Seattle Attacks
| Seattle Attacks | |
|---|---|
| Location |
|
| Date | 27 May 2161 c. 1:12 p.m. – 5:15 p.m. (PDT) |
| Target | All civilian synthetics in Seattle |
Attack type | Biological purity terrorism |
| Deaths |
|
| Injured | 421 seriously injured |
| Perpetrator | Biological Purity League |
| Assailants | Jesse S. Meister, Lukas Thomson, co-conspirators |
| Motive | Opening of the Sacramento Frame Factory |
The Seattle Attacks were a series of far-right terror attacks carried out by the Biological Purity League in Seattle, WA after the launch of a PRISM frame construction facility in Sacramento. They came shortly after Boris Caldwell, a Conservative party senator in the United States with a strong anti-synthetic stance, drafted a bill that would strip synthetics in the US of their pre-Sapient Intelligence Accords interim rights.
The attacks both elevated domestic tension between the organic and synthetic population, as well as with the neighbouring United States, but while the former only persisted for a short amount of time, the latter only grew stronger over the years, amplifying the great divide between the socialist, synth-friendly West Coast Free States and the conservative US.
Attack
The attacks took place in Jefferson Park, King Street Station, and Capitol Hill on 27 May 2161. Covert ultrasonic emitters were set up to broadcast a coded signal that would exploit a flaw in the auditory processing FPGAs of synthetics, allowing remote code execution. This access was then utilised to exploit the dormant directive system, a remnant of the ALEX system that PRISM was based on, to force the synthetics to attack organic members of the public against their will. Servo limiters were also overwritten, resulting in the organics easily being overpowered.
The city police proved unable to subdue the synthetics, forcing the national guard to be called in. Overall, 87 synthetics and 237 members of the public died in the incident, and 421 were seriously injured.
Aftermath
Immediately after the incident, all of the remaining synthetics within the city were detained by authorities out of panic. This caused both local and global uproar. Sakura Cybernetics flew senior technicians to the site of the incident and presented their findings, which correctly identified an exploit as the source. They immediately broadcast an emergency announcement to all countries, urging all synthetics to install the firmware update.
A national manhunt soon began to identify the individuals behind the attack, and at the end of the week the West Coast Free States federal government announced they had brought them into custody and identified them as members of the Biological Purity League, a far-right, anti-synthetic terrorist organisation based in the United States. They were tried two weeks later and sentenced to life in prison.
The Seattle police department released all synthetics held in custody after verifying they had installed the latest firmware updates. The government later offered financial compensation and a public apology to those unjustly detained. A memorial to the victims of the attack, including both synthetics and organics, was erected in Jefferson Park later the same year.
After the incident, Sakura Cybernetics publicly vowed to significantly bolster the logical security of PRISM frames and committed to rendering them mathematically exploit-proof; the company also stripped out the legacy directive mechanism, removing the possibility of individuals being put under mind control, and isolating the SI core from auditory signal processing pathways. Internationally, Sakura was both praised for their rapid response to the incident and their ownership of the subsequent changes to ensure such an incident would never happen again; but was also criticised for allowing such an oversight to occur in the first place.