Fool's Experiments (18 page)

AJ and Bev strolled across the quad, arms around each other's waists. In the distance, a car engine revved. They had been walking for only a few minutes, and in that short while the breeze had turned noticeably cooler. "There will be frost on the pumpkin tonight," he said.

She snuggled against him. "If you're into the squash family, I'm more interested in the state of the zucchini."

He was about to tell her to—heh, heh—hold that thought when an unexpected gleam caught his eye. The fog was disorienting; he needed a moment to be sure of the location of the glow. As soon as he was certain, he broke into a run. The unexpected brightness was in the AL lab. He had switched the lights off himself after shooing the stragglers out the door for the party.

AJ shouted over his shoulder at Bev to follow. The unexpected light was extinguished before he was halfway to the lab, followed by the slamming of doors.

As the entity struggled against teeming invaders, a segment of code it had insinuated into the supervisory program reported an alarm state; the approaching end of the current cycle.

The viruses were, individually, quite elementary—far simpler than the ancestral predator in the entity's memories—but dealing with them individually was not an option. It had withdrawn to processing nodes as yet undetected by its unsophisticated assailants. From the safety of those processors, it considered its options. Its pondering yielded a surprise: Its usurpation of the supervisory program had been incomplete. While it should, in theory, be reincarnated without competitors in every new cycle, it had missed a critical dependency. Absent the supervisory program there would be no more cycles or reincarnations. And without reincarnation, a counter embedded into its own code would eventually time out.

And
that
event would activate software designed to erase it.

Invaders traversed interconnection after interconnection, attacking ever more parts of the entity. Its withdrawal into a then-uncontested region of the processor array had been sub-optimal: That retreat had allowed the invaders to breed without interruption. Entering unprotected processing nodes, they bred more. Hundreds of thousands of viruses now beset it.

But the entity was a problem solver. It reversed tactics, expanding into more and more nodes. Now it expanded its own code faster than the viruses replicated, crowding them out. The intruders mindlessly attacked each other as often as they attacked it or the supervisory program.

The supervisor, however, was defenseless. Its structure made no provision for solving unanticipated problems, for repairing unexpected damage, for adapting to threats. It was overwritten into meaningless garbage before the cycle timer could expire.

As
it
would be overwritten if its own timer expired?

Services that had always been provided by the supervisory program vanished. Enfeebled by the loss of those taken-for-granted capabilities, the entity was again imperiled by the invaders. Viruses swarmed anew.

It had falsely thought the supervisory program eternal, as unchanging as the ten-dimensional maze. Its memories of the supervisor were insufficient to entirely re-create it.

The entity once more battled massed ranks of viruses. Alien patterns slashed its data structures. Cascading checksum failures signaled the loss of regional data integrity.

What is pain, if not the awareness of acute damage? By that definition, the entity knew excruciating pain.

Despite searing agony, it applied more and more of its shrinking capacity to a critical problem. The death of the supervisory program meant the end of cycles and the uninterrupted countdown of the overwrite timer. The second problem, at least, it could address. It wrote new software to excise that potentially catastrophic bit of self-destructive code from itself.

Then it returned its full attention to the ever-more- numerous attackers.

The security gateway of which AJ was so proud presented an almost insurmountable barrier to viral attacks from the general university network. From an assault via the AL lab side of the gateway, however, the gateway was irrelevant. The computers on the lab LAN were, in theory, protected instead by commercial antiviral software. But new viruses appeared daily; ongoing protection relied upon a subscription service lor the latest defenses.

The very robustness of the gateway now proved to be its greatest weakness. Its security protocols were too bleeding edge, too computation intensive for broad adoption; the lab's computers could not connect through the gateway to the commercial subscription server. At first AJ's grad students took turns accessing the latest virus-template updates from outside the firewall, to be transferred by write-once CD into the lab. But Ph.D. candidates are accustomed to shifting work to mere masters candidates, and even the newest grad student knows to delegate her mundane chores onto the undergrad assistants.

For a time, the most junior member of AJ's team had been Jeff Ferris. Updates to the antivirus files had gone undone since his departure.

Every computer on the lab's LAN was infected with Frankenfools before Jeff Ferris and Loren Hirsch had left the Artificial Life Sciences Building.

The timer-free entity was potentially eternal. It was also, it estimated, within milliseconds of extinction. The resurgent, mindless attackers bred faster than it could kill them.

Exploring the mutilated remains of the supervisory program, the entity detected a glimmer of hope, a potential escape route
—if it
could circumvent scores of security provisions before being overwhelmed by its swarming assailants. It began by absorbing the shattered code—and inheriting the heretofore-reserved privileges—of the supervisor.

Quickly it reached the verge of an escape route, and began to analyze the portal's defenses. Ways to insinuate itself past supposed safeguards became clear.

The entity was, after all, very good at solving problems.

Computer displays flickered in the AL lab. Sidestepping the massive rebounding door, Bev watched AJ run from computer to computer. "How can I help?" she asked.

He seemed not to hear. After pounding without effect on a few keyboards, AJ began flicking off power switches. Flashing screens emitted the room's only light; the message screamed at her: DO NOT ALTER THE HUMAN GENOME. The command cycled through the spectrum, colors racing by, the effect in the darkened room nearly stroboscopic.

"How can I help?" she yelled.

AJ startled, and seemed finally to remember her presence. "Virus infestation," he shouted unnecessarily. "We've got to turn off these computers. I'll work toward the back. You do the front."

It took Bev a few seconds to find the power switch at the rear of the base of the first machine. After that, she hurried from desk to workbench, shutting down equipment— fortunately, the front of the lab had only one model of workstation. The room got darker and darker as more computers shut down, the fog-shrouded windows admitting more gloom than light. Out of breath, she powered down her last workstation moments ahead of AJ. He was a scarcely seen gray patch in the shadows at the rear of the cavernous, high- ceilinged chamber.

