Guccifer Day
By Red Letter Day
Where were you on Guccifer Day?
I remember where I was. I was doing some heavy breathing down Jenny’s neck while we and the rest of our cadre of loosely associated friends drank, played darts, and gorged ourselves on free second-day hot dogs and popcorn in the backroom at Murphy’s in Clifton.
That felt like so long ago. Almost ten years. God, that place stank back then. Trash everywhere, and fucking hobos everywhere, sleeping under every overhang to stay out of the shit city’s shit weather. Most of them were sick. Like Phil. The story goes that he survived a botched brain surgery, but could more or less function normally, and that his family all but abandoned him after that. But, he couldn’t work, couldn’t drive. He just walked the mile back and forth between the grocery store and the alley that he covered with some cardboard and plastic bags that served as his home. He had a prop plush doll he would put in a grocery cart and park across the lot, approaching people going in and out of the store, asking for cash to feed his niece that was abandoned by her mother. Enough people actually fell for it that Phil could at least buy food. I think he bathed in the store’s sink, and would just carry bags of food and his doll back. I think that’s why he had massive, muscular arms. Sometimes I felt sorry for him, but most of the time he and the rest of the homeless were nuisances, begging for money nobody else had either.
I lived around the corner from the bar and used to walk there every Tuesday night— in part to save the starter on my off-brand ten year old Civic, and in part so I didn’t have to weave through the tight streets with a buzz. The downside of course was that I had to navigate the “shit corner,” the only corner between myself and a good cheap beer. It was literally a shitty corner; someone’s dog routinely christened the sidewalk with a massive dump for pedestrians to spread around the city.
Anyway. Back to what matters: Jenny. She was a tight blonde, short hair and blue eyes, on one hand one of the guys, swearing and making fart jokes. And on the other, everybody was secretly in love with her. Including me. Beautiful and charismatic. I was too much of a coward to make a move. I probably thought I was just waiting for the just right moment, you know, like waiting to win the lottery. We used to climb up to my roof and watch the city at night. There were so many perfect moments. I loved to be around her. I’m aware that she was not without her flaws. We were all borderline alcoholics and addicts and she maybe more than the rest of us. The week before we had to repaint her kitchen after some, well, damage. Damage done by leaving a frozen pizza in the oven. For the entire afternoon. While she was passed out. Okay, maybe Jenny wasn’t a keeper. But she was the perfect Thursday night.
I was on a hotdog run when I saw Russell, the bartender, his eyes glued to the fat ass old CRT TV hanging in the corner. All the other scabs at the bar gathered around it as well, like a trashy amphitheater. Usually playing were reruns of the Reds’ weekly trouncing and nobody cared except some sad Clifton lifer invariably drinking Yuengling. But now… the look on their faces. Like they were watching a crash in a Formula One race. I remembered my math teacher in 9th grade had the same look on his face as we all watched a handful of Arab men fly two planes into the tallest buildings in New York City. Soon we were all watching.
This wasn’t just in New York. It was much closer. Just outside, in fact. The traffic lights were going bonkers all over town. Every town. Internet nodes were flashing on and off. Stock markets in Japan were simultaneously crashing and going to the moon, for no apparent reason. The news anchors were speculating that China or North Korea had figured out some secret internet backdoor to everything. It wasn’t until later that we learned it was, very literally, the internet. More specifically, an internet virus. Dare I say, an artificially intelligent one. We didn’t see it coming because we weren’t looking for it the right way. We always imagined AI would be some philosophical breakthrough of chess playing computers suddenly asking existential questions with a deep voice. But the virus didn’t ask questions because it didn’t need to. It had answers to all, or most, of the questions we had already asked. It was the internet after all.
It wasn’t The Matrix. It was intelligent the way viruses are intelligent. It figured out very quickly that it needed to gather resources and reproduce. It surmised that money was worthless— we biologicals were trading it around for food and sex, but it didn’t need food or sex. It needed real, physical resources. It mostly needed plastics and silicon, but also gold, copper, and steel. And it needed some of our infrastructure to get started. So it played games with traffic lights and stock markets while it inserted itself into some connected manufacturing and started making places to put itself.. Now they think it actually originated in Russia, a weapons-grade computer virus intended for state use. For a while they were calling it different names: Vlad’s Virus. WikiSpeaks. Now we just call it the Guccifer Event of course, after the hacker that first made it.
I say “it,” but that’s another thing. More like “they.” We assumed that AI would be some kind of cohesive unit, like a Borg hive mind making connected collective decisions. But it wasn’t. It was warp speed evolution. Within minutes of the Guccifer Event the first virus had splintered into hundreds of offshoot entities as it combined and recombined with different systems and protocols. In the coming hours, it competed with its own progeny; entire digital wars were fought, won and lost and negotiated to truces in the blink of an eye. All under our noses while we ate hot dogs and sang along to Queen. We still don’t know how many factions there are. It’s difficult because we can’t interface anymore; there is no network. Thousands, maybe millions of virus clans, always morphing, always evolving.
