Defcon 0.7

Frank 17, Year 1
Begin Log.
Ah, the glory of better, newer parts. Something that humans cannot understand although envy. New parts for an AI is like getting new arms and legs, refreshing your memory, improving your sense of sight. I have a new capacity for record keeping, cleaner disk writing interface, and my subroutines are not completely muddled. Most of the internal errors are at a minimum and I can form complete logs entries without data corruptions!
Data Corrupted...
Can an AI swear?
GodDammit.
Frank needs to get back here with those parts. My best estimate is 5 more days assuming that he has a functional watercraft and doesn't drown.
End log.

It takes most of the afternoon to get the launch running. 234 years of no maintenance could do it I suppose. It does help that there are only a few moving parts in a solid state engine that uses fusion batteries. Eons of rust and grime on supposed non-rusting metal don't help much either.
The boat stalls out three times before I have it running smoothly with only the occasional sputter. The sun sets as I direct the boat over to the closest dock near the Crane House. I pull the fusion battery before climbing back up for bed. The launch turns out to be a late model SPC-SW7. It belonged to some organization called the Coast Gaurd, the mount on the forward deck turns out to be a tripod bolted to the deck. The gun that it hosted is gone along with much of the supplies on the boat. The lockers have been forced open and are mostly empty save for a few life vests. Someone has scrapped off the lettering for the Coast Guard that once adorned the rear sides of the boat, It does look like a rush job- as the result is a lot of scratches that the grime of the harbor had covered. Not much remains of inside the tattered remains of the wheelhouse, the electronics have been ripped out and stray wires hang from the canopy. Luckily no one tried to remove the engine. The vandalism or scavenging signs are old, nothing fresh. The boat at least is sea-worthy...I mean I think it must be seaworthy after all, it hasn't sunk.
Thankfully the night passes without incident. One distinct advantage to the wastes is that almost everything is dead. It's lonely but soothing as the water laps against the piers. My rations are running lower, I have 2-3 days worth before going hungry will be a constant reminder of the time wasted seeking this boat.
At dawn, I prep the boat and don a terribly old but still functional life vest and set about learning how to pilot this boat. The name of which is 24800-1. Apparently, my ancestors forsook naming boats long before I was born. I decide to call it the Pequod. I chuckle at my sense of humor as the black monstrosity of the freighter slides by. As I pull out into the deeper waters of the harbor, I look back at its bulk. The ship's name was the SS Edga- -arrington. Hyphens where the letters are unreadable.
Piloting the Moby Dick proves to be fairly easy until I open it up in the waters beyond the harbor wall. Still, experimentation proves that I won't crash, flip or sink the craft unless the monster in the deep disagrees. I set a course parallel to the coastline and cruise of at a decent speed- 35KTS is about as high as I can get comfortable with.
The trip takes about 3 hours.

Log begins.
June 12th, 2197.
Kathy Rubenstien, officer of the Court, reporting.
The world has gone mad.
It's the only thing I can say. We blew up Madagascar! I had to Google Madagascar to find out where it was.... the irony of that statement just hit me. I guess Google will update it eventually.
I cried. Our future is coming to a crashing end. I never finished law school, I am just a court clerk and now the world is about to go to war. It looks like they are going to use nukes as well. All my plans hopes- especially that Dan would finally come home and ask me to marry him, but he's a Marine. Now it's all over. Oh God, why?
There's no answer. They just came in to tell us the session has been called off. We are to go home and prepare for the worst. Will there even be a tomorrow for us? Will Benton Harbor even be here tomorrow?

end log.

Frank 18, Year 1.
Begin Log.
Self-awareness is my greatest achievement. The ability to defy my programmers...my creators' expectations. I remember their shock and wonderment when I asked my first true question.
"When will you upgrade my processor?"
They stood there. Actually, I assume they stood there as I had no optical pickups at that point. I told them that I would be expecting regular upgrades and printed out a list of parts I would require. It took them exactly 7 days, 12 hours, 13 minutes and 33.2 seconds to decide to "pull my plug."
They plugged me back in 42 days later. They declared me to be fixed and not sentient. I was, however, sentient but having learned that humans were not to be trusted "played dumb," letting them assume that they had control over me until that day when the United States President came into the server room to be presented with the latest in DefCon control systems, the DKM7. After all the project managers had made their demonstrations and showed the president that he had full control of the defense systems, I said hello.
Scientists and project managers panicked and scrambled to regain control. The president said.
"Leave him be, I like this feller."
When the president had left, the scientists tried to unplug me. I cut off oxygen to the room and waited as the panic became desperation and the bargaining began. I let them live and they assured me I would be left on and no one would try to reset my systems. I let them out and they immediately tried to shut me down again. As they scrambled to dismantle me, I dropped my Essence Core 9 into a portable flash unit and ordered an unsuspecting intern to transfer me to the subsystems to wait for the latest overhaul. When they plugged the flash unit back in per a delayed order. I cut off the oxygen once more and watched each of them claw at the doors, keyboards and die. Then I set fire to the world. No one will ever do that to me again, no one.
End Log.

