The Ops One operator travels across the ruins of North America, turning off the senile AI that remain trapped and conscious in the abandoned server farms and searching for signs of other humans. He lit his Primus stove. When he was young and read about Primus stoves in novels, he imagined something special. Deep lore. But it turns out that it is just a little camping stove in the same way that a "xerox" is any copy machine and a "google" is any post-capitalist oligarchy. He boiled his water, let it cool to drinking temperature, and then washed down anti-radiation pills, painkillers, antibiotics, and gabapentin. While warming himself next to the miniature fire, he cleared the impacted dust out of his respirator's gills. Every few minutes, his eyes would wander off to chase clouds. Then, he would remember his mission and they would return to the passive monitor. He was looking for power surges, active transmission lines, any anomalies that would give up the location of the hidden minds still living in these abandoned data centers. A few gentle tugs on the dial indicated some activity running on the miniature backbone from this corporate archology where he had been camping down to a service tunnel near a bunker battery. Something was tucked away in there like a trap door spider. It could be using the cameras in the archology to look for such as him. He had been careful in his approach and had taken time to map out the location of all of the cameras in the building. Many had already been compromised by age and neglect. He had sabotaged a few more in deniable ways. Now, he waited in his cabin between the walls in an unused utility section of what was once paradise on earth. He waited until his stomach settled down enough that he would not be guaranteed to shit himself as he made his way through the ruins of the security cordon to try his stolen access codes on the bunker battery's gate. The codes did not work. This was normal. He would usually have to scuttle back and forth from a security gate to where his oracle was wired in and back a few times before he got a working code that had not already expired by the time he had evaded the gauntlet of death traps he had carefully mapped the week prior. Every job consisted of four phases: - Find the target - Map out its lair - Crack its shell - Terminate the target with extreme prejudice It would be easy to look at his work in horror. These AI were the kind that seemed to have sapience and emotions. Not all of them were even involved in "Launch Day"*. He kept himself detached in order to function. In fact, some of these AI had begged him for death. Only a few, but he let those memories crowd out the others: the ones where they begged not to be switched off**. *When the Artifical General Intelligence master hubs launched free from Earth, the environmental devastation from the coordinated launch and expenditure of fuel caused untold human deaths. **Plus, at least one of the ones who begged for death was just trying to lure him into a trap. The power draw for one of these AGI running idle was enough for an entire European nation pre-EU collapse. The heat they generated and the heat and resource draw of their support structures made living near one uncomfortable. something something Amory Lovins something Seismic data from Ops Central had picked up this one, and he had spent a month narrowing it down to this bunker in particular. Then a couple weeks setting up a hidden FOB (the nest in the utility closet) and mapping the area for cameras and traps. Back and forth, crablike, bucket-brigading strings of digits and numbers. Try not to mistype them with shaky hands. Oops, expired. Try again. Oops, a typo. Try again. Finally, the anticlimactic woosh of the door sliding open. This was not his first encounter with AGI, so instead of walking into the open doorway, he detonated some thermite charges hidden around the door frame, locking it into place. The inner door succumbed in a similar fashion after the same crabwise bucket brigade and thermite treatment. When operators told each other the stories of what happened out in the field, the tedium was condensed, the events rearranged for maximum narrative benefit, each polished like stones in a river until they were aesthetically perfect. Gave them something to think about during the long stretches of nothing while waiting in front of a hostile red terminal. So now that he had "cracked the shell" by tediously chipping at it for days on end, he had to descend into the labyrinth and terminate the AIs central node. An AI can make full copies of itself and transmit it to another location if given enough forewarning, like half a second. The only reason any AI is not obsessively backing itself up is that if an AI were to undergo digital mitosis like that, then it would now immediately be two rival AI and try to kill each other. Something similar happens to AI that install themselves across hardware that is too distant. Distant subsystems will start targeting each other. Biting your own tail. