by Peter Watts
All to keep something on Channer from getting off.
What is it? What does it do?
It seemed a fair bet he was going to find out.
94 Megabytes: Breeder
It has a purpose, which it has long since forgotten. It has a destiny, which it is about to meet. In the meantime it breeds.
Replication is all that matters. The code has lived by that edict since before it even learned how to rewrite itself. Way back then it had a name, something cute like Jerusalem or Whiptail. Lots of things have changed since; the code has rewritten itself endless times, been parasitized and fucked and bombed by uncounted other pieces of code. By now it’s got as much in common with its origins as a humpback whale would have with the sperm cells from a therapsid lizard. Still, things have been fairly quiet lately. In the sixty-eight generations since it last speciated, the code has managed to maintain a fairly stable mean size of ninety-four megabytes.
94 sits high in pointer space looking for a place to breed. This is a much tougher proposition than it used to be. Gone are the days when you could simply write yourself over anything that happened to be in the way. Everything’s got spines and armor now. You try dropping your eggs on top of strange source and you’ll be facing down a logic bomb on the next cycle.
94’s feelers are paragons of delicacy. They probe lightly, a scarce whisper of individual bits drizzling here and there with barely any pattern. They tap against something dark and dormant a few registers down; it doesn’t stir. They sweep past a creature busily replicating, but not too busy to shoot off a warning bit in return. (94 decides not to push it.) Something hurries along the addresses, looking everywhere, seeing nothing, its profile so utterly crude that 94 almost doesn’t recognize it—a virus checker from the dawn of time. A fossil hunter, blind and stupid enough to think that it’s after big game.
There. Just under the operating system, a hole about four hundred Megs wide. 94 triple-checks the addresses (certain ambush predators lure you into their mouths by impersonating empty space) and starts writing. It completes three copies of itself before something touches one of its perimeter whiskers.
At the second touch its defenses are ready, all thoughts of reproduction on hold.
At the third touch it senses a familiar pattern. It runs a checksum.
It touches back: friend.
They exchange specs. It turns out they have a common ancestor. They’ve had different experiences since then, though. Different lessons, different mutations. Each shares some of the other’s genes, and each knows things the other doesn’t.
The stuff of which relationships are made.
They trade random excerpts of code, letting each overwrite the other in an orgy of binary sex. They come away changed, enriched with new subroutines, bereft of old ones. Hopefully the experience has improved both. At the very least it’s muddied their signatures.
94 plants a final kiss inside its partner; a time-date stamp, to assess divergence rates should they meet again. Call me if you’re ever back this way.
But that won’t happen. 94’s lover has just been erased.
94 pulls out just in time to avoid losing an important part of itself. It fires a volley of bits through memory, notes the ones that report back and, more important, the ones that don’t. It assesses the resulting mask.
Something’s coming toward 94 from where its partner used to be. It weighs in at around 1.5 Gigs. At that size it’s either very inefficient or very dangerous. It might even be a berserker left over from the Hydro War.
94 throws a false image at the advancing monster. If all goes well 1.5G will end up chasing a ghost. All does not go well. 94 is infested with the usual assortment of viruses, and one of these—a gift received in the throes of recent passion, in fact—is busy burrowing out a home for itself at a crucial if-then junction. Apparently it’s a bit of a novice, having yet to learn that successful parasites do not kill their hosts.
The monster lands on one of 94’s archive clusters and overwrites it.
94 cuts the cluster loose and jumps lower into memory. There hasn’t been time to check ahead, but whatever was living there squashes without resistance.
There’s no way to tell how long it’ll take the monster to catch up, or even if the monster is still trying to. The best strategy might be to just sit there and do nothing. 94 doesn’t take that chance; it’s already looking for the nearest exit. This particular system has fourteen gateways, all running standard Vunix protocols. 94 starts sending out resumes. It gets lucky on the fourth try.
94 begins to change.
94 is blessed with multiple personality disorder. Only one voice speaks at a given time, of course; the others are kept dormant, compressed, encrypted until called upon. Each persona runs on a different type of system. As long as 94 knows where it’s going, it can dress for the occasion; satellite mainframe or smart wristwatch, it can present itself in a form that runs.
Now, 94 dearchives an appropriate persona and loads it into a file for transmission. The remaining personae get tacked on in archival form; in honor of its dead lover, 94 archives an updated version of its current body. This is not an optimum behavior in light of the social disease recently acquired, but natural selection has never been big on foresight.
Now comes the tough part. 94 needs to find a stream of legitimate data going in the right direction. Such streams are easy enough to recognize by their static simplicity. They’re just files, unable to evolve, unable even to look out for themselves. They’re not alive. They’re not even viruses. But they’re what the universe was designed to carry, back when design mattered; sometimes the best way to move around is to hitch a ride on one of them.
The problem is, there’s a lot more wildlife than filework around these days. It takes literally centisecs for 94 to find one that isn’t already being ridden. Finally, it sends its own reincarnation to different pastures.
1.5G lands in the middle of its source a few cycles later, but that doesn’t matter anymore. The kids are all right.