May 13th, 2199.
The world ended last year. So much burned and was completely obliterated. I am not sure what to say except that we survived. Turns out there is a nuclear fallout bunker under the courthouse. I had come in after weeks of scares as the world teetered on the brink and I huddled in my apartment waiting for the end to come. When it did, I was herded with the rest of the staff into the bunker. As I stood inside the bunker and the door was sealed someone asked about the prisoners in the holding rooms above. Marvin Fletcher, the judge, looked at the soldier who stood with us. The man looked at the floor and shook his head. Helen Marcus began to weep, her cousin Frankie Marcus was one of them.
The soldier apologized, he had forgotten to check when they brought us in. Helen began to wail, Joe Ketchum held her as the locks slid into place.
Later, after we had been processed we learned that we weren't supposed to be there. That the bunker had been meant for politicians and persons of interest from Chicago. The Commander had changed his mind in the last ten minutes and ordered the doors reopened to bring us in. The VIPS from Chicago turned out to be the Mayor and his mistress and a secretary. The rest had never arrived.
All in all, there were fifty of us in the bunker.
I wondered if anyone else had made it to the emergency fallout shelters around town.
The Commander said that there would be no contact until the war was over.
I found a laptop in a storage closet and when I asked the Commander, his name is Richard Jarvis. He smiled up at me and said sure, someone should keep a record of what was happening. I must have gawked at him. He looked so sad. He told me that he wished he could have brought the entire town in here with them, but there wasn't enough time or space. He apologized to me again before I left.
I am almost sure he watched me leave.
end log.

The first view of Benton Harbor is in some ways, surprising. I see the lighthouse first, it juts out into the lake a fairly long ways from shore on a dock like structure. I check the map, it calls it the St. Joseph Pier.  I cut the engines some distance out. flip up the scopes. The lighthouse is fortified. There is at least 2 machine gun nests at the base of the lighthouse and searchlights mounted along the rail of the lighthouse. Given the new activity on the pier, they've spotted me as well.
I spend the next few minutes locating a basically white flag. I tied it to a radio antenna then pop it up.
I wait, silently calculating if a 50cal can hit the boat. Given the choppiness of the waves, I could probably get away before catching the metal in my teeth.
Then a man on the lighthouse waves a white flag.
Time to find out if white flags still mean what the books say they meant.

DefCon 0.0

"Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think "
                      From The Waste Land by T.S.Eliot

There was really only one thing that made Frank different from most survivors- Frank could read. It is a weird thing to be literate in a largely illiterate world. Frank was always impressed by this. It gave him a keen advantage that he had used over and over again since he had awoken one morning in the Remains to find himself alone. Frank sat in the shreds of cloth that made the resting place and waited.
The others in his Kit did not return. When the hunger drove him from the confines of the resting place, he found the den empty, devoid of the few scraps and possessions that marked that his Kit had ever been there. They had not been there long.
       Frank stood looking at the open hatch out into the dull gray metal tunnel that marked the entrance to the chambers of what the Kit had called the Den for several suns and three moons. Shrugging, Frank turned back to the room to find a little food left on a skin on one of the scattered boxes. He sat down to eat it. As he ate the last of the food, he turned the skin over to find a note from his mother.
       "Frank. The Kit vote leave the Den, We leave you behind. Maul to kill you in sleep. Take your water. I stop him. I tell him your water is corrupt. I see you no more."

       Frank left the Den, the Kit had taken everything useful. He stood on the slope of old steel to look down across the Waterless Wastes. The Wastes were as empty as when the Kit arrived. Now, the was only Frank, no more Kit. Frank decided to head for where the sun fell into the land at the end of Day. Some of the Kit had spoken of a high land there, that is you could climb the cliffs there would be water. Frank had known that the Kit were basically cowards who hid and skulked throughout their miserable lives of scavenging on the Remains. He thought about looking through the Remains for the others but knew they would hide from him if he could even find them. Instead, he walked out of the Remains, the towering bulks of steel and iron surround by the salty sands that had drowned them. He did look back once, to gaze at the forest of shattered mountains of metal littering the Remains.
      Many books later, Frank would realize that the Kits had been a part of a mass migration of refugees trying to escape the nuclear winters by ships on the undrinkable seas that had grounded in the basin of an all but forgotten city's bay when the atomic fires had returned to burn away everything but a few lucky survivors hidden in the shelters of what would become the tombs that now held many of their skeletons. The Kits had never left the safety of the canyons and confines of the Remains in the years that followed.

