Web of Extinction Read online

  Web of Extinction

  By

  John Conroe

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 John Conroe

  Smashwords Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  The Demon Accords:

  God Touched

  Demon Driven

  Brutal Asset

  Black Frost

  Duel Nature

  Fallen Stars

  Executable

  Forced Ascent

  College Arcane

  God Hammer

  Rogues

  Snake Eyes

  Winterfall

  Summer Reign

  The Demon Accords Compendium, Volume 1

  The Demon Accords Compendium, Volume 2

  Demon Divine

  C.A.E.C.O.

  Darkkin Queen (Winter 2020)

  The Zone War series:

  Zone War

  Borough of Bones

  Web of Extinction

  The Shadows of Montshire series:

  A Murder of Shadows (2020)

  Cover art by Gareth Otton.

  Table Of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  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

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 1

  “Greetings, Ajaya! It’s been what? A month since we were together?”

  “Hi, Cade. About three weeks,” I said.

  He held both hands out from his sides, almost shoulder height, palms up, and his eyebrows rose. “We’re still here.”

  “Yes we are.”

  “The world hasn’t ended—you were wrong,” he said, throwing it out like a challenge.

  “I’m sorry, did I put a deadline on it?” I shot back.

  “You said a whole lot of provocative things, Ajaya. You said Drone Night was run against this country by this country. You said the Spiders were looking to wipe out mankind, and you indicated the last one was using NSA facilities to do just that. You claimed to have a bomb in your neck.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s it?” he asked, incredulous, playing to the camera.

  “What is it you want, Cade? I know you’re kickass at these on-air theatrics. I’m not. Why don’t you just lay out whatever it is you want to say.”

  He looked at me for a moment, then his eyes hardened. “I’m saying that you lied.”

  “Ah, there it is. See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?” I said. “So where do you want to go with this? What’s your attack?”

  He frowned. “The government has refuted everything you said. Said you were a glory-seeking liar. That the whole thing was to get your fifteen minutes of fame… or maybe infamy would be better.”

  “Of course it refuted it. I even told you that they would be better at spinning than I could ever be. But did you research Dr. Wilks? Did you research Titanpointe? Cade, have you done your homework?”

  He was starting to get angry. “We looked into Wilks. Yes, she worked for the stock exchange, yes she was an acknowledged expert in AI. But that’s it. She disappeared over ten years ago.”

  “Just like I said. But doesn’t the fact of her disappearance trigger your journalistic instincts? Or is this just a witch hunt for ratings?”

  “It’s about getting to the truth. Yes, we looked into Titanpointe. Very mysterious, but ultimately no proof of anything.”

  “So why would I do this, Cade? Why would I send my family away, convince Astrid to leave, and make up a bunch of shit? I have no weapons, no drone assistant, I’m all alone, and you think I what? Want attention?”

  “People do all kinds of things for fame and fortune, Ajaya.”

  “You think I want fame? I lived a long time in the shadow of Zone War, Cade. The shadows are where I’m happiest. The only reason I have done or said any of this is because the danger is real.”

  “But Ajaya… the world hasn’t ended.”

  “Hasn’t it?” I asked. His frown deepened. “I asked you if you did your homework. You didn’t. You did superficial searches on information I gave you. You listened to the government. Very poor reporting, Cade. Piss poor. But hey, it’s okay, because I did the work for you. Both you and Trinity have emails in your inbox right now—from me. Open them.”

  His eyes unfocused as he accessed his contacts and his frown deepened.

  “What is this?” He refocused on me.

  “It’s an AI-driven graph of global accidents involving expert systems. It goes back ten years from yesterday.”

  “Trinity, can we put this up?” he asked off camera. She nodded and almost as soon as he spoke, the graph popped up on the wall behind us.

  “Walk me through this,” he said, looking curious.

