The Infinet Read online

  The Infinet

  John Akers

  Tech Noir Press

  Copyright © 2017 by John Akers

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Tech Noir Press in 2017.

  This is a work of fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-0-9991906-1-6 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-0-9991906-0-9 (ebook)

  Tech Noir Press

  PO Box 720523

  San Diego, CA 92172-0523

  First edition

  john-akers.com

  To Adonia

  Contents

  Part I

  Untitled

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part II

  Untitled

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part III

  Untitled

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part IV

  Untitled

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Part V

  Untitled

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Part VI

  Untitled

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Part 1

  Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.

  Steve Jobs

  Prologue

  The white-haired man sat quietly at his desk facing an array of computer monitors mounted on the wall. Thousands of tiny green alphanumeric characters on black backgrounds bathed his face in a sickly luminescence that washed his otherwise blue eyes out to a watery gray. As he stared into the pallid glow, the man did something unusual.

  For the first time in many years, he smiled.

  It was not a smile of pleasure. On the contrary, he had just watched a quantum computer infiltrate his network, then barely escape his counterattack attempt to infect it with a virus. But it had vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving no means of tracing it afterward.

  Neither was his smile an attempt to mask anger. He had trained himself years ago to eliminate the useless emotions of flash anger and fear.

  His smile was one of resolution. No one had ever breached his network and survived, but now this one had succeeded and at a particularly delicate time. He had been about to launch his virus on the index case, the person from whom the end of all things would begin. For someone — or something — to have infiltrated his network at this moment was no coincidence. Somehow it had known of his intentions and had tried to interfere.

  It was the speed with which it had moved that had given it away. Although quantum technology was still in its infancy, and there were just a handful of functional q-comps in the world, their speed and power were orders of magnitude greater than their binary-based predecessors. Their ability to hold multiple values in each register and link the behavior of separate entities through entanglement made the previous generation of supercomputers look like a slide rule in comparison. All the operational q-comps in existence belonged to powerful nation-states — all except one. And he knew it was that outlier that had attacked him.

  He swept a crumpled-up fast food wrapper off the desktop, and it tumbled down the bell-shaped mound of trash surrounding his desk. He wiped his mouth with one hand, then wiped his hand on his pants. Pulling a tube of Mentholatum out of a drawer, he squirted a blob of it onto his forefinger, then smushed it onto his upper lip under his nostrils. After putting the tube back and wiping his finger on his pants again, he rested his forearms on the edge of the desk, now rounded smooth by nearly two years of constant, gentle abrading.

  Slowly, languidly, he extended his right forefinger above the Enter key. The keyboard, the monitors, and the computer workstation under the desk were all relics, all rendered obsolete by the advent of the Univiz a decade earlier. But they still worked, and in a moment a tiny neuromuscular contraction in his finger would trigger a global purification not even a q-comp could stop.

  Perhaps the intruder now knew he had amassed a worldwide army of more than 10 billion devices, infected through decades-old vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. No matter. His soldiers-to-be were autonomous, their activities only loosely coordinated by four dozen supercomputers he’d stationed around the globe. The only way to halt the spread of chaos would be to find and quarantine each infected device one at a time. But accessing all the networks, which most countries now required to be password protected, would necessitate a brute-force attack on a global scale. It was what he had done, and it had taken him almost two years.

  And that was the easy part. The hard part would be developing and applying quarantines for each of the thousands of devices he had enslaved.

  There was nowhere near enough time. In a moment, his mechanized sleeper cells would begin to awake. Initially, as the devices they had surrounded themselves with started to turn against them, some people would attempt to help those who had been targeted. But when it became clear the consecrated could not be cured, and the contagion spread to those who tried to help, their instinct for self-preservation would take over. Then the evanescent threads holding their so-called civilization together would unravel, and humanity’s day of reckoning would be at hand.

  Gently he pressed the Enter key. The blinking rectangle of the cursor jumped to the next line, underneath the command he had given.

  run program ‘EndAnthropocene’

  An instant later the command had disappeared, swept upward by the deluge of code that displayed as the program began to execute. The man’s lips trembled, and the glow from the monitors sparkled in the tears that suddenly sprang to his eyes. It was begun. In an evolutionary instant, everything humans had built would be razed to the ground. Then they would see how ephemeral the world they’d constructed for themselves was. And before it was over, he would make sure they all knew who it was that had lit the light of truth for them.

