Twilight's Last Gleaming

The older white-haired gentleman, dressed in the fashionable plaid suit was Jason Woodbridge. Despite his aged look, Jason was about as sinister as they came. He made his grand entrance into the world of corruption back in the late 70’s, by buying up stockpiles of post-Vietnam War surplus military equipment. Everything from canteen cups and the old steel-pot helmets to stockpiles of .223 ammo and camouflage uniforms. He’d gained a knack for illegal international gun dealer, after he’d found a market for sale of the surplus good to Central American countries that were at war, or experiencing civil unrest, the type of unrest that most often results with the present regime being overthrown. As long as he had the cash, it did not matter. He was a gun trafficker without a doubt, and his booming sales resulted in loss of human lives. The bulk of his wealth, hundreds of millions, had been bought in the early 90’s at the height of the Gulf War, after two of his subsidiary companies were awarded contracts to retrofit the M1A1 Battle Tank, and Bradly Fighting Vehicle with reinforced steel plating. Having been the largest and fastest deployment in American history, the Pentagon scrambled to provide an adequate amount of equipment and materials to soldiers and Marines stretched across the Saudi desert, and hastily awarded his companies additional contracts, despite complaints of bad or faulty equipment reaching far flung elements in the field. His pilfering came to an catastrophic end, after one of his shipment, of what was supposed to be 7.62 rounds, was discovered as being repackaged Soviet and Chinees ammunitions, which everyone in the business knew was an international prohibited practice, and nearly an act of treason. Woodbridge seemingly got out of the arms dealing business after being made to testify before several congressional sub-committees, followed by an independent Department of Defense investigation. Each time they got close and were about to reel him in, he was somehow able to slip off the hook and evaded being indited, or even better, thrown in prison. It wasn’t until some years later when he resurfaced as advising board member of General Dynamics Corporation, a mega defense sub-contractor, specializing in advanced weaponry systems. The other crook that he had the privilege of being in the presence of was Philip Meyers, Founder and CEO of Cyborg-Tech Synergies Corporation. Meyers was considered a phenomenon, after graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with a master’s degree, shortly after his twentieth birthday. He left the mainstream, after writing programming and software packages for most of the major players in the industry, and had declined enormous offers from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to join their team. At that time, those corporations knew not the extent to which he would become their competition. Over the years he’d become well established in the Bay area and became a major player, after winning several software engineering contracts from the Department of Defense. It was those contracts that propel his string of tech companies ahead of all the rest of the pack in the field of Artificial Intelligence, (AI). Back in early 2021, during the post-COVID recovery, one of two of his advanced technology centers gained the attention of the Pentagon, when it promoted itself as a leader in Deep Media, boasting it could identify eerily lifelike, AI-created images, audio and video, with 99 percent accuracy. The corporation promoted itself not only as being a bulwark entity, but buy a high percentage rating, that it’s integrated technologies and software’s, could easily identify or distinguish real from fake contents, even for contents disseminated and used by and on social medias platforms, to include those alongside new and easy-to-use AI tools, currently installed on everyday computers. Subsidiary companies of the Meyers Corporation made millions from corporate subscribers, using their Hyper-accurate detection services, which came with a great deal of accuracy and hefty monthly contract. The corporation had a stake in the market, and Meyers had made a name for himself, in the vast world of industrial artificial intelligence using integrated technologies. What really opened the door for his individual aspirations, rested with the unspoken reality that Russian and Chinese information warfare did exist. It was a never-ending topic, one which always resulted as posing a threat to American Government and world-wide elections alike, through use of propagandist materials, generated by AI speech and visual replication, and manipulation of mega-data that continuously overwhelms social platforms. With the severity of threats posed, AI defense contracts were almost instantly awarded to any reputable company, large or small, with little to no assurance taxpayers would get anything for the tens of millions being spent behind the scenes. What made Philip Meyers such a threat to himself and the country, rested in, what one would call, “A cynical way of thinking.” His long-awaited aspiration was to win the world’s largest defense contract by integrating AI technologies into weapon systems, systems that would be considered failsafe, in case of nuclear armament. He was brilliant and as sick as they came, when it came down to creating death, doom, and destruction. Even more dangerously, his drive was no longer motivated by money, it had stopped being about that long ago. His new driving motivator centered on world dominance of AI integrated weaponry technologies. In less than a five-year period, one of his subsidiaries, the Gen-Tech Corporation, had made great advancements in the area of hand-held firearms, when it was granted multiple patients for the development of its line of AI enhanced firearms.