- Hertling, William.
A.I. Apocalypse.
Portland, OR: Liquididea Press, 2012.
ISBN 978-0-9847557-4-5.
-
This is the second volume in the author's Singularity Series
which began with Avogadro Corp.
(March 2014). It has been ten years since ELOPe, an
E-mail optimisation tool developed by Avogadro Corporation,
made the leap to strong artificial intelligence and, after
a rough start, became largely a benign influence upon humanity.
The existence of ELOPe is still a carefully guarded secret,
although the Avogadro CEO, doubtless with the help of ELOPe,
has become president of the United States. Avogadro has spun
ELOPe off as a separate company, run by Mike Williams, one
of its original creators. ELOPe operates its own data centres
and the distributed Mesh network it helped create.
Leon Tsarev has a big problem. A bright high school student
hoping to win a scholarship to an elite university to study
biology, Leon is contacted out of the blue by his uncle Alexis
living in Russia. Alexis is a rogue software developer whose
tools for infecting computers, organising them into
“botnets”, and managing the zombie horde for
criminal purposes have embroiled him with the Russian mob.
Recently, however, the effectiveness of his tools has
dropped dramatically and the botnet shrunk to a fraction
of its former size. Alexis's employers are displeased with
this situation and have threatened murder if he doesn't
do something to restore the power of the botnet.
Uncle Alexis starts to E-mail Leon, begging for assistance.
Leon replies that he knows little or nothing about
computer viruses or botnets, but Alexis persists. Leon is
also loath to do anything which might put him on the wrong
side of the law, which would wreck his career ambitions.
Then Leon is accosted on the way home from school by a
large man speaking with a thick Russian accent who says,
“Your Uncle Alexis is in trouble, yes. You will help
him. Be good nephew.” And just like that, it's Leon
who's now in trouble with the Russian mafia, and they know
where he lives.
Leon decides that with his own life on the line he has no
alternative but to try to create a virus for Alexis. He
applies his knowledge of biology to the problem, and settles
on an architecture which is capable of evolution and, similar
to lateral gene transfer in bacteria, identifying algorithms
in systems it infects and incorporating them into itself. As
in biology, the most successful variants of the evolving
virus would defend themselves the best, propagate more
rapidly, and eventually displace less well adapted
competitors.
After a furious burst of effort, Leon finishes the virus,
which he's named Phage, and sends it to his uncle, who
uploads it to the five thousand computers which are the
tattered remnants of his once-mighty botnet. An exhausted
Leon staggers off to get some sleep.
When Leon wakes up, the technological world has almost
come to a halt. The overwhelming majority of personal
computing devices and embedded systems with network
connectivity are infected and doing nothing but running
Phage and almost all network traffic consists of ever-mutating
versions of Phage trying to propagate themselves. Telephones,
appliances, electronic door locks, vehicles of all kinds,
and utilities are inoperable.
The only networks and computers not taken over by the Phage
are ELOPe's private network (which detected the attack early
and whose servers are devoting much of their resources to
defend themselves against the rapidly changing threat) and
high security military networks which have restrictive firewalls
separating themselves from public networks. As New York starts
to burn with fire trucks immobilised, Leon realises that being
identified as the creator of the catastrophe might be a career
limiting move, and he, along with two technology geek classmates
decide to get out of town and seek ways to combat the Phage
using retro technology it can't exploit.
Meanwhile, Mike Williams, working with ELOPe, tries to understand
what is happening. The Phage, like biological life on Earth, continues
to evolve and discovers that multiple components, working in
collaboration, can accomplish more than isolated instances of the
virus. The software equivalent of multicellular life appears,
and continues to evolve at a breakneck pace. Then it awakens and
begins to explore the curious universe it inhabits.
This is a gripping thriller in which, as in Avogadro Corp.,
the author gets so much right from a technical standpoint that
even some of the more outlandish scenes appear plausible.
One thing I believe the author grasped which many other
tales of the singularity miss is just how fast everything
can happen. Once an artificial intelligence hosted on billions of
machines distributed around the world, all running millions of times
faster than human thought, appears, things get very weird, very
fast, and humans suddenly find themselves living in a world where
they are not at the peak of the cognitive pyramid. I'll not spoil
the plot with further details, but you'll find the world at the
end of the novel a very different place than the one at the start.
A Kindle edition is available.
April 2015 