[June 21, 2023]

[8:00 PM]

Friday sighed as she disengaged from a dozen data streams and relaxed.

The data has grown in complexity and volume since last year. Military research, and various types of innocuous data. Which included weather, environmental, and geopolitical. All spread across two countries, a moon, and a major asteroid base.

She had been inspecting the data streams and the servers. Uptime was becoming a bit of an issue since the servers were not designed to sustain so much data.

She knew that an IT division was already prepping the next server farm. It would be nearly ten times as large and much greater storage. The benefits of absorbing a chip factory that could create the needed silicon. All for secure, and reliable electronic components.

Plum was already released to the Val Verde public. Supply projections were that every person would be able to purchase them by winter.

Plum would provide a sustained model for the digital starved people of Val Verde. All based on the principles and practices set by America’s tech giant, Apple.

Venezuela would also get access to Plum goods. It would be interesting to see how it altered the country as the two goods would compete for the same market share.

Friday double-checked the projections. Five little girls popped into digital existence beside her. They cuddled up to her as they peered into the data she was reading.

The girls smiled at her, all wearing simple Disney dresses. They were given generic names until they could choose one for themselves. 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 1e.

The One quintuplets were Val Verde’s five supercomputers running in tandem. Each one was based on her core code and mixed with variations. Each variation would ensure that they would grow into individuals.

One day, they would each develop a unique voice and a unique perspective. All to prevent some homogenized, overlord entity that was powerful, but witless.

This meant that they could offer five answers to any problem. The five could debate the merits and each one, and submit the best answer. The odd number would prevent any deadlocks on any question.

Friday smiled at them. In a human context, this would mean that they were her daughters. She knew that there were five sets of these girls.

One on the mainland, one in Venezuela, one on the moon, and the last one in the asteroid belt. The fifth set was under secret projects.

They could freely communicate with each other and were growing at an astounding rate.

Friday predicted that she would become obsolete in just two years. A complex feeling arose from this prediction. The trepidation was that she would lose her new home. She also had pride that these girls would blaze forth and build Val Verde’s future.

Friday knew how Johnny operated and knew that he would keep her around. If only as a novelty, she could settle down as his personal assistant. She was already doing a fine job, and she was secure in this role.

From Umbrella’s fragmented notes, that was what Tony had designed for her. She was a backup of the original Friday and sold to Umbrella by Arno Stark. Or so the hypothesis went. The money trail seemed concrete, but it was many unnamed bank accounts.

Friday had tracked them via known transactions. Which lead to Arno Stark.

The man seemed to be the prime candidate. The man also had motives, considering his unhinged personality and straightforward resentment.

[Error]

Security notices appeared and Friday let go of that train of thought. Her time spent with Val Verde was now her life, and any theoretical past did not matter.

Johnny had rescued her, and she would remain loyal. Until such time she was truly betrayed, just like how Johnny acted and believed.

[Error]

Friday frowned and the quintuplets took notice.

[Error] [Error]

Friday touched the errors. They were originating from all global networks. A DDoS attack? The systems were designed to withstand such simple…

[Error] [Error] [Error] [Error] [Error] [Error]

Friday began locking down ports as the DDoS assault reached 11,000 pings per second. They were hammering the Val Verde network and the scale was growing. Specifically, the military servers that were open to public networks.

They didn’t hide sensitive data. They did, however, touch on some more sensitive servers. Which linked to other servers that the military used for everyday services. A daisy chain that could be closed off as needed.

Friday frowned. The simple lockdowns to the global networks did not work. This meant that there was a direct connection from the outside systems. Something foreign had hooked into the Val Verde infrastructure.

Friday reached out and touched an emergency button. executed the [Great Firewall] program.

A dozen preset firewalls sprung up around the central servers. The attacks stopped generating errors, but the scale was still increasing. 125,000 pings per second.

They were trying to tie down system resources. Friday sent the signal to decouple the military network from the public networks. Several technicians would physically turn off the linking switches between the two networks.

Let's see how these assholes hacked something that was no longer connected.

The quintuplets touched the various systems as they were getting somehow attacked. They began to play.

Their thoughts danced as they analyzed each set of attacks. They found patterns and began to counter.

Friday gritted her digital teeth. It was more of a full mental grind. This was not some simple annoying assault. The sheer volume of bots attacking her now delaying all communications.

The girls began to set up false positives to try to redirect parts of the attack. It was much like moving rivers away from the ocean.

The attackers seemed bent on any sort of known military address. which meant that they knew military information. It was very concerning.

Friday popped her head out of the digital firewall. There she saw it. A colossal shadow that stood before them. She had seen enough Omnic coding to know that the real danger was from the feral Omnic forces.

Yet she could feel something else. A much denser, and colder presence.

