Earlier that day....
After Nova ejected everyone from the meeting room when Aron’s upgrade began, the group naturally broke up and went in their own directions to handle the business of the empires; whether it be Aron’s political empire or his business empire, both required someone at the helm at all times.
The AIs had headed back to their gathering point and work area, a nondescript office in the virtual version of the Cube on Avalon Island. While they could work anywhere, and they didn’t really even need a physical representation of themselves or the space around them, they truly wanted to know what it was to be human. Thus, they acted like them whenever possible, and keeping an active office space was a part of that.
[I keep thinking that something weird is happening, but I can’t quite figure it out at the moment. Sister, please tell me what you think.] Nyx waved her hand and the office they were in broke apart, then rapidly reconfigured itself into the library representation of the Akashic Record.
The library had grown extensively over the past few days, and now it stretched out seemingly endlessly, with bookshelves stretching out into the distance to a point where they all seemed to converge, and reaching up to the virtual heavens until they couldn’t be seen anymore. Over seven billion books were contained on those shelves, and each book was accompanied by a tiny, inch-high pucks with dragonfly wings on their backs. Every now and then, one of the pucks would pull down the book they were responsible for and write in it with a goose-feather quill, then replace it on the shelf in its spot.
[What’s happening? Tell me about it,] Gaia replied. When it came to collecting intelligence and compiling it, she knew that Nyx was the absolute best. Her heuristic algorithms could produce leaps of logic that were nearly identical to those of a human’s “gut instinct”.
[We have seven billion people scanned, leaving only a couple hundred million without brain data in the Akashic Record. Of those seven billion, nearly six billion have already applied for imperial citizenship and registered their IDs.] As Nyx spoke, the library reconfigured itself. When she mentioned the numbers, the bookshelves rearranged themselves to show the specific categories she was talking about; for instance, when she mentioned the brain data that wasn’t included in the record, all of the empty bookshelves moved to the forefront.
[So the travel logs should account for that same ratio. Six out of seven passengers on mass transportation, such as airplanes, trains, and buses, should have imperial IDs. But that’s not the ratio I’m seeing. Instead, I’m seeing three out of every seven passengers with imperial IDs and the rest claiming they haven’t accessed VR yet, so don’t have an imperial ID,] Nyx said.
[Let’s go through the raw data together and see if we can figure it out,] Gaia suggested.
Nyx made a throwing motion toward Gaia and “threw” her the raw data the spymistress had been worrying at. [Here’s what I’m talking about. As you can see, as soon as martial law was lifted, there was a drastic uptick in people traveling. That’s point number one. Point number two is that there’s an abnormal number of people traveling on old government-issued IDs. And point number three is that there are only a few people traveling on old IDs in each plane, train, and bus, so there’s one or two people on this flight,] she pointed at a flight from O’Hare Airport to Dulles International Airport, [one person on this train, two people on this bus....] Nyx continued pointing out abnormal data points one after another.
Taken individually, they were all explainable. For instance, the uptick in travel could be explained by people visiting their families for the holidays and getting caught up in martial law and forbidden from traveling home until it was lifted. People without imperial IDs might have just not gotten around to it, or perhaps they hadn’t received their VR hardware yet. And the odd distribution could have just been pure chance. Point by point, everything seemed reasonable, but taken altogether, it was certainly a bothersome trend.
Gaia thought for a long time, figuratively speaking, and agreed with Nyx that something weird was going on. But just like the petite spymistress, she couldn’t figure it out either. And with Nova’s attention focused on Aron, it fell to his plenipotentiary representative, Gaia, to make the call. And make the call she did.
She first raised the internal alert level to yellow and called for Minerva.
[Here, boss,] Minerva said.
[Warn the police forces that there’s something fishy going on. Have them investigate the data that Nyx brought up and apply their human ‘guts’ to the problem.]
[On it,] Minerva said.
[Athena,] Gaia called out.
[Yes, ma’am?] the head of ARES responded.
[Raise the threatcon to condition yellow and have ARES on standby. Cancel advanced training and start issuing gear to all the new recruits in meatspace and put them on two hour watch rotations. Hopefully, this is just a false alarm, but it’s better to be prepared than be caught unprepared,] Gaia ordered.
[Yes, ma’am!] Athena saluted, then teleported to ARES central command to delegate tasks to Aeolus and Poseidon.
The AIs were doing their best to face an enemy that perfectly countered them: “the Unknown”. Their father, the pillar of their very existence itself, was currently out of commission and they were on their own. It was a very nerve-wracking, yet exciting moment for them. If they managed to handle the situation perfectly without his input or orders, they all felt that they could be proud of having proved themselves. But if they failed, it would show that they weren’t as prepared to venture out and face the world on their own. And none of them wanted to disappoint Aron, as they desperately strove for his trust and attention at all times.
......
Burj Khalifa, UAE.
When the truck driver collapsed to the ground, it only took a minute or two for a bystander to notice his collapse and call an ambulance for him. Ten minutes later, the ambulance arrived and the paramedic declared the truck driver dead on arrival. They called the police to take the big rig that was blocking the ramp to the underground loading dock and the coroner to collect the body.
The police arrived first and began inspecting the jackknifed truck. They cut the lock off the doors on the back of the trailer and pulled them open. The first officer to look in went pale in the face and weak in the knees at what he saw.
“Shi—” he began, but the word was destined to remain incomplete forever as the many tons of military-grade explosives in the trailer detonated, taking out two-thirds of the load-bearing support structure beneath the towering Burj Khalifa.
And just like a tree being felled by a lumberjack, the tower tilted to the side. The tilt was slow, at first, but picked up speed as the 828-meter-tall tower fell past a certain point until it unstoppably fell toward the Dubai Mall and the hundreds of thousands of people contained within.
......
In the air somewhere over Virginia aboard a passenger flight headed to Dulles International Airport.
A young, well-built man stood up from his seat and reached above himself, pulling his backpack out of the overhead baggage compartment. He placed it on his seat and unzipped it and a smile crossed his face as he checked the contents within. He reached into the bag and pulled out a silver cylinder with a red button on it, then zipped it up and put it on his back.
Holding the cylinder in his hand, he made his way to the flight attendants’ station, where he checked his watch, then picked up the handset they used to communicate with the entire flight with his other hand. He raised it to his head as if it was a regular phone and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for disturbing you, but there’s something you need to be informed of.” The smile on his face grew bigger and brighter. “There is a bomb on this plane, and the detonator is in my hand. It’s a deadman’s switch, too,” he pressed the button and held it down, “So as soon as I let go of this button, we’ll all become martyrs and meet our maker.
“But do not be afraid, because your sacrifice is noble and necessary. There is a devil in this world, and we must defeat him. He cannot be allowed to win! So please, take a moment of silence before we all head out to our final destination.” He bowed his head and closed his eyes.
A passenger in first class saw that the terrorist was distracted and leapt at him. But he miscalculated his angle of attack and, instead of grabbing the detonator in the young man’s hand, he grabbed his wrist instead and the terrorist lost his grip on the detonator.
Everyone on the plane watched as the silver cylinder fell from the young man’s grip, then the fateful soft sound of a click rang out, becoming the last thing those passengers heard as the plane itself became a fireball and fell from the sky.
