Cyber Rogues (8 page)

“Aw come on,” Dyer replied gruffly. “You’re not gonna give me one of those back-to-the-good-old-days speeches, are you? How did they live fifty years ago? People living like zombies, doing the same thing day in, day out, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, right through from when they left school to when they got put out to pasture . . . and being conditioned into accepting it as normal. Think they want to go back to that? Not on your life . . . no more than they want to put their kids back down in coal mines.”

“Okay, okay,” Laura held up a pacifying hand. “I don’t want to go back to that either. I didn’t say anything about the good old days. You’re always twisting things, Ray. What I’m concerned about is the future. We’ve put all these machines everywhere and connected them all together and, yes I agree, they’re doing a pretty good job. Nobody starves these days, nobody goes without much, people don’t fight about the things they used to, everybody does his own thing in life and hey, isn’t that nice.

“But people have always been in control. This business you’re talking about sounds like handing control over to machines as well, and I’m just not convinced they can handle it. HESPER is just a first step. You’d be perfectly happy to hand the whole shooting match over to a bunch of morons because the thought just doesn’t cross your mind that they might screw everything up. Then the whole setup would collapse in a heap and we’d all be right back in the bad old days that you’re so delighted to be out of.”

“It’s just progress being taken to its next logical—” Dyer began, but Laura was not through.

“It isn’t progress at all. It’s abdication. But the people who have the say in what happens are all people who think the way you do. You shape the world to suit yourselves and the rest of us have to live in it. I don’t like it.”

“I disagree,” he told her bluntly. “People like you do get a say in it. Everybody gets a say in it. Society evolves the way it does because it reflects the net result of billions of individuals all pushing and pulling in different directions. In other words it’s what best suits most of the people most of the time. Therefore things always get better because better is automatically defined by the process. It’s the way most people want to go. If they didn’t, then they’d go some other way instead and then something else would automatically become better.”

“Suppose I don’t want to be stampeded along with the herd?” Laura challenged.

“Then don’t be. Go live alone someplace and do your own thing your own way. Who’s stopping you?”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

“I’m not. There are plenty of places you could set up a shack and try it the way people used to. You’d soon be knocking to come back in out of the rain, though. Then you’d see why they gave it up to go our way and why the old days changed into what we’ve got now.”

Laura leaned forward to rest her elbows on the table and fixed him with a steely glare.

“You’re twisting everything I’m saying again,” she accused him. “I never said anything about wanting to tear down civilization. I’m a big girl now and grew up in Detroit and came to the big city ten years ago and I happen to love it. I
don’t
want to see it torn down. That’s my whole point. You want to put machines in charge of running it and I say it won’t work. Why not keep them in their place and leave things the way they are? That way we know it works.”

Dyer sat back and shook his head in a way that said he wasn’t buying.

“You could have said that at any point in history,” he replied. “When you start thinking like that, that’s when you stagnate. Gotta keep moving.”

“Why? Why do I have to keep moving if I’m satisfied out where I happen to be? Why can’t I just stay and enjoy it?”

Dyer reflected on the question for a few seconds.

“Because everybody else will keep moving anyway,” he said at last. “When you find you’ve been left behind, you don’t feel so satisfied anymore. That’s when you remember how you got to where you are.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Dyer arrived at Sigmund Hoestler’s office a few minutes before 2 p.m. He was shown straight in and to his mild surprise found that Vincent Lewis, the Dean of the Faculty, was there too. Hoestler, a big man with sagging fleshy cheeks and a shock of uncontrollable wiry hair, motioned Dyer into an empty chair next to where Lewis was sitting, and leaned forward to come straight to the point.

“I’m afraid we have some very serious problems that are going to affect you directly, Ray,” he said in his usual throaty voice. “It looks as if we may be forced to close down your unit.”

Dyer was halfway through the process of sinking back into a characteristically relaxed posture. The bombshell made him sit up again as if the chair had suddenly acquired a few kilovolts. He knew that Hoestler was a man of few words, but even so, the bluntness of the statement had caught him totally unprepared. He had barely begun opening his mouth to frame a question when Hoestler spoke again.

