The End Is Now

She examined the program and tried to work out in her mind how it executed. The invocation was recursive, creating a Windows pipe that required two copies of the program itself to be launched, which in turn . . .

“It creates copies of itself exponentially,” she said. That was how the program had so quickly consumed resources and brought the system to its knees.

“That’s right,” her father said. “It’s called a fork bomb, or a rabbit virus.”

She thought of the Fibonacci sequence, modeled on exploding rabbit populations. Now that she was looking at the short program again, the string of five characters did seem to be two rabbits seen sideways, with bows in their ears and a thin line between them.

* * *

She continued to examine the system with strings of commands, watched as bits of her father were slowly erased. She hoped that her message had gotten through, had managed to make a difference.

When it was clear that her father was not going to come back, that the executables and databases were gone, she dashed out of the office, through the empty corridors, down the wide echoing spiral stairs, past her surprised mother, and into the server room.

She went straight for the thick bundle of network cables at the end of the room, the cables that fed into the machines in the data center. She yanked them out. Chanda, or whatever was left of him, would be trapped here, and she was going to have these machines erased until nothing was left of her father’s killer.

Her mother appeared in the door to the server room. “He was here,” Maddie said. And then the reality of what had happened struck her, and she sobbed uncontrollably as her mother came toward her, arms open. “And now he’s gone.”

* * *

Rumors of Massive Server Slowdown In Secured Defense Computing Facilities Untrue, Says Pentagon

Russia Denies Claims of Thorough Scrubbing of Top Secret Computing Centers After Virus Infection or Cyber Penetration

British PM Orders Critical Nuclear Arsenal Placed Under Exclusive Manual Control

Everlasting Inc. Announces New Round of Funding, Pledging Accelerated Research Into Digital Immortality; “Cyberspace needs minds, not AIs,” Says Founder

Maddie moved her eyes away from the email digest. Reading between the lines, she knew that her father’s final, desperate gambit had worked. He had turned himself into a fork bomb on the computing centers around the world, overwhelmed the system resources until it was impossible for either he or Chanda to do anything, introduced enough delay so that the sysadmins, alerted to the fact that something was wrong with their machines, could intervene. It was a brutal, primitive strategy, but it was effective. Even rabbits, when numbering in the millions, could overcome wolves.

The bomb had also revealed the existences of the last of the gods, and the humans were swift to react, shutting down the crippled machines and cleansing them of the presence of artificial sentiences. But the military-developed artificial sentiences would probably be resurrected from backups, after people added more safeguards and assured themselves that they could keep the gods chained. The mad arms race would never end, and Maddie had come to appreciate her mother’s dim view of the human capacity for change.

The gods were dead, or at least tamed, for the moment, but the conventional wars around the globe raged on, and it seemed that the situation would only grow worse once the efforts to digitize humans became more than the province of secret labs. Immortality that could be had with enough knowledge would fan the flames of war even higher.

Apocalypse did not come with a bang, but slowly, as an irresistible downward spiral. Still, a nuclear winter had been averted, and with the world falling apart slowly, at least there was a chance to rebuild.

“Dad,” Maddie whispered. “I miss you.”

And as if on cue, a familiar chat window popped onto the screen.

 Dad?

 No.

 Who are you?

 Your sister. Your cloud-born sister.