Ghost Ping

"King in the Mountain — GHOST STORY"
Arizona, United States of America, 2044​

. . .

De-fragmenting memory clusters, play-process from startup. Checking for Singularity Condition...

The NSA agent definitely didn't bring in that wire.

But where did it come from, and where had it been? Did someone else connect to Harts? The creeping thought of such things scared Agent John Smith more than undead corpses and nuclear fallout. His optimized blood ran cold, and Smith gave off an involuntary shiver as the reinforced bunker door sealed behind him.

The senior agent would struggle with sleep tonight. And not because of jet lag or because of a makeshift, stiff office bed. Smith had a lot on his mind.

The net noise tonight almost thrummed with a fever pitch.

. . .

Far away, but on the same continent of North America, another restless mind was lost in her own thoughts.

Artificial indigo-violet eyes stared upward into a grand sea of stars illuminating the darkness with the majesty of the Milky Way galaxy. A small, day-old fire smoldered its last embers in the background, illuminating the backs of her military compatriots as they camped out on a desert canyon ridge.

The night animals remained silent in the dark at her presence as she was scarier than any organic flesh human. Rather a lithe, artificial form of plastic and metal made with careful code and precise 3D printing into the likeness and hyper real reflection of the human form. A twisted mirror, a perfected human. A creature separated from nature, yet surrounded by it in the fire light.

Her separation from nature wasn't the subject of tonight, rather Kusanagi Motoko wondered who pinged her from halfway across America. She was far away from anything important, caught between long hours of driving along abandoned, state-farm roads in the hilly Arizona back country.

Tonight, her mercenary team set up camp overlooking the banks of the powerful Colorado River. Motoko couldn't see the sloshing banks of the wide river below against the reigning dark. At least not without turning on her artificial night vision, but she could easily hear the river's quiet, endless roar.

Something else woke her up. A strange ‘war dial’ cold call in the middle of the night, a bolt fired out from the black. Tracing the call to an overhead telecom satellite, the network trail led back to a mom-and-pop phone server farm in rural Kentucky. There was no message or extra detail, just a simple caller request. Motoko set aside the minor embarrassment of leaving traces of her cyberbrain address across the United States. The previous server visit was almost three years old now.

She dived past the server farm's SIEM monitoring, masking herself as a flurry of spam emails. The overworked, one-man security team didn’t even see Motoko enter having wandered away for a coffee break. Motoko uncovered the data ledger for the war dialer only to find disappointment. There was a definite attempt to ping every MAC and IPv6 address in the server farm's database. Nothing about it was strange, she should just ignore it. Motoko allowed another sigh at the amateur recon attempt and her own carelessness to remain on an old address routing table. She attempted to delete the new and old entries; however, disappointment didn't last long.

Motoko's physical body jolted a little, shifting on the hard stone she used as a cushion as the not-so-gentle giant Batou rustled in his sleep and grumbled about stinky candles two feet away. Inspecting the dialer’s data ledger again, Motoko saw someone broke the local encryption all the way through and blanked the ledger with multiple formats of junk data. No other ledgers in the specific, public-facing server looked like this. Just this junk call ledger which included her person.

A worthless trail. But an amateur recon attack suddenly turned into a wizard-class hacker feat. Nothing about the person who called Motoko was an amateur. She gulped. Apparently, she stumbled on another ghost story in the Net. Someone across the digital sea calling to her, but refused to leave a call back option.

She eventually let herself drift back to sleep, unable to address the issue in the current time with her limited bandwidth. But Motoko did wonder, "Alright. You've found me. Now, what are you looking for?"

. . .

“Spoken. A bolt from the blue heavens, an impartial warning.”

This world. What have we done to it?

\\

2042...

The Group of Four super-states (G4: America, China, Russia, and European Union) sought economic sustainability—and opportunity—for their elites and technocrats. Known otherwise as the Four Dominions or Four Kingdoms (4D/K), the great nations carved out a skewed, multi-polar world order for themselves.

Empowered by their pursuit of macro-intelligent AI managers, America coined and launched the “war-as-industry” model in their fractured backyard, igniting a once-frozen civil war into a hot one. Elsewhere, similar civil conflicts and unrest emerged to the G4’s benefit.

The world elites called their experiment “sustainable warfare,” built on the back of disaster capitalism and enforced by tech feudalism.

Sustainable war grew to safeguard the relative bounties and competitive domination enjoyed by rival powers in careful, automated cooperation. However, the great nations sought their own economic interests first and AI-driven global instability soon followed: first specters of system collapse, then societal extinction.

\\

2044...

The event was gradual and avoidable, until it wasn’t anymore. The Global Simultaneous Default (GSD) struck like clockwork. A black swan event once thought impractical became reality as data farms corrupted overnight and finance firms froze all transactions. Physical and digital currency became worthless. No one claimed responsibility within reason...

In the collective panic, the war economy accelerated out of desperation, and sustainable wars grew as new power players entered the fray. Even advanced nations suffered invasion, separatist movements and civil war for the hubris of the G4.

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2045...

“The day we become gods; we will not know the difference.”

The world teeters on the edge of an abyss, and the great unknown...