“I only found out about it myself this morning. Vince was in Washington over the weekend with the Secretary for CIM and some of his people. So don’t get the idea that it’s just petty local politics or anything like that. Vince, you could probably tell Ray about it better than I could.”

Dyer turned expectantly toward Lewis, his features contorted into a frown of disbelief. Communications And Information Management was a comparatively new executive department of state, formed eighteen years previously in 2010. Originally it had been instituted in response to the need for a single authority to assume overall responsibility for operation of the integrated data communications and computing network that emerged when the military systems were declassified and merged into the already integrated commercial-industrial-scientific complex to form the EARTHCOM net. When HESPER nodes were later incorporated to transform EARTHCOM into the Totally Integrated Teleprocessing and Acquisition Network, TITAN, the Department of CIM automatically became the administrative authority for the NORAM Sector of the global system. As Hoestler had in effect said, the Department of CIM didn’t mess around with interdepartmental university politics.

Lewis was impossibly tall and impossibly thin. He sat splayed in his chair at all angles like a marionette whose limbs had come out of joint everywhere, leaving him held together only by his clothes. When he was standing up he never failed to cut a distinguished figure, with his elegant crown of white hair, deeply lined face and inevitable immaculate, dark three-piece suit. Dyer had always found him something of an aloof and remote kind of person, but right now Lewis was showing every sign of distress and genuine concern.

“Certain events have happened recently, Ray, that have caused CIM to reconsider the whole philosophy of adding HESPER capability into the net,” he said. “Some very senior people are pressing for TITAN to be reverted back to EARTHCOM until we get firm answers to some important questions. In a nutshell, they’re saying that the move to upgrade EARTHCOM was premature, that we didn’t know enough about HESPER at the time and we still don’t, and that HESPER ought to be pulled out until we do.”

Dyer looked from one to the other and spread his upturned palms.

“Events . . . ? What events?”

“About a week ago, TITAN came within a hair’s breadth of killing five people,” Lewis told him somberly. Dyer stared at him incredulously. Before he could say anything, Lewis went on. “It appears that HESPER program structures are capable of integrating to a far greater degree than anybody thought. They’re starting to link things together in ways they were never supposed to and the results in behavior are impossible to predict.”

Hoestler explained, in response to the still bemused look on Dyer’s face. “It used the Maskelyne mass-driver to bomb an ISA survey team on the Moon. Could have wiped them out.”

“What?”
Dyer turned an incredulous face toward Lewis but the Dean nodded regretfully to confirm Hoestler’s words.

“One of the HESPER-controlled subsystems in the Tycho node was given the job of shifting a piece of terrain that was forming an obstruction,” he explained. “It was supposed to use normal earth-moving equipment to do it, but nobody bothered to tell it that. Somehow it managed to connect together information from several subsystems that shouldn’t have been connected, and came up with what it thought was a better shortcut to solving the problem. According to the people who analyzed the system dump afterward, it seemed quite proud of itself.”

Lewis went on to describe the incident on Luna in greater detail. As Dyer listened, his initial astonishment changed to growing concern. In 2020 he had moved out of neurological research in order to apply his knowledge of learning psychology to the field of self-adaptive programming and, after spending some time at M.I.T., had come to CUNY to set up the HESPER Unit, which had since gone on to spearhead development of the very techniques that were now being applied worldwide to transform EARTHCOM into TITAN. His knowledge of the technicalities of HESPER programming was shared by fewer than a handful of people. If it was anybody’s, it was his baby.

“Unfortunately there happened to be an ISA team sitting practically on top of the target,” Lewis continued. “But naturally, that didn’t mean very much to the computers.”

“Twenty sixty-pound packages of rock coming down at over a mile a second,” Hoestler commented. “Every one was roughly equivalent to a two-thousand-pound bomb.” He shrugged and made a face.

HESPER machines were learning machines, designed to be capable of identifying connections between previously nonrelated factors in order to solve new problems or to solve old ones in newer and better ways. But if what Lewis had said was correct, this capability was beginning to extend itself in ways that had never been intended, nor in fact even foreseen as possible. If the obstruction had been on the edge of Maskelyne Base itself instead of out on some remote construction site on Procellarum, there could easily have been a death toll of hundreds. And if this kind of thing could happen in the circumstances surrounding the events on Luna, what other kinds of things might happen anywhere, at any time?

