William Hertling
A.I. Apocalypse
CHAPTER ONE
A Regular Day
Leon’s phone buzzed, beeped, and shrilled at him until he reached one arm out from under the flannel covers and swiped his fingers across the display to stop the alarm. Eyes still closed, he shrugged off his blankets and stumbled towards the bathroom, a trip of only a few steps, hitting himself just twice along the way: once walking into his closed bedroom door, and the second time on the corner of the bathroom sink. He turned on the water, and leaned against the white tile wall waiting for the spray to get hot.
When he was done in the shower, he wrapped himself in a towel and walked more alertly to his room, steam rising faintly off his body in the tiny apartment’s cold morning air. The superintendent wouldn’t turn on central heating for another month, regardless of whether it was cold or not.
It was quiet in the apartment, his parents already at work. He grabbed yesterday’s dark blue jeans off his chair and pulled them on. On his desk was a deflated bag of cookies and an empty bottle of soda, evidence of his late night Mech War gaming session. He dug in a pile of clean laundry his mom had deposited inside his door until he found his vintage I(heart)SQL t-shirt. It was obscure enough that no one at school would understand it. They’d probably think it was some new band.
He grabbed his phone and shoved it into his pocket. He thumbed his desk, unlocking the drawers, and pulled out a locked metal box decorated with stickers carefully layered over each other to form, in aggregate, a picture of a plant growing out of a heap of garbage. An artifact of a girl from last year, he both treasured and was embarrassed by it. In the depths of the box, he rummaged around until he found rolling paper and some non-GMO weed, which he put into a jacket pocket. He fumbled through the container again, anxiously looking for his cigarettes, until he finally found them inside the empty cookie bag. He shook his head, wondering why he had put them there.
Leon walked the few steps down the short hallway to the kitchen. He shook cereal into an old cracked white porcelain bowl and followed with cold milk. He gently bumped his phone on the table, activating the wall display next to the table and syncing it to his phone. He surfed the in-game news while he ate, and checked out the game stats. He was ranked twenty-third on his favorite Mech War server, up ten spots due to the new genetic algorithms he’d written for targeting control. He had some ideas for an anti-tracking algorithm he wanted to try out next.
When he finished slurping cereal, he grabbed his backpack and headed out the door, securing all the locks. His Russian immigrant parents thought you could never be too secure. In addition to the electronic building lock and a digital fingerprint deadbolt, they had an actual antique key lock. Leon wore the key around his neck sometimes, and half the kids at school assumed it was a curious kind of jewelry.
He walked the few blocks to South Shore High School. Hundreds of kids streamed across Ralph Avenue, ignoring the cars. Drivers angrily honked their horns as their vehicles’ mandatory SafetyPilots cut in automatically. Leon ran across with a group of other kids, and funneled through the front door with them.
Leon made his way into first period, math. James was already there, wearing his usual army green flak jacket. Leon’s Russian heritage gave him blond hair and a tall, large frame, but James still had an inch or two in height and a solid fifty pounds on him. He punched James on the arm as he went in, and James punched him back. The bell rang, and they hurried to their desks in the back row. Moments after everyone else sat down, Vito flew through the doors and slid into his seat next to them, earning a glare from the teacher.
They might have been the three smartest kids in school, but they tried to keep that secret. They didn’t fit in with the Brains. Preppy clothes and drama club seemed ridiculous. Though the football team would have loved James, James would rather be playing MMORPGs. They surely didn’t fit in with the popular kids and their shallow interests. They weren’t skaters or punks. They might have been labelled geeks, but the geeks rarely came in wearing military jackets or ditched school to smoke pot. They were too smart and had too much of the hacker ethic to fit in with the stoners.
No, they were their own clique, and they made sure not to fit anyone else’s stereotypes.
Leon glanced over at Vito, who was fiddling with his ancient Motorola. Vito lavished care on the old phone. The case was worn smooth from thousands of hours of polishing from Vito’s hands. Even the original plastic seams had disappeared with age. When a component died, Vito would micro-solder in a replacement. Vito said that after a certain point the phone just didn’t get any older, it just got different.
Leon daydreamed through the class, volunteering a correct answer only when the teacher called on him. In his mind he was walking the ruins of Berlin in his mech, replaying the scenes of last night’s gaming.
He thought about writing a new heat detection algorithm for his mech. The current generation of games required custom programming to do well. Leon knew from history class that a long time ago the marketable commodity in games was gold and equipment. Now it was algorithms. The game made available the underlying environment data, and it was up to the player to find the best algorithms for piloting, aiming, detecting, moving, and coordinating mechs. There was a persistent rumor that DARPA had funded the game as a way of crowd-sourcing the all-important algorithms used to control military drones. Leon couldn’t find any solid evidence online to prove or disprove it.
No, maybe he should focus on a new locomotion algorithm. He’d heard that some mechs, using custom locomotion code, were coaxing ten percent more speed and range while keeping their thermal signatures lower. If that was true, Leon could sell it on eBay for top dollar.
Leon became more deeply immersed in the problem, and when the bell rang, only James whacking him on the head woke him from his thoughts.
“See ya later, Lee,” Vito called, heading off to another class.
“Adios.”
Leon and James walked together to their social studies class.
“How are your applications coming?” James asked.
“OK, I think,” Leon said. “I just finished the MIT application. I aced the qualifying exams. Dude, it sucks though. If I don’t get a scholarship, I’m screwed.”
“You and everyone else, man.” James clapped him on the shoulder.
“Okay class, who can explain the legal and political significance of the Mesh?” Leon’s social studies teacher looked around. “Josh, how about you?”
Josh looked up from his desk, where he appeared to be scribbling football plays. “Uh?”
“The mesh, Josh, I was asking about the mesh.”
“Mesh, uh, helps keep you cool on the field?”
The uproar of laughter from the class drowned out the teacher for a moment. “Very funny. Come on, someone. This is how you play games, watch TV, and get information. Surely someone has cared enough to figure out how all those bits get into your house.”
Leon rolled his eyes at James and mock yawned.
“How about you, Leon? I’m sure you know the answer to this.”
Leon hesitated, weighing the coolness impact of answering, then reached a decision. He felt sorry for the teacher. “The Mesh was formed ten years ago by Avogadro Corp to help maintain net neutrality,” he began.
“At the time, access to the Internet in the United States was mostly under the control of a handful of companies such as Comcast, who had their own media products they wanted to push. They saw the Internet as competing with traditional TV channels, and so they wanted to control certain types of network traffic to eliminate competition with their own services.”