The dream that teaches

This is not some article, this is a story, a story about a dream, a dream I had. In this dream mankind was done for, greed finally won and this planet was going down fast. But there was hope, a ship was made, a ship that looked a lot like the one we saw in the movie Titan AE (yes, the cartoon). Anyway, the ship was loading. The people were boarding through 8 gates each quarter of the ship got two gates, a high and a low one, and they all went to different floors. I was walking down one floor, the gate had two trenches, the normal one and a first class one. I was in the first class one, not because I was a VIP, but because I think I was a crew member. As I was going through the gate the doors started to close, there was a door every 100 meters and I had passed the 6th or 7th door and I saw the 8th door slowly closing. Just for a second I hesitated, then I started to run as fast as I could, I got past door 8, I had to duck for the 9th door and the 10 I got by diving and rolling just before the door would close. I ran over the gangway into the ship.

I was in the ship, and I saw confusion everywhere. Then I felt the shudder, the engines were preparing a launch. I shouted people to get into any cabin, any room with seats and buckle up. I ran towards the hatches, they were closing too. I saw the panic of people still outside. There was nothing I could do. I ran to a comm board, I tried to raise the alarms, but my security clearance was not high enough. I felt the strong shudder, it was lift off time. I saw a chair ran to it, sat down and strapped in. On the other side of the room was another man with three women, all strapped in, all looking confused and all but one passengers. One of the women was a deckhand, or steward. I could not tell, but her rank was decently higher. Lift off and the g-forces were pushing me in the chair, the ship was taking off, leaving well over half outside and who knows what supplies never made it onboard. I felt the acceleration and I lost consciousness, or I drifted away in some sleep like statement. It was four minutes later when I came round, at least that is what my watch indicated. I looked at the others The officer was already on the systems trying to look for an explanation. I introduced myself. Engineering assistant Lazarus, Ma’am! She nodded. Do you know what happened? I shook my head. Not a clue, I was before door 8 when they started going down. I ran as fast as I could and here I am. She nodded. We need to get to the bridge, follow me engineer. I followed her, she seemed sure and determined. Just the I like my officers to be, knowing what to do next. We got to the central ring where the elevators were, my ears started to hear something odd, I could not put my finger on it. But she opened the door and entered, she looked around and as I entered she seemed to be speaking, but no sound came out. I suddenly remembered the white noise. I grabbed her arm and yanked her out of the elevator just as the doors were closing. We got out, but barely. She looked almost haunted. Tried to shout at me, but still no sound. I pointed at her mouth and shook my head. I pointed at my ears and shook my head. I think she got the message. She was still silent, this was going to take some time. We walked to another elevator a quarter of the ring further. I heard almost the same sound, my ears were affected as well, not as much as the voice. The elevators were rigged, but why? Then I remembered, the AI will monitor any usage. But its camera’s would pick up our gestures and voices. It could lipread as well, so the action made no sense. But for now we were stuck on this floor. 

This was the first part of the dream, the dream took me forward instantly (by a lot), the AI was partially hacked, not the AI itself, an AI cannot be hacked, but the AI was Arabic, the hackers did away with the profile parameters, they disabled linguistic options, gestures and lipreading. The AI would not know what was going on. In the end the AI was hacked, not by attacking the AI, but by hacking the access ports to the AI and disabling access to it. Each port was replaced by a simulated null: port that streams data and numbers, but the numbers would make no sense and as the AI took more resources to figure out the data given, less resources, other than the bare minimum would be available for all other duties. A hacking achievement never seen before and the hackers ended up with nearly all planetary goods and not much people to dump into space. The biggest heist in history and the witnesses that were still around were floating in space, not alive at all.

As I said, greed won, in the end, it would infect other places too, that is the outcome of greed, it never ever stops.