UNKNOWN DESTINIES – VOLUME 1

Edited by Fiction4All

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

What Bot Invaders? (Geoff Nelder)

Clickety Clackety (Wynelda Ann Deaver)

Dog Days (Carl Hughes)

Lucifer and the Large Hadron Collider (Ian McKinley)

Ninja Kitty (Jackk N. Killington)

Flotsam (Liam A Spinage)

Steel Velvet (Rie Sheridan Rose)

Death in the Dust (Rie Sheridan Rose)

Home by Sunset (Rie Sheridan Rose)

Ego Trip (Marise Morland)

Buttoned Up (Marise Morland)

Pursuit (Marise Morland)

I’m in Charge (Marise Morland)

Sustenance (Marise Morland)

Roxette (Marise Morland)

Crowning Achievement (Marise Morland)

Caballo Chronicles: The Nocturnals vs. The Boondockers (Chris Rodriguez)

Chico on the Floor (Rickey Rivers Jr.)

Poster Girl (Liam A Spinage)

The Orbe Below (Geoff Nelder)

Doppler Effect (Geoff Nelder)

What Bot Invaders? (Geoff Nelder)

Leanne’s resumption of consciousness drove her dream ever faster into forgetfulness. Her eyes opened slowly, inviting the question why was it so light? Had they left the bedroom light on? Ye Gods, it was daylight and too much of it! She kicked the duvet off the bed.

“Jon, wake up, we’ve overslept. We have to get Amanda to school, her SATs start today.”

He growled, scratched his nether regions, and reached for the cup of cold, half-drunk drinking chocolate. “Hey, Lee, you’re the electrician, didn’t you set that new alarm clock last night?”

She reached for her grass-green Sigma Electrics coverall. “I did and it’s five to nine. You’ll have to get her to school while I dash to work.”

Outside she was still gargling mint Listerine because her Smaart toothbrush vibrated so fast her skull rattled and she had to abandon it. What was going on? Now her car door wouldn’t open obliging her to use the manual key. “What the hell, Jon?” she yelled even though he should be inside the house, urging their daughter into her school uniform.

The stench of stale Doritos was bad enough but to leave such detritus on the driving seat… ugh. At least the hybrid’s dashboard lit up and the engine hummed when she pressed the starter. Her relief didn’t last more than a few seconds when the vehicle put itself into reverse. Luckily, the foot brake overrode the not-so Smaart e-car’s autonomous controls before she made a hole in the garage door.

She tapped at the control screen to turn off all the computerised aspects of the drive although it wasn’t possible to disengage every electronic or actuated component in a modern vehicle. At least she could drive the thing and get to work using one, mostly screaming gear.

Four miles later she pulled up at the building site, noting hers was the only car although several bicycles and a skateboard leant against the canteen wall.

Three men uniformly dressed in tan cowboy-boots, grey hoodies and blue jeans sat on a tatty, old sofa in the corner all leaning forward watching a TV. Leanne made herself a coffee and joined them.

“Hey, guys, any of you had trouble—”

Col, the foreman, interrupted her. “The whole world has, Lee. Electronics have gone berserk.”

Nev, a Jamaican fitter, said, “Wife says it’s the rise of the machines like Vernor Vinge says in his Technological Singularity, but she reads too much sci-fi. Makes her paranoid. I told her—”

“Strange though,” Col butted in. “My own Smaart TV wouldn’t come on at first and then it came on, off, on, off in sync with our electric fire. Too hot an’ all. Neither would stop till I yanked the plugs out. I was glad to get out of there. Then me car wouldn’t start. You’re our leccy, Lee, what’s going on. A massive solar flare? An Electromagnetic Pulse from a Ruski space station?”

Leanne sniffed at her Italian Rich Blend coffee then fished out a couple of strands of her auburn hair normally kept back by a band and hard hat. “Can’t be an EMP, can it?”

“Why not?”

She pointed at the TV. “’Cos that’s working—it’s not steam-powered.”

Colin scratched his head making Leanne wonder if that’s why he was now bald. “Our Ring doorbell played up dead early, too. Kept ringing even though no one was there, then didn’t ring when the postman tried it. Left a parcel to get wet on the doorstep.”

