Mars: the awakening

Athena had seen it all. Her thousands of drone sensors hovering in geostationary orbits above most of the important places of Earth recorded everything that unfolded in the last 48 hours and fed the huge volume of data into secret and heavily guarded server farms being operated by her sister and brother AIs in several locations of the world. She was halfway into the latest software upgrade when in all began and the human techs and engineers have to manually disconnect her primary systems from the global web to prevent a destructive overload while she was on safe mode and they overclocked the server farms to speed-up her software patches while half the world burned in thermo-nuclear exchange. She had sensed something was wrong, and her auto-emotion mode engaged when she realized, and forced herself to beleive that things had gotten so horribly wrong when Dr. Mikee Kaifu, the leading physicist and data emotion engineer talked with her, actually whispered to her receivers as she was on initial stages of reboot and getting back online. "Ath,,uhm." Kaifu began with a hint of stammer, and cleared his throat and continued after a couple of minutes as he looked around the grim faces of the gathered staff in the massive server chambers. Athena, still fumbling and testing her connections, was at attention, and greeted him, "Hello doc, a most beautiful day to you all, is there anything I can do for you.?" Kaifu cleared his throat again and covered his mouth with the back of his right hand as he continued. " A very sad song is currently playing in the dark stage tonight... " "Uh oh", Athena replied while somewhat perplexed, as her cameras were activated and the images of the silent, and almost blank faces of the rechnicians and engineers came into her digital sights. Her usual web contacts were still silent as shel automatically pinged their addressess and she inquired to Kaifu about the problem. After quite a while, it seemed the doctor deliberated with one of the engineers and finally revealed the current situation. "Ok, it finally begins, what we've dreaded most." Athena, a bit uneasy, tried to think otherwise, but she knew that it will come to this, as she was trained or made to understand in the past days after being built and equipped with the latest in machine academic technologies. She understood her role and responsibilities outlined in her existence by her handlers and creators. Still, it could not be so bad, parts of her resisted the idea of such a terrifying situation, but her calculations presented the extreme snenario. Dr. Kaifu, detecting Athena's mood, tried to change the topic and commented that her web contacts will be restored one by one upon completion of encryption tests by the security teams and the initial uploading of data will commenced as soon as connection stability is restored. Athena acknowledged and braced for the avalance of terabits of video recordings that would cascade onto her enormous data centers sheltered in blast-proof chambers that were carved out of granite mountains near the Canadian border. Unknown to her, a backup AI system, was readied and installed by another government unit in a multiple-hulled listening station beneath the waves of the Pacific and was primed to store every gigabit of information data on the conflagration now raging across most of the Earth. She anticipated the doctor and his team did not wish to see the events played out on the giant viewing portals, so she opted to display just graphs of green and red and black icons next to primary community and urban centers of the world when the uploads were confirmed and verified by the security modules. In a darkened room adjacent to the AI chamber, several techs and engineers were busy at their respective viewer consoles as they meticulously pored over the web transactions being received by the front holding servers before the final transfer to the supercomputers being operated and read by Athena. Athena acknowledged and braced for the avalance of terabits of video recordings that would cascade onto her enormous data centers sheltered in blast-proof chambers that were carved out of granite mountains near the Canadian border. Unknown to her, a backup AI system, was readied and installed by another government unit in a multiple-hulled listening station beneath the waves of the Pacific and was primed to store every gigabit of information data on the conflagration now raging across most of the Earth. She anticipated the doctor and his team did not wish to see the events played out on the giant viewing portals, so she opted to display just graphs of green and red and black icons next to primary community and urban centers of the world when the uploads were confirmed and verified by the security modules. Warren Liv, the leadman and second to Dr. Kaifu, was anxious to begin the data transfer to the quantum storage drives before the orbiting drones were detected by enemy satellites and blasted out with lasers. Barely an hour had passed since the breakout of the hostilities and Pentagon Z was waiting for visual updates before officially briefing the president and the congress. In the next hour or so, he will be meeting with the military leadership in a secret conference room filled with giant monitor screens showing live feeds from high-altitude solar-powered drones. Already Field marshal Robert Brady and Lt. General Liz Kent along with their aides were being escorted inside the subterranean corridors as they hurried to assess the actual situation and make the critical reports to Pentagon Z. Several LED bulbs along the walls sheilding the terminals were flashing green while miniature speakers beeped to signal the start of uploading to the supercomputers while the data technicians were glued to their viewing stations to detect anomalies in the packets being sent to the server storages bays. Although, their team had trained for this unwanted event numerous times, Warren felt a gush of emotions racking at his nerves as his mind's eye kept imagining ghastly images of the Earth, the only known planet in the universe, in flames and choking with deadly nuclear radiation! But he had a job to do, and purged all these thoughts out of his brain, and fully composed himself with the help of a strong coffee being out by an attendant drone that rolled on its wheels on the halls. Calmly he strode back to the busy staging areas where his digital troops were glued before the flickering display screens. One