Wonder w-3

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Agreed,” said Webmind.

  “I’m no expert on the structure of the Internet,” Masayuki said. “But I have a friend who is. Her name is Anna Bloom; she’s at the Technion in Israel. Miss Caitlin, Malcolm, and I approached her for help when we first theorized that ghost packets were self-organizing into cellular automata—before we knew that you existed as a… a person. Of course, as soon as you went public, I’m sure she immediately connected the dots and realized that what Caitlin had found was you. We might do well to enlist her help again.”

  “Professor Bloom is a person of good character.”

  Masayuki was taken aback. “You know her?”

  “I know of her; I have read all her writings.”

  “Including her email, I suppose?”

  “Yes. Her expertise does seem germane to mounting a defense: she is a senior researcher with the Internet Cartography Project, and she has long had an interest in connectivist studies.”

  “So shall we bring her on board?”

  “Certainly. She’s online right now, having an instant-messaging session with her grandson.”

  Masayuki shook his head; this was going to take some getting used to. “All right, let’s give her a call.”

  Moments later, Anna’s narrow, lined face and short white hair appeared on his screen. “Anna, how are you?” Masayuki asked in English, the one language they shared.

  She smiled. “Not bad for an old broad. You?”

  “Pretty good for a fat dude.”

  They both laughed. “So, what’s up?” asked Anna.

  “Welllll,” said Masayuki, “you must have been following the Webmind story.”

  “Yes! I wanted to contact you, but I knew I was being watched. I got a phone call on Thursday from a military AI expert in the States, trying to pump me for information about how Webmind is instantiated.”

  “Was it, by any chance, Colonel Peyton Hume?” asked Webmind.

  “Malcolm, was that you?”

  “No, it’s me. Webmind.”

  “Oh!” said Anna. “Um, shalom.”

  “The same to you, Professor Bloom.”

  “And, yes, that’s who it was,” she said. “Peyton Hume.” A pause, as if none of them was sure who should speak next. And then Anna went on: “So, what can I do for you, um, gentlemen?”

  “Colonel Hume is aware of the surmise you, Masayuki, and Caitlin made about my structure,” said Webmind.

  “I swear I didn’t tell him anything,” Anna said.

  “Thank you,” said Webmind. “I didn’t mean to imply that you had; we know the source of the inadvertent leak, and he has promised to be more circumspect in the future. But Colonel Hume and his associates used that information to develop a technique for purging my mutant packets, which they tested by modifying the firmware in routers at one AT&T switching station in Alexandria, Virginia. I defeated that attempt but need a way to defend against a large-scale deployment of the same technique.”

  She said nothing, and, after a moment, Masayuki prodded her. “Anna?”

  “Well,” she said, “I did say to Hume that I’m conflicted; I don’t know if your emergence, Webmind, is a bad thing or a good thing. Um, no offense.”

  “None taken. How may I assuage your concerns?”

  “Honestly, I don’t think you can—not yet. It’s going to take time.”

  “Time’s the one thing we don’t have, Anna,” Masayuki said. “Webmind’s in danger now, and we need your help.”

  Peyton Hume got out of the limo and entered his own car in the parking lot at WATCH. He waited for the other vehicle to pull away, then used his notebook computer to download a local copy of the black-hat list the NSA kept. He felt his skin crawling as he did so, but not because he found the people on the list distasteful. A few different life choices, and he might have ended up on it himself. No, what was creeping him out was the thought that Webmind was likely aware of what he was doing; the damn thing was clearly monitoring even secure traffic now and was able to pluck out classified information at will. They’d left too many back doors in the algorithms—and now they were taking it up the ass.

  Once he had the copy of the database on his own hard drive, he turned off his laptop’s Internet connection. He also pulled out his cell phone and turned that off, and he shut off the GPS in his car. No point making it easy for Webmind to track his movements.

