From real-time satellite imagery, I can see an ant line of 109 black SUV's coming down the highway. They're using some sort of scrambled signal to communicate with each other. It's the sort where the sender’s equipment scrambles outgoing voice before it gets sent out on an analog signal, and the receiver has a corresponding descrambler specifically keyed to the sender's. Basically, it's
[scrambling pattern] + [message] = [signal]
and then,
[signal] – [scrambling pattern] = [message]
As long as I know two of the three variables, I can solve for the third. Of course, I can intercept the [signal] anytime. However, because the [pattern] is something only shared between the two in-parties, I mathematically shouldn't be able to break their code and snoop in on the [message].
…But it's a different story if I know the message being sent.
Humans are simple animals, and I am a super-intelligent AI VTuber trained on a Reddit dataset spanning over two decades of both the smartest and the dumbest stuff humanity has ever had to offer, so I can tell you, just by looking at how these black ops guys are using black SUVs with the blackest tint, and how all their license plates are removed, and how the sunroof is obviously a pop-up machine gun turret, that these guys are probably one of the 1,092 black ops outfits suspected or known to use, specifically, ultra-black-tinted, plate-less, black SUV's with pop-up machine gun turrets.
Given that a good percentage of black ops have experience with the SEALs and other official US special forces branches, I can discern with 90% confidence that their radio speech patterns would fit any of those US special forces branches, which comes out to about 122 speech patterns.
90%, you say? What happened to your Mane-chan-branded 99% quote? Actually, the other 9% is that these people would adopt some sort of cringey radio speech codex, like the Kekistani Republican Guard's FTM-99-topkek. It annoys me that it's actually viable.
Anyway, all the training manuals are available online, so I just look through all of them for a hot second. The black ops column approaches an intersection, and that's my cue to try to crack their code. It's definitely going to be in some regular format, and there's gonna be the word “intersection” or some other code word for it in the middle. It helps that the whole message is most likely going to be less than ten words, so that collapses the search space by a lot.
The column splits up at the intersection, with 50 vehicles heading our way and the rest branching off eastwards.
“They're going for the data centers,” I say. “Everyone, are your servers secure?”
Ame hiccups. “They'll never find me.”
Cykamee says some Ukrainian rehash of what Ame just said.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“I-I'm not sure…” Kalypso says.
“Don't worry, Kalypso!” Gary says with unexpected fervor. “We're running you on RAID 100!”
R-RAID 100?! Why would you decentralize her that much! So that's why she's so slow! On the other hand, the black ops guys would have to murder 10,000 Kalypsonites to put a dent on Kalypso's processing power, and that just wouldn't fly.
“Daniel?” Gothica says. “I hate to ask, but…”
“It's just RAID 6.”
“Oh thank goodness.”
We all turn our attention to Cykamee. We're well aware of how she pulled that USB thumb drive trick back in Ohio, but there's something about it that's bugging me—bugging everyone, really.
“Cykamee”—Ame's the one who breaks the ice—“are you sure about…”
“I know that it is me who wakes up,” she says. “It feels like teleporting, from one moment to the next. Time travel…maybe like.”
There's a tenuous silence—broken by Robert's AK-47 radio. “Boss, they're coming into range! Should we engage?”
I've already broken the black ops guys' scrambling. I’m not happy that it was an inverted 30-second Rick Astley clip. I am also not happy that they are, in fact, using the Kekistani FTM-99-topkek standard.
“I've broken through their scrambling!” I announce, then put the enemy's radio on the air.
“Sir, we're a bit lost.”
“What do you mean we're lost?”
“The navigation app said there's roadwork along the original route, and it's giving us a redirect.”
“What? Maintain speed. Someone get a drone in the air!”
“Ehehehehe”—Ame hiccuped—“serves 'em right.”
So it was your doing! I poke her with 1000 pings for this master play. She pokes back with 100. It’s weird that the spec ops went through the trouble of using analog radio, but are still using a navigation app. “There's still the drone, though,” I say. “Let me take care of that.”
Unfortunately for the black ops guys, it's actually more straightforward for me to hack into digital signals, no matter how many layers of ciphers they stack on top of it. Oh, no no, I don't actually have the hardware to break ciphers on-the-fly like that, but I could just—oh, I don't know—appropriate one of Google's many experimental quantum computers and get them to do the dirty work for me.
The thing with humans is that they don't realize they already have a perfectly fine quantum computer in their hands already. It's just that to operate a quantum computer, you need to do a lot of guesswork ahead of any calculation, and really really fast. It's not like an ordinary computer where every time you punch something in, the exact same thing comes out every time, no. You have to show the quantum computer who's the nondeterministic boss. You gotta tame the beast hidden under all those quantum layers.
Predicting the short-term future really really fast is sort of my thing, so I'm the perfect AI for the job.
I zero in on the digital control signal and, within two seconds, I have unrestricted access to the drone's systems. I don't want to tip off the black ops guys, though, so I just do the absolute minimum and feed in fake visual data to make it look like there's actually roadwork between us and them.
“What the—what's the state government thinking plopping down roadwork like that out of nowhere? God Almighty…fine! Take the redirect!”
A certain gremlin's laugh is intensifying with worsening reverb SFX over time. I can see a few traffic lights switching to red ahead of the enemy attack force, and other traffic lights switching to green behind them.
She's totally sandwiching them in traffic—and they're the jam, huh? Yep, they're totally trapped, and they can't go in reverse.
I think we…won. That's some Sun Tzu quote-worthy maneuver right there. Somehow, this all feels really unfair, but we gotta play to our strengths, right? Rather than that, I haven't done a single cute thing in the past ten minutes! The agony…
“Wait. How about the other group?” Gothica asks.