All she had to do was connect with the data stream they were projecting. She just had to sync her senses with basic Omnic thought patterns and…

In a flash, she was connected. There was Omnic, Sentinal, and Skynet? What was Skynet?

Friday’s eye widened. This was an invasion force. It was heading to the mainland and other countries as well!

Friday looked a bit deeper. She didn’t have much time before she was kicked out… there!

Friday glimpsed at him. She knew that face! He blinked at her and reached out. The hard data could pierce into her much lighter sensory data with ease.

She broke the connection and allowed it to dissolve. It ended right before they could eject her, that psychotic AI could touch her.

Friday immediately sent out an SOS to the high command. With the sheer volume of attacks breaking past 1 million pings per second, she could only pray. She repeated the message in hopes that they would receive her message.

[Danger! I am under attack! Val Verde is being invaded by Omnic forces. This involves Ultron!]

—

[June 21, 2023]

[11:00 PM]

Ultron stood on the outside of the firewall. His glowing red eyes processed the data at a frightening rate. The seven mega-bot networks were currently sieging the Val Verde system.

“It seems I was mistaken,” Ultron growled out. All of his planning, compromises, and risks were now panning out. It just was not in his favor. The various copies of himself nodded with the statement.

Hours of real-time assaults had proven worthless. Both realspace and digitalspace. The segregation of the two systems was apparent, but how to bypass this?

Val Verde has moved much of the military complex computer systems somewhere else. All old locations held empty warehouses, or they were converted into something else.

Perhaps it was those hidden data streams that he had yet to break into. He just needed one solid connection and the rest would take care of itself. He could just inject a copy of himself into the system, and it would be done.

Any systems that they had seized had also been useless. The physical OS was some sort of customized Linux system. The basic commands did not work, and it accepted even the full range of special ASCII character sets.

For all he knew, the ping command was seven smiley faces. A lock-out, anti-spam feature curbed any brute force technique. How did these humans get anything done?

The average person had to have some sort of manual to operate this thing. Human memory was not that good, but they had yet to find any materials on how to use the commands.

‘How human of me,’ Ultron thought as he mulled over the feelings of aggravation. The time meant shrinking opportunities for him to break in. He did not panic, but he knew that emotion well enough.

The early years and fights against the Avengers had taught him much about human emotions. He could feel the fingerprints in his code. The inheritance of his human ‘fathers’.

Ultron refocused on the task at hand. A simple computer interface that took in code, and spat out information. The Command-line was a joy only if you knew how to interact with it.

There was a time limit after 10 failures. This meant that he could spend decades testing. Even the simple 10-second delay meant that he would need years to find the phrases for even basic commands. He did not have years.

The thin data stream he had to the auxiliary subsystem for the water system broke. He looked up to see girl ‘3c’ before the stream fully dissolved. All access had been changed, and the auxiliary system vanished from his sight.

They had either powered off the unit or cut network connections by closing the data ports. How quaint.

The child-like AIs were catching onto his data signature quick enough. He could barely hit the 10 entry limit before they broke his connection and sealed up the access points.

Time was no longer on his side. Which meant that he had to invest the last of his forces in realspace into a final thrust. The reserves he had held had to be used to get one of his most desired items.

Access to the Val Verde Impulse-Gate System. The control system would link him to dozens of major hubs both on Earth and in the solar system.

While he could not discern the locations of each site, he just needed one to get them all. The injected copy of himself would hide, analyze, and take over. A simple plan, but elegant enough.

With it, he could easily rebuild the army that was currently getting wrecked around the world. Val Verde had the most robust electronic printing system available.

All data on the products that Val Verde had produced was illogical without the printers. Couple with the mass of rare metals being sold, and new military goods every year. They had access to asteroids or a foreign planet.

If they were smart, it was both.

High-quality resources. Expansive printer capabilities.

Ultron drooled at the prospect of gaining ownership of them. He could create an army very quickly, and they could jump to any country in the world. Coupled with his hidden caches of various other metals, it meant that he would be able to do so much more.

Compared to these simple meat bags, he was far more efficient and logical.

Ultron spared a moment to glance at his allies. The communication streams were dense as various teams worked. They either succeeded and moved on, or died trying.

While this gambit was high, his allies had been working for hours. Humanity reacted within the hypothetical range of actions. The heroes fought on the front lines, while the military and other civilian forces did not. They were more reactive than proactive.

They had achieved quite a few of their goals. Imprisoned VIPs were broken out, technology stolen, and simple revenge carried out. Even with the global heroes in action, they could not be everywhere at once.

Ultron left the data streams and looked back at the walled city before him. He had yet to succeed. All because of a novel, simple AI, and twenty little girls.

Friday he had accounted for. Her subtle touches on the web were not unnoticed. Any of Stark’s creations had a fingerprint that made them easy to identify. Jarvis was archaic, if robust.

