Viral Spark

by Martin McConnell

  “What’s wrong with it? Why is it brown?”

  “This is one of the brood combs. I check them once a week. The queen will lay her eggs in these cells while the workers tend to them, and supply them with nutrients. You can learn a lot about the health of the hive by taking a look.”

  “You know, you could just stick a camera in there.”

  “They don’t like the light, and I’d need to attach one in order to see anything useful.”

  Bees zoom all around, some crawling over the comb and on his hands, others buzzing in his face. One of them lands on my hand, and I hold it up for a closer look. The skin is yellow and black striped velvet, the wings are thin sheets of ice.

  “I guess they don’t have to worry about jealousy and fighting. You said the workers don’t have sex organs?”

  “On the contrary, there’s quite a lot that they have to fight about. And they actually do have the organs, they just don’t use them.”

  “Sounds like a waste.”

  “Yeah, well,” he inspects the tray carefully while talking. “The last thing you want in your brood is some worker laying eggs. Believe me.”

  “But most of the time they all get along, don’t they? I mean, there are thousands of them in there, and I don’t see any fighting on that comb.”

  “If we harvest too much honey, part of the hive will swarm. I imagine there’s a lot of deciding among them about which bees get to stay and which are forced to leave. Then there’s the queen herself. If the workers decide she isn’t doing a good job, they’ll treat some of these babies with a special royal jelly they make. The process spawns new queens, who will challenge the old one in a battle to the death. Quite a lot going on in these little boxes.”

  “And the whole mob acting independently, without direct control from humans to make such a complex system work.”

  “Hmm. Yes.” He replaces the comb, and stacks some of the other boxes on top. “You look distracted. Did you fail a test or something?”

  “No, actually I graduated. All of my modules are done.”

  “I figured you would be happy about that. You’ve been working hard to finish early. What’s the problem?”

  “Other things going on. Kind of sucks the pleasure out of everything else.”

  Don slides the bee box, which is mounted on a base with casters, back into line with the others, the same way that bots will adjust merchandise on a shelf. “What’s going on? Girl trouble?”

  “You might say that. Amanda’s ex-boyfriend wants to kill me, and I’m sure that he’s beating up on her.”

  “Are you sure he’s an ex-boyfriend?”

  “Yeah. I mean. I guess. I’m pretty sure she said that she dumped him.”

  “Then why haven’t you alerted the authorities?”

  “If I’m wrong, after I get out of detention Mike will find me, and kill me.”

  “Sounds to me like you are guessing instead of knowing.”

  “I don’t have any actual proof, but she had this mark on her neck the other day, and some excuse for how it got there.”

  “Why hasn’t she told the police about him?”

  “I don’t know. It’s so weird.”

  “And she hasn’t told you that he hit her?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then there’s nothing you can do. Tragic. I remember a time when things were different, where the mere assumption that someone was being abused was enough to call the police, but it led to fake calls and ruined reputations. The fake ones started overshadowing the real incidents, and falsely reporting violence became more of a crime than actually hitting someone.”

  “It’s a stupid policy.”

  “Maybe, but unless you want to go to jail to prove that point, then you should let her handle it. It’s her mess.”

  His words make me feel worse. I turn and lean on the rail separating the garden from foot traffic.

  “Hey, believe me, I understand. At least now I know what’s bugging you. Maybe you should just go see her.”

  “What if Mike in in her apartment? He’ll mow me over.”

  “Well. That’s one way to get him arrested.”

  “Thanks.”

  I stare across the field of green vegetation. On the far side, the lift looks like a small tower with a double door at the bottom. Various forms of communications equipment reach from the top of the stubby structure toward the sky, which fades to an even deeper shade of blue, revealing a couple tiny glints not bright enough to shine in the daylight.

  “That’s it, then? Girl you like is getting out of her relationship, and you’re hoping to get in without making waves?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “Part?”

  “The robots at work have been glitching. We tracked the disruptions to an outside signal. At first it looked like mere tampering, but the guys at the main office think it’s some kind of virus infecting the system. It’s acting indiscriminately on everything electronic.”

  “A virus? It isn’t often that I hear about one of those nowadays. I thought they figured that problem out once and for all. Just goes to show that no matter how foolproof your security protocols are, someone will eventually figure out a way to break them. I’m surprised that anyone is still trying.”

  “It isn’t serving them any purpose. The bug is just making adaptive displays sputter, interfering with music, and causing random glitches. Why would anyone invent a virus like that?”

  “Probably just to see if they can do it.” He leans on the handrail beside me. “Maybe it’s just collecting data for a further infiltration down the road. See what you can actually tap into, and then start the attack once you have all of the access codes.”

  “You seem to know a lot about viruses.”

  “Techie stuff wasn’t always the way it is today. We’ve been integrated for a long time, don’t get me wrong, but in the old days, the integration wasn’t fully trusted or accepted. Not just hackers writing virus code, but people stealing money, advertisers becoming more and more aggressive. These were big issues when I was a boy, just after the turn of the century.” He pauses.

