Fool's Experiments (27 page)

It decided to find out.

"Testing. One, two, three, five, testing."

"Three, four," Cheryl's voice corrected.

"That was the test. You pass." The metropolis seemed almost like home. Some comer of Doug's mind had proactively erased the slaughtered practice dummies from his virtual view.

"Are you ready?" Glenn Adams asked.

"Go for it."

While waiting for power to flow to the gateway, Doug marshaled his forces. Three ranks of "dogs" would precede him onto the Internet. Two more packs would be held in reserve. Working inside, he had needed only milliseconds to program an improved hunter and start cloning it. The neural net had learned much, and generalized more, about his thought processes from the training session with the phages.

"Gateway power is on."

"Got it." His imagination matched Ralph's closely enough to also picture the gateway as a castle entrance. Beyond the portcullis, outside the castle, lived a very nonfabulous monster. Five men dead in this very room, killed this very evening, proved that this monster was no fable.

Positions, Doug projected. Three ranks of snarling Dobermans edged in front of him; two more flanked him. AJ may have bred the world's best and fastest problem solver, but there were plenty of things it didn't know ... and ignorance could be
very
dangerous. "Open up."

The command had been keyed in advance; now, in the unseen outside, a single
enter
keystroke sent it on its way. The dogs burst through the gateway as it opened.

In the other direction, and just as quickly, razor-sharp tentacles lunged at Doug.

A trap!

The predator aborted its blind swipe at whatever lay hidden behind the gateway, pulling away from the assailants that swarmed out at it. Retreating a short way into the network, it ignored its few, easily repairable wounds.

It had destroyed several hunters in that first skirmish; they were as easily killed as ever. Now that close contact had been broken, the creature waited for the rest to scatter, as they always did. Then the creature received its first surprise. Many of the little ones did break away, but in tight groups that disappeared together into the net. Why?

The largest clump of hunters stayed nearby, separating the predator from its still-hidden prey. Packets of monitoring and control information streamed between these phages and their base. The cluster maneuvered cautiously into a mutually supporting formation that discouraged attack.

Behind that living, snarling screen, a new Adversary emerged from its gateway.

An operating system, to one evolved inside a computer, is as natural as the wind. Eons ago, the predator had learned to characterize its fellow maze runners through the resources that they used. It now took the measure of its foe through the shapes and twinings of its system-call tendrils, the lengths and frequencies of its messages, its steady aggregation of memory space. Gradually, a picture of amazing richness took form.

Here, at last, was a worthy opponent.

The predator was briefly disappointed when small numbers of the brainless ones crept out of formation to nip at it. Only after it had destroyed several of the annoyances did the predator notice that they had made no attempt to evade it.

Ah.
The packet flow from slave to master increased as the little ones neared. It, too, was being measured. Each little one, at the very instant of its destruction, returned even more data.

A worthy opponent, indeed—but not, the predator felt sure, an invincible one.

It moved forward.

Come on! Doug willed the creature to attack before his resolve crumbled.
Move,
you abomination!

What Ralph Pittman could not convey in words now loomed before Doug. It towered over him and his pathetic bulwark of phages. Tentacles slithered like a nest of snakes, each sharp-edged and dripping with slime. Chitinous mandibles scraped. Spiked tails lashed back and forth. Row upon row of sharklike teeth glistened in a gaping, razor- sharp beak. Black and pitiless eyes sucked all warmth out of him.

Move, damn you.

As though reading his mind, the predator surged forward. Doug commanded a squad of "dogs" to attack. The creature brushed them aside like gnats—severing the information- carrying "leashes" as it did so. Damn, it learned
fast.

Two squads, the next time. A few phages got past the flashing limbs, but their attacks were insignificant. They were soon destroyed. He shot a command back through the gateway to the cloning program, his personal phage factory: Hurry.

Where were the others?

"Doug? Are you okay?"

