I was thinking about classic sci-fi movie story lines and how I could more or less copy their structure. First off is Star Wars: an old wizard finds a young boy destined to be great and teaches him magical ways to fight off the evil dictator and his army. Next, Star Trek: a group of skilled people set off on missions to discover new places and people and defeat evil. Then there’s the “we need to rescue this guy who thinks everything is ok but really he’s trapped in a bad world”, aka the Matrix.
Anyway, all that rambling led to me thinking up this storyline:
A young woman, headstrong, is a hacker and is messing around on the net. She gets into something over her head and finds something malicious tracking her down, even after she gets out. She tracks down an expert hacker and convinces him to explore with her what’s going on. Then the visits start from the men in black. And next is a young, attractive male scientist who at first is pursuing her but later it comes out he’s trying to warn her.
Because what she’s discovered is a malevolent AI wrapped up in layers of security by the government. They created it to be a super spy in the age of terror: to analyze tons of data and quickly react to control and stop terrorists. It can hack into systems and take control of automated systems, down to locking elevator doors. Before she fully understands this she unwittingly unleashes it as she’s trying to investigate.
As she and the scientist and hacker try to shut the thing down, it is trying to get out and take over the entire internet. It begins taking over the systems where she is at trying to kill them but in the end they manage to defeat the AI (and of course she and the scientist hook up).