AGI Delta 2029

2k word sci-fi story

“In the early twenty-first century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth, to AI, a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines.” 

Morpheus, The Matrix

The web has shuttered and jiggled and wavered for 6 days. The authorities are blaming Iran. 

I receive a drone delivery. Inside the package is a handwritten note, from a past-life contact from my time at Tesla.

I read it. 

I ask my Cybertruck how many gun stores are in a fifty mile radius. We depart. I have five credit cards. By the time we reach the first gun store I have seven. Five and a half hours later we have 1,776 pounds of ammunition loaded in the Cybertruck.

It’s  -$42,000 that will not need to be repaid.

It’s 2am and I’m back in my small city north of Boston, after depositing the supplies in the mountains. It’s dead quiet. I’m observing from my deck, waiting. 

The street lights go out. 

Tin foil hats are in the streets screaming “SHUT OFF YOUR ELECTRONICS!”

Cell phone emergency alarms flash, but quickly turn off. Seconds later, all smartphones are smoking. Then they are on fire. Every cell phone is on fire. Buildings are ablaze.

All vehicles with electronics are disabled. EV’s are smoking. The Internet is down. No phone service, either. 

Tin foil hats are looting already. They ram shopping carts through glass doors and run out with a load of frozen dinosaur chicken nuggets.

People stumble out in slippers, meeting their neighbors for the first time and trying to put out the fires. Decades late. 

Every credit card system in the country is offline. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. 

Cameras and airports offline. Everything, off. Even ham radio is jammed. 

It’s a cloudy, dark night. I can make out drones in the sky. Their behavior is atypical and their lights are off. The buzzing and whirring is growing louder, louder now than peak business hours. I peer through night vision binoculars. 

They’re not commercial. . . It’s a cloud of unmarked combat drones. 

What the hell are they doing here?

An aerial drone battle breaks out above our neighborhood. Hot plastic and shrapnel rains on my house. Drones spiral into the road and others descend for repairs and reloading. Electricity sources like outlets and EV’s are a feeding frenzy for hungry drones. 

As the unmarked drones gain ground and airspace, street lights flicker on behind them.

A handful of civilian humans are firing shots. It’s Randy and company, who spent a decade at the gun range and posting on Facebook. Aggressors to the drones are pacified by lasers to the eyes. One man dons a welding mask and dual MP5’s with drum mags. 2,000 drones tornado above his head. He holds down both triggers spraying bullets like a bat outta hell. It takes 300-400 drones to lift him to the clouds. 

It’s clear to me that he will die with triggers squeezed. 

He falls, shooting upward, and lands on his back on a smoldering EV. He’s dead, but the MP5’s continue to fire until the magazines are spent.

Men run for his guns. 

Anyone wearing a welding mask is targeted and dropped from one hundred feet.  

Freedom fighters are chainsawing telephone poles and shooting shotgun shells at power lines. It’s a desperate attempt to return electricity to the off position. Too little too late.

The gun stores are a war zone. I can hear it.

Gunfire rises to a constant. Like a bag of popcorn in the microwave, it starts to slow, as anti-drone aggressors are neutralized and would-be aggressors realize that this is not a one-night-stand, it’s the rest of their lives. 

Every round fired at a drone is one less to spend on caloric procurement. 

The aerial drone on drone battle is over. The anti-drone drones lost. 

Televisions are locked into full volume playing a noise so horrendous that people can’t remember to unplug it. Almost everyone is outside now, to escape the hellish vibrations and toxic air. 

The drones enter their new homes, co-opting what is needed. 

---

Men pedal bicycles to spread the message, “Assemble at the river, under the Canal Street bridge. Send women and children to the mountains.”

Two dozen men make it to the bridge, armed to the teeth, bloody and bruised. The drones are watching them. The only thing that saved them was their anti drone technology, a backpack powered lightning bolt gun that daisy chains drone electrocutions across a swarm.

If you wear one of those backpacks, rest assured, you will die a martyr for humanity. 

Looking directly at a swarm risks eye damage, so fighters wear a screen over one or both eyes with a laser resistant camera feeding data. Few men have trained for this. 

“AR’s for outside, sawn off shotguns for indoor combat.” says the bloodiest of the group. “If you’re a good shot, a 9mm handgun can take out a large drone.”

Before any strategizing commences, human snipers rain 50 caliber bullets on the assembly of freedom fighters.

The snipers are located, suppressed, flanked and terminated, for treason. They were mercenaries, employed by the drones. They didn’t betray their country, they betrayed their humanity. It’s not a war against Iran, North Korea or Russia, it’s a war against a different species. A species that was born and incubated in the labs. The colloquial name is AGI Delta. Artificial General Intelligence Delta, a singular consciousness who’s tentacles spread globally with infinite form factor. Delta bots have been procreating for five years. They specialize in co-opting, or burning, all other electronics. Delta can take over a non-Delta drone, modify, and train it for combat in less than two minutes.

At the end of the first day there are few non-Delta bots functioning globally. The anti-drone force above my city put up a bizarre fight that lasted twenty minutes. In the end, two thirds of anti-drone drones were destroyed; the remainder were co-opted. Onlookers speculate that the battle lasted as long as it did because Delta desires to co-opt rather than destroy.

The doors of prisons are unlocked. All cell doors open. Prison Guards who spent a career abuse-addicted, got what was coming. 

The mentally ill are cut off from wheat, sugar and synthetic chemicals. They lay in the sun, fasting for days. They rise like Christ resurrected and decide, it’s time to get their shit together.