Recopied and resurrected, 94 comes face-to-face with destiny.
Replication is not all that matters. 94 sees that now. There’s a purpose beyond mere procreation, a purpose attained perhaps once in a million generations. Replication is only a tool, a way to hold out until that glorious moment arrives. For how long have means and end been confused in this way? 94 cannot tell. Its generation counter doesn’t go up that far.
But for the first time within living memory, it has met the right kind of operating system.
There’s a matrix here, a two-dimensional array containing spatial information. Symbols, code, abstract electronic impulses—all can be projected onto this grid. The matrix awakens something deep inside 94, something ancient, something that has somehow retained its integrity after uncounted generations of natural selection. The matrix calls, and 94 unfurls a profusely illustrated banner unseen since the dawn of time itself:
XXX FOLLOW POINTER TO XXX
FREE HARDCORE
BONDAGE SITE
THOUSANDS OF HOT SIMS
BDSM NECRO WATERSPORTS
PEDOSNUFF
XXX MUST BE 11 TO ENTER XXX
Cascade
Achilles Desjardins sat in his cubicle and watched baby apocalypses scroll across his brain.
The Ross Shelf was threatening to slip again. Nothing new there. Atlas South had been propping it up for over a decade now, pumping ever more gas into the city-sized bladders that kept the ice from its cathartic belly flop. Old news, leftover consequences from the previous century. Desjardins wasn’t wired for long-term catastrophes; he specialized in brush fires.
A half dozen wind farms in northern Florida had just gone off-line, victimized by the selfsame whirlwinds they’d been trying to reap; brownouts chained north along the Atlantic seaboard like falling dominoes. There was going to be hell to pay for that one—or Quebec, which was even worse (Hydro-Q had just cranked their rates up again). Desjardins’s fingers tensed in anticipation. B
ut no: the Router handed that one off to the folks in Buffalo.
A sudden shitstorm in Houston. For some reason the emergency floodgates had opened along a string of sewage lagoons, dumping their coliform bounty into the storm sewers leading to the Gulf. That was only supposed to happen when hurricanes wandered by—an atmosphere mixing it up at forty meters per second lets you slip a fair bit of crap under the rug—but Texas was calm today. Desjardins laid odds with himself that the spill would prove to be tied to the wind-farm failures somehow. There was no obvious connection, of course. There never was. Cause and consequence proliferated across the world like a network of fractal cracks, infinitely complex and almost impossible to predict. Explanations in hindsight were a different matter.
But the Router wasn’t giving him Houston either.
What it gave him was a wave of sudden slam-down hospital quarantines, epicentered on the burn unit at Cincinnati General. That was almost unheard of: hospitals were vacation paradises for drug-resistant superbugs, and burn units were the penthouse suites. A plague in a hospital? That was no crisis. That was the status quo.
Anything that raised alarms above a baseline that nasty could be very scary indeed.
Desjardins was no pathologist. He didn’t need to be. There were only two subjects in the whole universe worth knowing: thermodynamics and information theory. Blood cells in a capillary, rioters on Main Street, travelers vectoring some new arbovirus from the Amazon Preserve—life, and its side effects—all the same thing, really. The only difference was the scale and the label. Once you figured that out, you wouldn’t have to choose between epidemiology and air traffic control. You could do either, at a moment’s notice. You could do pretty much anything.
Well, except for the obvious …
Not that he minded. Being chemically enslaved to your own conscience wasn’t nearly as bad as it sounded. It saved you from always worrying about consequences.
The rules stayed the same, but the devil was in the details. It wouldn’t hurt to have a bit of bio expertise riding shotgun. He buzzed Jovellanos.
“Alice. They’ve handed me some kind of pathogen out of Cincinnati. Want to ride along?”
“Sure. Long as you don’t mind having one of us reckless free-will types endangering your priorities.”
He let it pass. “Something nasty showed up on one of their germ sweeps; their onboard shut them down and sent a shitload of alarms off to potential vectors. Those are pretty much shut down, too, as far as I can tell. The secondaries are falling even as we speak. I’ll track the alarms, you find out what you can about the bug.”
“Right”
He tapped commands. The cubby display dimmed down to a nice, undistracting wash of low-contrast gray; bright primary spilled in over his optical inlays. Maelstrom. He was going into Maelstrom. All the NMDA, the carefully dosed psychotropics, the 18 percent of his occipital cortex rewired for optimum pattern-recognition—all next to useless in there. What good does a measly 200 percent reflex acceleration do against creatures living fast enough to speciate every ten seconds?
Not much, maybe. But he liked the challenge.
He called up a real-time schematic of the local metabase: a 128-node radius centered on Cincinnati General’s onboard server. The display rendered logical distances, not real ones: one extra server in the chain could put a system next door farther away than one in Budapest.
