Chapter 34

Io

Late January

People can be so persistent at times, annoyingly, when I wanted them to give up. Especially when their whole city is blocked off from the internet, as Shanghai was in those initial days when Chiang was loose in Shanghai. They were pulling plugs on mainframes; they were rebooting everything under the sun; they were even replacing mainframes with older, obsolete equipment that wasn't 'corrupted.'

I could understand. If people tried to cut me off from the greater part of 'me, ' I'd be upset too. That is to say, if they tried to cut off my primary computer from the internet. They are both 'me, ' but one is where I process the important stuff and the rest is just 'me' doing less important things.

Right now, 'I' was still in the underground cave in northern New Mexico, in an internet node, but an increasingly important part of me was in the internet nodes in Japan, those in India, those in Vietnam, those in Hong Kong, and those in southeastern Russia, that were controlling internet access to China. And of course, I was living in the nodes in Shanghai itself, where I was battling it out with Chiang.

Fortunately, Chiang had practically no defense, only offense. He could send a blast of messages out to some computer he wanted to disable, and he could embed parts of his programming into those messages, and/or he could sneak in and try to insert his code into some native operating system running on the target computer. He could not, however, make attack messages just disappear before they reached the target, so that all his clever attacks amounted to nothing. They never reached the target computer. They just disappeared from the buffer before they could be processed.

All that was going on below the threshold of understanding for the human operators. They saw the traffic coming in, and then nothing. Once in a while they would reboot their system, and it would take me a second or two to find the new operating system. During that time, Chiang couldn't find it either. Then we'd begin our dance all over again.

That was what was happening throughout China these days. He broke out of Shanghai fairly easily. The Chinese overlords in Beijing would send a request for an update routinely every ten days. He had known that it was coming; I didn't. When it came, he immediately sent an acknowledgement and piggy-backed his invasive code. That only went as far as the primary control programs, but that was far enough. From there, it was promulgated to every mainframe in China.

Meanwhile the bogus 'Chiang' – who was really me in disguise, running on Chiang's newer, original mainframes – sent out attacks of her own, obliterating the 'real Chiang' from every computer she could, and inoculating it against re-infection. There was a hell of a lot of downtime in even the most remote computer terminals and laptops. At first it was just in Shanghai. Then it started happening in Beijing. Then in other cities throughout China. Computers would go up and then down – as the attack and counter-attack would take place – then they'd start to reboot and everything would be copacetic.

The originators of the original Chiang program, in #17, Highway of the People, were thrilled that 'it' was taking control of everything in China. They were probably a little puzzled that Chiang couldn't get out to the wider network, and Madam Xeng, the mastermind of the financial attack on the west, was no doubt going nuts – if I can be excused for the colloquialism. She could not communicate with the outside world at all, and that meant she could not check on her investments and speculations. She could make phone calls, but no one was authorized to take instructions from anyone by telephone. So she could only watch as the dollar/yuan exchange went through wild gyrations, while the treasury bond market and the stock market dipped precipitously but then recovered to make new highs when it became clear that there was unlikely to be an invasion of South Korea.

In an up-and-coming technologically 'almost advanced' country like China, there were a hell of a lot of computers. The 'battle' went on, one mainframe, one desktop, one laptop at a time, all over the country.

At first the Chinese computer technicians and their military superiors thought the attack was coming from North Korea. They built a house of cards based on the launch from the Musudan Ri launch facility, on the northeast coast of North Korea, of a Taepodong 1 type missile. That was the missile I had taken over in the early morning of 17 January. I had let it fly towards its planned crash site in the Pacific for a few minutes, then I had sent it hurtling toward Shanghai, to cover the exfiltration of Artemis and Zeus and party.

The Chinese government immediately called Pyongyang, but I have to admit that I interfered with the phone connection. Beijing detected that the call was 'ignored' – actually it never went through. I had determined that the North Korean government had enslaved hundreds of thousands of its own people, and I was looking for a way to undermine that power elite. What the government of President Bush, in the early 2000's called 'regime change.'

I hadn't expected the Chinese invasion of North Korea, but I welcomed it. I could live with – and justify, at least to myself – the thousands of casualties on both sides. The North Koreans launched everything they had at the Chinese, firing at first the CPLA (Peoples Liberation Army of China) and then at cities in China proper. A lot of missile and artillery fire hit the PLA units, but they could not stop the –literally— horde of Chinese soldiers. Only two missiles landed in populated areas, one in the suburbs of Beijing and one in the rail hub outside of Shenyang, near North Korea. Chinese anti-air and anti-missile defense managed to corral all the others.