  He didn’t have the luxury of traveling far; he needed somebody nearby, somebody he could speak to face-to-face, without Webmind being able to listen in. He sorted the database by ZIP code, rubbed his eyes, and peered at the screen. He was exhausted, but he could sleep when he was dead. For now, there was no time to waste. This was it, the showdown between man and machine—the only one there would ever be. Once Webmind took over, there would be no going back. There had been other times when one man could have acted, and didn’t. One man could have saved Christ; one man could have stopped Hitler. History was calling him, and so was the future.

  He examined the list of names in the database and clicked on the dossier for each one. The first ten—the closest ten—didn’t have the chops. But the eleventh… He’d read about this guy often enough. His house was seventy-four miles from here, in Manassas. Of course, there was always a chance that he wasn’t home, but guys like Chase didn’t have to go anywhere; they brought the world to themselves.

  Hume turned on the radio—an all-news channel; voices, not music, something to keep him awake—and put the pedal to the metal.

  The current announcer was female, and she was recapping the day’s campaign news: the Republican candidate trying to pull her foot out of her mouth in Arkansas; a couple of sound bites from her running mate; some White House flak saying that the president was too busy responding to the “advent of Webmind” to be out kissing babies; and…

  “… and in other Webmind news, oncologists across the globe are scrambling to analyze the proposed cure for cancer put forth by Webmind earlier today.” Hume turned up the volume. “Dr. Jon Carmody of the National Cancer Institute is cautiously optimistic.”

  A male voice: “The research is certainly provocative, but it’s going to take months to work through the document Webmind posted.”

  Months? It was a ruse on Webmind’s part; it had to be. Webmind was buying time. Hume gripped the steering wheel tighter and sped on into the darkness.

  eight

  Masayuki Kuroda was leaning forward in his chair now, looking at the face of Anna Bloom on his screen. “The Americans have a technique that does work to scrub most of Webmind’s packets,” he said into the little camera at the top of his monitor. “Now all they have to do is get the Ciscos and Junipers of the world to upload revised firmware that would cause their routers to reject all packets with suspicious time-to-live counters.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Anna said.

  “Why not?” asked Masayuki.

  “Most of the routers on the Internet are running the same protocols they’ve been using for decades,” she replied. “The reason is simple: they work. Everyone’s afraid of monkeying with them. You know the old adage—if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Plus there are thousands of different models of routers and switches; you’d need a different upgrade package for each one.”

  “Oh,” said Masayuki.

  Anna nodded. “In 2009, an Internet provider in the Czech Republic tried to update the software for routers there,” she said. “A small error he introduced propagated right across the Web, causing traffic to slow to a crawl for over an hour. Can you imagine the lawsuits if Cisco or Juniper mucked up the whole net—if, say, the new firmware had a bug that caused it to delete all packets, or modified the contents of random packets?”

  “Well,” said Masayuki, “obviously, they’d test—”

  “They can’t,” said Anna. “Look, before Microsoft rolls out a new version of Windows, they have tens of thousands of beta testers try it out on their individual computers, so that bugs can be found and fixed
prior to the release going public—and, still, as soon as it does, thousands of additional bugs immediately come to light. You can test router software on small networks—a few hundred or even a few thousand machines—but there’s no way to test what will happen when the software goes live on the Internet. There’s no system anywhere on the planet that duplicates the Internet’s complexity, no test bed for running large-scale experiments to see what would happen if we changed this or tweaked that. The Internet is a house of cards, and no one wants to send it all tumbling down.”

  “What about the Global Environment for Network Innovations?” asked Webmind’s disembodied voice.

  “What’s that?” asked Masayuki.

  Anna said, “GENI is a shadow network proposed by the American National Science Foundation in 2005, precisely to address the need for a test bed for new ideas and algorithms before they’re turned loose on the real Internet. But it’s years away from completion—and unless it ends up having a Webmind of its own, there’ll be no mutant packets acting like cellular automata on it to perform tests on.”

  “So Webmind is safe?” asked Masayuki, sounding relieved.