  “Ten years ago, the rate of accidents by AI expert systems was moderately high. Car accidents, plane issues, shipping errors, accidental release of private information, financial security, et cetera. But then they drop right off as AI improved. Within three years, they bottomed to almost nothing and stayed that way for over four years. But look here, at the last three years. They started to creep up three years ago, doubled two years ago, and then went up by a factor of ten early this year. Now, in the last few months, they’ve skyrocketed.”

  “Ajaya, everyone knows this. It’s the result of your meddling with the internet.”

  “And when does the government say I meddled, Cade? Four weeks ago? Yet these numbers have been shooting up long before that. Ships colliding in open ocean, planes crashing, cars and buses smashing. But that’s the obvious stuff, Cade. Open that line there, the one from two months ago.”

  He sent a silent command and the data plot opened a subwindow that listed the accidents.

  “Read through those, Cade. Ignore the planes and ships. Look at line three—an Ebola-infected man leaving Africa gets by the airport AI’s health screener and makes it to France, where additional infections occur.”

  “Yeah, like three people, then they stopped it,” he said, not impressed.

  “It shouldn’t have happened at all. Look at number seven. Two ships colliding in the North Sea. One an oil tanker, the other carrying grain. Both sunk. And an oil slick over one of the most important fishing grounds in Europe. Look at eighteen: a Russian unmanned fighter, buzzing a US combat ship and it loses control, smashing into the ship’s side. It hit a heavily armored spot. If it hadn’t, that ship would likely have been crippled or possibly sunk. How about war, Cade?


  “Look at thirty-nine: a floodgate control AI in Ohio malfunctions and floods out countless acres of farmland throughout the state, right at planting time. And on and on. All of those happened long before the government said I or Harper had any impact on the web.”

  “You’re implying that the Spider did it? Plum Blossom. Through the NSA facility?”

  “Yes, Cade, I am. Why are all these systems crashing now? The government didn’t deny that some drones escaped the Zone and created problems, but this stuff is much farther spread than a few drones.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know… malware? A virus? Trojan horse, maybe? Not my area of expertise. All I know is a supercomputer programmed to kill off humanity has had unlimited access to the internet via a government intelligence satellite uplink for years. And if I’m so far off, why did Zone Defense bomb the top of that Longlines building two weeks ago? I know that you know they did that, because your new show caught video of it.”

  “This seems… desperate,” he said.

  “To me it seems like you’re willfully hiding your heads in the sand. Cade, are you familiar with tipping points?”

  “Like when something reaches a point of no return?” he asked.

  “Exactly. I think Plum Blossom is experimenting with viruses and malware, looking for the right algorithm to put enough expert systems out of com…” I gasped, a sudden pain in my neck so severe that I thought, for a second, that the bomb had gone off. Sharp, shooting pain, up into my brain, down into my chest.

  I felt my hand slap my neck, a motion I had avoided for weeks, yet this time I couldn’t stop the reflex.

  “Ajaya?” Cade asked, concern replacing the challenging expression he had worn moments before.

  A spasm took my voice, but a few seconds later I was able to shake my head.

  “Ajaya? Are you okay?”

  The pain receded, moving from a red-hot poker to a dull, thought-robbing throb. “Ah, how’s the… ah, new show… going? How’s it going?” I stuttered, changing the subject as fast as I could.

  “Um, it’s, ah, good. Our drone teams have killed off hundreds of enemy units. Are you alright?” He turned to the camera before I could respond. “We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be back in a moment.”

  Trinity was at my side in a second, her assistant and another person with her.

  “What was that? Are you okay?” she asked.

  “It was sharp pain. I thought the bomb had gone off,” I said.

  “But what was it?” Trinity pressed. The assistant offered me a bottle of water and I took a sip.

  “I’m pretty sure it was a warning,” I said.

  “Are you acting?” Cade asked, concern changing to anger.

  The other guy behind Trinity shook his head. “No, our programming AI says it’s a 99.999 percent real pain reaction. A really severe pain reaction.”

