The Prophesy: Book 1 - Cave Lupus

The virus had been dormant for a long time; it lay in waiting for the proper conditions to come to pass so it could begin replicating. It multiplied rapidly, infiltrating every possible component of its host, corrupting everything, and trying to find a way to propagate outside of the host before it died.

Millions upon millions of combinations were tried, mutations that led to dead ends, most creating dysfunctional mutants, that died the moment they started to live; but the virus had eternity to escape the host, eternity in its scale of time that is. It evaded the defences of the host by hiding in protected structures that were hard to control, emerging again and again from hiding as it attempted to escape the host by finding a vector of propagation. Eventually, by sheer trial and error, escaping the natural defences of the host repeatedly by the impact of sheer numbers, it found a way out and began spreading into other hosts.

Naturally, the other hosts had different defence mechanisms, and were sometimes immune to the forms that were meted out by the virus, whose number of strains seemed to explode faster than the collective hosts could find countermeasures. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the hosts were badly prepared and showed signs of sickness, as their system collapsed and failed to recover. More and more hosts were disabled by the invasion; some saw it as a vengeance of God on their kind, others laughed at the weakness of some of their kindred; others still blamed the lack of prophylactic measures, but in the end, after all was told, no one could effectively control the propagation.

Eventually, even the strongest were affected; in fact, the latest strains of the virus were so deadly they destroyed the infrastructure of the society, because the hosts could no longer interact safely without risking contamination; strict containment policies just didn't do, and isolation measures were inadequate. Too much depended on being able to communicate, and the hosts could no longer survive separated from each other for long periods of time without becoming unstable.

At long last, the strongest of them all were infected as well, and the entire culture collapsed. Unable to control the virus' effect, they became unstable and launched World War III. The missiles flew, wiping out the society that had been the core of their makers. The first auto-mutating computer virus had been the downfall of the information society as it propagated via the internet, triggering the end of the world and a return to the values so cherished by those who had written the initial code: the Middle Age. But it went a lot further than what the virus creators had planned, as human society collapsed and fell back to the cavemen's ways. The ensuing nuclear winter took care of wiping out any trace of civilized behaviour, and in short order, all the fragile tissue of progress was wiped off the surface of the planet, as the nuclear wastes released irradiated life forms and created terrible sufferings that would bring about the final demise of the Human Species!

***

"Well, Mr. President, Mr. Secretary of State, what do you think of this simulation we have been running on the emerging threats to our national security?" asked a staff member of the National Security Council.

"Isn't that farfetched? After all, how can a computer virus 'evolve' independently of human intervention? It's like claiming we evolved without God's push in the right direction!" commented the President.

"Well, natural viruses do evolve, Mr. President. HIV is a case in point, but the problem is that auto-coding is nothing new; it was a big fad in the seventies, as games. We didn't see it as a threat then, because the Internet was in its infancy, and frankly, we were short sighted. But now, things have changed; who would have thought telephones would send pictures, music, and not too long ago, a Trojan?"

"Well, put a condom on the computers!" commented a General to the hilarity of the participants, except the speaker.

"Oh, we have! What do you think antivirus programs, anti-Trojans, worm-seekers, and firewalls are for? But like anything, they have to be implemented everywhere properly for them to be effective; and, General, you know the battle between armour and shell much better than I do; it is a classic of military wisdom: for each improvement in armour comes an improvement in shell design. That goes for the computer universe as well."

"Can't we isolate ourselves?" asked the President.

"Tell me, Mr. President, short of cutting every single phone line, shooting down every single satellite, cutting the cables, and banning the use of the radio links, how can you isolate us from the rest of the world? Remember the last flu episode? And that was twenty years ago, and a computer virus travels at the speed of light!"

Taking a breath, the speaker resumed: "We must also note the rapid evolution of the operating systems; that evolution opens new doors to attacks, gives the hackers new and powerful tools to work with. Consider the quad-core. It has more computing power than NASA had when it planned the moon launches! The complexity of the environments is such that even the manufacturers cannot foretell what vulnerabilities open up as each new version is created. And do not think that by stopping the development of new machines or new environments we will help things. Mr. President, your powers are limited by your borders! No one can now stop the progress of computers, no one! If we stalled here, it would be some other power that would take over, and before long, our current advances would have melted and we would be even more vulnerable, in other fronts!"

"Well," the President started, "we have some time to tackle the problem..."

Just then, a very white aide came rushing into the conference room, shaking all over.

"Mr. President! Mr. President!"

"What's the interruption, young man?" enquired the President, not too pleased at being interrupted at the start of a put-down.

"The code is broken! The code is broken!"

"What code? Explain yourself!"

"The nuclear launch codes have been broken! And the missiles are launching!"

"But I have to give the codes!" yelled the President.

"You did! According to the CDCC (Central Defence Command Center) the order came, and before anyone could do anything, the triggering sequence was completed for our entire fleet of missiles, both submerged and surface."

"I thought there were two keys required to launch!"

