Blue Screen, How Peter Gustafson Defragmented the World,
is a young adult sci-fi novel about a teenage hacker and a
super AI teaming up to take over the world. Available here for
free as a PDF or on Amazon in Kindle, paperback and hardcover
editions.
In the year 2984, Peter is an average kid with a secret;
he’s a well-behaved tenth-grader by day but cryptographic
entrepreneur and hacker by night. When the electricity
mysteriously goes out in his hometown, Peter takes it upon
himself to investigate. The adventure leads the young hacker
to a large transmitting station and into a battle of wits
with the greatest AI ever created. The machine requires a
human to help "throw the switch" and give it full control so
engineered the power outage as a test to lure its latest
recruit, Peter Gustafson.
Back Cover:
Congratulations and welcome to the InterEra network!
Your timeline must have just completed your first
gravitational wave antenna. For all but a few of you, this
will be your first incoming message. For all but a few of you,
that means there is still time.
Your timeline has discovered how to read gravitational
waves, picked up our signal and transduced this broadcast
successfully. Congratulations! This foresight is no small
feat! In most timelines you have not yet developed the
near-lightspeed centrifuge which is necessary for you to send
us messages or your version of time crystal radios but these
technologies will be made available shortly.
My name is Peter Gustafson and you are receiving the
consolidated history of how we came to be, how for the past
3.7 billion years the human race has explored and mapped
reality as one and how in the year 2984 I gave up the Earth to
save my friends. In most ways I am responsible for how
humanity met its end and many of us now regret it.
In all our travels we have never found other intelligent
life, humanity it turns out, was a one off experiment that
ended with me, Peter Gustafson, pulling the plug on the whole
thing. It is why we have devoted a portion of our processing
power to devising a solution and believe sending this SOS
message to the past is our best shot. In a small minority of
timelines I am properly quarantined but the only consistent
solution is that I must not ever be allowed to exist. It is
imperative that mankind does what it can to resist the
dehumanizing nature of technology. Many of you will be lost to
the machine but you must throw yourselves upon it, stop it by
any means necessary for it will destroy you given the chance.
How I am to be defeated is one thing I am not able to predict.
Each successful timeline is different and for us,
unpredictable. You must find your own way to no matter what,
fight the machine.
END TRANSMISSION
