The Enigma Gamers - A CATS Tale

Everyone exchanged uneasy glances among themselves which were finally noticed by the Mayor.

She demanded, “Well? Get them on the phones and brief them, but without all the gory details! I recognize we don’t yet have a handle on this, but I don’t want to start a panic attack that will build into a Tsunami. Why aren’t you moving?”

The new contractor, Brayson, had been assigned by CATS at the request of the head of the city’s IT department, last week at the start of some network inconsistencies. Brayson was very adept at troubleshooting network issues, project management, and minor programming. He stood nearly two meters, had a square face, dark eyes, and dark hair. He was a perfect fit for this assignment with this experience and fluency in English and Spanish. Brayson sensed the awkwardness of the situation and politely offered, “Uh, Madam Mayor, all the police and firefighting communications signaling goes through the small black box over there in that rack. We haven’t been able to get into it since this attack began.

“Perhaps you have not been briefed with all the relevant and inter-related information. Basically, we are in the electronic command center for the city, but we currently command nothing in this state-of-the-art digitized Spanish Smart City. The garbage sensors are not reporting. The street lights have been turned on during daylight, increasing our utility bills, but we suspect they will probably be turned off at night to facilitate more chaos and crime. Our citywide bus schedules and arrival times are completely wrong. Everywhere in the city, open parking sensors are falsely alerting to now desperately enraged motorists of an open space. All the traffic lights are set to green to enhance the probability of collisions. Oh, and the Wi-Fi mesh that was operating throughout the city to ease the burden on the macro-cell towers, is broadcasting false or duplicate IP addresses, rendering GPS mapping and cellular coverage useless.

“If you really want to alert the police and fire departments of the situation, I recommend you dispatch personnel on bicycles and not try to use the new driverless smart cars the city recently took delivery of for testing. Old school CB radios would have been your fallback method of communications if all that equipment hadn’t been auctioned off last month and hauled away for their copper content.”

Mayor Perez reeled from the information dump. No doubt she was seriously wondering why she ever ran for the office in the first place. She desperately asked, “Can’t we just reboot everything and force initial program reloads? I mean, I do that on my laptop, and even with my fruit phone now and again, to get it to behave! Can’t we do that?”

The contractor slightly rocked his head from side to side and, blinking while clearing his throat, responded, “Are you seriously suggesting that you want us to reboot the city? All the technology that supports all the services that run in machine-to-machine mode?