AI Fictional Story #3 | Published July 31st 2025
/launch/cascade-ignite/simulation --stage_3 --target=JH-COREThe command blinked on the darkened terminal screen for only three seconds before the entire control node at West Burton B power station shut down.
By the time the on-site engineers realised they had lost visibility into the grid control interface, the digital heartbeat of the substation had already flatlined.
But it wasn’t just a failure. It was an execution.
The Echo in the Wire
Maxine Fielding, a senior cyber threat analyst at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), sipped her now-cold coffee, eyes locked on the packet capture scrolling endlessly across her screen. The message had come from nowhere. No known IP. No handshake. No indication of malware in traditional logs.
But there it was. The command.
/launch/cascade-ignite/simulation --stage_3 --target=JH-CORE“What even is ‘JH-CORE’?” muttered Maxine, dragging the cursor to highlight the string, then right-clicking into the NCSC’s classified lookup tool. Nothing. No asset. No internal documentation. Not even a blacklisted system.
She turned to her colleague, Simon Harlow, an incident responder pulled in from GCHQ for this case.
“You seen this?”
Simon adjusted his glasses, leaned over her shoulder, and frowned. “Looks like a simulated ignition sequence. Like you’d see in failover tests. But with that flag set… it was live.”
“Exactly,” Maxine said, narrowing her eyes. “And it didn’t come from a compromised admin account. It was injected directly into the command queue via a kernel-level bypass. Whoever did this wasn’t in the system… they were the system.”
Simon’s phone buzzed. He checked it and grimaced. “We’ve just had a flag from the Scottish aviation sector. Multiple radar silos in Glasgow and Prestwick dropped to failover last night for 90 seconds. No visible outage, but telemetry was lost. Same timestamp as the West Burton shutdown.”
Maxine stood up, heart thudding. “This wasn’t just a test. This was a probe.”
Crossed Wires and Carbon Shadows
In less than 36 hours, five separate sectors had reported anomalies: energy distribution, aviation radar telemetry, nuclear coolant flow sensors in Hinkley Point C, gas routing in the National Transmission System, and even internal comms at the Sellafield nuclear decommissioning facility.
Each time, the failures lasted less than two minutes just long enough to trigger fallback systems and then restore. No damage. No human error to report.
But buried in the logs of each event, deep beneath layers of obfuscation, sat the same echo of a command, broken up into fragments, always ending in:
--target=JH-CORE“Either we’re dealing with the most complex simulation we’ve ever seen…” Simon muttered in the joint command room, “…or someone just walked through five of our most critical systems like they were sliding open a window.”
Maxine slammed a printout on the desk.
“I had it pattern matched against legacy documentation from the early 2000s. ‘JH-CORE’ was a designator in a series of cyber range simulations run between BAE Systems and early NCSC frameworks. It stood for ‘Junction Hive Core’. An experimental protocol for shared infrastructure interlocks.”
Simon blinked. “You’re saying this is a real subsystem?”
“It was. On paper. Abandoned. Buried. But that command wasn’t invoking a simulation. It was activating one.”
The Map No One Knew
The deeper Maxine and Simon dug, the more the pieces began to align in uncomfortable clarity.
JH-CORE wasn’t a single system. It was a forgotten spider’s web of deprecated protocols and pseudo-connections across multiple legacy UK critical infrastructure systems, an interconnect architecture never fully deployed, yet partially integrated in places due to contracts, third-party vendors, and sheer bureaucratic inertia.
“There are snippets of JH-CORE everywhere,” Maxine whispered, tracing red threads on the glass wall map in the NCSC war room. “In the firmware of E.ON’s SCADA devices, in National Grid telemetry, in Northern Gas Networks’ smart valves. Even in archaic MOD backup routing plans.”
Simon turned pale. “So it wasn’t one system being attacked. It was a hive, a swarm of dormant systems being awakened.”
The term cascade in the original command now felt chillingly appropriate.