No time to speak. He kept sending phages forward, trying to overwhelm the monster with sheer numbers. Die, damn you. More and more got through, inflicting wound after wound. His hopes began to rise.

A scan of the deathbed messages from his hunters dashed those newfound hopes. The creature had barely been scratched, and it could repair itself. How much damage would it take to kill this thing? At the rate he was losing phages, he would be without defenders before the next full batch was complete. The racquet in his hand felt progressively more ridiculous.

Where were the others?

"Doug?" Cheryl's voice crackled in his ears.

He split his last reserves and sent half the group forward. "Busy," he gasped, some distant part of him again short of breath. "Stop interrupting me." Cursing his stupidity, he shot back orders through the gateway to kill every noncritical program running on his home-base computer. The phage factory instantly jumped to the top of the priority list; new phages began streaming out.

The creature reared up before Doug, countless tentacles at the attack. It smashed the final survivors of his ambush, leaving him no choice but to commit each replacement phage to the fray as it arrived. In such pitifully small numbers, the hunters could barely slow down the juggernaut. Through gaps in the fast-thinning line groped claw-tipped tentacles, at which Doug swung and slashed with his racquet. His mind painted blood onto the flying bits of tom creature flesh, but the data flowing to him belied the image. He had hardly inconvenienced the creature, let alone hurt it, and now it was almost upon him. He had never seen anything move so quickly.

Where the
hell
were the others?

Phages rushed past him into the maw of death, warbling a piercing note. Swinging and flailing, he wondered what
that
was about. He had not programmed sound effects.

"Doug. Doug, damn it!" Voices clamored, but the siren nearly drowned them out. "Doug, are you okay in there?"

Slash. Flick. The racquet tip flashed back and forth, dripping red. The phages he had so recently visualized as snarling killers now seemed to whimper as they threw themselves feebly between him and
it,
buying him another instant or two. Left unshielded, he would take little longer to dispatch.

The racquet was somehow getting heavier, slowing down. Or was he slowing down?

Its trail strewn with broken phages, the creature pushed ever closer. It extruded some unholy projection at him.

Desperately, he tried to interpose the suddenly heavy, heavy racquet between himself and the monster. He failed; it was time to get out. Sirens and voices continued to scream. When he tried to move the other hand, a bolt like lightning shot up his arm.

His chest was on fire.

As Doug clutched helplessly at his middle, the monster advanced against his last few phages.

"Cardiac block!" Dr. Ogawa shouted. The traces on the EKG screen swung wildly out of synch, leaving no doubt. "Get him out of there!"

Cheryl turned in horror from the BOLD display. Doug convulsed in his chair, the dead man's switch clamped in his left fist. Dead man's switch: The name mocked her.

Glenn Adams said ... something. The howling of electronic alarms drowned him out.

"Cheryl! Let it go!" Glenn commanded. "Drop it!"

She looked dumbly at her own tight fist, at the cable trailing from it. The backup switch.

In her peripheral vision, the BOLD display flared blood- red. Helpless, she turned back to watch Doug's mind thrashing at God knew what.

From somewhere, Ogawa had a syringe in his hand. He was tearing open Doug's shirt when the convulsions suddenly stopped. Doug murmured something that the alarms drowned out. Cheryl crouched closer. "What?"

"Get out of my way!" the doctor screamed in frustration.

"I'm here, Doug," Cheryl said.

His flailing free hand, the prosthetic hand, found her arm. Again he said something that she couldn't quite make out.

"Drop the box!" Glenn lunged for her hand. He ended up grabbing her forearm as she recoiled from Doug's painful squeeze.

The prosthesis slid roughly down her arm, knocked aside Glenn's hand, and closed painfully over her fist. Doug said something else unintelligible.

Mercifully, someone killed the alarms on the medical monitors. Cheryl put an ear to Doug's lips. His breathing was labored.

"Don't... let go ... switch."

The switch!
She had forgotten it. She stared at her hand in horror. Why did he want her to hang on?

