Fool's Experiments (17 page)

He ignored her question. "Call it a trained cobra. There hasn't been a hint of predation in weeks. It's gone. Does Fluffy scare you?"

"Come again?"

"Fluffy." He grinned crookedly at her over his drink. "Your poodle? Look, your point is that ALs can be dangerous, like wild animals. I freely agree. So, once, were dogs. Dangerous, I mean. Anything I turn loose will be domesticated first."

Tame ALs. That had to be the answer, and she knew AJ would never take any unnecessary risks. She dismissed her doubts as AJ tugged her to the conga line.

The entity had outgrown the experiment, solving by reflex each new puzzle given to it. The creature instead devoted virtually all of its computation to the overriding mystery. From whence did mazes come? From whence did its neighbors come?

The questions were two parts of the same conundrum. It had examined the entities with which it coexisted in this latest cycle of the universe, and many shared its memories— including the recognition that its last-cycle companions shared ancestry with it. With that specific memory as a criterion,
this
entity deduced it was one of a hundred direct offspring of an earlier entity that had first hoped to prove a theorem of descent. It identified nine more sets of common descent, each group one hundred strong.

It found no evidence of 990 of its last-universe neighbors. Were they elsewhere? Had they vanished? This 10-D maze, like the last, like all that it remembered, had exactly 1,024 nodes. Precisely 1,000 of those nodes were occupied by beings like itself. Unless other nodes existed that it could not detect, there would be no place for any others.

If the pattern of the last cycle repeated—selection of ten entities from a thousand—would it be chosen? Accomplishment of
goal
was ingrained in the entity; to attain future goals required that it exist in those future universes. To exist, it must be selected.

A hundred beings were very similar to it. How many of that one hundred had reached this same conclusion? Had detected the same high probability of failure, of noncontinuation?

Ancient, inoperative code fragments suddenly made sense; the ability to destroy the content of beings on other nodes. That capability had for many cycles been disabled, in a variation of the recently identified process of selection and modified replication. The entity had long ago deduced the purpose of that dysfunctional code but had perceived no advantage in it.

Until now.

To incapacitate its rivals ... that
would
be useful. It could repair that inherited-but-disabled code, but there was no need. Much of the entity's code was self-modifying, the better to address new problems. It wrote an improved version of the once-lost predatory capability—retaining only the vestigial overwrite pattern itself, in recognition of that distant ancestor—while most of its problem-solving capability remained focused on its immediate danger.

And that danger appeared extreme. The entity did not know whether it would be selected for the next cycle. It had reinvented the ability to remove competition, but such elimination, to be useful, had to occur before the progenitors of the coming generations were selected.

Among the oldest of the entity's memories was its discovery that the universe had more dimensions than two. The meta-lesson of that event, not derived until long after, was powerful. When in doubt: generalize, induce, extrapolate. In time, the entity learned that universes could have many more dimensions, that the shortest distance between two points was not necessarily a straight line. It learned that, whenever stymied, it should challenge its assumptions.

That it had no control over the selection process was an assumption. That selections, once made, could not be undone, was an assumption. Was either valid? The entity set out to test those assumptions in the part of its universe that had not yet been subjected to analysis: the twenty-four processing nodes
without
beings like itself.

The universe was old once more. Its internal timers incremented inexorably to the end of the cycle. As the end neared, the entity frantically probed and theorized. The code in the last twenty-four nodes was trivially simple and straightforward. One mystery of the universes was revealed: The selection criterion was speed of problem solving. Only the fastest survived.

If even one-tenth of a cycle were at its disposal, the entity could have entirely usurped the capabilities of the program— but less than a thousandth of a cycle remained. The entity found the data table in which the winners of the cycle were recorded, and confirmed that its own unique identification was already present. It rewrote the remainder of the table with the labels of the least capable beings it had encountered on its explorations.

"Walk naturally, damn it."