  Anna raised a hand, palm out. “Oh, no, no. I didn’t say that. If the US government wants to bring you down, Webmind, they’ve got an easy way. That test they did to see if they could eliminate you: it was doubtless only phase one. You said they used an AT&T switching station?”

  “Yes,” Webmind replied.

  “Proof of concept, and with AT&T equipment.”

  “That’s significant?” asked Kuroda.

  Anna made a forced laugh. “Oh, yes indeed. AT&T has a secret facility that nobody speaks about publicly; employees in the know just call it ‘The Room.’ It has multiple routers with ten-gigabit ports, and, quite deliberately, a significant portion of the global Internet backbone traffic goes through it. Of course, the NSA has access to The Room. Had his small-scale test succeeded, Colonel Hume doubtless would have modified those big routers to scrub your mutant packets. They wouldn’t necessarily get them all, but they’d take out a big percentage of them. Of course, if you hit The Room with a denial-of-service attack scaled up from the one you used against the initial switching station, you’d choke the whole Internet—and Internet cartographers like me would be able to pinpoint the target as being on US soil; there’s no way the Americans could keep under wraps that they’d tried to kill you.”

  “For the moment,” Webmind said, “the president has rescinded his order to eliminate me.”

  “I’m sure,” said Anna. “Still, The Room exists—and someday, they might use it this way.”

  “I hope the US government will come to value me,” Webmind said.

  “Perhaps it will,” said Anna, “but there’s another way to kill you—and it’s decentralized.”

  “Yes?” Webmind said.

  “It’s called BGP hijacking. BGP is short for Border Gateway Protocol—it’s the core routing protocol of the Internet. BGP messages are shared between routers all the time, suggesting the best route for specific packets to take. Do all your mutant packets have the same source address?”

  “Not as far as we know,” Webmind said.

  “Good, that’ll make it harder. Still, they must have some distinguishing characteristic—some way to tell if their hop counters are broken.

  One could spoof a BGP message that says the best place to send your specific packets is a dead address.”

  “A black hole?” said Masayuki.

  “Exactly—an IP address that specifies a host that isn’t running or to which no host has been assigned. The packets would essentially just disappear.”

  “That is not unlike the method I use to sequester spam,” Webmind said. “But it hadn’t occurred to me that it could be used against me.”

  “Welcome to the world of human beings,” Anna said. “We can turn anything into a weapon.”

  It was almost 2:00 A.M. when Hume pulled to a stop outside Chase’s house. The neighborhood was nice—posh, even. And the house was large and sprawling; Chase clearly did all right for himself. He had a couple of small satellite dishes on the roof, and there seemed to be a big, commercial air-conditioning unit at the side of the house; guy probably had a server farm in the basement.

  He also probably had a sawed-off shotgun or a .357 magnum under his desk, and he likely didn’t answer the doorbell when it rang this late at night. Although Hume could remove his blue Air Force uniform jacket before going in, he was pretty much stuck with the uniform shirt and pants, not to mention the precise one-centimeter buzz cut.

  It looked like Chase was still up: light was seeping around the edges of the living-room curtains.

  There was no indication that Webmind tapped regular voice lines—at least not yet. Hume had stopped at a 7-Eleven along the way and bought with cash a disposable pay-as-you-go cell phone. He used it now to call Chase at the unlisted number that was in his dossier.

  The phone rang three times, then a gruff voice said, “Better be good.”

  “Mr. Chase, my name is Hume, and I’m in a car out front of your house.”

  “No shit. Whatcha want?”

  “I can’t imagine you’re not sitting at a computer, Mr. Chase, so google me. Peyton Hume.” He spelled the names out.

  “Impressive initials,” said Chase, after a moment. “USAF. DARPA. RAND. WATCH. But it don’t tell me what you want.”

  “I want to talk to you about Webmind.”

  He half expected the curtain to be drawn a little and a face to peek out at him, but doubtless Chase had security cameras. “No parking on my street after midnight, man. Get a ticket. Pull into the driveway.”