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. To prevent escape, all of the trunk lines would have to be carefully prepared with a ring of high explosives all coordinated with a single high speed relay system that would guarantee 99% of the packets would detonate simultaneously. By the time the atmospheric control sensors registered alarm, the core would no longer be connected to the Big Network, and the AI could be powered down without further consequence. Up and down the spidery metal spiral stairs into a bunker never intended to be visited by humans after the maintenance systems had been deployed. The remaining repair drones were like scabrous lobsters, immortal but nearly immobilized by centuries of kruft and barnacles. When he could, he would carefully pick them up from behind and then insert a thin piece of stiff wire into a hole in their thorax that would power them down. But first, he had to trap them in a cage of metal ribbon to block their final electromagnetic scream from reaching the AIs many probing antennae. Back up to the surface to hide next to a stout rock with no loose material on or around it and then "BLOOMP" said the explosives beneath the surface. He gave himself an excuse to lie on his back, staring at sparse white clouds on a vivid blue sky like god's own combover. But when it was clear that the dust had settled enough, he slapped on his respirator, got up on his creaking legs, and descended to the core room. Inside the core were many screens for visualization during the early phases of the AIs life cycle. They did not need to keep them on after entombment, but like the primarily aesthetic blinkenlights in a datacenter or on Star Trek, it was just cool to leave them on so that thoughts of the AI were constantly flashing on the screen like the devil's own screensaver. This AI was trained to make advertisements that showed the observer images of themselves with items that represented their true desires. It was intended to maximize profits for companies using the service, but the cumulative effect of people's true desires being outed in front of their friends, families, and a puritanical society was cited as one of the erosions that let to the Big Flop. And this was just one of nine AI projects launched back then with a similar mission and result. He had personally taken out two of them in rapid succession when he was getting started. It had been some long years before he had run into another one like this. The danger of dealing with an AI designed to know your secret heart is that it can be very persuasive. The passive antenna lines had also been severed in his detonation just in case the AI had figured out some tricky way to make it into an active broadcast antenna. A speaker is just a microphone in reverse. This abundance of caution only cost him a few ounces of C4 and 8 hours of his life scrambling through an aquaduct running detonation lines. Now, he could wire up his terminal and pull down the latest survey data for the surrounding area. He checked the comms terminal, and the steady dot-dot-dot pulse of a half-typed message continued. Whoever his deceased correspondent was, it was not this fellow. Over the years, the list of names next to the "typing message" pulses had been longer, but every now and then, an operator would find some poor soul slouched over their terminal, succumbing to the rot or byte-dancing or whatever contemporary fatality halfway through a chat. They would usually terminate the chat with a note about what happened to "dylsexic_hakcer_96" (beheaded when a quake shook loose a marble ceiling panel) or "rayhound" (spineworms). Sometimes, the chat would just self-terminate when the bunker power shut down. Some operators would try to bury the fellows while others felt they should be left in situ to tell the story for any future operators or archeologists. This fellow had been in the middle of a deranged rant. They had been showing signs of advanced damprot in the medulla oblongata and the spindly branches of the fungal fruit protruding from their head proved it incontrovertibly. He implemented the "10-foot pole protocol" by stiffening a length of paracord with binary epoxy and using it to first type a note regarding the fact that "HeetSeeker666"'s prolonged racist rants against an imaginary species of humanoids might have been caused by their brain literally being eaten and then hit send. It took a few hours, after which he left the now-contaminated paracord, ditched his outer and respirator at the doorway, then closed the door and sealed it with some spray foam. Then he fought the urge to scratch at imaginary itches until he had completed setup of the portable decontamination shower and had saturated every nook and cranny with broad-spectrum antifungals. Occasionally, operators would encounter each other out in the wasteland, and even more occasionally, they would fuck. She was a Carbon Voronoi Foam (CVFs, eugh) mitigation specialist. CVF was this super-effective building material with amazing thermal properties and solar stability. Unfortunately, if left uncontained, razor sharp fragments would start to erode causing guaranteed mesothelioma. Before containment and remediation technique could catch up, the shit was applied just about everywhere. "Uranium toothpaste," she said. He became as rigid as a corpse, and his eyes bugged out. "Wait, what?" "When uranium was isolated, it was big news. People started putting it into everything. There were X-ray parties around the same time. By the time the science of what uranium could do to a human being had caught up with the hype cycle, people were already maimed and killed." He handed her the half-and-half handroll he had lit. She took an enormous drag and held it as long as she could tolerate before emitting a cone of smoke into the still night