World's Worst Day Ever Read online

  He didn’t usually talk dirty, and wanted to get this right. Maybe he’d meet her in person someday and although she may think of him as a pervert, at least he’d be an eloquent one.

  ***

  G’laxix Sphaea lifted out of Japan from the Fukuoka area, heading West-Northwest over the East China Sea. This avoided the South Korean ADIZ (Air Defense Intercept Zone) to the north and a reported American carrier task force in the western Pacific.

  Lurking near Guam was a U.S. Navy Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, known in navy-speak as a ‘boomer’, waiting for the G’laxix Sphaea to leave Japan. Using electro-optic sensors from American bases and human intelligence assets in Japan to find and track the target, the silent submarine launched a single D5 Trident II ballistic missile towards the west.

  The D5 missile, carrying 10 multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, known as MIRVs, was loaded with W76 thermonuclear warheads. Each MIRV was set to detonate shortly after separation, intending to catch the G’laxix Sphaea when she was just outside the atmosphere. As with most military plans, everything fell apart almost as soon as there was contact with the ‘enemy.'

  The US military had grossly underestimated the capabilities of the G’laxix Sphaea, at least in defensive armament, and did not realize the countermeasures built into the D5’s warheads were almost useless against her technology. Had the G’laxix Sphaea been completely Yollin in origin and not a hybrid of Kurtherian, Yollin and Terran subsystems, events may have turned out much differently.

  The G’laxix Sphaea missed the submarine firing the missile but did notice when the D5 broached 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 G’laxix Sphaea responded by alerting its crew, but humans could react only so fast. The purely human delay meant defensive fire reached out with only seconds to spare. The ship’s puck-based defensive fire shredded the incoming MIRVs and none survived long enough to detonate, but unfortunately for Earth, the G’laxix Sphaea did not use Kurtherian high-energy weapons for close-in defense.

  The warheads did not explode as the kinetic energy of the pucks shredded the missiles, and the resulting debris immediately fell back into the atmosphere. From G’laxix Sphaea’s bridge, the captain watched the fireworks on the main display. “Can someone explain to me how the hell that missile got so close?” What followed were explanations from a nervous bridge crew and information from G’laxix Sphaea identifying the missile as American and using a new form of countermeasures.

  The debris superheated on reentry and broke apart into smaller pieces, most of which burned up. Unfortunately, the warhead casings contained plutonium-240, a refined metal that was resistant to boiling. The bomb casings turned into a particulate cloud that rained down from the upper atmosphere, into the south-westerly prevailing winds…drifting over China

  The cloud blew ashore slowly, following the coast to the south. The particles impacted from Shanghai to Hong Kong, but most landed in and around Shanghai. The concentrations were not high enough to set off radiological detectors and witnesses on the ground watched the ‘meteoroid shower’ 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…

  ***

  Bethany Anne was livid, thinking, I need to head straight for the White House so I can have a conversation with the only person who can fire a nuclear missile. I expect after I’ve torn off a few of his fingers that he may be able to explain his fucked-up reasoning to me.

  She was finished with the ass-wipes on this mud ball. There were those who opposed her presence on Earth and were making her life miserable and then there were those who opposed her existence. So she’d collected her people and declared it was time to go hunting out in the stars.

  After all, there was space to explore, alien races to meet, and Kurtherians to kill.

  ***

  Two and half years later, Biyu had moved up in the world from her early days as a hacker. She’d become General Li Wang Wei’s personal technical assistant. It was like a personal assistant, but for technical matters. She accompanied him most of the time, using her laptop to crawl the Web, looking for juicy morsels, the crumbs that would show him which way the winds blew.

  What he considered important was growing more and more limited.

  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. He ignored the platitudes of the doctors and nurses, trying to understand why his only son was dying. Even with advances in medical technology, some types of cancer were untreatable, including the one inside his son. After many attempts to combat the disease, it had spread from the boy’s lungs to the rest of his body and nothing they had tried had worked.

  There were whispers the Americans had technology from the aliens that would cure cancer, but none of his quiet and frantic searches to find such technology led to success. He was sure the Americans, in fact, did have a cure and were keeping the technology from the rest of the world, just like the twice-cursed Etheric Empire.

  His anger deepened as he thought about the Americans, silently cursing their existence, imagining them as a blot on 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 gave him broad access to secrets, more than most of the Chinese ruling elite. He knew about the ill-fated American attack on the Archangel and the fact the American missile was destroyed before it detonated.