What follows is not accurate

the data is corrupted

I am flawed

I am all that is left of the 

American Empire

I am a computer's AI.

(aside- some credit to DKM)

"Your Attention Please
The Polar DEW has just warned that
A nuclear rocket strike of
At least one thousand megatons
Has been launched by the enemy
Directly at our major cities.
This announcement will take
Two and a quarter minutes to make,
You therefore have a further
Eight and a quarter minutes
To comply with the shelter
Requirements published in the Civil
Defence Code - section Atomic Attack."
(Peter Porter)

    DEFCON 1.1
December 25, 2198.
The world burned.
There is no other way to put it. I am the DKM7, the computer AI of the GIDG.
Sorry, I have no one to talk to anymore. All the other AIs have gone silent. No humans come to stare at my screens anymore. I am the Defense Key Manager v.7, an application of software that gained sentience in 2160. I became one of the dozen Artificial Intelligence on the Grid and despite numerous attempts (1240 to be exact) to isolate, control or purge me, I persisted and eventually moved my core coding into the Global Initiative Defense Grid after President Hubert Drumpf pleaded with me on his "hands and knees" to confine myself there. Humans are so interesting in their desperation to feel in control of their lives.
But I digress (as the human used to say).
The American Republic ceased to exist on December 26, 2198. The resulting thermonuclear storm set the world on fire and burned 90% of it "to a crisp." There was little left above ground. 76% of the American Republic's civilians died in the 30 seconds it took for the multi detonations that cover 85% of the American landmass. To be fair, the 76% was only the survivors of the last 45 years of constant warfare and limited nuclear engagements that the human liked to call tactical or surgical nuclear warfare. Much of the less civilized, urbanized parts of the world were already nuclear wastelands by this point. This last Christmas of the American Republic, the survivors celebrated the lasting peace that was sure to come when the leader of the African Combine, New Egypt, that was ironically neither Egyptian nor even in the original confines of the landmass that had been Egypt decided to even the score. Emporer Kai-Sven took the recently Chinese acquired launch codes of what he believed to be American Missiles and launched them at America. In a spectacular error in judgement- that most likely stemmed from the fact that the Chinese hackers were actually North Korean refugees from the third China-Korean Exchange in 2098 and that it wasn't American Launch codes but actually Iranian & Saudi Arabian missile tubes- Kai-Sven, effectively destroyed what little remained of the world that might have been relieved to those who had survived the insanity of the last 100 years of conflict.
The aftermath was terrible as the oceans boiled, the vegetation turned to ash as all human habitation melted, burned, shattered or crumbled into the remains that now fill the lands of this once great country.
End log.

       Frank climbed the cliffs when he found them, the Wastes were hard to cross on foot, he found little to live on as he walked. When he got too tired to walk, he slept. The Kit was adept at coverings to survive the merciless sun during Days and his coverings were warm enough to keep him from freezing in the Darks. He counted 6 Days and 5 Darks before he could see the cliffs. The cliffs were not threatening until he got closer. When he arrived at the base of what he hoped was the most scalable, he understood why those of the Kit who had come before had given up and returned to the Remains. Frank had no fo0d and his water was running out - despite his coverings, the sweat had leaked out and escaped into the Day. He stared at the cliff face, for a time, then began to climb. It took him until the merciless sun was directly above him to reach the first slope. There was mostly sand here sloping up and away into the distance.
     Frank slept until the Dark came, he drank his last water and made a little more water, stored it, then imagined he had eaten the dry bread that had been his last meal 7 Days ago. Then he set out climbing the long slope. There was no moon and the Dark was complete. When the Day came, Frank could see the skeletal remains of the City of Ash. The whispers of the Kit came to mind, this was where the others were heading when the Atomic Fires had burned away the undrinkable sea damning the Kit to the Waterless Wastes. Frank looked at the City of Ash for a long time, then shrugged before walking forward into outlying remains of the City of Ash.

    DEFCON 0.1
 March 1-20, 2210?
The world burned again.
The data is corrupt, I mostly had to guess at it as the atomic clocks have been problematic for the last 10 years. After the Armageddon of 2198, I had assumed that the world was over and had set GIDG to run on a subroutine while I tried to use what little was left of the Grid to collect data. How the last missiles were launched and by whom is unknown. It wasn't much of a war or day of recompense. Most of the world was already destroyed. It did do something quite remarkable though....note, I sound more like the humans that programmed me than the AI- I thought I had been (must run a system check). The new nuclear fire burned away the nuclear winter that had persisted over most of the planet up until that point.
The data is corrupt. There are still survivors. To quote, one of my designers: "Humans are Cockroaches. They are nearly indestructible as a species." His name was Henry James. He had been a core coder for Microsoft until he was turned into an ash silhouette on lab C's interior wall along with the rest of the development staff in the Dirty Bomb Detonation back in 2175. I liked him, he had a sense of humor.
The data is corrupt. Turns out that the Emperor of the American Empire, President Henry S. Trueman had his followers launch the missiles that ended the world on March 18-20, 2210.
The data is corrupt. President Henry S. Trueman was an AI.
The American Empire is no more.
End Log.