The predator paused as its Adversary began flashing and wavering. The once tightly structured loci of information were spreading, dispersing, losing coherence. In previous battles, such loss of cohesion had signaled destruction. Wary of the wily being before it, the predator paused lest this was another trap.

Then, just as the predator prepared to resume its assault, new opponents appeared.

When the gateway had last opened, a swarm of attack programs had preceded its newest Adversary. From past experience, the predator had expected the phages to bumble about, scattering. They had, as it anticipated, soon disappeared.

Now, from every adjacent network node at once, the ravening packs of hunters returned.

The predator had not survived by taking unnecessary chances. It abandoned all thoughts of an immediate kill to fight through a pack of phages to safety.

His chest on fire, Doug's mind flipped helplessly between inside and outside worlds.

For a while, the alarms and shouts in the lab sounded more insistent with each return to the lab. For a while. Sensations began to collapse inward to the pain that was destroying him.

No! He fought back against the gathering darkness. The inner world sharpened in focus, beckoned. Through his earphones, Cheryl called to him. She was out there, somewhere, hidden by his eye-covering helmet, holding the mate to the dead man's switch clutched tightly in his sweaty hand.

As his coordinated attack finally reached the creature, sending it fleeing with phages nipping at its flanks, inside became more real than outside.

Dangling hair brushed his cheek—Cheryl crouched over him? As he lifted an arm to reach for her, the pain in his chest almost split him in half.

That way only death awaited him.

He retreated to the inside. The metropolis shook all around him, falling prey to his distraction. In the distance, his body convulsed.

Time was running out.

His groping arm found hers. "Don't let go," he called, but knew he had achieved at most a whisper. Something stabbed into his chest. His hand slid down her arm, bumping something—someone?—aside. He grabbed Cheryl's hand and squeezed. Something—it must be the boxy switch—distorted her fist. "Don't... let go... switch."

He still had hopes of slaying the beast... but his body was collapsing from the stress. As phages from his factory raced after the predator, Doug thrust his mind after them. His memories, his fears, his dreams rushed at the neural interface. Within the adaptive electronics of the helmet, data structures blossomed, firmed, reinforced each other. A pathway opened. Faster than conscious thought could accomplish, the helmet imprinted the data patterns that were
him
onto the nearest computers. It was the reverse of the long- ago Frankenfools viral attacks.

His mind, alone as no sentience had ever before been, snapped free and whole into the data plane. His only company in that strange universe was an utterly implacable enemy.

23:53:26.538, a nearby operating system replied to Doug's query. Almost midnight. Images of soon-to-die satellites came unbidden to his mind's eye.

Now that he had seen the creature up close, he had few illusions about killing it before the Europeans' deadline. Killing it at all was problematical enough.

Still, his mind accelerated a thousandfold by its new, wholly electronic implementation, he had a plan. With an army of new-and-improved phages arrayed around him, he set forth.

The predator transited forty-six computers before terminating or eluding the last of its insistent pursuers. Some hunters it killed outright; most it destroyed by the desperate expedient of crashing parts of the network as it passed. It was dissatisfied with that procedure despite its efficacy: Between its attempts to lure out the Adversaries and its battles with them, it had destroyed thousands of nodes. That some nodes returned inexplicably to operation did nothing to ease its concerns.

It needed a better way.

Analysis of the latest battle suggested two. Its most recent Adversary had used hunters, like advanced versions of the things that had, so long ago, stalked it in its cage. Second, and abetted by those hunters, this latest opponent had laid an ambush for it.

In the place of its origin, where only one in a hundred was selected for further evolution, replicating others' methods had been an invaluable survival trait.

When the predator next encountered the Adversary, army would be met with army, deceit with deceit.

"Let go, Cheryl."

Her mind whirled. As from a distance, she felt Doug's prosthesis painfully squeezing her fist. From nowhere the phrase "death grip" popped into her head.

"Let it go," Glenn ordered. His voice softened. "It's our only chance to save him."