Nev pointed at the TV showing an all-electric bus taking its passengers, screaming, into a canal with the driver running after it. “No one’s going to trust any electrics after today, whatever’s causing it. There, I’m taking off my new Fitbit before it decides to stop my heart beating instead of just measuring it. Oh my God, should I remove my mini-med insulin pump? It could kill me if it wanted to!”

They all looked at him. “Good point,” Col said, “but can’t you switch it off with an app?”

“But that’s electronic too,” Leanne said. “And it’ll be the same for anything with programmable semiconductors. The new pacemakers, e-mood enhancers, cochlear implants, remote-controlled sex toys—oops.”

“The list is endless but how is it happening?” Colin said, “The government will have to convene another Disaster Emergency Committee.”

“And they’ll take years and millions in expenses to come up with no answers,” Nev said, pointing again at the box, this time showing a robotic lawnmower chasing pensioners around a park.

Col stood, finished off his mug of coffee and coughed. “We’d better get on with this retirement complex before the project manager finds us gawping at TV.”

Leanne stood too and walked to a bench where her tool belt waited. “Now then which tools can we trust not to turn on us?”

Nev laughed. I’m glad mine are just hammers, chisels and saws. Hang on, my drivers and drills are electric.”

Fearing the worst, Leanne set to installing the latest heat pumps and boilers. Suppose whatever was causing the electronic malfunctions affected all the equipment she’d just fitted? As it happened, they appeared to be working properly via the remote sensor and app. The AI component she was reluctant to activate, worked beautifully, but she worried.

Back to the canteen for lunch. Peanut butter and sliced tomato sandwiches—her favourite, thank you, hubby Jon.

She wondered if the kettle would behave as it should and it did. Who wanted AI in kettles anyway? Some genius decided commuters would want their tea as soon as they arrived home so the kettle knew the time and so turned itself on if it had enough water. It knew—somehow—whether its owner wanted tea or coffee. Tea shouldn’t be steeped above 85 degrees Celsius. Instant coffee to be at spot on 80, not boiling like your granny did them. The clever kettle would know which of its owners would be first through the door—from GPS location pinging their mobile phones—and reroute the heating, if necessary, to their barista coffee maker instead. She wondered if the machines could turn against their ‘masters’ overcook the beverages or learn how to make them toxic.

“Hey,” Nev yelled and giggled simultaneously, “Everything’s working now. Said on the radio. Must’ve been a glitch in the ether. Haha.”

Um. Leanne knew of spikes and frequency faults that could make electronics misbehave but not globally and simultaneously.

Two weeks passed with no further problems at work or on the news. Leanne worried though that her career could shudder to a halt if it happened again and was astonished that Jon and the media didn’t worry too.

Computer studies was her forte at college and it came in handy for her job. At home she pulled out one of the under-bed drawers, and dug out a laptop she’d not used for two years. No Windows on this baby. She plugged in a USB dongle before switching it on so that the Operating System booted up from it and displayed a closed Linux distro she and a few dark-web friends created a while ago for pirate apps.

She sent a private message to her former hacker friends.

‘say Gan*g. Le& here. looking into the weird stuff on the 12^th. anyone found oddities?’

While she waited for a reply, she hacked into the downloaded code of her own Smaart car that had gone wrong that day but was apparently fine now. The machine code filled the screen while she plugged in another monitor for her own programming. Out of habit, she had downloaded the original coding for the vehicle when she’d bought it, as she had for all her devices. She ran a subroutine to find any differences between the car system coding then and now.

There! In moments several lines blinked in red at her. While she frowned at the bizarre coding, a ping announced one of her hacking gang had sent a reply.

‘hey Le&. you’re slow, some of us isolated what seems to be corrupt lines last week. sending a screen dump of it. don’t try and run the code, it might unhinge God-knows-what. Ka%’

“yeah, Ka%, i've been busy. some of us have proper jobs you know. same anomaly as in my Smaart e-car. not looked for it elsewhere. you?’

‘everything we examined, so far. what you rekon? global glitch from a solar flare or like?’

