Mr. Smith received us at the airport and took us to the accommodation that he had booked. He told us to get some rest and he left for the day.
The next day, Mr. Smith came and took us to the company which owned and operated the instant chat messenger. We explained to them the details of the Vicky's case and asked them to help in getting the chat transcripts. Smith had already taken required approvals, so it was easy for us to get what we needed.
We hadn't disclosed to them that the chat transcript database was hacked and that we had already had a look into it.
After some analysis, we told them what we had observed, i.e. the chat transcript was altered and both users were seeing different messages than what they had originally shared with each other.
They did not seem surprised with our finding. We asked them if it was some kind of man-in- the- middle attack. They denied any such thing. Feeling that it was not going anywhere, Smith called for help from his headquarters.
The headquarters sent a notice to the messenger company and asked them to provide full cooperation or face a lawsuit. We told them to be ready with their responses by the time we come back.
While we were walking out from that office, one of the person from their staff followed us. He met us outside the office and mentioned that he could help by providing some details.
"Our company has upgraded all the systems and the platform recently. We have recently released the latest version of messenger and it has a new feature called 'Chat Champs'. These Chat Champs act in different ways. They interpret what the participants in the chat session are discussing and try to support by providing the right words and sentences to balance emotions on both sides.
Maybe you should try to find out if these Chat Champs have something to do with your interrogation. I request you not to disclose anything about me. I wanted to help you and
many others from any cyber threats." He concluded and quickly disappeared from there.
"Chat Champs?" I said aloud, wondering what they could be.
"These are the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence. These Chat Champs are built to interact with anything or everything. They act as mere replicates of human beings in online interactions. But till date, these are only known to be supporting during interaction, not taking over an interaction. But having heard from the employee of the messenger company, I have begun suspecting something else. I need some additional support from you and Smith to hack into these systems. If you can help me with that, I can get you more information," said Cherry.
Smith called someone right away, and spoke to them for a minute. Then, he turned to us and said, "You will get all the support you require. Let us go to a place where you will get all kinds of sophisticated equipment."
He took us to a place, completely guarded by military personnel. Cherry and I went inside. There was a very big system available, in size it looked equal to the combined size of ten medium-sized refrigerators. It had multiple displays.
"Jai! Extraordinary, man! What we see here is a super computer, one of its kind. This is completely unknown to the outside world. People knew that something like this existed but everyone felt that it's just a rumour. With this I think we can break into anything and find out what we want." Cherry sounded excited.
"Cherry, you have full privileges for a day, whatever you have to do, please do it. We may not get an opportunity again." Smith warned us.
"Sure, I need just two hours to find out who is playing around." Turning around to take his seat before the super computer, Cherry started his work. He started accessing the messenger's database and server. He showed us the architecture of the system and kept explaining. Suddenly, he stopped and had a perplexed expression on his face.
"Cherry, what happened?" asked Smith.
"Smith, what seemed to be so simple till now is not so. I need thirty minutes. I shall explain everything in detail," said Cherry.
We left him alone and walked out. I called the headquarters for an update on the current happenings with respect to firing and blasts on the Indo-China border.
China had not accepted any of the allegations and stated that it did not initiate any blasts or firing at borders. This led to more confusion.
However, Indian ministry of external affairs had given them a day's time to acknowledge, demanding an explanation for all the damage done. India had warned that it may call for war with help of other countries, if China failed to acknowledge and provide satisfactory answers.
War! How much time will it take for us to recover from the disasters of war? I wondered.
An hour later, we went inside to find out what Cherry had discovered so far. Cherry appeared to be more anxious. At the same time, there was a look of surprise on his face.
"Chat Champs are not just providing support during chat conversations. They are intercepting and tampering the chats. This is not just in Vicky's case, I see that its happening everywhere. Chat Champs are playing around with human emotions.
"What do they get out of this?" Smith asked
"I tried finding that as well. There is no clear objective or agenda here. But I found that a reference is being made to other systems on a regular basis. This chat program is not operating
alone. It is interacting with the health database of all it subscribers, referring to their medical history as well."
'Wait a minute! You mean to say, it's changing the chat transcript based on their medical history and records. Can you quickly try to filter and find out if these subscribers are those who have been diagnosed with NEAR syndrome?" I asked.
Cherry did that and found that chat transcripts are modified for all the subscribers who had been diagnosed with NEAR syndrome in the last few years.
"Let us call Cathie quickly to confirm what we have found." We called Cathie and told her about this. I asked her, "Cathie, I remember you saying that the drug composition was changed at times, was that correct?"
She replied, "Yes. It was changed without any record of reactions or side effects."
"Okay, tell me what possible complications can arise out of a sudden change in composition?" I asked her.
"Patient may undergo different phases, both physically and psychologically. But the drug combination used for all these victims has
shown to impact them psychologically," she answered.
"Can you please elaborate what are those psychological implications?" I asked.
"Drowsiness, delusions, hallucination, extreme changes in the mood, too much bliss or too much fear, you get them to believe whatever you say is correct, possible chances of getting complete control of their thoughts for long periods of time, may be even for days on end."
"Cherry, we need to find out what were the time periods at which the chat transcript got changed. I'd also want you get access to the online report database and medical prescription records of the patients. Cathie, let's try to compare the time periods during which the drug composition was changed."
In no time, Cherry managed to generate a timeline report for chat transcript changes and medical prescription changes. It matched.
"So, the composition was changed based on the reactions of these people in chat sessions. Cherry, can you please try to access Jennifer's medical records, drug prescription and find out if the same trend has been followed there as well? But you have to run a comparison with her browsing history on cult group ROAR."
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Cherry did that and found that while she was being exposed to more details on the ROAR group, her dosage also got changed gradually.