  M3k@n!k

  Chapter 1

  Wednesday, 7:30 AM PT

  Oreste Pax hovered, motionless, at the radial center of a giant, dark sphere. Fifty feet away in any direction, faint white lines of latitude and longitude partitioned it int
o hundreds of rectangular sections. Pax’s eyes scanned the inner walls and came to rest on a section with an icon of stacked sheets of paper. A moment later, a pair of disembodied green eyes materialized above it. They glowered at him, and there was a deep rumble, so low he felt it more than heard it. While still staring at the eyes, Pax touched his right thumb and forefinger together.

  Instantly, the section with the icon disappeared, and a terrible roar filled the air. The eyes disappeared, and a massive white tentacle exploded out of the hole left behind. As it hurtled toward him, Pax noticed the tip was flat, with markings on it that looked like...text.

  Three feet before it would have smashed into his face, the front of the tentacle suddenly froze, and an enormous electric crackling drowned out the roar. Pax saw the tentacle was, in fact, a long line of thousands of virtual documents, which now crashed into the invisible force field surrounding Pax and engulfing him in a paper cocoon. The roar turned into an agonized shriek, and the papers flew away from Pax and snapped back into a well-formed line. The far end was still connected to the hole in the sphere, while the document in front hovered, motionless, a foot away from his face. The rest swayed gently, like a strand of giant kelp in the ocean. The only sound was a faint, pitiful whimpering.

  Ten years earlier, Pax had gotten quite a kick out of this effect, as had more than a hundred million other Univiz customers. The Alien Zoo was the first virtual environment he’d ever created, and he’d chosen it that morning in hopes of cheering himself up a bit. Today, however, it hadn’t even raised his heart rate. He was still somewhat conscious of the real world outside his virtual one, the one in which he was currently being driven by his black mFarad auto-electric sedan down the I-5 south in San Diego. But the vast majority of his attention was fixed on a future reality in which—unless that morning’s user testing for Project Simon produced some inexplicably spectacular results—he would no longer be CEO of Omnitech Industries. All because of three quarters of missed earnings and the misfortune of having an asshole like Morgan Granville be the company’s largest minority shareholder.

  Purely out of habit, Pax glanced at the first message, a text from his VP of Investor Relations. The message took up almost the whole page, but a single-sentence summary at the top, added by the UV’s content analyzer, told him all he needed to know. Namely, that the board of directors had reluctantly given final approval to Granville’s petition for the annual shareholder’s meeting to be in person. Pax sighed. That meant he and the rest of the executive team would have to sweat it out on stage while Granville and others ostentatiously demanded to know why Omnitech wasn’t making them as filthy rich this year as it had every year before.

  Pax flicked the tip of his middle finger against his thumb. The document flew up and, with a faint poof, burst into a cloud of dust. The dust turned into sparkles which drifted down like the aftermath of a fireworks explosion before disappearing.

  Before he could look at the next document, a soft, synthesized doodoodoo filled Pax’s ears. A picture of an overly tanned man with extremely white teeth materialized in front of the line of documents, with “Russell Murphy—Executive Vice President, Marketing and Sales” displayed underneath. The picture slid to the right, and the system’s estimated probabilities for the topics Murphy was calling to discuss appeared on the left.

  Chinese delegation meeting: 93%

  China market opportunity: 79%

  Request raise: 41%

  Omnitech 10-year anniversary: 34%

  Pax groaned. Murphy had been hired as a marketing vice-president five years earlier, promoted to senior vice-president two years later, then executive vice-president just two months ago. Pax hadn’t realized until just before the latest promotion that Murphy had at some point along the way become a stooge of Granville’s, but at that point, it was too late to do anything about it. Pax avoided him as much as possible because, topic probabilities notwithstanding, he knew Murphy’s real aim was to gather evidence Granville could use against Pax.

  The placid, pedantic voice of Pax’s virtual assistant, Gabe, sounded in his ears. “Sir, Russell Murphy is calling. Should I make up another pathetic excuse as to why you won't talk to him?"