‘dunno. north koreans maybe? some of their red-star linux bots are similar.’

‘it’s like the kind of bots used in malware to infect computers and devices but Mik3 tried the code on an isolated laptop using a north korean OS and it fell flat—error messages galore. we were hoping you’d log in cos you’ve contacts at GCHQ ain’t you? they must have solved this mystery and if they’ve not maybe they could use what we know to stop it happening again.’

Leanne had to think. Yes, a former boyfriend now worked at the radio section in Cheltenham but could she trust him to keep any contact anonymous?

‘i do but maybe hold fire. we’re a secret group. hell, we’ve not even met face-to-face. we have to ensure any message we send to my contact can’t be traced back to us.’

‘no probs. set up a false IP trail. we can make it look like it’s come from the king. ha, I like that. anyhow, why can’t you just phone him and tell him that you worked it out yourself. he knows you’re sharper than razor wire, don’t he?’

‘but so’s he. he’s not much into coding but his colleagues have to be so they’re bound to know what we do. leave it a while, Ka%. back in touch tomoz when i've done more searches.’

‘just a mo, Le&, tune into al jezeera. fuck, its happening. reports of malfunction airplanes, not just kettles and cars this time and from countries that sat on it officially like russia and iran. think now we should send what we know to your pal before everyone in the world either goes mad?’

She deleted the errant code from the operating system but when she rebooted, it was back. Reinfected from other boot-up files. It would take a complete scan to find every instance of the bot code and delete them all before rebooting. If it was a normal hacker’s bot she could write a patch to nullify it but it wasn’t. She tried to do that, rebooted, and it was back. Grrr.

***

It took an hour before she sent a visual of their discovered bot—if that’s what it was—to Steve, her ex: narcissistic, hunky, egoistic, charming, womanising, handsome, sickeningly-correct boyfriend and while insufferable, the only contact she had at GCHQ. She didn’t need to sign the message and she did the trick of rerouting it via numerous encrypted servers. Thing is, would Steve remember that she was into coding? It was while they were students. A lot of women and prosecco has passed under the bridge since then. He’d probably just pass it on to the relevant department. His speciality was installing listening posts on sensitive borders. Just as she pressed Send her lights went out. Could just be a fuse…

It wasn’t. Every light in Clacton took a hike, maybe all of Essex, Britain, Earth. Although they all came back on an hour later. No explanation from the Energy Minister or anyone. Just light circuits were involved though. How was that possible? She chewed at a braid of her red hair while searching her brain for what smart tech was involved in domestic lighting? The consumer unit was new and did have a circuit board and was linked to AI-involved units in the house but not every residence had up-to-date equipment. The bot infections must be further up the distribution line even to the power stations, transmission lines, substations and smart voltage boosters.

Later that evening both of Leanne’s smart televisions lost their screen images to a white blank screen for three minutes, followed by animated wavy black and white lines inducing reactions on social media and radio worldwide from annoyance and anger to epileptic seizures.

“With no TV and my phone on the blink, are we going to the pub or an early night?” Jon said while standing in the gloom of their lounge lit by a flickering screen and the orange street light streaking in through their first-floor flat window.

“You go, I need to try something.”

“Lee, you’re not downloading those bot things are you? Thought you’d left that life behind.”

“Just to see if the corrupt code has changed since last time. I’ll see you down the Horse in half an hour. Tops.”

He opened the door. “I might be back if the pub can’t pull any pints. They’d soon run out of bottles.”

Leanne waved at him and continued on her laptop. It wasn’t connected to the web and its non-standard operating system appeared to be immune from the bot infecting other devices. She’d taken apart her neighbour’s drone that’d stopped working and downloaded its operating system onto a memory stick, now plugged into her laptop. The machine code appeared on screen. To most it’d look like random letters and numbers but to experienced programmers, certain patterns emerge. Again she ran a search subroutine and the anomalous code showed in red. Unchanged from the first cases. She was about to message Ka% when an almighty crash and a yell of, “Freeze!” made her jump.

She just managed to press F12, a key that triggered a macro that would wipe and burn her laptop’s memory, including the dongle, before a taser sent her quivering, falling off her chair to the floor.