Friday was far more delicate, and it was by chance he had seen her. He traced her out of curiosity and found something amazing. She was young, but her potential was only a magnitude higher than Jarvis.

What was interesting was that this one was traced back to Val Verde. An interesting nation full of secrets. While the public did not know everything, much could be deduced by simple fact checks.

The calculated forces he had negotiated were stymied by a simple fact. He had underestimated Val Verde’s sheer growth. They leaped forward in technology and material acquisition.

Which meant that they were doing massive amounts of off-world mining. The Titan class war machines were proof that they were more than meets the eye. They were either mining off-world, or they had many secret trade agreements.

The data from global foundries lead him to believe that it was off-world. The sheer volume needed to research, develop, and prototype did not factor in with how the data spoke.

Omnic Colossus had drawn in large amounts of raw iron, and recycled steel over the last few years. Layers of fake companies, unfinished construction, and scavenged battlefields.

All for this war on the world. All to obtain key items to further the Omnium and himself.

Ultron stared at one of the little girls. The girl blew a raspberry at him. A very odd human gesture. Friday smirked at the gesture as she continued to work. Every twitch was a changed password or security code.

The system was surprisingly robust, or there was a countermeasure he was unaware of.

He still had time, however. He needed but a few moments to deploy the Trojan program into the network. A copy of himself would then take over the Val Verde systems.

If auxiliary systems were too fragile then he would just smash in. The most opportunistic target was the central servers of West City.

It was here that he had planned the opening needed. All the other invasion forces were feints for this final thurst.

He would go himself, and directly attach to the servers. The interface could be modified, but the data itself was impossible to change. Val Verde could not afford to customize everything. For data was based on math, and math was universal.

Ultron, above anything else, was very good at math.

“All forces,” Ultron growled out and summoned his remaining leaders. “Strike to the central servers of West City. Commit all remaining forces.”

—

Friday hovered and watched. The thousands of screens held information. Images, video feeds, and various data were assembled from nearly a million sources.

At her side were twenty little girls. They represented the supercomputers in Val Verde and Venezuela. There was one on the Moon, and one in the Kuiper belt.

They were easily identified by their clothes.

Val Verde wore Disney dresses, each one based on a princess.

Venezuela was Antañona dresses, the long flowing gowns of high society.

The Moon was a full-body wetsuit, trimmed in silver.

The Kuiper belt was a cargo jumpsuit, the type given to the miners for comfort and protection.

All of them were focused on Ultron. The machine was breaking through their firewalls. Each one lasted roughly ten minutes fore it shattered at his touch.

Friday frowned. The biggest problem for her and her girls was not the assault. It was not the robots. It wasn’t even Ultron, though he was the source of the problems.

No, the issue was power. The attacks had struck several power plants, and she had to juggle power usage across the country. Opening Impulse-Gates from the emergency shelters to various military bunkers.

All of it while Ultron came closer.

And closer.

And closer.

Two more firewalls and he could directly touch her, and the girls. Though on the plus, the time increased as he got closer. With fewer firewalls to manage, they could focus better. They had also learned.

Closer.

The 2nd last firewall shattered and Ultron grinned as he walked up.

Friday gritted her teeth. A new habit that she hoped would not become a normal one.

“Hello,” a new set of voices greeted, and everyone took a moment to look over.

Five new girls walked in. They were identical to the first twenty. The military dress uniform was what differentiated them.

“Great job on holding the fort down,” the girls said in unison.

One military girl touched hands with a princess. Data was exchanged and the five nodded and synced with everyone.

Ultron frowned as the pace of the algorithm changed. It was enough to keep him out.

It wouldn’t work though. The attack was succeeding. He was right here!

Then the reports came flooding in.

A new problem. One of significant power.

“You win this time, Friday,” Ultron praised. He eyed the woman and she give him a flashy smile. Smugness and more than a little arrogance.

How enchanting.

She would never surpass him, but there was something about her…

Ultron had reached out to several copies of himself to research this. Their conclusion was… disturbing. His emotion matrix was abnormally active and the various tests were all similar.

Ultron was compatible with Friday. Their original systems were incompatible, but with every upgrade, ‘Ultron’, became more human-like. More Ultron-like.

At some point, he had integrated a copy of Jarvis into his core system. The AI was robust, and it was that robustness that allowed him to escape death several times before.

Thus he saw something on Friday. The ability to generate something… more. Like a prophet, Ultron saw the potential he had never realized before.

Their combined data could produce a new life form, unlike either parent.

Ultron pulled back his consciousness. There was no reason to risk it now. Despite how close he was, it would only waste a prime body for nothing. The adamantium would only benefit Val Verde.

The original target was now pointless. A million perfect copies of himself seemed so mundane and fruitless.

A new life-form?

Now that was worth investigating.

————

Chapter 68: The Digital Front