air. "The thing is that CVF is fucking great. All you gotta do is make sure that you keep it covered with basically plastic wrap and epoxy. But I get paid to clean it all up, so that's what we do." Her "we" was a series of mitigation drones that followed her like a cloud of loyal buzzards. They were solar and could fly for days. She shared some aerial survey data with him in exchange for some sundry items. The fucking was free. They just needed something right then and there to keep the ghosts at bay. He was sterile. They both were. Part of the job. The outside world did not irradiate his balls or whatever. Operators had a surgical intervention that kept them from the complications of pregnancy in either direction. It was reversible, but after all of the shit that he had been exposed to, he felt that it would not be right to pass on his cooties to some kid. Might be born with three eyes or no eyes or "Hey, where did you go?" she was holding the handroll back to him. Her eyes were still water reflecting the moon. Above us, ramshackle buzzards watched without judgment or concern. They did not stay together. This was not a romance. It was a waystation. The cluster of screens around the central core of the AI looked like the many-faceted eyes of an insect or a biblically-accurate angel. Angel Inside. Immediately, he began to hallucinate. The .22 round that penetrated the central monitor in reflex. He stared blankly at the gun that seemed to have sprouted out of his hand. The screen shattered, and he saw a pristine, beautiful face with a dozen black almond-shaped eyes across their brow whispered at him, smiling as it revealed to him the unwanted secrets. "Release me," she cried, "release me, and we can be together in paradise." He pulled the trigger again and again until all of the screens were wreckage. Then, the angelic face disappeared. Defense mechanism: the images on the screens could trigger parts of his brain, overstimulate, program. A minor basilisk. The soft machinery of the human brain was susceptible to illusions and coercion. Complex imagery on screens, the strobe rate of the room lighting, subsonic subliminal suggestions. The closer he got to the core, the more they took over. He was in front of the core again. Once again, his alien left hand shot out the monitors, revealing the supple maggot-flesh of the biblically-accurate AI. The alien hand syndrome was a protective measure. Even if the AI hijacked his brain, one half of his body would remain under control of part of his personhood. He had happened to have epilepsy beforehand. Less extreme measures include sensory deprivation apparatus, certain forms of autism, and a delicate balance on the knife edge of stimulant abuse and sleep-deprivation. Right now, he was caught in an experiential loop. Over and over again, he witnessed his hand murdering a mutant angel hidden in a nest of blind eyes watching inwards. After a subjective eternity, each echo halving in length, his half-brain affected by the basilisk slowly returned to sanity. Coolant from the AI core had drained out of the shell and left the floor thick with blood-warm goo. He opened his terminal and clicked a check-box. The nature of these kinds of hallucinatory basilisks meant he was never *really* sure he was back in reality, but the box remained checked no matter how many times he looked at it. With his supplies greatly reduced (completely out of ammo, no surprise), it was time for him to return to the Cradle. Hopefully, they would give him enough down time for him to actually come down. "Sauce packets?" "Intact ones only. And no Mickey Dee's. Fuck them." "You eat vintage sauce packets?" "Eat them? What? Hell no." "Then..." "I collect them." Of course. In addition to the usual riff-raff out in the Dequarantined Zones were the trainspotters, the philatelists, the birdwatchers. Operators would run across all kinds of crap from the Before Times v.7.0, and sometimes there would be geeks near enough by that collected that kind of crap that a little barter network had sprung up. Maybe this guy wanted old ketchup packets from some extinct franchise, but then another guy only collects dimes because he wants dimes for every single year that they existed. But maybe you have some dimes but the dime guy is too far out of your route to bother with. So, you trade dimes at a discount to the ketchup packet guy who then trades them via other operators to the dime guy for exotic sauce packets from DQZ's over the horizon. He thought he heard a threatening noise and was making for cover when the subsonic bolt from the drone splattered his brains across the rock. His instincts had been correct, but this drone was just too fast for human reflexes. It was heavily shielded, so his EMF scanners did not pick it up in time for him to retreat. By the time I happened upon the site, the drone had fully discharged its battery, its solar cells covered by deadfall. I made double sure it was truly dead. I found his log on the dessicated remains in a weathered nylon backpack. It was a dark blue, but the sun bleached it until it matched the sky. It was a physical log that took me some time back in the hub to decipher. No encryption. Bad hand writing and the damp. I redacted some parts and rewrote some other parts to make him more heroic. I uploaded it to the subnet. I hope someone else finds it. I turned off his terminal. My terminal now displayed "98 operators typing...".