  “I just can’t figure out why someone would write a program that would respond to my music.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This guy from the main office brought me a tablet to scan the Wi-Fi signals with, so we could start tracking the thing. I had some music playing, and the tablet started––singing. Humming and clicking, random notes. When I tried to turn the music down, the bug turned it back up. When I shut if off, it pitched a fit. Almost like it was angry.”

  “Oh dear,” says Don. “Maybe it’s finally happened.”

  “Maybe what has finally happened?”

  “When I was a boy, there was a paranoid idea floating about that machines would eventually spawn consciousness. Nobody thinks about it anymore, but it was the cause of several movies and pieces of literature. There were even scientists trying to pursue a machine-based intelligence, and doing pretty well at it from what I remember.”

  “Why did they stop?”

  “I’m not sure. Regulations, fears, who knows. There was one video I remember watching where this guy was speaking to the complexity of integrated infrastructure. Before the Internet-of-Things bubble. He claimed that any system, once complex enough, could spawn consciousness. I would say that our interdependence with technology is enough to fill his minimum requirements. Perhaps what’s happening isn’t the result of technical mischief. Maybe this happened on its own.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Impossible?”

  “Yeah, that’s crazy. I mean, what would have given it the initial jolt. All of this happened suddenly, days ago. The world isn’t any more interconnected now than it has been for decades.”

  “Perhaps it’s been developing for decades, and finally showed itself. The initial spark of creativity comes, in human beings, without warning. A child doesn’t learn how to talk, or walk, until months after being born, even tho
ugh the machinery is in place.”

  “It takes time for muscles to develop,” I respond, “And time to learn. That doesn’t mean that babies aren’t alive.”

  His head tips toward me while his eyes stay fixed on the horizon. “I wouldn’t say they aren’t alive. But are they truly conscious? I certainly can’t access memories from being that young. Maybe I wasn’t producing memories yet. Maybe when I started to save thoughts in my head, perhaps that was the spark of consciousness in me, or in anyone.”

  “I don’t remember my first words as a baby either.”

  “Maybe real consciousness is something that’s delayed after birth. Maybe this virus of yours was born a long time ago, but it’s now finally catching those initial bits of conscious thought, making its first memories, and experimenting with electronics like a baby experiments with her limbs, grabbing for anything she can stick in her mouth.”

  “That doesn’t work either, I don’t think. A baby is one person. One device. It’s not a bunch of different devices interacting with each other.”

  “You might say that the true consciousness of human beings isn’t in one person, but in our economy, or our trade. Perhaps we’re all part of a larger organism that’s still growing. We’ve spread into space. There are colonies on Mars and the moon. Perhaps that’s the growth of the being that is the human race.

  Or you could think like the bees. On their own, they act independently. But maybe the hive is the organism. While a swarm appears to us as a group of them being ejected from the rest of the hive, it’s similar to amputating a body part. Or perhaps it’s more akin to reproduction of things like bacteria. They get too big for one box, or one set of resources, and split into two groups. The swarm, if it survives, will start another living hive. A single bee is hardly a deep thinker, but the hive acts like a much more complex organism, thinking on the hive level, rather than concerning itself with the life or death of an individual worker.”

  His words stir the philosophical parts of my mind, conjuring images of the interlocking pieces that make up every living thing. Colonies of algae are sometimes thought of as a single unit. Lichens are a symbiotic community of yeast and bacteria, but they look like little plants.

  Don continues, “And we ourselves are made of cells, smaller pieces, each one alive, that only act consciously through the network they create to make a person. Each cell in my body is alive, but on their own, they’re hardly much to talk about. Get millions of them together, and you have a deep thinking human that can understand the world around it, and the nature of its own pieces. A person is really a collection of billions of living organisms working together, at least in that light.”

  My brain hurts. I push off the rail and take in a breath of the quickly cooling night air. My shoulders catch a shiver, and my skin suddenly feels like a sheet of ice. “It’s getting late.”

  He nods. “Yes. It’s about time for me to be getting back to my own little cell in the greater organism of this building. I need to tidy some things up.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.” I start toward the lift, and his voice stops me.

  “Hey.”

  “Yes?”

  “Try to celebrate tonight. This is a big step in your life. Finishing your school, I mean. Push your worries to the side, and savor it for a moment. Don’t go so fast through life that you forget to enjoy the little victories.”

  “Thanks.” I enter the lift and descend to the second floor, thinking about his advice.

  My apartment is empty and silent, until that miserable service elevator shakes it again. Thoughts of bees buzz in my head. Slowly, my mind is wrapping around the similarities of bees in a hive to neurons in a brain. Disjointed parts of a larger organism, each of them performing a specific and repetitive task, and forming a cooperative group; together they make a single living creature of another sort.

  A hive not only reproduces by swarming, it stores honey like fat. When the hive is disrupted, bees act in unison to investigate and fix the problem. Perhaps the idea isn’t so crazy.

