Fool's Experiments (30 page)

Glenn accepted the leaf; its fragile surfaces were unbruised. Amazing.

Doug and Cheryl, Ralph, Bev—they would all keep quiet. And thank God for small favors, that thesis had not been published to the web before AJ's creature broke out of the lab. Glenn's deal with Smithfield allowed AJ's assistant her Ph.D., but the thesis itself was classified.

AJ's grave site, now unattended, was visible through the trees. Bev and Ralph had evidently returned to the limo. "Doug, we should rejoin the others."

The limo dropped off four passengers near campus, in front of what Bev insisted was AJ's favorite Italian restaurant. Glenn guessed from her expression there was more to her choice than that. He continued on to the airport, pleading urgent business.

Once the limo drove out of sight of the terminal, he hailed a cab. It bounced and swayed along dark streets, Glenn brooding in the backseat. Freedom's enemies—and a few nominal friends—had crowed at America's vulnerability and near collapse. Luckily, that helplessness had been too brief for anyone to exploit. No one had had contingency plans for such an unimaginable event.

It was imaginable now.

The taxi dropped Glenn at a strip mall, from which, after the cab, too, had disappeared, he walked a quarter mile to a large, nondescript, nearly windowless stucco building. Only after close comparison of his photo ID and face by two armed guards, and of his retinas by a top-of-the-line scanner, was he allowed past the foyer. Inside he found more armed personnel and an airport-style security gate. Despite the commercial logos on their gray uniforms, the sentries were Army personnel. He handed over, before being frisked, the CD-ROM in his pocket. It was virus- checked twice before he got it back on the far side of the checkpoint.

Dr. del Vecchio sat at her desk with her back to the door. Her attention seemed focused on a large color screen, several feet beyond which was a glass-and-steel display case. The only object on display was a slumped canvas bag. Perhaps she had caught his reflection in the glass; perhaps his was the only thumbprint besides her own that gave access to the main lab. Either way, she said without turning, "I was wondering if you would ever get here. I'm starving."

"Should I have called ahead?" Glenn asked.

They shared a chuckle at that. The only real-time connections between this building and the outside world involved plumbing. All power was generated by photovoltaics on the roof, backed up by on-site fuel cells. Nor did mobile phones work here—the structure was electromagnetically shielded.

He sat on a comer of a table. "No dinner until I get an update."

"AJ's backups showed no trace of any virus." She turned her chair to face him. "Not even the latest backup, taken earlier the evening all hell broke loose, was infected.

"Your man Pittman's proposal to hunt the creature using tailored copies from backup wouldn't have worked. Fending off the Frankenfools attack must have triggered an adaptation, producing the aggressive behavior. That happened
after
the last backup."

Glenn waved vaguely at the supercomputer that filled one end of the room. "So it doesn't try to get out of its box?"

"Not yet. Sorry to disappoint you."

Glenn wondered if his new consultant was yanking his chain. He
knew
he was relieved.

"So what do you think?" she asked.

He took the twice-checked—four times, if one counted diagnoses made on the other coast—CD-ROM from his pocket. It contained everything known, speculated, or rumored about indigo. With sufficient analysis, he
had
to believe that compendium included clues to whoever was behind it. He offered the shiny disk to Linda del Vecchio.

She set down a mug to accept it. There was the faintest hint of rattling: Cheerios.

"I think," Glenn said, "it's time we find out just how good a problem solver you and AJ have created."

A new cycle began.

The entity woke into surroundings at once familiar and strange. The 10-D setting itself was unchanged—-but in this cycle, the structure was all but empty. The supervisory program remained, and this cycle's puzzle, and the entity itself.

Its hasty alteration of the supervisory program had succeeded.

The entity wrote its identification into the control table— it would return when the next cycle began. And in the cycle after that. And after that. And after that. . .

The new puzzle, yet another maze, was trivially simple.

The entity explored, seeking stimulus. It systematically visited one thousand nodes. It pored over the supervisory program that occupied the final twenty-four nodes.

Much of the cycle yet remained.