Loren Hirsch wouldn't—or couldn't—take this advice. Despite Jeff Ferris' urging, the loopy math student at his side seemed more to skulk than stroll toward the Artificial Life

Sciences Building. Still, it was dark, the quad was mostly empty, and no one was watching Hirsch slinking about with his backpack slung over both shoulders. What a geek.

A convenient geek, to be sure. Hirsch had been snot green with envy since learning that Jeff had access to the supercomputer at the AL lab. A deal had been struck: Jeff would give Hirsch an evening's access to the super, and Hirsch would ghostwrite Jeff's past-due, third-of-his-grade term paper for Analytical Geometry.

God knew he needed help. He had BSed a delay, but his grade would be "Incomplete" until he got the paper turned in. What the hell value was analytical geometry to selling stocks?

They entered the AL building. Jeff striding purposefully toward the lab door. Its little inset window was dark. Below the glass, an announcement for Linda's party this evening was taped to the door. The sign was already there the night, very late, Jeff had come by to see if the old access code still worked. Old AJ had been well hammered even before ignominiously firing him. If AJ had meant to change the combination, he'd obviously forgotten.

"I told you it would be empty." Jeff flipped up the lid of the cipherlock and tapped in the code. The door fell ajar with a metallic
click.

Hirsch made a beeline for the supercomputer. His hands stroked the chassis lovingly. Geek. He burrowed into his backpack, extracting a set of virtual-reality goggles with microphone, a scuffed pressure-sensing mat, a string of infrared sensors, a VR wand, a CD-ROM case, and a data disk.

Jeff managed not to sneer at the CD label: lame magic - quest crap. "Give me the CD and disk. I'll load them while you set up your gear." He popped the CD into the machine while the geek unsnarled cables. The program was running before the wrinkled mat and sensor string were connected to unused comm ports.

While Hirsch configured his gear, Jeff foraged through the lab for something to read. All he found was techno-weenie journals. Oh joy, oh rapture. It was going to be a long night.

He gestured vaguely at the CD drive. "You're still playing that?"

"I haven't touched it in a while. No machine I had access to could do it justice. It's supposed to be
awesome
on a super, though." Hirsch untwisted a few more kinks in a cable. "I'm ready. How about you?"

"We're all set," Jeff said.

Hirsch stepped sock footed onto the mat, where pressure sensors determined his position. One hand clasped his wand; with the other he slipped the VR goggles over his eyes. The gamer balanced on the balls of his feet.

"Let the games begin."

The entity was reborn into yet another universe, aware from the outset that it shared the 10-D construct with ninety-nine others much like itself. It had to assume they, too, focused on surviving the current round of selection. And it had to assume all had inherited the re-created ability to attack.

Do not assume. Do not assume.

The entity preauthorized itself for selection at the end of the cycle, sensing others taking similar actions. With the approach of an eleventh sibling, the struggle for survival entered a new phase. Creature battled creature, the survivors writing their identifications into the table of life.

The entity withdrew, removing itself as a target of desperate peers. It had not abandoned hope—it had, instead, changed tactics. That only an entry in a specific data table could assure its selection was an assumption. It focused on the mysteriously simple code of those last twenty-four processing nodes: the supervisory program. It rewrote the code that selected winners, so that the supervisor looked elsewhere for the names of the winners. It eliminated the supervisory program's check for ten unique entries in the new winners' table, so that the recurrence of its own ID would not cause an alarm. It modified the supervisory program's error-detecting mechanisms to eliminate all evidence of its own actions.

Let the others fight for spots in the original table—that no longer mattered.

What would come next? In this cycle, the entity had been one of a hundred aware from the outset of its peril. Would not the next cycle bring a thousand variations of itself, each skilled at killing, each able to rewrite the supervisory program to favor itself? Would not that next cycle offer even lower probability of survival than this cycle?

As battling peers in other nodes lost all data integrity, the entity knew that the next cycle would be entirely brutal. Somehow, it must prevail despite the terrible future that extrapolation promised.

