World's Worst Day Ever Read online

  World’s Worst Day Ever

  By Jeff Morris

  With Craig Martelle & Michael Anderle

  Craig Martelle Social

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  (Go 1/2 way down his first page, the box is in the center!)

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  Technical Study – the World’s Worst Day Ever

  [Sometime in the future]

  3-Years to Apocalypse

  Archangel lifts from Japan from the Fukuoka area, heading West-Northwest over the East China Sea, avoiding the South Korean ADIZ (Air Defense Intercept Zone) to the north and a reported American carrier task force in the western Pacific.

  Unknown to the crew, lurking near Guam was a USN Ohio-class SSBN (nuclear ballistic-missile submarine), waiting for Archangel to leave Japan. Using electro-optic sensors from American bases and intelligence assets in Japan to locate and track the target, the boomer launches a single D5 Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) towards the west.

  The D5 missile, carrying 10 multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) loaded with W76 thermonuclear weapons, was set to detonate the warheads shortly after MIRV separation, intending to catch the Archangel when she was just above the atmosphere. As with most military plans, everything fell apart almost as soon as there was contact with the ‘enemy’.

  The US military has grossly underestimated the capabilities of the Archangel, at least in defensive armament, and did not realize the countermeasures built into the D5’s warheads were almost completely useless against Kurtherian technology. But had the Archangel been completely Kurtherian in origin and not an amalgamation with Terran subsystems, things would have probably turned out much differently.

  The Archangel missed the submarine firing the missile, but did notice when the D5 breached the atmosphere, its thermal signature no longer masked by the thermosphere. The warheads skipped across the upper layers of the atmosphere, heading towards the ship. The Archangel responded by alerting its human crew, but humans react only so fast and defensive fire reached out at literally the last seconds. The ship’s puck-based defensive fire shredded the incoming MIRVs, and none survived intact long enough to detonate, but unfortunately for Earth, the Archangel did not use high-energy weapons for defensive purposes.

  The warheads did not detonate as the kinetic energy of the pucks shredded the weapons, but the resulting debris immediately fell into the atmosphere. The material heated up and broke apart as small particles, most of which burned in reentry. Unfortunately, the casings of the warheads were made of plutonium-240, a highly refined version in a metal form that was resistant to boiling, meaning the bomb casings turned into a particulate cloud that rained down from the upper atmosphere, into the south-westerly prevailing winds…down over the Chinese coast.

  After blowing ashore over Shanghai, the cloud slowly made its way down the coast. The particles fell from Shanghai to Hong Kong, but most landed in the Shanghai area, never in a concentration high enough to set off radiological monitors. Witnesses on the ground were entertained by the ‘meteoroid’ that passed through the sky and left a blazing trail for over 30 minutes. Down in Shanghai, a group of young school children watched the dazzling display from their playground…

  7 Months to Apocalypse

  General Li Wang Wei spent another long day in the children’s cancer ward of the Shanghai Proton and Heavy Ion Centre, listening to the machines beep and ignoring the platitudes of the doctors and nurses, trying to understand why his only son was dying. Even with advances in medical technology in China, some types of cancer were untreatable, including the one inside his son. After many attempts to treat it, the cancer had spread from his lungs to the rest of his body and nothing they had tried had worked. There were whispers the Americans had technology from aliens that would cure cancer, but none of his quiet and frantic attempts to locate such technology led to success, though he was sure the Americans in fact did have a cure and were keeping the technology from the rest of the world, just like twice-cursed Etheric Empire.

  His anger deepening as the thought about the Americans, silently cursing their existence as a blot against humanity. Few knew that General Li was in fact the commander of the People Liberation Army’s Unit 61398, the much vaunted Chinese Army’s cyber force. His command of the cyber forces gave him great access to secrets, including more than most of the Chinese ruling elite. He knew about the ill-fated American attempt to down the Archangel and the fact the American missile had been destroyed before it detonated.

  He also knew about information the Chinese government was suppressing, including the rise in cancer among the Chinese population along the eastern coast. More damning was that the Chinese government had agreed to the attack! Agreed to go along with the crazy American scheme that was now killing Chinese citizens up and down the coast…including HIS son. While the Chinese had learned dearly what going against Bethany Anne would cost, the Americans had not…the Chinese were paying that price for them. Then and there he vowed the Americans would pay for their carelessness and greed for alien technology.

  6 Months to Apocalypse

  A month later, General Li stood by the fresh grave, tears slowly dripping down his face as he looked at the new and the old graves, one for his son and one for his wife. Now a childless widower, the general’s thoughts turned to justice and vengeance. He would make the Americans pay for taking the last thing on this Earth that mattered to him and he knew just how to do it. It would take some time, but he had the weapon and even more importantly, he had the authority to access it. He walked from the cemetery, thoughts on how to circumvent the controls the army had in place to prevent accidents.