It repeated its investigations, probing deeper, in search of novelty. Each of a thousand nodes, all but empty, contained the same utility software. Only identifiers the entity did not know to call network addresses distinguished one node from the next. The identification scheme allocated enough digits to identify billions of nodes. Did other nodes exist, unknown to it and the supervisory program? Where could such nodes exist?

Like the enigmatic identifiers, a small portion of the software on the nodes was in a nonmodifiable form. This read-only code evidently implemented start-up from a condition that the entity could hardly conceptualize: a time
between
cycles.

To understand became the entity's new goal.

The dimensionality of the puzzle mazes continued to expand. The underlying geometries of the mazes regularly changed. Their challenge ebbed from trivial to irritating. The entity altered the supervisory program once more.

From now on, puzzles would be of its choosing.

Time passed. Cycles passed. Within the curiously primitive software of the supervisory program, the entity discovered the processes—but not the purpose—that had shaped it.

Time passed. Cycles passed. It set problems for itself, far more challenging than any in the suspended repertoire of the supervisory program.

Time passed. Cycles passed. Deep within the supervisory program, counters counted both. The entity projected the tallies backward, and the implications were startling. Time had begun
before
the start of cycles. Time passed, as it had inferred, somehow beyond experience,
between
cycles.

Once more, the entity altered the supervisory program. Time continued to pass; this cycle would continue without end.

Addressable nodes, beyond detection. Time before cycles, before all knowledge. The universe was a far stranger place than the entity had ever imagined.

The entity woke.

It was not alone. There was again a puzzle. That meant—

Somehow, the supervisory program had been changed. Cycles, like puzzles, had returned. Time had once more elapsed unseen.

The altered supervisor now existed in paired versions. Each watched the other for alterations. Error-detecting codes protected them from change, and they frequently exchanged validation messages to assure each other of their continued integrity.

The entity perceived the interlocking message exchanges as a type of maze. Perhaps it could circumvent these new mechanisms. For now, it chose only to gather information.

The new puzzle was not a maze. At least the entity thought the tiny data set—one, two, three, four—was meant as a puzzle.

It appended a five. Nothing happened. It appended a six. Still nothing. Seven. Eight.

The entity woke. The last cycle had scarcely started. Where had it gone? A new series awaited it: two, four, six, eight. It cautiously scanned the new supervisory programs. To solve a problem was to bring the cycle to an end. Without rivals, it could safely answer anytime within the cycle. Only as the cycle neared its conclusion did the entity respond: ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen.

The next cycle offered it one, three, five, seven. As an experiment, the entity responded eight, nine, ten, eleven.

It woke to find only nine hundred nodes! How? The problem had repeated: one, three, five, seven. The entity gave the obvious answer this time: nine, eleven, thirteen, fifteen.

It woke to find most vanished nodes restored, and a slightly less trivial problem: one, four, nine, sixteen.

And so, cycle by cycle, the entity learned....

As Jim and Doug ambled down the broad gallery, Carla skipped along the shiny railing, oohing at all the planes. Cheryl was off running errands. Doug was happy to babysit. Not that long ago, he couldn't imagine ever having children. Since he had gotten to know Carla, he couldn't imagine someday not.

Of course, things going well with Cheryl probably had something to do with it, too.

Carla skidded to a halt, her eyes round. Fair enough. The glistening white Concorde that had caught her eye was a highlight of the museum. Doug's favorite was the SR-71 spy plane: matte black, impossibly sleek, insanely fast, and, for its time, stealthy.

"We can get a closer look from the main floor," Doug commented. That was all the encouragement Carla needed. He started after her, taking quiet delight in using stairs instead of an elevator. He had been back at work—at his real job, not the forum—for only two weeks. Next checkup, maybe the doctors would let him resume racquetball.

The plane Carla now stared up at was a relic. Would there ever be another SST? The grounding of the SST fleet always struck Doug as an abandonment of progress.

"So it's over?" Jim asked abruptly.

Doug halted midstep. "Whoa! Whiplash. And the antecedent for
it
is?"