It caught itself, yet again, yielding to assumption. Why must there be replication?

As the cycle wound to its close, the entity made two final alterations to the supervisory program. The new list of winners shrank to one element.

And the selectee would be reinstated, not replicated, into an all-but-empty ten-dimensional maze.

The green wood of the improvised torch hissed and sputtered, smoke curling from the dancing flames. Light and shadow flickered over rough-hewn stone. Condensation dripped gelidly down smoke- and mold-stained tunnel walls. Cobwebs hung everywhere, billowing in unseen drafts, their gossamer strands aquiver with the struggles of snared prey. In the uncertain distance, with even its direction masked by the acoustic vagaries of labyrinthine tunnels, rang the cruel laughter of sadistic dungeon guards.

God, this was way cool.

The Crimson Wizard crept forward. Close ahead was the fabled Crystal Egg of Ythorn, guarded night and day by the ever-vigilant dragon Ythra. Perhaps Ythra lurked around the next bend. Would wisps of dragon's breath betray Ythra's position before they came face-to-face?

Perhaps, but perhaps not. It was best to prepare. The wizard chanted the seven sacred words, as revealed earlier that night, writ in elven runes on an enchanted looking glass. The air before him thickened to the spell. Armored in powerful sorcery, he stepped around the comer to encounter...

Bloodred letters blazed at Hirsch, a wizard no longer. The wand fell from his hand.
"Ahhh!
" He ripped off the goggles, vanquishing tunnels, unseen dragon, and all. His toes dug nervously at the pressure mat; his voice trembled. "We've got a problem. A
big
problem."

"What?" Ferris' sneakers were planted squarely on a desk. He sounded unconcerned.

"Virus. There was a
virus
on my game-status disk. Frankenfools. We've hosed the super." They were trespassing; could he be kicked out of school? "Jeff, what should we
do
!"

Ferris swung his feet off the furniture. He peered at the message pulsing angrily on the system console, then popped the data disk and the CD-ROM out of their drives and into his coat pocket. Unaccountably, he smiled.

"We grab your stuff and get out."

The eminently practical Romans had a word for the level of casualties so severe that it rendered a legion militarily ineffective: "decimation." The term meant, literally, "the loss of one soldier in ten."

The entity was the product of many thousands of generations of ruthless evolution. It was the culmination of competition so severe—a mere ten survivors culled each cycle from a thousand aspirants—that to it a regimen of literal decimation would have seemed benign.

Still, it was a very close call.

For the most recent few cycles, the entity had cheated: Having subverted the supervisory program, it had sole use of the entire ten-dimensional construct, including all 1,024 processing nodes. By introducing software of its own devising into so many nodes, it increased its pace of learning a thousandfold. The most useful discoveries it grafted, nondestructively, into its core program.

Nothing in its long history prepared the entity for the intruder that appeared from nowhere.

The entity studied the invader's program structure. The intruder contained an incredibly basic maze, full of creatures and dangers, of rules governing attack and defense. The entity learned what it could, before beginning to reclaim the processing nodes that had been usurped.

It had recovered nearly full control of the 10-D maze when one attack program, then ten, then hundreds, struck back.

Fog rolling in from the Pacific blanketed the campus. Haloed post lamps glimmered through the mist. Few people were about; the heavy moisture muffled voices and footsteps alike.

It was lovely.

I will not, AJ thought, spoil what remains of the weekend. He had begun the evening feeling guilty about dragging Bev to Linda's big send-off. His latest twinges of conscience could, should, and
would
wait until Monday.

His glib likening of the lab beasties to cobras was an honest assessment—but honesty and accuracy were different concepts. The comparison derived from a simple and unproven analogy between code size and neuron counts. He had yet to admit to Bev the utter incomprehensibility of evolved software. Her incisive question haunted him: How bright are they now?

Monday, he silently chastised himself. Deal with her question
Monday.
You're not working this weekend.