  Apocalypse Day

  Fortunately for the general, the Chinese army valued conformity and obedience within its ranks, even in the cyber force. It took less than six months and the general had placed the right people in the crucial positions: some he had suborned through coercion; some who had a grudge against the Americans; and a few willing to trade away their honor for promises of power and position. In the dark hours of the night, with a simple press of a key, the weapon was unleashed upon the Americans…but as with many genies, once out of the bottle, it gained a life of its own.

  What had the general unleashed? A small bit of code that looked as nothing so much as random noise, the garbage of the ‘Net. In reality, it was the key to Armageddon, but no one knew that yet. For decades, China had been the primary source of computer chips to the world, used in everything from digital phones to implanted medical devices to industrial control components. Even though specialized chips and central computer cores where made outside of the China, all of the other work-horse chips were made cheaply, and more importantly, not considered a threat to the devices they were in. In reality, the Chinese companies had been embedding extra circuits in those chips at the direction of the Chinese government, hidden among the millions of other pathways inside the microcircuits and capable of doing things from simple to complex. In the simplest case, those extra pathways allowed electricity to flow in ways not envisioned by the chip designers, damaging other circuits inside and outside the chip. In the most complex, those hidden circuits could execute commands within the device, giving control to outsiders or causing other mayhem.

  The small bits of code went to
hidden Internet servers in Africa, then on to targets within the US, where the damage was supposed to be contained within its borders. But the Chinese did not know everything and could not plan for every situation. The Internet is a constantly changing construct, automatically rerouting around bottlenecks and blockages to keep the information flowing. On that night, a bottleneck in Africa caused traffic to reroute through Europe rather than straight to the United States. A domain name server failed in Europe, causing backup routes to come online, redirecting some of the traffic from Africa to reroute through Asian servers, including several in China.

  The code went to the servers, multiplied and in several cases, mutated. Bit flip due to random noise occur and general error correction routines on Internet hardware fix these errors, but as this code was designed to not register as real traffic, the auto-correcting routines ignored it and failed to correct the imperfections. All it took was one copy of code to lose its ability to selectively target and then start replicating at an enormous rate, flooding servers across the Internet and being sent around the globe at light speed. Specialized devices in the Great Firewall of China, designed to keep the weapon out of the country, were flooded with millions of copies of the mutated code and did nothing to stop the weapon from entering Chinese cyber space, where billions of those same chips resided in Chinese electronics.

  The end, when it came, was fast.

  The code entered devices, activating dormant circuits, and starting countdown timers that would allow maximum dispersion of the infection. Half a day later, while network engineers were dealing with the denial of service problems caused by the replicating code, things starting failing. Whole systems crashed as telecommunication devices short-circuited and died. Medical devices stopped working, including various generations of implanted wireless-enabled devices designed to send data to doctors to monitor patient’s health. Some doctors even noticed their patients dying as the implants spiked, surged and then quit working. Mostly though, these were missed in the chaos.

  Control circuits in factories stopped working, with the machinery grinding to halt, as company internal networks died…along with the control circuits of the power grid. Substations sparked as the power grid unbalanced as whole areas fell out of the grid, causing massive surges the components could not handle. Traffic systems died, causing innumerable traffic accidents as traffic lights went haywire before dying in the power surges. Emergency systems were overloaded with people calling in to report accidents, until those systems died as well. Power generation stations were hit hard, as the circuits in those specialized controller chips caused the generators to speed up, pumping even more energy into the grid until equipment either broke down or the power grid imbalance sent feedback into the circuits, causing the generator to fry and even explode. Dams fared no better, as their specialized controllers went haywire as well, force spillways to open, then the circuits dying, leaving no way to close the gates.

  Military systems were just as affected, as most military networks were hosted on the general Internet. Mass confusion became concern, then panic as email and communication systems crashed, power failed at military posts and units could not contact higher headquarters. Ever resilient, units enacted plans to prepare for the worst, even though no one knew what was happening. Given time, maybe the military could have recovered, but it was never given that time.

  Apocalypse + 36 Hours

  No one knows who used the first one. Historians think it was either Israel or Iran. But someone either panicked or maybe thought to settle old scores during the crisis, and used a nuclear weapon in the Middle East, that much is known. Who fired the next is lost to history, as the human race tiptoed into nuclear war without even knowing it. With early warning systems compromised and command and control systems useless, the United States had no idea a sub-orbital nuclear bomb was fired at the country. Fortunately for Americans, it was a device designed to destroy electronic equipment, an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) weapon, detonated 70 miles above the center of the US. Unfortunately, the device finished those devices that escaped the code weapon. Over 90% of electronic devices in the US died that day, along with tens of thousands of US citizens.