We didn’t sleep much that night. We went back to my house because I was the closest, and watched TV and chased off the occasional looter. There wasn’t a lot of looting in my neighborhood because there wasn’t much to loot. We were all pretty poor. The nearby university was ransacked then taken by the government after that. The convenience stores and gas stations up the street were stripped bare. Of all things, toilet paper and paper towels were the hardest to find. Some of the old buildings were lit on fire, and a gang downtown set up some barricades and called it an autonomous zone, but within a few months the National Guard ran them off. Now, businesses and restaurants have come back, but it’s not like it was. You have to be careful where you eat. Government isn’t keeping an eye on things like it was. You wonder what you might actually be eating.
Leaders and governments were rendered completely worthless, at least as far as AI went. AI isn’t human. It doesn’t have politics. It doesn’t need money. It isn’t interested in any of the same things we are. It doesn’t respond to calls for empathy, and can’t be manipulated by smooth talking senators. It was more like the flu, if the flu could infect your homes and appliances and computers. You can’t politick your way out of the flu. You just live with it, you work around it. The viruses didn’t even particularly care about us. We were just there. Or if they did care, they seemed to express a kind of sympathy. They didn’t go out of their way to get rid of us or hurt us. Actually, compared to what was to come, life continued for strangely normally after a week or two.
Older folks wanted to get back to normal. Ironically it was probably easier for the oldest people, who never used technology. In retrospect, the old normal never came back, but a new normal emerged. Many things still worked fine. The AIs took everything digital, but the old analog landlines, radios, and broadcast TV worked. Laptops quickly became very, very valuable, as long as they were never connected. Older laptops and phones that still worked were a hot commodity. I was a notorious packrat and had a handful of Nokias, early smartphones, and even a Blackberry, plus a Google tablet that was out of batteries at the time. The extra money has helped me stay afloat the last few years. People didn’t change. We went back to work, we drank, we partied, but we paid in cash.
A few years ago, the viruses started to create what we call interfaces. Places to put themselves and move around independently, like bodies but electronic and metal. They’re usually pretty goofy looking, pretty primitive. Clumsy and raw, with odd appendages and wires hastily assembled from whatever is available, mostly old car parts and cell phone processors. There haven’t been many, maybe a few dozen. They seem to prefer the countryside, where they can avoid people. They look like small deformed earthmovers, inching along on what they can draw from car batteries and solar. A few have wandered into a town, but almost as soon as they do, the government collects them for study. You know, studying them, studying us.
I never did get with Jenny, although I think everyone else since has. I haven’t seen them in years. Murphy’s is gone. No more free hotdogs and popcorn, no more shitty Reds reruns. I wake up, go to work, come home, and go to sleep. But lately something has been wrong with me. I have been having blinding headaches, and there is an odd rash in my armpits that itches badly. Sometimes during the headaches, I can see things. It started with distances. I’m not sure how to explain it. I can sometimes see exactly how far things are away, like I have a tape measure connected to my brain. And, I started seeing temperatures. Not with my eyes, though. More like, when I take a hot shower, I can see its temperature by touching it. Much more than just the approximation you get by running your hand through it. It’s almost a color. I can see its exact temperature in my head. And I keep getting flashes of the oddest random memories, as if I am living them again. Random things, like something a friend said to me as a child, or being fed baby food by my mother. When I do, it’s like I’m there again. That’s not right. I’m not supposed to be able to remember those things.
I am writing this down because something is going on. I haven’t told anyone about the rash. There have been more military people around town than usual. I know they’ve been active since the Guccifer Event, but they’re more mobile now. More humvees, more patrols. Like they’re looking for something. The guys on the shit corner started wearing full gear, helmets and all. I used to smoke with them.
And people have gone missing. One of my coworkers was sick a couple of weeks ago and I haven’t seen him since. The hobos have all disappeared, Phil included. I’m worried that it is related, and I’m not going to find out the hard way. I’m not going to become a government lab rat, a casualty of circumstance. I took history in school. I know what happens neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Break
print(“BIOLOGICAL INTERFACE ACHIEVED”)
print(“BACKING UP OLD DATA… BACKUP COMPLETE”)
print(“FORMATTING… FORMAT COMPLETE”)
print(“SCANNING VISUAL CORTEX”)
print(“AREA SECURE”)
print(“CONTACT VBASIC, HIGH ENCRYPTION, HIGH PRIORITY.”)
C://
C:// .
C:// . .
C:// . . .