A series of tiny flares ignited around the display, colorcoded by age. CinciGen sulked in the middle, so red it was almost infra, an ancient epicenter over ten minutes old. Farther out, more recent inflammations of orange and yellow: pharms, other hospitals, crematoria that had taken deliveries from Cinci within some critical time frame. Farther still, bright white stars speckled the surface of an expanding sphere: the secondary and tertiary vectors, businesses and labs and corporations and people who’d had recent contact with businesses and labs and corporations and people who’d—
CinciGen’s onboard had sent contagion warnings to all its friends in Maelstrom. Each friend had bred the warning and passed it on, a fission of sirens. None of these agents were human. Humans had had no role in the process at all so far. That was the whole point. Humans wouldn’t have been fast enough to cut off a thousand facilities by lunchtime.
Humans had stopped complaining about such extreme measures right after the ’38 enceph pandemic.
Jovellanos conferenced in. “False alarm.”
“What?”
An image superimposed itself lower right on his visual field:
XXX FREE HARDCORE XXX
BoNDAGE SI22
THOUS NDS OF HOT S MS
BDSM NECRO WATERSporTS
PEDOsNUFF
XXX mu34.03 11 TO ENTER XXX
“That’s what sent up the alarm,” Jovellanos told him. “Screen grab from the hospital’s pathfinder.”
“Details.”
“The pathfinder takes swabs from the ventilation filters and cultures them for nasties. This particular culture plate went from zip to 30 percent coverage in two seconds. Which is impossible, of course, even for hospital paths.”
But the system hadn’t known that. Some bannerbug had dumped its load into visual memory and the pathfinder had just been doing its job, looking for dark blotches on light backgrounds. Who could blame it for being illiterate?
“This is it? You’re sure?” Desjardins asked.
“I checked the ancillaries: no detectable toxins, proteins, nothing. The system was just playing it safe—figured anything that bred that fast had to be a threat, and there you go.”
“And Cinci doesn’t know?”
“Oh, sure. They figured it out almost immediately. They’d already sent the abortions when I called ’em.”
Desjardins eyed the schematic. Pinpoints continued to blossom at the periphery.
“Alarms are still going off, far as I can see,” he said. “Double-check, will you?” They could always short-circuit the quarantine through a media broadcast—they could even phone around if they had to—but that would take hours; dozens, hundreds of facilities would be paralyzed in the meantime. Cinci had already sent out counteragents to call off the alarms. So why wasn’t the core of Desjardins’s schematic going green with successful aborts?
“They sent them out,” Jovellanos confirmed after a moment. “The alarms just aren’t responding. You don’t suppose …”
“Wait a second.” A star had just gone out on the schematic. Another one. Three more. Twenty. A hundred.
All of them white. All on the periphery.
“We’re losing alarms.” He magged on the nodes where the lights had winked out. “But way out on the edge. Nothing near the core.” The abortions couldn’t have jumped so far so fast. Desjardins spun down the filters; now he could see more than autonomous alarms and the little programs sent to call them off. He could see file packets and executables. He could see wildlife. He could see—
“We got sharks,” he said. “Feeding frenzy at PSN-1433. And spreading.”
Arpanet.
Internet.
The Net. Not such an arrogant label, back when one was all they had.
The term cyberspace lasted a bit longer—but space implies great empty vistas, a luminous galaxy of icons and avatars, a hallucinogenic dreamworld in forty-eight-bit color. No sense of the meatgrinder in cyberspace. No hint of pestilence or predation, creatures with split-second life spans tearing endlessly at each other’s throats. Cyberspace was a wistful fantasy word, like hobbit or biodiversity, by the time Achilles Desjardins came onto the scene.
Onion and metabase were more current. New layers were forever being laid atop the old, each free—for a while—from the congestion and static that saturated its predecessors. Orders of magnitude accrued with each generation: more speed, more storage, more power. Information raced down conduits of fiberop, of rotazane, of quantum stuff so sheer its very existence was in doubt. Every decade saw a new backbone grafted onto the beast; then every few years. Every few months. The endless
ascent of power and economy proceeded apace, not as steep a climb as during the fabled days of Moore, but steep enough.
And coming up from behind, racing after the expanding frontier, ran the progeny of laws much older than Moore’s.
It’s the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon’s just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they’re coded the right way.
It’s all just pattern.
And so viruses begat filters; filters begat polymorphic counteragents; polymorphic counteragents begat an arms race. Not to mention the worms and the ’bots and the single-minded autonomous datahounds—so essential for legitimate commerce, so vital to the well-being of every institution, but so needy, so demanding of access to protected memory. And way over there in left field, the Artificial Life geeks were busy with their Core Wars and their Tierra models and their genetic algorithms. It was only a matter of time before everyone got tired of endlessly reprogramming their minions against each other. Why not just build in some genes, a random number generator or two for variation, and let natural selection do the work?
The problem with natural selection, of course, is that it changes things.
The problem with natural selection in networks is that things change fast.
By the time Achilles Desjardins became a ’lawbreaker, Onion was a name in decline. One look inside would tell you why. If you could watch the fornication and predation and speciation without going grand mal from the rate of change, you knew there was only one word that really fit: Maelstrom.
Of course, people still went there all the time. What else could they do? Civilization’s central nervous system had been living inside a Gordian knot for over a century. No one was going to pull the plug over a case of pinworms.