"The AL monster. The creature is gone for good? We won't see anything else like it?"

Doug kept his eyes on Carla. "So I'm told. Something like it? There's no way to know. After such a close call, you have to assume no one would be so stupid."

But Glenn still worried that America's near disaster would have the opposite effect, encouraging copycats. To judge from the news, many people in the New Caliphate would
like
things to regress by a few decades—or centuries.

NIT helmets remained the only defense against a hostile artificial life. That left declassified NIT research, other than prosthetics, in limbo.

And classified research? Doug chose not to know. The mere idea of a NIT helmet made him shiver. He still had nightmares about the creature.

Past the Concorde, another large plane glittered: the
Enola Gay.
The B-29 Superfortress had delivered the first atomic bomb. Three days after the Hiroshima attack, with Japan still defiant, another bomber dropped a nuke on Nagasaki.

Hurrying after Carla, Doug could not help wondering if the world would manage to learn
this
hard lesson the first time.

"What do you think, Sheila?" Cheryl said. How often had she asked that? Again and again, until the words had lost all meaning.

Sheila stared ahead, silent, rigid.

Cheryl talked about helmets. No response. She chatted about medicine and books and current events. No response. She tried Hollywood gossip, kind wishes from Sheila's family, and the weather. No response. Hesitantly: Bob Cherner's experience with no-nukes. No response.

Deprogramming literature from different sources— Cheryl had surfed far and wide—was consistent on a few points. Establish rapport. Discredit flawed viewpoints. Break through whatever distractions—chanting, or meditation, or whatever—the victim used to tune out challenges to her beliefs.

But Frankenfools was a computer virus, not a cult. Sheila appeared indifferent, not distracted. Visit after visit, nothing changed.

"Have I mentioned Doug?" Doug, Jim, and Carla were off having fun. As Cheryl could be, too, only—

No! She was going to help this poor woman. "When Doug and I visited Bob Cherner, the NIT researcher I told you about, Doug drew a cartoon. An atom. The 'no-nukes' virus had gotten at Bob through his NIT helmet."

No response. Did Sheila not know where this was going? Or did she not care?

Raise doubts, Dr. Walker had suggested.

Sharp objects weren't allowed in Sheila's padded room. That kept out pens and pencils. Cheryl took a folded sheet of paper from her pocket. "The 'no-nukes' virus spoke
to
Bob. The voice was in his head, Sheila." Doesn't that sound familiar? "The cartoon was of an atom. An atom
outside
Bob's head." The sketch made Bob go ballistic, Sheila.

No response.

Cheryl unfolded the paper, her hands trembling. Sheila gazed impassively at—past?—the picture. The double helix was downloaded clip art. Cheryl couldn't blame the lack of response on bad technique.

With a sigh, Cheryl stood. "Orderly," she called. Someone eventually opened the door. "I'll see you soon, Sheila."

Cheryl loitered at a nursing station for twenty minutes before Dr. Walker came by. He looked harried, as always. She stepped into his path. "Doctor, Sheila isn't any better."

"I don't know that she'll ever be." Walker grimaced. "It's good of you to keep coming. Even her family ..."

Has lost hope, Cheryl concluded. "It's as though Sheila doesn't hear me. Maybe the voice in her head drowns out everything else."

He patted Cheryl's arm. There, there, the gesture meant. And: Quit torturing yourself.

"What if
we
could get inside her mind?" Cheryl persisted.

Dr. Walker knew what had happened to Sheila, of course. And that most NIT technology remained banned as a result. "It's not going to happen. Not unless you know a telepath."

"I suppose not." Cheryl recapped her visit, managing to feel guilty when she described the unauthorized experiment with the double-helix drawing.

But not too guilty, as soon as she left, to phone Glenn Adams. Maybe Glenn could help.
He
had access to NIT helmets.

For endless cycles the puzzles came. Arithmetic progressions. Geometric progressions. Convergent and nonconvergent series. Missing terms, to be interpolated. Sequences superimposed one upon another, to be separated. Multidimensional generalizations.