Sara looked down from her window. She should have evacuated but this was her home. Her grandparents lived here, her parents lived here. She was born in the room she was in now.
She hoped her brother, wherever he was, survived the madness and kept the line going or it was going to die here.
Her city had been bombarded for a month now. They had been aiming at military areas. She was amazed by the amount of military sites were said to have been built in the middle of residential areas.
Defenses had been mounted – signals had been jammed, EMP pulses had brought a number of planes down, until the guns had been taken out. People had wondered where the air force was. It turned out that there was a massive denial of service attack being made on the country. All methods of co-ordinating an attack had been thwarted. What made matters worse was that it appeared to be the populace that were mounting the attack. Hordes of machines slaved together making continuous hits on vital systems here.
Sara supposed it was only a matter of time before we struck back.
The tanks had rolled in three days ago. The army moved out and meet them and there had been pitched battles in the streets. The casualties on both sides had spiked dramatically, the civilian count on her side was heartbreaking.
Every punk with an implant was on the streets. Guerrilla squads constantly updated through non-official means of communication were supporting the troops – passing orders, setting up check points, or even transmitting live as eyes on the streets.
Sara looked down from her window. It was the future of warfare, she supposed. The bot-net taken to the extreme. The public had been downloading and installing code, without any idea what it did.
It did what any other bot-net did. It slaved thousands of machines and set them to the task of hitting the enemy. Except this time it wasn’t computers in homes, it was implanted in heads.
A zombie army of civilians on the streets and throwing themselves at the enemy – soldiers and tanks – with gleeful indiscrimination. Soldiers pumped round after round into the wave of bodies that just kept coming. Those who fumbled a reload were torn apart as the wave moved on. Tanks were harder to stop and, eventually, only were through the amount of bodies that clogged the wheels.
Sara turned away from the window and prepared to leave her city.