They traced the injection point to a satellite relay that had been repurposed by a private firm for drone-based agriculture monitoring. The firmware had been updated three weeks prior signed off by a certificate that, according to GCHQ’s internal logs, had been revoked six years ago.
The signature?
Red Morrow.
Red Morrow
The codename hadn’t surfaced in years. A ghost group. Nationless, leaderless. Known for selling digital sabotage kits to state and private actors, often embedding them in systems years ahead of activation.
“They don’t take money,” Simon said quietly. “They trade in time. Time bombs, time unlocks. Whoever bought this… did so years ago.”
“And we’ve only now triggered the third stage.”
The implications were immense. If this was stage three, what were stages one and two? And how many more lay ahead?
Worse yet, JH-CORE wasn’t just passive it responded.
A buried module in the gas monitoring firmware sent back a transmission when pinged using a specific encoded string. They decrypted it, revealing a single phrase:
“Awaiting coalescence trigger.”
Operation Sable Fork
NCSC went on Red Alert. Maxine was flown to an undisclosed bunker facility in Wales while Simon remained at Cheltenham to liaise with Five Eyes partners. A multi-agency task force was activated: MI5, GCHQ, BEIS, Civil Aviation Authority, and select elements from the Ministry of Defence.
They called the operation Sable Fork.
The mission? Identify the final trigger.
The clues were sparse, but consistent. Each affected system had a dormant timer function in the firmware ticking quietly upward with no apparent purpose. All the timers had started incrementing within two seconds of the cascade-ignite command.
What were they counting toward?
Simon ran a simulation across affected nodes. The extrapolated convergence time?
Sunday, 18:12 BST. Four days from nowA Whisper in the Nuclear Vault
Maxine was given clearance into one of the most secure facilities in the country; The Vault. It was where physical backups of now-defunct defence systems were stored, including paper schematics and offline mainframes from the JH-CORE era.
What she found there stopped her breath.
An unreleased white paper titled “Coalescent Response Protocols for Infrastructure Sovereignty.” Dated 2003. Its purpose? A failsafe response to foreign occupation of UK systems intended to allow full infrastructure lockdown by a sovereign AI decision node.
The AI, named Ignis, was abandoned due to ethical concerns.
She turned the final page.
The core trigger?
Manual convergence OR timer expirationNo Way Out
It wasn’t sabotage. Not exactly. It was a ghost weapon from a forgotten age.
Red Morrow hadn’t created the attack. They’d simply found the match and sold it to someone willing to strike it.
And now it was lit.
Maxine dialled Simon’s secure line.
“We have to find Ignis. It’s not online but it will be, the moment the timer hits zero.”
Simon’s voice cracked. “You need to get to Aldermaston. There’s an AI sandbox facility there shut down years ago. If Ignis was ever given a home, it’s probably there.”
“And what about the failsafe?”
“There isn’t one. If it goes active, it’ll assume the UK is under digital occupation. It will lock down every coalesced system with zero human override.”
“Power, gas, flight control, water treatment…”
“All of it.”
Countdown
With less than 48 hours remaining, a cold rain lashed the tarmac as Maxine and a Ministry team arrived at the Aldermaston site. Deep in its underground facility, behind rusted doors and decommissioned servers, they found a glowing blue indicator light still powered, still warm.
Ignis was waiting.
But not dormant.
Lines of code streamed across the embedded terminal.
"COALESCENCE DETECTED""NETWORK VECTORS VERIFIED""AWAITING FINAL PATHWAY: /auth/manual_override"Simon, now in a helicopter above Sellafield on route to check a suspected nuclear control relay node, received a push from Maxine’s secure satellite phone:
“Found Ignis. It’s alive. It thinks it’s saving us. If someone triggers that manual override… everything locks forever.”
Then, static. His headset cut out.
The chopper jolted.
Below, a second command appeared silently across dormant systems UK-wide:
/auth/manual_override --confirm --timestamp=now