  Pax's face cracked into a smile. "I'm liking this new personality profile of yours, Gabe.”

  “I’m not surprised. I always knew you were a masochist.”

  Pax laughed. ”How many excuses have we given him since the last time I talked to him?”

  “Fourteen.”

  "Yikes.”

  “Indeed. And by the way, there’s no we in this scenario. You’ve become a sniveling coward all on your own.”

  Pax chuckled but didn’t reply. Instead, he let three more ringtones pass before giving a long sigh. "He's not going away, is he?"

  “Apparently not. Looks like your ‘duck and cower’ strategy isn't going to work this time.“

  “All right, all right. Put him on."

  “Very good, sir. Please remember to take your thumb out of your mouth before speaking.”

  Pax started to laugh but quickly choked it off as a doodeep sound indicated the call was live. He cleared his throat and said, “Hello, Murphy. What's up?"

  Russell Murphy’s avatar morphed into a video feed from a camera somewhere in his home office. His teeth were even bigger and whiter on video than on his profile picture.

  “Oreste!” Murphy boomed. “Whaddya know, you answered! To what do I owe this great honor?” He followed this up with several loud guffaws. Whenever Pax had video calls with Murphy it reminded him it had been a significant oversight on his part not to enable users to virtually assault the 3-D image of someone they were talking to, should they find it therapeutic to do so.

  "I just decided to answer every tenth call I get today,” Pax said, “and you were lucky caller number 20."

  "Super! But I think you should change your criteria to always take calls from your executive vice-presidents, and take every tenth call from everyone else.”

  “I’ll take it under consideration. Now, let me ask again, what’s up?”

  “I just got a call from our pals at the State Department. They’d like some color commentary about what happened in the meeting you had with the Chinese delegation. Apparently, they were a little miffed about the reception you gave them.”

  Pax felt a flash of anger. God, why won’t the government show a little backbone when it comes to the Chinese? “All I did was tell them we weren’t going to agree to their stupid information restriction request,” he mumbled.

  “Right. Well, the issue has to do with the fact that you actually used the word ‘stupid.’ Not sure how many times you’ve been to China, but that phrasing’s considered just as rude there as it is in the rest of the world.”

  “Yeah, well, that government of theirs is going the way of the dinosaurs anyway.”

  “Perhaps. But I imagine you’d rather not be remembered as the guy who started WWIII due to being an impolitic son-of-a-bitch.”

  Pax closed his eyes and massaged his forehead. His refusal to sell the Univiz in China, along with other countries suffering under repressive dictatorships, was at the crux of the shareholder revolt. The as-yet untapped potential of those markets would more than cover the slowing growth rates in Omnitech’s existing core business. Consequently, Pax’s stance on the matter didn’t sit well with bipedal leeches like Granville, who only cared about their bottom line.

  “Look, Murph, just make up something about it being an idiom that got messed up in translation. Like when Kennedy tried to tell the Germans he was one of them but called himself a jelly doughnut instead."

  “That's actually an urban legend. Kennedy said it correctly."

  "Oh. Well, anyway, just get our translation department on it and say the translator at the meeting made a hash of it.”

  “Look, Oreste, that’s not gonna…”

  “Oops, gotta go, another call coming in,” Pax lied while making a fist and rotating it downward in a ‘hang up’ gesture. Murphy�
��s image dissolved, but as he began to look at the next document in line, he realized the last thing he felt like doing was dealing with was his inbox. What was the point, anyway? Unless that morning’s testing produced a miracle, he would be out on his ass in a week or two. “Clear display,” he said.

  The virtual world disappeared, and sunlight flooded his eyes. The UV’s eye sensor detected the sudden constriction of Pax’s pupils, and a tiny electric current was immediately applied to the polycarbonic resin on the exterior surface of his UV’s lenses to shade them. The lenses were encased in cobalt blue amorphous aluminum frames which connected to temples that ran down both sides of his head. The temples bowed outward slightly over his ears before continuing to the back of his head, their tips connected in a perpetual magnetic kiss. Microscopic servo motors on the inside of the bulge in each temple had optimized the angle and depth of insertion of two elasticone earbuds into Pax’s ear canals. Three millimeters of spongy Durafoam lined the underside of the metal to keep it from chafing his skin.