  “So what does it mean?” Cade asked, anger gone as fast as came.

  “It means I can’t talk about the topic I was talking about,” I said.

  “The whole virus thing?” Cade asked. The throb in my neck shot me a short burst of agony. I nodded, again unable to speak for a moment.

  “Oh God, it’s real,” Cade said, realization dawning.

  “Of course it’s real. You think Ajaya would lie about that? He’s never lied about anything, especially the Spiders and the Zone,” Trinity said, leaning close to look at first my neck and then my eyes.

  “But you told me to come at him like he was lying? Oh? Ratings?” Cade said, the light going off.

  She somehow managed to give us both one look that simultaneously said no duh to him and it’s just business to me. It was a whole body kind of thing with an eye roll and a shrug mixed in.

  “Can you continue the interview?” she asked me.

  “Not about that!”

  “No, of course not. We’ll just continue to talk about the new Drone Wars segment that you guys left off on. In fact, we’ll pull up live feed and you two can just ad lib. You’re both good at that, especially together,” she said with a big smile that seemed mostly for Cade’s benefit. He nodded, eyes slightly wide.

  “Is that okay?” she asked me.

  “Yes. Just nothing about what I was talking about before. My leash just got tugged—hard,” I said.

  “Okay, let’s bring it back live,” she said, waving her people back out of camera range.

  “And we’re live in three, two, one,” counted down the guy who had taken my side in the credibility argument.

  Chapter 2

  “So, you can see, our teams are fielding some pretty impressive drones,” Cade said, covering his nervousness, but not perfectly.

  We were watching live feeds from a trio of production drones that were following the new Drone Wars teams as they sent their highly customized, self-built combat drones into the Zone.

  I had, with nothing else to do on my daily schedule, watched most of the daily episodes up to this point, so I was already familiar with all the teams. It had been interesting to see what smart amateurs had built to send in against military bots, and I had noted that the newer model units were racking up a decent kill count against the older Zone units. But each swarm of team drones was being run by inexperienced amateurs, both live humans and AIs.

  “Yeah, pretty cool designs,” I said.

  “I sense a but in your sentence,” Cade said.

  “Well, this has been tried before. The military did it right after the walls went up around Manhattan. Then the Zone drones adapted quickly and started to eat the military units for breakfast.”

  “But this is a decade later. They’re old and slow, and you, personally, knocked out two of the Spiders,” Cade challenged. His whole tone was different this time though, much less hostile.

  “Which is why it might be taking longer for them to adapt,” I said, trying to stay engaged. I won’t lie: The whole stabbing-pain-in-the-neck-and-brain thing had shaken me up—a lot. “Plum Blossom has a lot to handle by itself.”

  “But what would they do?” he asked, curious.

  “I don’t know… set up ambushes or something,” I said.

  His trademark smile came back. “Come on, Ajaya. You can do better than that. Nobody knows the Zone like you do. Give us a guess… a real guess,” he said, the normal Cade back, replacing the nervous Cade.

  I felt my interest pique for the first time since we’d come back from break. I gave him a nod and then focused on the screen, really studying the situation.

  There were four separate teams, with swarms ranging from four drones to a really big group of a couple dozen minidrones, all flying in fully synchronized formations. All four swarms were traveling at a pretty high altitude, flying between skyscrapers, trolling for drones, which they hadn’t been seeing.

  “How many have they killed so far, to date?” I asked. He’d told me once but I hadn’t paid much attention, because, you know—neck bomb and shit.

  “Four hundred and twelve,” he said.

  “Most of those in the first week, right?”

  “Yes. The Zone units have gone quiet lately, not coming out to challenge these big teams.”

  “Which makes sense, right? If you’re getting your ass beat, stop going head to head. So, yeah, I’d expect them to see almost nothing and I’d be…”

  “There, one of the little ones… a Kite,” the voice of one of the team leaders broke in, excited. “The ones that hunt with Tigers!”