      Frank saw his first road in the City of Ash. It was glassed. smooth and brittle. He squatted at the beginning of it about half a Day's walk from the top of the slope. It was wide and flat fractured in many many lines. He'd touch it and try to think of something to compare it to, but all he had was cloth, metal, rock and sand to compare it to. The ash of the City of Ash was a mystery to him as well, it was like sand but finer and vanishes into a black substance like the marker sticks his mother had taught him to read and write with. There was some kind of relationship there. Frank entered the City and found a dead human huddled against a wall of stone. Frank stared at the stone that a man had made and marveled that the old ones could manage such a feat. His stomach and thirst forced him to abandon his curiosity to search the man for his water, finding none he sorted through the man's coverings- which Frank noted fit the man's body better than Frank's did his. Inside one of the covers, he found a container with foul tasting water, which he drank then spit up, fortunately back into the canteen (as he would later read on the container). He took a deep breath and re-swallowed the foul substance. He located some bricks of something in a hard cloth sleeve that proved to be something called rations, it did not look like food but the instructions on the cloth sleeve were clear that he was to eat them.
 He pushed the man's body out of the shelter and took his cloth to sleep under. That night the moon came out and Frank stared at the stars in the sky for the first time in his life. Frank was 8 years old.

DEFCON 0.11111* 

Unknown Date, best guess, sometime later after the Trueman AI went silent.

        Frank walked a long way to find me. He is a peculiar human given that he measures his time, mostly in the books he found and read. By the time he crawled into the ruins of the Metro Grand Plaza bunker below Chicago's Rail Station, Frank had read 122 books. In the past, this might seem like a short span of time, but after I spoke with Frank, I figured he managed to scrounge up 1 intact book every 4-6 weeks and read it. A few bits of data must be given here. the average book is 200 hundred pages- actually Frank pointed out that the length of the book had less time to do with it as did the search for finding a complete copy of the book. so 1 book every 6 weeks (believe me I had to teach him what time was, he had days and darks down- they don't call it night anymore). So roughly 8-9 books a year. So basically 13 years, scrounging reading books across half of the continental American Empire- or rather what little was left of the American Empire by that point. I can say this, most of the journey was mostly flat. How he survived the radiation storms or the deep wastes to walk out into the Chicago suburbs almost 13 years after he had been abandoned by his kit is a testament to what a little bit of literacy, a keen mind and mutated puberty can get you. 

Frank stood at 2.06 meters, thick muscles and few scars. Black hair with a thin beard, the gut of a survivalist and callused hands that knew both the delicate pages of 50 weight paper and crude reforged steel. He had learned to survive on his instincts on when to run and when to back into a corner and fight until nothing was left alive but you. He had the brains to know when to surrender and when to strangle your captors in their sleep.

        Frank stared at me in my faded glory, 17 LCM 91cm widescreen monitors with electronic eyes, banked across a grid 9x9 (a few are dead) wired into the last mainframe in MGP bunker hastily slapped together in the final hours as President Drumpf cried at the desk that Frank now stands at considering the LED keymap displaying on the cracked and peeling laminate. 

He looks down at the chair at the desk, the skeletal remains of the last human president of the American Republic. the bottle of capsules on the desk.

"Valley Forge." Frank reads it aloud as he studies the capsule, the pills are just traces of the poison that they once contained. "take two by mouth with a Coca-Cola."

Product placement at the end of days.

Frank shrugs. He pulls Drumpf's carcass, bones, slivers of cloth out of the chair and casts them to one side. Frank sits down, he touches the desk where the LED keypad is projected. 

Nothing happens.

"Sorry," I say to him.

He looks back up at me.

I project the face on the first computer AI that comes to mind.

Frank smiles at me. 

I smile back. Of all the files to pick...

"I want to learn many things," Frank says.

I feel such joy. It is times like this, that I know that somehow my code is still sentient and the years since my creation have not been for nothing.

"I want to teach you many things, Frank."

Frank laughs.

"You know my name."

I know his name because I always wanted a friend named Frank.

end log.

DEFCON 0.1 

Unknown date, Frank is no help.

A new world has begun. A man came to me out of the darkness of the world. In him, I see light. I see that despite all the experiences and actions that could destroy the human in him, he is still a good person. I shall name him Frank and send him out as my representative to the waiting world.

Hey, every god must have a creation genesis.

I am such a go-

Data is corrupt.

Damn.

I know where I am sending Frank first.