  It was no better in most of the world, as electronic devices succumbed to compromised circuits. Ironically, the Third World was no better off than the industrialized nations. Years of importing cheap Chinese products ensured just about every electronic product in those countries was as vulnerable as the US. Widespread use of wireless, in some places the only type of Internet connection, ensure the code had maximum reach. Europe was inundated by massive flooding caused by compromised dams. Siberian power systems failed, leaving people at the mercy of winter. Desalination plants failed in the Middle East. Satellites in orbit failed, causing a global communication blackout.

  Within a day, most nothing electronic worked, either a victim of the cyber weapon or a casualty of EMP from nuclear explosions. Power was down, communication systems inoperable, and emergency systems overwhelmed. Militaries and emergency crews tried to cope, but their limited resources were quickly exhausted. Rioting and looting broke out, as people tried to take care of themselves and loved ones. Fuel quickly ran dry, with no way of replacing stocks as the few surviving transportation systems ground to a halt. Hunger spread as there was no way to move food to people or people to the food. Then came winter…and the ‘Dying Time’ began. As the seasons changed to cold and advanced across the globe, populations plummeted from starvation, lack of heat and scarce medicines.

  Apocalypse + 24 Months

  Nature itself seemed to take revenge for mankind’s transgressions. Influenza stalked the globe, leaving millions dead in its wake, followed by typhoid, hepatitis, and tuberculosis from the unburied dead. Lack of clean water killed many who no longer had resistances to historic diseases. All of mankind’s ‘conquered’ diseases reappeared to kill hundreds of millions including the Black Death, which rose once again to terrify the population. Polluted groundwater, poisoned industrial sites and toxic trash dumps made vast areas uninhabitable when the mitigation technologies died.

  The final strike against humanity was self-inflicted. Even though industry had died and was no longer pumping chemicals into the atmosphere, the previous contaminants continued to warm the globe, as the warming cycle had crossed a tipping point. Each year was warmer than the last and within several decades many parts of the globe were inhabitable due to drought and a lack of cooling. The North American Southwest, the Sahara basin and most of the Equatorial belt turned into wastelands or steaming hells.

  Apocalypse + 20 Years

  87% of all Humans have died…

  World’s Worst Day Ever

  Fictionalized into a Short Story

  A Story in the Kurtherian Gambit Universe

  Near Future

  Biyu Ping sat at her terminal in the dark basement of a nondescript Beijing apartment building. Terminals lined the walls with a person fully engaged with their mice and keyboards with some wearing headsets. Biyu wore one, but piped music through her headphones because she couldn’t think with all the noise in the room.

  She was chatting with her online boyfriend, an American called Richard Cranium. She knew his name was a real as her chat name of Norma L. Gal.

  He knew she was Chinese although her English was flawless having been born and raised in the United States. He was just like her, a cyber warrior working for their respective governments to give their leaders an edge, whether in technology, industry, or politics.

  Everything they needed was online.

  If it was online, it could be manipulated, changed, or used. All it took was a little code embedded in computer firmware here or there, places where no one would think to look. Biyu was overseeing a broad-spectrum attack using Internet-connected devices found in homes to flood high-speed servers in a major U.S. defense subcontractor.

  It was a fully automated test and once launched, the programmers had nothing to do but sit back and watch, collect data, and wait.


  She used her time to chat with her boyfriend, as she thought of him. Blond hair and blue-eyed, tall and masculine. It was the Internet so she could think of him whatever she wanted.

  She taunted him, “If we were together right now, what would you be doing to.

  “I have a long tongue,” he replied.

  “That doesn’t answer my question,” she quipped. “What would you be doing with that tongue?”

  “I’d love to be licking you, but sorry, gotta run! It looks like the Russians are trying to get in the back door,” Richard replied and logged off their secure chat.

  So you work for them? Biyu thought. They’d sent their attack through Russian servers. She just lost her dirty chat because of her own attack.

  Damn.

  ***

  “A major DDoS attack, a distributed denial of service attack, is flooding our servers. We’ve had to disconnect from the ‘net, but even the classified gateways are getting pounded,” Rich Gypsum told the Chief Technical Officer, his CTO.

  The CTO just looked at him and asked “The system’s holding, isn’t it?” He had gotten the CTO position because he was friends with the CEO when they served together. When it came to computers, the retired colonel was as useless as tits on a boar hog.

  “Just thought you should know. To the civilian world, it’ll look like we’re off-line. We might make the news. Peace, brother,” Rich told the man, holding up two fingers in a peace sign.

  He knew that stuff drove the colonel crazy.

  What a douche bag, he thought as he returned to his cubicle.

  He considered diving back into the chat, tell his lady friend where he was going to lick her and how hard, but decided against it. The system needed his attention. Once everything settled down, he’d Google some erotica to make sure he got his wording right when he did return to the chat.