it would go, stopping a few times on the way. Siphoning gas was the tricky part.

"Is it just here, or is it everywhere?" asked James.

Jane replied "It primarily involves NATO, Russia, and China, but all the third world nations with significant military capability are also affected, especially the ones with or suspected of having nukes."

James blurted it out. "Why did they do this to us?"

Jane went quiet for a minute. She said, "It was us. We escalated it beyond reason. We unleashed capabilities much more devastating than what we're seeing here. It was us..."

Eventually they 'borrowed' a car, and drove the rest of the way. They both cried when they arrived. The kids cried. Even pops and pop-pop shed a few tears. 

Jane’s dad had taught her how to run a clandestine, person to person, patchwork mail system. They were true off grid survivalists. Not even a CB radio. Just word of mouth. A barter system brought odd items, but over time that dwindled to nothing. By then the extended family, and the distant neighbors, lived off the land, not wanting external contact.

Jamie and Jackie told tales of the way the world was to their grandchildren, but within a few more generations that had stopped. It all seemed like fairytales. Their only source of written knowledge was old man Willard’s library, Jane Thompson’s granddad. He had all kinds of books on maintaining their rural existence, water management, food cultivation, etc… He also had a complete set of Loeb Library's Greek and Latin books, and numerous books on Greek mythology, history, philosophy, and their arts and sciences. For the next few decades, whenever someone asked about the long ago, someone else would exclaim “Gods and Monsters!”