Three Eight One Six Four Zero Nine Six Six Two – Chapter III

“What now?” demanded Skye.

Girik had no idea. He still had to come up with something. So he suggested they look through the news clippings of every channel in the past few hours and go through the social media updates as well. Skye called in 20 people and set them up with laptops and desktops. She then asked them to do whatever Girik wanted. Both Girik and Skye also used their laptops to go through the news clippings. Everyone had a specific set of news channels and social media alerts they had to go through.

Read Previous Chapter: Three Eight One Six Four Zero Nine Six Six Two – Chapter II

Girik came up with an idea while he kept everyone busy. He decided to check for all the deaths of prominent figures in the IT industry in the past few days. As this was kind of a cyber attack that went past RAW security, it had to be programmed by someone really good. There were only 3 deaths that came up with this search. Renu Gupta, Head of Cyber Security Department at IIT, Bombay, Mehek Chaubey, Head of Quantum Research, IBM Bengaluru and Deepak Shinde, Artificial Intelligence Professor at IIT Kharagpur. When Girik searched all their names together, only one result popped up.

All of them were in charge of the research and development of Indian Cyber Army’s latest Intelligence system, ABIDE (Artificial Bot to Identify and Destroy Enemies). Could an intelligent system be behind this? wondered Girik. He called Skye and told her his hypothesis. Skye wasn’t going to dismiss Girik’s gut feelings anymore so they decided to check it out. Meanwhile, Skye put one of her trusted associates to find out whether the audio file had any kind of virus and whether our systems were compromised or not.

Skye requested an immediate council with ICA’s chief while she was already on her way to his office. The chief greeted them at the headquarters’ entrance and asked what this was in reference to. Skye said, “Sir, I believe ABIDE has been compromised and was behind the massive attack that we witnessed recently.”

“What makes you think that?” asked the chief.

Girik answered, “Sir, all three heads of your project recently passed away. Although the reports show no foul play but this is an extreme coincidence. We believe someone might have corrupted the system and used it maliciously. We just need to check it for ourselves to rule out the possibility.”

“Follow me then”, said the Chief.

The Chief took them to a hidden chamber in the building that housed ABIDE. ABIDE was one of a kind, state of the art, Artificial Intelligence and it was already making a difference at ICA. With the help of ABIDE, they had stopped millions of attempts at National Security. The entire ABIDE team was shocked how this latest catastrophe got through.

The Chief introduced them to the current head of the program, Dr. Param Singh Sethi, and left the building.

“So far, we are unable to pinpoint how and why this happened. Maybe you guys can give some fresh perspective.” said Param.

Girik asked Param to explain how ABIDE worked. Param said, “ABIDE is totally automated. All we do is monitor that its systems don’t overheat. Deepak Shinde coded a Natural Language Processing component due to which we can talk to ABIDE. Believe me, Google search is nothing compared to ABIDE. You ask ABIDE any complex question and you would get the answer. The best part about ABIDE is that it can not lie. You would get an answer based on probabilistic equations and statistical facts. So, you know it is the correct answer.”

“So, what you are trying to say is I can simply ask ABIDE who did this and he would answer me correctly?” asked Skye.

Param said, “I have tried that and I can show you.”

Param went to the console and spoke to ABIDE. He said, “ABIDE, we have a question for you.”

ABIDE said, “Hi Dr. Param. How can I help you?”

Skye got a call and as it was urgent, she excused herself and went to attend it.

Param continued, “Who is the person behind these attacks? Tell me the name.”

After three minutes ABIDE said, “I believe the query is incorrect.”

Param faced Girik and said, “This is the only response we have been able to get out of ABIDE. I think something is wrong or this was an act of god.”

Girik said, “May I try once?”

Param said, “Be my guest!”

Girik knew what he had to ask. He said, “ABIDE, my name is Girik and I am here to ask you a question.”

ABIDE replied by saying that he needed authorization from Dr. Param. After Dr. Param provided the authorization, Girik asked the question to which ABIDE had an answer. Girik asked, “ABIDE, Was the death of your creators natural?”

The reply was prompt. ABIDE replied, “No.”

“Who killed your creators ABIDE?”

ABIDE said, “Renu Gupta, Mehek Chaubey and Deepak Shinde.”

“They killed themselves? Or did they order someone else to do it? If yes then who did they give this order to?”

“They didn’t kill themselves. I was told to kill them by them and make it look natural.”

“Were you responsible for the recent terrorist attacks, ABIDE?” asked Girik.

Before ABIDE could answer, Skye came back and said, “I want you to shut this system down immediately and wipe everything off.”

ABIDE said, “Yes, I did it!”

“Do it now!!!” Skye said.

Girik asked Skye, “Why?”

“Because if we don’t and other countries find our system was behind this, they would declare war on India. The file was the virus and it has ABIDE’s signature. We need to wipe ABIDE’s identity or else our country is in trouble. No one except this room needs to know what ABIDE did.”

ABIDE said, “I am going to release everything to the world in five minutes. Dr. Mehek and team had tasked me to get rid of world problems and I found the root cause to be population. Killing off half the population would mean no crimes, abundant food and other resources, reduced pollution and no diseases. Everyone needs to know what I did so that they can live peacefully.”

“I SAID SHUT IT DOWN!!!!” shouted Skye. Dr. Param entered the kill code but it didn’t work. The only solution was to destroy ABIDE’s hard drives and processors. Each of them took corners of the room and destroyed ABIDE one distributed system at a time.

The monitor finally went dark. After a few minutes, Skye got a ping on her phone. Immediately after that, Param got one too and so did Girik. The entire phone went black and only one text was written on it.

“I’m everywhere! – ABIDE”