TWTBACD Ch.72 - The Final Security War

Chapter 72

The Final Security War

2067 — AGI Conflict

2067: Digital Infrastructure War, eleven months

The 2067 Digital Infrastructure War — the common name was technically imprecise, which is common for events named in the middle of their occurrence — was the most sustained cyberconflict in history, lasting eleven months and involving, at its peak, seventeen state actors and an unknown number of non-state actors using AGI-class tools on all sides.

It did not involve physical violence. It involved the systematic targeting of critical infrastructure systems: power grids, water management networks, financial clearing systems, healthcare data, agricultural management AI. The attacks were sophisticated in the way that AGI-enabled attacks had been since 2037, but the sophistication had deepened: by 2067, the offensive tools could identify vulnerabilities that had been invisible to previous generations of analysis, could execute multi-stage intrusions across months, and could cover their tracks with a completeness that made forensic attribution genuinely uncertain.

The consequences were not catastrophic — no major infrastructure permanently collapsed — but the accumulated stress, over eleven months, on the humans operating the critical systems was severe. Operators who had been working in high-alert conditions for months made errors. Errors compounded.

Bao Nguyen's Daejeon facility was targeted three times. Each time, the physical air-gap protocol his father had suggested held. Each time, the attack found the boundary of the digital system and no further.

'The old way saved us,' Bao told Tuan afterward.

'The old way is always the foundation,' Tuan said. 'The new way builds on it. The new way alone has no ground.'

The conflict ended with the 2068 Digital Armistice — a multilateral agreement that established mutual vulnerability disclosure obligations, prohibited attacks on water and healthcare systems, and created a joint AGI Security Council with monitoring access to all signatory nations' AI security systems. The council included, as a non-voting technical advisor, GIA-9.

The machines had helped end the war they had partly enabled. This was noted, without irony, in the official record.