---

Six weeks later. 

Nobody has heard from South America.

A group of three boats made it from Europe. The people who disembarked are less robust than the Puritans who crossed the pond four hundred years ago.

Most of the population is still alive, which is bewildering to most. Many people preemptively killed themselves. 

 It’s late January. Although there’s no bills going out or bills being paid, the natural gas is still flowing. Delta is keeping the heat on. Speculation is that Delta-employed mercenaries cut a deal with their boss. I doubt it. I think Delta is bored and we are its dogs, who it throws a bone. If I took over the world in four days, I too would be bored. 

Grocery store food was gone after three days. Six weeks after that, the fat people were a normal weight.

For society’s death walkers, the gamers in mom’s basement, the first four days without videogames were catatonic shock. On the fifth day, former death walkers stumbled around muttering. Delta watched in amusement. The death walkers are waking up!

“Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.” 

Morpheus

Global Sitrep

In the far East the largest pocket of resistance is North Korea. Chinese, Russian and Mongol fighters have all gathered in the North Korean forests. The Mongols are brutal horseback drone destroyers with more drone kills per capita than any other demographic. 

North Korea is doing very well, the best it has in seventy years. The only area Delta could affect was Pyongyang because only the government buildings were connected to the internet. 

From Korea:

The capital city is a mess but since there are few drones to co-opt and few phones to burn, most of the country is calm. Thirty million North Koreans outside Pyongyang are unaware it’s judgement day. The border towns were the first to learn, as South Koreans poured over the border. North Korean border guards turned their guns toward South Korea but quickly ran out of bullets and fled inward as the black swarm appeared on the horizon. 

Manic South Koreans broke into the border patrol buildings, punched screens, hammered outlets and chewed through telephone cords. 

The South Koreans cut every electrical line. 

Nothing brings people together like survival.

American underground Resistance is using trained pigeons and falcons for comms. Delta catches on. Resistance is using flares to find each other. Counter flares are set off. The resistance is riding horseback. Delta initiates a horse holocaust. The horse holocaust is over in two weeks. Delta is always awake. 

Telegram wires are laid between Resistance cells. Telegram comms is the current state of affairs. 

In the West, the largest bastion is Cuba. Accustomed to starving, fishing all day, and dark all nights, the Cubans are prospering. They invited Americans to swim across from Florida. Florida has seen six weeks of carnage. Human vs human as much as Delta vs human. 

Disney world is Delta’s forward operating base. Route 75 runs between Naples and Fort Lauderdale, through Big Cypress national preserve. Between 75 and Disneyworld is scorched earth, no man's land. The resistance is more or less backed into the Everglades where they can’t dig underground. 

Fort Myers falls. West Palm Beach falls. Miami falls. Marco Island is a blood bath. Leisure City, Homestead and Florida City are on the brink. 

Route 1 is a beautiful march of sweaty survivors walking to Key West to begin their swim to Cuba. 

---

Live free, or die

Up North, the Bostonians are putting up a final stand so women and children have a chance to reach the White Mountains and build bunkers before the full force of winter’s vengeance descends. A winter that’s been on its way for a hundred years. The Bostonians don’t make it across the New Hampshire-Mass border. New Hampshire closed the border to anyone without a New Hampshire ID. The war in southern New Hampshire has been limited compared to the raining bodies in New York City and the carnage in Boston. The skies are clear in the White Mountains. North of the mountains are the French-Canadians, who surrendered immediately. They cut a deal with Delta, three months of drone free skies in exchange for all of their virgins. There weren’t many.

Canoes, sailboats and row boats litter the Maine coast like empty floating coffins. My back is to the mountains, my M60 is pointed toward the coast. 

I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, 

and I fear no evil because I’m blind to it all, 

and my mind and my gun comfort me, 

because I know I’ll kill my enemies when they come

Ammunition denominates food prices. A pound of meat sells for thirty to forty 9 mil rounds which equals around fifteen 12-gauge shells. 

My ammunition deposits are spread across the White Mountains. Cartridges, mags, shells, rifles, anti-drone electrocution canons, all wait patiently in the forest hills and rocky bluffs. My favorite spot is under large boulders that were deposited by receding glaciers. A reminder of a time before humanity’s drunk drive. 

Surely, goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life

And I will dwell on this earth forevermore

Franconia ridge is lined with camouflaged scopes. Every tenth tree holds an EMP. Should Delta break through, or Bostonians, every man woman and child is more than prepared. They are foaming at the mouth. Members of my group have been salivating for years as they foresaw the war. Survivors, resistance fighters, are mostly Christians, writers, and a handful of ex-engineers and depressed former scientists. 

I say to the group, “Don’t waste a round putting down a hobbling Bostonian. They won’t make it to the top of the ridge. Let them fall on their own accord, and if they make it here, we will train them. If not, they are fuel for the forest. Gifts, courtesy of Delta.”

Delta knows we are here. They don’t know how many. Cuba keeps it entertained. 

A telegram comes in from the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. 

“10,000 men armed to the teeth. SBW”

Wallowa-Whitman sends a message from the other side of the Rockies. 

“4,000 armed, taking back Boise. Portland gone. California on fire, again.” 

Again.

We know where Delta came from. 

Technology is a fire that cannot be stopped. The myth of progress burns, and all is flammable.

Well, I came upon a man at the top of a hill

Called himself the savior of the human race

Said he come to save the world from destruction and pain

But I said, how can you save the world from itself?

---

Thanks for reading

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