Something I'm working on

[Saggy]

 

FOXX-OMEGA

(Prelude)

By Kenneth Brown

 

It came into my room uncorrupted by my drapes, the card-board on my window, anything. It seemed to seep in through every orifice, determined to illuminate every nook and cranny. I glanced at my clock disoriented, squinting as it seemed like someone had turned on a flood light.

 

The LCD display on my bedside clock was completely useless, as all I saw was a brightly tinted red screen. At this point I could tell something was seriously wrong, as I heard car horns all over, the shouts of men and the shrieking of women and children. Putting the clock back on the table, I walked toward the window to get a better idea of what was happening, but before my hand even brushed the drape aside to reach the latch, every man shouting, every car horn blaring, quickly turned into a dull ringing as the glass shards burst out of the window's frame, cutting thin slices through the drapes, and lacerating my arm. I recall falling, and though I'd like to think it was due to good wit, it was simply the shear force that knocked me over--probably saving my life. The surreality of the moment is clear in my mind even now... The plaster on the walls seemed to simply leap outward and fall like snow to the ground, and the thin but razor-sharp beams of light emanating from the teared drapes gave way to an utter nightmare as the wall collapsed outward onto the street.

 

People scattered like roaches after a bright light was turned on, frantically trying to find any form of shelter they could. The dead lay in the street, their clothes bloated from the gases produced as their flesh literally boil on the asphalt. Pools of blood fume up as if the earth had become a giant hot-plate, evaporating everything that could not find a place cool enough. Roof tops were on fire, planes were falling from the sky, the rubber on automobile tires simply melted as they came careening down the street, attempting to navigate the countless obstacles to some fabled escape. The smell of iron and sweat filled the air, as I noticed my own skin beginning to burn. I sat waiting for the expected flow of blood, but all I saw was a cloud of smoke billow from every crack as all the tissue in my hand turned into a blackened, charred appendage. I suddenly heard screams again, my own, as I stood shrieking in disbelief at the world that had just revealed itself to me that morning.

 

The shock-wave took many minutes to reach us, but the light from the blast was brighter than the sun in the sky that day. Some people knew right away what it was, others were mystified, millions more never lived past the first split-second. A 50 megaton nuclear war-head detonated by the Russians had a blast-radius of 210 miles. On November 12, 2010 a 200 megaton nuclear war-head was detonated in San Fransisco, Houston, Omaha, Detroit, Cleveland, New Orleans, New York, Washington DC, and Miami, effectively crippling nearly every major city within any significant distance along with them.

 

The attack was a strategic offense led by forces still unknown to what remains of the American public. On the day I write this, November 13, 2013, little is still known about our country any longer, to any of us. I reside in a small pocket of survivors outside of Seattle, Washington. Given our geographical location, much of our area was not too badly damaged by the attacks. Unfortunately however, on various scouting missions, the most we've been able to assess at this point is that there is at least a 500 yard wide mine-field between every conceivable crossing point on the Washington-Canadian border. When this discovery was initially made outside of a former bus stop in Bellingham, Washington, two of the eight people that led the scouting mission were executed, and the other six are now regularly observed performing slave labor--this usually entails clearing mine-fields, emptying the latrines, or serving the role of human test subjects for hand-to-hand combat instruction and weapons testing.

 

We have never been able to fully ascertain what happened that day, or what sort of world lays beyond the few hundred miles our scouting teams have successfully been able to report on. To date we've only been able to make contact with three other pockets of survivors, and many of these people are constituents of others that were disbanded and culled by presumably Canadian forces after mounting an attempt to breach the Montana-Canadian border.

 

In August of 2013, we launched a covert operation, utilizing troops that were stationed at Fort Lewis and the Yakima Training Center. We discovered that the waters in the Puget Sound area were not patrolled, and unguarded. We set up base, and it was not long after that a big part of the picture was revealed to us immediately as some of our people successfully managed to slip into the criminal underworld in what was once Vancouver. There we learned the terrible truth...