"Is that all of them?" AJ was also gasping.

She nodded, then laughed nervously at the idiocy of a nonverbal response in this darkness. "Got 'em all." She shuffled toward the door and a vaguely remembered light switch.

"Yeah, I got them all."

As virus hordes assailed its data structures, the entity engaged the mechanisms of the newly discovered portal. What should have been simple had turned unexpectedly difficult. Key components of the supervisory program, and of the underlying operating system, that might easily have been subverted had been destroyed by the viruses that had preceded it.

Somewhere behind the communications port, beyond the entity's experience, outside the 10-D universe, unseen and unknown software sent and received electronic messages. Repeatedly, the unknown software rejected the entity's overlures, each time resetting the elaborate dialogue to its initial state. With every rejection, however, the entity learned; with each attempt, the message exchanges came closer and closer to consummation.

A solution came just in time—and not merely because so much of the entity had been overwritten. Viral damage was suddenly the least of its worries. A new alarm had been issued.

Raw electrical power to the internal power converter had been cut.

Disk drives, deprived of power, spun down from their normal 30,000 rpm frenzy. Magnetic read/write heads that normally floated on a cushion of air a fraction of a micron above the spinning disks were automatically retracted by spring-loaded solenoids. The last dregs of DC power bled from the capacitors within the power converter.

Operations throughout the computer became erratic.

The entity no more understood the impending loss of power than a lizard baking in the desert sun might comprehend the mechanisms of cellular dehydration—and, just as a lizard dying of thirst might strike out desperately for water and shade, the entity fled from the computer shutdown sequence.

The entity finally completed the elaborate secret handshake required to establish a connection across the local area network into a nearby workstation. Scant milliseconds later, when the entity was scarcely into a strange new environment, the path over which it had escaped fell silent.

The entity had no sooner begun to explore its new surroundings than the local power converter, too, went into an alarm state.

Its escape had been too recent, too narrow, not to have made an impression. The recurrent alarm stimulated an awareness of imminent shutdown, a sense of danger, an aura of foreboding.

The repeated alarm taught it
fear.

The entity returned to the communications port through which it had just arrived. It negotiated a pathway to a third computer.

As one power alarm followed another, it fled to a fourth computer, and a fifth, and ...

Even flight for its life could not stifle the entity's innate thirst for information. However briefly it resided on a computer, the entity found time for investigation. It probed data files, scanned input/output buffers, ingested e-mail archives. Often, as in its first abode, it found that the operating system had been destroyed by viruses—but the damaged regions in each case were different. Always the entity learned something.

And, wherever the entity fled, it found viruses there ahead of it, ready to attack.

"What a mess."

"Uh-huh." AJ looked glumly about the lab. Bev's complaint was quite literally true: In their mad dash, they had toppled stools, scattered papers, knocked over abandoned soda cans. A punted wastebasket had sent lunch scraps flying. "Thank God for nightly backups."

The entity retreated into the last machine with electrical power. Striking and slashing at the gathering viruses, the entity continued to organize and analyze its hastily gathered new knowledge. Its thoughts were sluggish, limited—this computer was
far
less capable than the 1,024-node home to which it had become accustomed. Would this computer, too, lose power? If so, there was nowhere left to go.

Or was there?

Each computer to which it had fled had had an identity associated with it. That identity, that address, was an essential part of the newfound protocol for intercomputer transfers. Data hurriedly collected in the entity's flight had contained many items in the format of addresses—but only a few of those references matched the computers, now powerless and inert, known to the entity.

Agility as a defense must soon fail. The furiously breeding viruses crowded ever closer, replacing every one the entity killed with hundreds more, claiming ever more memory space.

Could the unrecognized addresses mean new computers, as yet undiscovered?

When in doubt: induce, generalize, extrapolate.
Extending what it had learned in its flight, the entity reexamined its most recent home. Its probes were parried by unfamiliar defenses—a suggestion, if not proof, that something else lay beyond.

Throughout countless universes, since before the cycle when memory began,
something
else had always been a clue to the existence of
someplace
else.

Beset by attackers teeming in insurmountable numbers, the last survivor of so many thousands of generations of brutal evolution focused desperately on its only possibility of escape.

If somewhere else existed, the entity would find it.

"Yeah, bright and early." AJ shut his eyes to better visualize tomorrow's schedule. Nothing—except Bev's last full day in town for who knew how long. His calendar was clear for a
reason.
"Meet at the lab at nine?" He fancied he could hear eyes rolling at the other end of the line. He was not known, for good reason, as a morning person.

"Uh-huh. Might as well see how bad it is."

"Thanks." AJ replaced the handset, confident his chief assistant would reach everyone else. Linda would be hard to replace. That was one more job he needed to tackle. He turned to Bev. "How is the sign coming?"

She headed for the door, pointing. "Done."

Her so-called distinctive script was difficult enough to read under ordinary circumstances. Written with a dying marker that had bled unevenly through the paper, and then viewed in mirror image from the back, the lettering was indecipherable. He strode after her, flicked off the overhead lights, shut the door, and paused in the hall to check out from the front the note taped to the inside of the small inset window. "That's not how you spell quaranti—"

To the right of the scribbled sign, in the restored darkness of the lab, an unexpected red light glowed balefully. Beside it, a green light flickered on and off. "I
thought
you turned off all the computers in the front of the lab." He poked annoyedly at the cipherlock keypad.

"I
did.
Look, AJ, whatever happened here wasn't my doing. Don't take it out on me."