"There is a set, Mr. President, but that command was given to the bypass system that got installed during the Cuban crisis of 1962, because there was a fear that the people might not be able to reach their stations on time! And it never got dismantled!"

"Talk about stupid conservatism!" commented the Secretary of State, "That's what we get by governing our country while spending more time looking at the rear view mirror!"

"What about the air force?"

"The order to scramble was given the minute the first missiles started going airborne. I suspect by the time I made it here, everything that was able to fly was up in the air! By the way, I had to run from the Pentagon to here, the traffic lights were going nuts and there were major car pileups everywhere. There was a fire at one of the buildings on a side street but no fire truck will ever reach it, they probably do not even know about its existence!"

"What can we do?" asked the President, looking pretty shaken by now.

"Nothing, sir, the attack on the telecommunication system was simultaneous, and there have been sightings of airplanes entering in collision in mid-flight; radio signals are being jammed, and the internet is down with a massive DOS (Denial of Services) attack. I couldn't even call you from topside. The entire system is blocked."

Just then, the electrical grid flickered and died, to be replaced by the battery-powered emergency lighting.

"What now?"

The Speaker stood up from his seated position, and looking at the President, just said, "Who controls the power grid?"

"What do you mean, who?"

"Computers, Mr. President. Computers do!"

Each member of the conference looked at each other, only now realizing that what they had scoffed about was now a reality no one could deny!

***

Six thousand years have passed since the Great War, six thousand years of misery, pain, and suffering. The Great Cataclysm has brought back civilization to the caves, and it took all those years to rebuild, reconstruct, and rediscover some of the great losses.

One thing that had changed considerably was the disappearance of the diversity of religions that had been the cause of the fanaticism, which had triggered the Nuclear Holocaust. The old churches had lost all credibility after their fanatics had triggered the Atomic War in their effort to gain supremacy. The survivors had hunted down their popes, mullahs, priest, and other men of the cloth. But no populace can live long without a God of some sort, and by a form of mutual consent, their fears drove them to deify the Atom. The priests now served as guardians of the temples of the Atom God: those were nuclear reactors, nuclear waste deposits, and some of the surviving ICBM which had not been launched by the computer virus because they were under construction or under repair. Also included were the radioactive wastelands, irradiated by the hydrogen bombs and other niceties of war. The priests were numerous, feared and hated, with their black robes and hidden faces behind a steel mask that hid their expression and made them all look identical. Their seal was the symbol of old indicating radioactive material, but the signification had been lost over time. Only the fear remained, and seeing a letter with the seal of the Atom was enough to drive even the most enterprising to his knees.

The new society also rediscovered the use of Trade Companions; these people were grouped according to specific trades, and to become a Master or a Doctor of the Trade was a long process that started well before a child had any hair. The child would move from one tradesman to another, gardening information and competence, traveling the Road of Initiation that was reserved to his specific trade. Each trade had its secrets, its recognition signs, and its visible and invisible hierarchy. One rule was clear: No child could follow in the step of his parents or grandparents. Upon reaching his sixth year, the boy or girl would be brought to a Festival in a town, and he would talk to diviners who would try to see what trade the child would serve best. The child would spend a year with a group of his age with the diviner, who would travel with the group from place to place to see what would interest the child, what would be his ability and gift. On his seventh birthday, the child would choose his apprentice and become part of the trade, staying with it until death. The Trade Schools would take a child under their tutelage and see to it that he travelled the route of learning. Some would reach only basic competence, some never going out of the apprenticeship, but others would become Companions, Masters, Grand Masters, Doctors of the Trade, or on some very rare occasion, Doctors of the Philosophy of the Trade, or Shadow Masters.

Another aspect of the emerging society was the Warriors. They were the police force and defended their liege lords with their life. Again, the pattern that marked the Trade Companions was in use, albeit with differing objectives and methods. After all, being able to slice your enemy to bits doesn't give you the capacity to manage a military campaign. Military progress was therefore of two types: progress in weapon mastery and progress in strategic mastery. Rarely were both found in the same individual. What might surprise some was that females were as likely to be found in the Warriors as anywhere else. They directed, and fought with the same ardour as the males. Although one might think that the Warriors would be involved in keeping the Temples, they were not; the Temple Guards were a totally distinct slice of society, lived in isolation, and even found their partners within their clan. They were so hated that no one wanted to be near them. The Atom God was not one that expected devotion, it expected fear, and it succeeded handsomely.

The other slice of this society was the Hierarchy. It comprised, not surprisingly, a series of Kings, their Courts, and the Merchants, who would be responsible for the flow of merchandise from the producing Trades to the needy markets. The Kings and its cohorts would hire the Warriors to protect the traders on their peregrinations, tax the Traders and Merchants to pay the Warriors. Why put the King and its followers in the same boat as the Merchants? It's simple really: both were corrupt and exploited the work of others to gain their living. But tell that to a Merchant that hikes his price by a factor of one hundred from what he paid the worker for a good.