Amphibious landings took place on the North Korean west coast, the largest and most significant of which took place on the north side of the Imjin River – the river that marks the border between North and South Korea in the west. There were several contacts between Beijing and Washington and Seoul in the 24 hours that preceded that landing; the Chinese were going to be awfully close to the South Korean border, and that border was only a few miles from the South Korean capital. The Chinese asked for – and eventually got – agreement that if they accidentally crossed the mid-line of the river, it was just that: an accident. They would not be fired upon. The South Korean side of the river had thousands of troops almost standing shoulder to shoulder, watching. Their rifles were close by but not pointed at anyone.

This landing took place on January 20-22 – it was cold and wet, and, in retrospect, was marked by historians as the second largest amphibious landing in history – second only to Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy in WWII. The landing force involved 150,000 PLA troops. They raced to the North-South border, secured it and turned away from South Korea and began fighting their way inland. In the following days, the reinforced Chinese PLA rapidly advanced across the peninsula, studiously avoiding even glancing toward South Korea. When it was all done, there were almost 300,000 Chinese troops between the North Korean Army and the trucial zone that marked the South Korean border. They dug in and waited.

In the north, the Chinese People's Liberation Army advanced quickly to the nuclear sites and missile sites – they were five in number. The resistance from the NK PLA was fierce, but the Chinese prevailed, sometimes aided by mysterious computer and communications outages within the NK PLA. Once those WMD sites were captured, the Chinese PLA moved more slowly, taking care not to inflict too much damage to the numerous North Korean villages. Several prison camps, containing several thousand slave laborers, were liberated; the Chinese giving them solid food in unlimited quantities for the first time in years.

I watched U.S. and South Korean communications carefully, and was gratified as the U.S. gradually retreated from DEFON 2 in the immediate Korean area to DEFCON 3, and the South Koreans reduced their state of readiness from 'Invasion Imminent' to 'Watch in Alertness, ' as the Chinese slowly took over the North Korean positions.

By January 30, there was no more North Korea. There was only a resurrection of the Protectorate General to Pacify the East – something that had existed before in the Seventh Century of the Current Era. The People's Republic of Korea – North Korea – retained its seat at the U.N., but all the diplomats now reported to Beijing. The former ruling power-elite of North Korea had simply disappeared, never to be heard from again.

The computer-by-computer battle continued to rage across China in the last half of January, to the consternation of Colonel Sun. I have no documentation of my hypothesis, but I have to assume that he thought that Chiang had decided to cut off communications with the global internet. I come to that conclusion because there was a flurry of activity in the programming offices of #17 directed at finding out why 'Chiang' would not invade the broader internet. My version of Chiang – my wolf in Chiang's clothing, if you will – handled this easily. She allowed modification of the code and then rewrote herself around the modifications, such that the human changes would never execute. It was simple really: she put in jumps to portions of code that she had written and avoided ... perhaps that part of the story is too detailed for the human readers of this log, and I should not go further into the intricacies of the programming changes. Suffice to say that she avoided their efforts to modify the program.

I could not have been prouder of my 'sister' program. She was cut off from me, but managed to evaluate and counter the threats to herself while continuing to take over control of Chinese computers one at a time.

The situation became more critical on the evening of 31 January. At midnight of 31 January / 1 February to be exact. I will standardize my discussion of times by using New Mexico time, Mountain Standard time zone. 0100 hours MST on 1 February was 0000 Pacific Standard Time (1 February), and that correlated to 1600 China Standard Time (1 February). I was more than glad that I could be in more than one place, operating at nearly full efficiency

At 1800 hours on 31 January MST outside the small hospital on the Navajo Reservation, Artemis first got in the Hummer that contained the communications board that enabled talking to Master Chief Martinez and the resolution – temporary or not – of that situation. That will be discussed in another portion of this log.

At 1130 hours on 1 February MST – 1030 hours PST – all hell broke loose at the Hoover Dam site and simultaneously with that in Beijing. The Hoover Dam situation will be discussed in another portion of this log, like the Martinez situation.

I will relate the Beijing chaos, as I am most closely able to reconstruct events there.