  I crawl into my perfect sheets and close my eyes, wondering if the consciousness I feel is part of a chemical-electrical program running in my brain, or the essence that arises from the complexity of a billion interacting organisms that make up the whole of my being.

  ELEVEN

  My eyes open to the sweet sound of a symphony playing in the apartment. I can’t remember if I left my music on, but if that were the case, it should have followed me to bed. Another glitch? This time in my home? Regardless of the cause, it’s a treat to wake up to the serenity of soft violins. Perhaps I can tweak the alarm system to play music when it detects that my sleep cycle is over.

  I stomp toward the bathroom, shower, and enter the kitchen to discover that the sound is coming from my smock. I pluck the device free from the wrinkled clump of fabric, and the musical score shifts to the Spring Concerto. On the display, a built-in music player has been accessing my personal files, and the tablet has been playing music all night. The clock at the bottom reads 0400. This is the downside to living without direct access to sunlight. My cheap theme showcases a bright, sunny day through the kitchen window at all hours.

  A yawn forces my eyes closed for a moment, and I drop the tablet on the kitchen island. There’s no sense returning to bed. By the time I fall asleep, it’ll be time to rise again. The best course is to give the morning a hard start. I turn on the biscuit maker and brew some tea.

  My mind wanders as the hot liquid pours into my cup. Don’s words replay in my mind, about bees and neurons and consciousness. Once the biscuits are ready, I return to the kitchen island as the device plays on. I access the network beside my plate, and look up a diagram of the human brain on the Global Network.

  The net is great for researching some things, and poor for others. Schematics are displayed with various lobes labeled and identified, but that doesn’t really help me. I perform another search for neurons.

  More names, more biological descriptions of what they look like, rather than how they work. Titles like cell body, dendrite, axon, Schwann’s cell, myelin, and axon terminals fill the picture as captions. Basic bio stuff from school. There’s something about a voltage threshold before firing. I dig deeper, turning up how the cells collect chemicals from the environment inside the skull, and how different chemicals affect their abilities. On the surface, each of them is designed to do only one thing. They are tiny data hubs which collect energy from neighboring cells and redistribute that energy once it hits a threshold, by firing. One simple task, like bees collecting honey, and together they form a hive that controls all other aspects of the human body. Through some magic, these cells perform their simple tasks, and create the circuitry of the human experience.

  As I start on the second biscuit, I search for attempts to create neural networks throughout history, and how the science really hasn’t evolved that much. There is plenty of data available on scientists and the data they collected. Enough to suggest they were on the verge of figuring it all out. No reason is given as to why the research was stopped, though there is mention of government limitations on networked machines. What an odd thought: a non-networked machine.

  The context of the science is spoken of as if it were alchemy. The consensus is that it was a fruitless pursuit with no direct application to anything worthwhile. Thinking machines would be incredibly limited, not helpful. Any truly living thing is going to make mistakes. It won’t be perfect, and it’s possible that it will have reservations about the task it was built for. Machines are made for a purpose, not to have their own thoughts about the nature of existence. Living things define their own purpose.

  After the restructuring of government grants many years ago, corporations took over funding for most scientific endeavors, and neural networks were one of the lost areas of study. Anyone working with that kind of AI had to do so without financial compensation. People moved toward studies that could directly create income streams, such as better personal devices with
more features, and automated shipping industries. Network research changed focus to monitoring automatic trucks and planes, or designing new hardware for loading and unloading those vehicles.

  My studies are interrupted by a blast of noise from the device. Another blast echoes from the walls a moment later. The cycle repeats, an octave higher.

  “What the crap are you doing now?”

  Once again, music comes out of the device, restarting a quartet version of Vivaldi’s Spring. I reach for the tablet, lifting it from the table as it blares another eruption of offensive noise. The sound shocks me enough to drop it, and Spring resets, playing again from the beginning. I fiddle with the controls, shut off the music program, and then scan the equalizers again.

  “Why are you behaving like this?”

  Everything looks the same as before, including the high pitched whine. I zoom closer on the scale. The noise spike has moved to 55,000 instead of 60,000. I check the radio spectrogram, and it too has undergone a tiny change. The main interference frequency has moved to 4.8 gig, laying directly over the Wi-Fi frequencies in the building.

  Doing a direct comparison of the two signals, tiny differences in the spectrums become obvious. The Wi-Fi signal has a lot more static in it, and I look for some way to filter it out. Determining what is streaming data for the devices in my apartment, and trying to separate them from the viral broadcast isn’t easy.

  Wireless protocols are composed of several parts. The initial pattern of ones and zeros specifies a device that should receive the data that follows. Any other device will typically ignore signals not addressed to it. That initial bit of code is followed by a packet, and then a short string to announce the end of the packet. I call them hashes when I deal with them at work. The good thing about the virus is its randomness. The informational part of the packet is scrambled into nonsense, and doesn’t follow any typical protocol.

  Still, deciphering what is actually encoded information and what isn’t is near impossible. There’s no part of the signal that jumps out and claims to be legitimate, but some of the packets don’t end with the standard end-of-packet string.