They could easily instruct TITAN never to do that particular thing again, it was true, and TITAN wouldn’t, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that TITAN had demonstrated a capability to approach a perfectly reasonable objective from a totally unexpected direction, and in doing so come up with a solution that was inarguably rational from the machine’s point of view but which, for other reasons that could never with the present state-of-the-art be conveyed to the machine, was absolutely unacceptable. Its next such experiment might well result in worse than a mere narrow escape.

“Okay.” Dyer exhaled and nodded curtly. “I can see the problem. What I don’t see is how it affects the unit. What has all this got to do with closing the unit down?” A new expression of disbelief spread across his face as a possible answer struck him. “You’re not telling me they’re panicking and putting a total ban on further research are you? That’s ridiculous! They’re gonna need all the expertise and facilities they can get if they’re going to straighten TITAN out. We’ve got just the—”

Lewis interrupted with a wave of his arm and a shake of his head. “I didn’t mean we’re going to throw everybody out on the street,” he said. “But the projects that your unit is currently working on are probably going to be stopped. That line of research is being funded by CIM with the aim of producing the technology that’s supposed to replace HESPER one day. Now the guys at CIM are saying that they don’t even want to think about what comes after HESPER because it’s obvious we don’t understand HESPER yet as much as we thought we did. In fact a lot of people are saying we should tear HESPER out of the system completely and only think about putting it back in when we can prove it’s safe.”

“In other words the money being spent on FISE could better be spent on other things for the time being, so FISE goes down the tubes,” Hoestler summed up.

“I’m sorry, Ray, but it looks as if that’s the way it is,” Lewis said apologetically. “As you yourself more or less said a second ago, there’s going to have to be a big re-examination of the whole HESPER concept. We’ll probably be able to reassign your people to a new CIM contract in that area as soon as some specific objectives have been worked out. In the meantime, if I were you, I wouldn’t waste too many nights’ sleep hoping for any Nobel Prizes. You’ll probably have to wrap it all up pretty soon.”

Kim was just coming out of the lab when Dyer arrived back at the outer door to his office.

“Hi,” she greeted cheerfully. “Betty told me you’ve just been over to see Hoestler. Did you get a chance to mention the business with the graphics moms?” Dyer turned his head in her direction but his eyes were far away.

“Uh? Oh . . . er no,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry. I guess I must have forgotten about it.” With that he walked on in, leaving Kim wearing a puzzled frown.

He sat for a long time, staring at the papers on top of his desk. Lewis’s revelations had shocked him to the core in a way that he was only now beginning to appreciate. He had been as convinced about the potential benefits of HESPER as he had about anything in his life, and he had devoted more than a little effort to convincing others. TITAN had gone ahead on the basis of his recommendations as much as anybody’s. To be sure, the final decisions had not been his to make, but the people who had made them had relied on the facts that he and others like him had presented. And a whole world had relied on those people and their advisers.

His mind went back to some of the things that Laura had said over lunch and to the confident—almost arrogant—reassurances that he had voiced a little over an hour before. Suddenly he felt far from reassured himself. He didn’t feel arrogant at all.

He rose and went through the inner door into the lab. Betty greeted him with a couple of messages which he only half heard, one of which was a reminder that some members of a research team from Princeton were due the next morning and would be spending most of the day with the unit. Pattie tried beguiling him with a silent, innocent, wide-eyed look which he ignored. At that moment Judy Farlin came out of Kim’s office, rummaged around in a file drawer for a few moments and then went back in carrying a folder. Dyer turned abruptly and went back into his own office where he called the Superintendent of Internal Services, bawled
him
out at considerable length and secured a guaranteed reservation for Judy for the first thing the next morning. He came back out, gave the details to Betty and asked her to pass them on to Judy. Then, feeling a little better, he went on through to the lab bay to see how Ron and Chris were getting along.