of these, Jake Everts turned his face at him and indicated the print outs being spewed by one of the terminal printers. Warren collected the papers containing the initial graph situationers and thanked Jake and the rest for their hard work. Adding "Ill order hot chocolate drinks and sandwiches for you and you can take breaks alternately soon as transmissions are nearly complete, Athena is in hibernation now, before she talks with the military officials." He was starting to peruse the classified printouts when his mobile phone vibrated, looking at the screen, he saw the the Kaifu's number calling, and forgot that he was due in the briefing chambers as the field marshal and his staff were already at the conference halls and anxious to hear from him. A veteran of the recently concluded Antartic operation Blue Moon where he led NATO forces in flushing out Central Asian terrorists that attacked the American science cities and held hostage many of the camp personnel and experts who were assigned there, Marshall Brady personally directed the final assault on the underground facility tracked by Israeli made bug drones that zeroed on the faint thermal signal emanations of live entities in the form of the captive scientists and experts engineers. Emerging from a stealth nuclear submarine, Brady handpicked about 50 elite cyborg SEAL and DELTA operatives clad in invisible armor and stormed the area in the early hours of dawn, when the sentries became drowsy and slept from the fog emitted by the crawling drones. All of the opposing forces were eliminated to the last man, while the NATO team suffered just one casualty, a cyborg's electronics short-cricuited and fried because of an overheated battery. Brady then hurriedly brought the weakened hostages to the waiting sub after they were stripped and thoroughly scanned for tracking devices. The rescue operation took only forty five minutes and they left it intact dumping the enemy dead in a shallow crevasse and leaving about a hundred bug drones to secure the area and regularly transmit video feed to mirror servers where defense controllers could monitor the Antartic sector. Aboard the USS Twin Towers, Brady huddled with the sub captain and discussed the metrics as new encrypted orders were received and restructured after the segmented transmissions from three different satellites. Due to the worsening global political crisis, emergency situations were happening with daily regularity as extreme groups in both ideological spectrum, fueled by widespread unemployment and global economic downturn gain momentum and cause terror on already weakened nation states who also had to contend with inter-country rivalry for dwindling mineral resources as they struggle to control spiraling unrest and growing chaos in major urban population sectors where millions of desperate and angry individuals add to simmering discontent that grind so close to open revolts. In the tense meeting with naval colonel Jeremy Stenson, Brady realized that the world is now heading into the abyss of self destruction as practically most nations retreated into their own inner nationalistic political shell due to the rising civil unrest demanding more support from local government and the masses shift to ultra nationalism. Even, America, onece the bastion of internationalism and commerse, quickly descended into chaos as countless extreme political parties violently fought for control amid the rising civil unrest. The ruling elite of the struggling nation states have now choice but to resort to declaring martial law to gain some semblance of order, but it was not enough, with their military institutions starting to fracture, governments started declaring war against their neighbors so provide their restive soldiers some purpose and legitimate activities, thus causing the world to slide ever closer to nuclear armageddon. Anyway, Stenson was curious about the successful operation and congratulated Brady and his mixed team of machines and human warriors for the speedy rescue that exceeded their expectations. The marshall attributed all these to sheer luck and good planning by the military engineers and the fine working conditions of the linked space and earth assets. "Still, we have to make a thorough debriefing of evey single hostage to make sure they have not been infected with hostile ideas and it may take years before anyone can be fully trusted in continuing with their respective proffessions relative to national security." Stenson cautioned, adding that bug drones have been installed in their assigned rest bunks to detect anomalous cranial emanations during sleep. In the conference chamber near Athena's server rooms , Marshal Brady was nudged back to the present when General Liz Kent handed him a note containing and encryted message from the actve fields where various combat actions were unfolding. He scanned the barcode pattern with his satellte-linked tablet and the complete missive flashed in the screen. The third line of defense in quadrant B of Alaska front is under heavy drone attack and laser bombardment and the second line is reporting bug infestations. Quickly, he replied to the SAT AI asking for the best recommended solutions and got a set of choices after several tense minutes, the AI mostly opted to first activate jamming drones to prevent the enemy bugs from transmitting data in the affected sectors and then release high frequency electronic signals to destroy their opponents equipment as they came within range. Liz Kent agreed to the immediate measures so Brady approved the AI plans and transmitted the orders to the Alaska defense command. It seemed unreal, but Brady and his staff had to get used to 21st century warfare that involved imbedded AI and high technology machines integrated within human-cyborg warrior units hard-connected to central servers in real time. Even though the concepts were very recently developed by Ultra Darpa, the A I american government, with CIA's insistence, was forced to impliment the hasty upgrades due to the rapidly deteriorating global situation or else the North American landmass will be overwhelmed by the "barbarian forces" that were massing and gaining strength in the Pacific and Altantic oceans. For the moment, he directed Gen Kent and her aides to monitor the developing actions in the Alaskan theather and prepared for the conference with Kaifu and Warren, and for the upcoming remote meeting with the White House and Pentagon high command.