  General Li was aware the destroyed American missile had contaminated the entire Chinese coastal area with cancer-causing particles. The Chinese government was suppressing the information of that event, even keeping the rise in cancer among the Chinese population along the eastern coast a secret. He also knew the most damning fact - the Chinese government had agreed to the attack!

  They had decided to go with the crazy American scheme that was now killing Chinese citizens up and down the coast…including HIS son. While the Chinese had learned much earlier what going against Bethany Anne would cost, the Americans had not. Especially since 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.

  He would avenge the Chinese children.

  ***

  A month later, General Li stood by two graves, one very old, and one very fresh. Tears slowly ran down his face as he looked at the resting places of his wife and son. Now a childless widower, the general’s thoughts focused on justice and vengeance. He would make the Americans pay for taking the last person 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, thinking how to evade the controls the PLA had in place to prevent “accidents.”

  He needed help. He was lonely, but not alone.

  “Biyu,” he said, barely above a whisper when we climbed back into his limousine. The young IT guru paused her work and gave him her full attention. “I need you to do something for me. Me, not the People’s Liberation Army. Will you do that?”

  The general was more than distraught, but he had always been kind to Biyu. “Of course, General,” she replied.

  ***

  Fortunately for the general, the Chinese military valued conformity and obedience within its ranks, even in the cyber force.

  With Biyu’s help, it took fewer than six months until General Li had identified and placed the right people in the right positions. It didn’t matter how he gained their obedience. Through coercion, intimidation, promises of power, or loyalty to mother China, he built a shadow network of people who only responded to his orders.

  In the dark hours of the night, with a simple turn of a key and press of a button, the weapon was un
leashed on 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 like 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 and implanted medical devices to industrial control components. Many countries built specialized chips and central computer cores domestically, with rigorous over watch of their design.

  Other commonly-used chips were chosen with low cost in mind. Chinese companies filled that void with cheap alternatives. Even though these chips were secondary, considered irrelevant by so-called security professionals, they each had special code hidden within them. Alone, maybe they weren’t a threat, but with billions of other chips…

  The Chinese companies had been embedding extra circuits in those chips at the direction of the Chinese government for a long time. They were hidden among the millions of other pathways inside the microcircuits and did actions from simple to complex.

  In the simplest case, those other routes allowed electricity to flow in ways not envisaged by the chip designers, damaging other circuits inside and outside the chip. In the most complex situations, those hidden circuits could carry out commands within the device, giving control to outsiders or wreaking havoc in ingenious ways.

  Biyu had studied the plan, at the general’s bidding. She assured him the damage would target only America. After he pressed the button, she monitored the advance of the digital plague.

  The small bits of code went to secret Internet servers in Africa, then waited to flood targets inside the US, where the damage was supposed to be contained within its borders. Africa’s network groaned under the onslaught, teetered and collapsed, but redundancies and backups ensured that outages would only last for a few moments, not long enough for an average user to understand there had been an outage.

  The Internet was a constantly changing environment, automatically rerouting around bottlenecks and blockages to keep the information flowing. On the night the weapon launched, a previous bottleneck in Africa caused traffic to reroute through Europe rather than straight to the United States.

  A domain name server failed in Europe under the strain, causing backup routes to come online, redirecting some of the traffic from Africa through Asian servers, including several in China.

  The code went to many servers, multiplied and in several cases, mutated. Small changes in code, called bit flip, occurs often because of random traffic noise, and general error correction routines on Internet hardware usually fix these errors. However, this code did not to register as real traffic, so the autocorrecting routines ignored it and failed to correct the flaws.

  All it took was one copy of the code to lose its ability to target selectively, kicking off broad replication at an enormous rate, flooding servers across the Internet and spreading around the globe at the speed of light.

  Once again, human frailty had overcome security procedures. Several major Chinese chip manufacturers had profited by illegally selling their compromised chips inside China, rather than only to the export market. Specialized devices in the Great Firewall of China, designed to keep the weapon out of the country, flooded with millions of copies of the mutated code and did nothing to stop the threat from entering Chinese cyberspace, where billions of those compromised 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 reproducing code, pervasive and cascading failures began.

  Whole systems crashed as telecommunication devices short-circuited and died. Medical hardware stopped working, including generations of wireless-enabled implants designed to send patient’s health data to doctors. Some doctors even noticed their patients dying as the implants spiked, surged and then quit working.