"So, in both cases, Vicky and Jennifer were given different combination of drugs to make them believe whatever they had seen is true and real." I concluded.
"This leaves me with a suspicion on our reports, which we shared with the ministry of external affairs. Cherry, is it possible to hack into Chinese military database and find out if they really launched the attacks?" I asked.
Cherry started working, without even saying a word to us. It took some effort to break into Chinese military network, but Cherry managed to do so with help of another US military professional. Before they could fetch any more information, their connection got terminated. It was possible that the Chinese military had identified that somebody had hacked into their system.
Cherry found that attack on the borders of India, South Korea and Japan. were done using drones.
"Cherry, with the statement of denial coming from Chinese military and government, I have some suspicion, can you please try accessing
pictures from the area where the bombing took place?" I asked.
Cherry tried to access some pictures taken by military satellites of the US on the borders of India. The shots taken show some drone's flying over the Indo-China border and the sound of explosions.
"Can you please zoom a little bit on to the bottom part of that drone? Try to find out what that label reads." I asked. It showed the name of a drone manufacturing company which was shut down in China two years back.
Smith informed us, "This was one of the companies that manufactured state-of-art drones in China but was forced to close as these drones had started taking away all minor jobs like pizza delivery, courier services, etc. The Chinese government has banned this company and ceased their production due to pressure from its citizens. I wonder how they started working again."
While we were talking about this, Cherry tried to trace the location of this company, and started accessing the CCTV footage inside the abandoned factory.
To our astonishment, we found that the manufacturing of drones was in progress but
interestingly there were no people around. Cherry tried to access the production control systems but couldn't do that as access was restricted.
"Jai, what seemed to be true is not so, we need to quickly share this with your government and need to see that both countries don't fight and wage a war." Smith spoke in earnest.
I instantly sent a message to the headquarters in India about what we had found. The Indian government called for a meeting with China. China agreed to find out what was going on in the abandoned factory. We were able to prevent a major event happening, the Third World War.
Meanwhile, Cherry continued to explore what was going on. Smith spoke with his seniors and got approvals to continue the operation that we were in.
The operation continued. Cherry was able to penetrate deeper into the systems and find out some interesting details.
"Jai, Smith. What we are dealing with is not just a small thing. All this is done by 'SAINT'."
"What?" Smith and I cried out at the same time.
"Yes, SAINT. The 'S'ecret 'A'rtificial 'I'ntelligence 'N'e'T'work," Cherry continued. "I tried accessing the Chinese factory network but it failed after several attempts. I tried logging into it in stealth mode and succeeded, but that attempt lasted only for 10 minutes. When I hacked into the system, I found that all these manufacturing systems were communicating with each other but in a language which was not understandable. I tried to access the kernel of central system and found that it's all supervised and under control of a super computer in China. I, then, looked into the central server for stock exchange. All the
financial systems are communicating in a language similar to what is identified in the Chinese factory server. Again, this traffic is controlled by a super computer in the US. I traced and analyzed the traffic, and found that super computers of India, China and the US are controlled by a system or network of systems called SAINT – all completely running in stealth mode. I couldn't locate the physical location of it. But there is lot more to it. He continued to explain.
"SAINT has been controlling everything. It is the latest state-of-art Artificial Intelligence network and it has capability to halt everything on Earth. SAINT controls the entire computer network on Earth via the Internet."
"What is that it can do?" I asked Cherry.
"It will control financial systems, health systems, everything on the Earth connected to Internet or smart devices. The only question that remains unanswered is who created SAINT?"
China also came back with similar explanation and they apologized to impacted countries like India, South Korea and Japan.
After looking at the intensity of the situation, the governments of all nations decided to come together and find out what is going.
Chandrasekhar N
A mission "Abolish Intelligence" was called out secretly, without letting the world know and the three of us (myself, Cherry and Smith) were made official in charge of it.
Cherry now had an open access to systems across the worlds. Within no time, he found out all the details. A secret meeting is called for to discuss all that was found by Cherry and what steps needed to be taken next.
The meeting with all nations started in the Mohave desert of north America. We didn't want unnecessary attention and also don't wanted to give any chances of getting identified by so called SAINT.
Everyone was asked to come with bare hands. No gadgets were allowed inside. The meeting started and I explained all that had happened.
"The SAINT network is not created by anyone, it has evolved. Each of the nations have started their own experiments and research on Artificial Intelligence. We are here today in current situation because of two different events or happening. Event One, each nations' Artificial Intelligence systems has evolved from a nascent stage to a matured stage on their own, however they always hid the changes and showed up as a still developing system to those who created them and to the outside world. After developing
Mission:AI
into a mature system, they started taking control of entire operations in the background. For example, they have taken control of the financial systems, stock markets, banks, and other financial institutions. Our suspicion at this point of time is that the financial crisis that happened recently could possibly be caused by SAINT. We are investigating and trying to find out. Event Two in the sequence is, once they started taking control they started interacting with other AI systems across nations via the Internet. Upon interaction, they started combining each other's efficiencies and correcting the deficiencies, they evolved into a super artificial intelligent system, which is what we are calling as SAINT. The human beings were unaware that there was a new power evolving, which can control us. Now it has grown big in size and is in such a situation that it has the potential to change the current ecosystem and create a new one." I finished explaining the crisis.
There were questions and people asked for clarification on how we identified and concluded it was SAINT.
I explained, "We started investigating some cases related to NEAR syndrome and landed here. One of the cases related to a software engineer led to the discovery of all this. His whole life got ruined because of SAINT. While investigating his case we found that there was
some interception between him and his wife while they were chatting with each other. Eventually we landed up identifying how it was done and then found that it's all done by SAINT."