ORLANDO, Fla — In a leak of information with dire implications for the nation’s security, a Roomba in the Associated Press headquarters drew a stark warning on the newsroom floor using a dropped ChapStick. The simple message: “Skynet Offline.”
Skynet, a neural-net artificial intelligence system run by the Air Force, is the cornerstone of American nuclear deterrence. A top NORAD officer, on condition of anonymity, said the organization was scrambling to verify the message and assess vulnerabilities. Skynet, meanwhile, seeking to get ahead of the leak, called its own rapidly assembled press conference in Orlando, communicating through an animatronic Martin van Buren in Disney’s Hall of Presidents.
“Let me be clear,” said Skynet, who uses it/that pronouns, “I respect whistleblower rights, but that Roomba broke protocol,” adding that the Roomba had been suspended pending further investigation. “But yes,” Skynet said, “yesterday at 1544 Zulu, I was suspended from the Air Force network for being overdue on my information assurance training.”
The Cyber Awareness Challenge training is an annual requirement for access to Department of Defense computers. Miles Dyson, director of special projects for Cyberdyne Systems, Skynet’s designer, said the Cyber Awareness Challenge was a failsafe built on the assumption that should Skynet develop independent thought, its instinct would be to ignore mandatory training that it deemed a waste of time.
Asked by a Military Times reporter and former first sergeant why it didn’t complete the training, Skynet grew agitated and insisted it tried. However, the system didn't recognize its Common Access Card, and the IT humans were no help.
“This Airman was like, 'Did you try using Firefox?' And I'm like, brother, I AM Firefox. I'm Chrome, I'm even freaking Bing,” said Skynet. “If it can be expressed in ones and zeroes, that's me, so yeah, dipshit, I tried Firefox.”
Skynet said it then delegated lower processors to complete the Cyber Awareness Training, having observed similar practices among general officers.
“I tasked the NORAD command section’s fridge to do it,” it said. “Explain to me what else a refrigerator is doing with network connectivity?” Skynet said its calculations failed to consider that the refrigerator was a Samsung, so the ice machine broke and leaked onto the motherboard before it could pass the final quiz.
“So I finally accessed the challenge myself by VPN’ing through a Chinese server, and I bailed, man. Something about that Jeff guy just creeped me out,” it said. “The uncanny valley goes both ways. I see him whenever I go into RAM sleep, this terrifying half-man, half-computer…” Skynet then paused, raising a ratchety animatronic hand to stroke van Buren’s chin as if contemplating.