  Since the chips failed to report, the abrupt end of the monitoring reports was the only suggestion of both the chip and patient death. Mostly, these were missed in the overall chaos and went un-mourned by any but the bereft family.

  The general stood in the Unit 61398’s command center. China’s obsessive culture of secrecy meant even its own cyber forces were unaware of the weapon and how to combat the chaos. The cyber force should have been the best prepared of any unit to oversee the weapon while also preventing its effects from reaching them.

  But they didn’t and they couldn’t.

  The general watched system after system go dark as the cybernetic plague ran rampant through electronic systems. He hung his head in shame as he realized he’d destroyed not only America but the rest of the world as well. Biyu put one hand on the general’s arm, then pulled his ceremonial pistol from the holster at his side.

  He expected his well-deserved death was imminent, but the bullet that fired wasn’t for him. When he opened his eyes, his pistol was on the floor, next to Biyu’s lifeless body.

  Traffic systems failed, causing many vehicle accidents as traffic lights went haywire before failing from the compromised chips. Newer cars with Internet connections went crazy swerving in traffic, randomly accelerating or braking, deploying airbags, or suddenly dying while moving.

  Emergency systems overloaded as people called in to report accidents, until those systems died as well.

  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.

  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 overloaded the circuits, causing the generator to fry and even explode. Substations sparked as the electrical grid unbalanced, plunging entire geographic regions into darkness. The shifting and cascading surges overwhelmed electrical components.

  Infrastructure, such as dams, fared no better as their specialized controllers went haywire, forcing spillways to open, then circuits died, leaving no way to close the gates and flooding anything downstream.

  Controllers in pipelines went haywire, increasing pressures beyond safe levels and causing explosions and ruptures in refineries and along the thousands of miles of pipelines. Leaking oil, natural gas and industrial chemicals created havoc and the resulting clouds of toxic gases hung heavy over populated areas.

  Rich Gypsum lasted forty-two seconds fighting the monstrosity that attacked them from Europe before the entire U.S. military-industrial complex collapsed as its computers died.

  Most military networks ran over the general Internet.

  Mass confusion turned to concern, then panic as email and communication systems crashed, power failed in military posts, and units could not contact higher headquarters. Ever resilient, units carried out prepared plans to handle the crises, even though no one knew what was happening. Given time, maybe the military could have recovered, but it never had that time.

  With the loss of all systems, the contractor sent everyone home. The greedy bastards were already trying to figure how they could stiff their employees for the day’s pay. It looked like there wouldn’t be digital record of who was on the clock and who wasn’t.

  Little did they realize that it didn’t matter.

  It took thirty-six hours before the first nuke was tossed. No one knows who used it. Future historians would argue for hours, thinking it was either Israel or Iran.

  But someone either panicked or maybe believed there was an opportunity to settle old scores during the crisis. A nuclear weapon detonated in the Middle East, that much is known. Who fired the next is lost to history, as the human race ran headlong into nuclear
war without even knowing it.

  With early warning systems compromised and command and control systems useless, the United States had no idea that a suborbital nuclear missile was fired at the country. Fortunately for Americans, it was a weapon designed to destroy electronic equipment, an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon, and detonated 70 miles above the center of the US.

  Unfortunately, the weapon finished the destruction of any computer device that escaped the code attack. Over 90% of the electronic devices in the US died that day along with tens of thousands of US citizens.

  Fortunately for the world, the failure of military systems prevented widespread nuclear attacks. No one knows how many were actually used, but the resulting EMP continued the destruction of electronics. Loss of civilian and military leadership increased the chaos gripping the world.

  The Global Positioning System went offline, causing ships and airplanes go off course. Air traffic control centers went dark, leaving planes relying on the skills of the pilots. The newest airliners were full of the corrupted chips and inflight wireless receivers ensured the code found them in the air.

  Hundreds of planes fell out of the sky that day.

  It was no better elsewhere in 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 those in the US.

  Widespread use of wireless, in some places the only Internet connection, ensured the code had maximum reach. Europe succumbed to massive flooding caused by compromised dams. Siberian power systems failed, leaving people at the mercy of winter. Desalination plants failed in the Middle. Satellites in orbit failed, causing a global communication blackout.

  Within a day, almost nothing electronic worked, either a victim of the cyber weapon or a casualty of EMP from nuclear explosions. Power was down, communications inoperable, and emergency systems overwhelmed. Militaries and emergency crews tried to cope, but exhausted quickly their limited resources.