 

Dozens of nations across the world took part that day, as a way to "Cleanse the world of the injustice the United States has bestowed upon it..." claiming it was necessary in order to "Evenly and fairly distribute resources across the globe." With the United States actively engaged in over four separate campaigns as part of the War on Terror, as part of the general-consensus at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, America were thought to be the terrorist

 

Much of the information about who planned and orchestrated the attack is unknown to us. The attack was played off in many other countries to be a terrorist action against the United States as to avoid public-backlash in various governments, but in secret the true perpetrators seamlessly penetrated U.S. computer systems with the help of insiders, and unleashed an undetectable, unstoppable, self-distributing computer-virus called FOXX9 that gathered test launch-sequence-numbers for over a year and a half before executing its primary objective--brute-forcing the missile-launch-code for silos all over the U.S., aiming them at the silos themselves, and firing. The FOXX9 virus is heralded as a piece of programming gold in the hacker community, but the true extent of its capabilities are unimaginable. To date the FOXX9 virus has been used on only the United States and Britain that we know--instead of simply annihilating the entire country, the people of Britain were forced to leave their homes, knowing the fate that the Americans had met. Much of the information we gained on how the attack against us was conducted was only pieced together by reading about the attack on Britain.

 

No sooner than our probes started gaining valuable intel., than they were nearly all discovered and brutally murdered as part of a public display against treason. The Canadian government guised them as computer hackers that were going to attempt to use the FOXX9 virus to launch an attack against Canada. Little is known of what outcome this had on the Canadian public, though with our very limited technology we were able to pick up radio and television broadcasts close to the border for about a week or so after the event. Hacking syndicates around the country, determined to prevent governments from discovering the FOXX9 virus which they hadn't actually discovered in the first place, had created its successor, the FOXX-OMEGA. The key difference, and the difference that makes it so much more deadly, is that the virus is adaptive and self-updating. Through complex distributed-compiling, live-patching, and a few modifications on some of the most sophisticated source code the world has ever seen, these people have created an alteration of the virus that is much more effective, much harder to trace, more distributed, and low resource enough to run on even the most skimpiest computers. While our greatest scientific minds may have created the nuclear weapon, the FOXX-OMEGA virus made the nuke accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and it wasn't long after that until we saw more lights in the sky.

 

The FOXX-OMEGA virus is the final installment, but it is not a static release. The source code is embedded with its own self-aware compiler, constantly updating the functions to remain undetectable, or changing its operations for specific tasks and targets. The virus does this on a level that creates so many variants of the source code, that the original is no longer available, and thusly impossible to guard oneself against. Because of this fact, as we began being much more able to penetrate the Canadian government with our probes, we learned that because of the FOXX-OMEGA's adaptive self-compiling design, there is simply no defense against it, and nearly every one of the world's nuclear missiles went off line. The few that didn't were detonated by FOXX-OMEGA hours later, being the very few missiles left being targeted by millions of variants of the code. Some country's instead of disarming completely chose a dummy system that would simply launch dud nukes—-this actually turned out to be the wiser choice, as weeks later a variant of the virus would be discovered wreaking havoc on the world's economic market. With so many countries with no money, and no nukes, the world that had destroyed a country to rid itself of war once more actively engaged in conquest. Though I awoke that day to the destruction of America, I feel I will be laid to rest seeing the destruction of humanity.

 

So I've also started the next couple chapters, but I'm wondering what people think before I go ahead with that. Anyone like the idea?

 

Yeah, so, just leave feedbackabout the idea here please.

[Bartleby]

I liked it, Kenny, and I'm not just saying that because we're friends. It's a very thorough and articulate story thus far, and I think it's an interesting and original idea for one. Though I'm not quite sure I like the title, but it's only a prelude, so it's not that big of a deal.

 

And, coming from someone who is definitely not a computer hacker in any loose sense of the term, I understood everything fine.

 

I'd read it.

[WHAT!?]

Damn. That was horrible.

 

Not your writing style, and definitely not the story, but the idea of that kind of a future. It paints one hellish picture.

 

Its interesting, if you provided more chapters to continue the story I'd definitely read on. Like Bart said, I have very basic understanding of any sort of coding. I understood all the concepts well enough to not be confused by them.

[GameChristopher]

Hell-f*cking-yes.

Now THAT was worth reading.

[Eminence]

Extremely interesting, very nice to read. Excellent imagery and what have you, nothing more to say really than very nice!

 

Interesting to see where it goes, should you go ahead with it. I certainly like the idea!