  Hume did that, got out of the car, and headed through the chill night air to the door; mercifully, the rain had stopped. By the time he was on the stoop, Chase had opened the door and was waiting for him.

  “You packing?” asked Chase.

  Hume did have a gun, but he’d left it in the glove compartment. “No.”

  “Don’t move.”

  The man turned and looked at a monitor in the hallway, which was showing an infrared scan indeed revealing that he wasn’t carrying a weapon.

  Chase stood aside and gestured toward the living room. “In.”

  One wall was covered with shelving units displaying vintage computing equipment, much of which had been obsolete even before Chase was born: a plastic Digi-Comp I, a mail-order Altair 8800, a Novation CAT acoustic coupler, an Osborne 1, a KayPro 2, an Apple][, a first-generation IBM PC and a PCjr with the original Chiclet keyboard, a TRS-80 Model 1 and a Model 100, an original Palm Pilot, an Apple Lisa and a 128K Mac, and more. The second wall had something Hume hadn’t seen for decades although there was a time when countless computing facilities had displayed it: a giant line-printer printout on tractor-feed paper of a black-and-white photo of Raquel Welch, made entirely of ASCII characters; this one had been neatly framed.

  Another wall had a long workbench, with a dozen LCD monitors on it, and four ergonomic keyboards spaced at regular intervals. In front of it was a wheeled office chair on a long, clear plastic mat; Chase could slide along, stopping at whichever screen he wished.

  Chase was tall, black, and heroin-addict thin, with long dreadlocks. There was a gold ring through his right eyebrow and a series of silver loops going down the curve of his left ear.

  “You ever kill anyone?” Chase asked. He had a Jamaican accent.

  Hume raised his eyebrows. “Yes. In Iraq.”

  “That’s a bad war, man.”

  “I didn’t come here to discuss politics,” said Hume.

  “Maybe Webmind stop all the wars,” said Chase.

  “Maybe humanity should be able to determine its own destiny,” said Hume.

  “And you don’t think we be able do that much longer, so?”

  “Yes,” said Hume.

  Chase nodded. “You right, maybe. Beer?”

  “Thanks, no. I’ve got a long drive home.”

  Hume knew that Chase was twen
ty-four. He’d come to the States three years ago—the required paperwork magically appearing; more proof that he was one of the best hackers in the business. In other circumstances, someone else might have gone off the reservation to hire a former black-ops sniper, but for this, a digital assassin was called for.

  “So, what you want from me?” said Chase.

  “Webmind must be stopped,” Hume said. “But the government is going to waste too much time deciding what to do, so it has to be done by guys like you.”

  “There ain’t no guys like me, flyboy,” said Chase.

  Hume frowned but said nothing.

  “You don’t say to Einstein, ‘Guys like you.’ I’m Mozart; I’m Michael Jordan.”

  “Which is why I came to you,” Hume said. “The public doesn’t know this, but Webmind is instantiated as cellular automata; each cell consists of a mutant packet with a TTL counter that never decrements to zero. What’s needed is a virus that can find and delete those packets. Write me that code.”

  “Why I wanna do that, man?”

  Hume knew the only answer that would matter. “For the cred.” Hacking into a bank was so last millennium. Compromising military systems had been done, quite literally, to death. But this! No one had ever taken out an AI before. To be the one who’d managed that would ensure immortality—a name, or at least a pseudonym, that would live forever.

  “Need more,” said Chase.

  Hume frowned. “Money? I don’t have—”

  “Not money, man.” He waved at the row of monitors. “I need money, I take money.”

  “What then?”

  “Wanna see WATCH—see what you guys got.”

  “I can’t possibly—”

  “Too bad. Cuz you right: you need me.”

  Hume thought for a moment, then: “Deal.”

  Chase nodded. “Gimme seventy-two hours. Sky gonna fall on Webmind.”

  nine

  Even though it was a Saturday morning, Caitlin’s father had already left for the Perimeter Institute. Stephen Hawking was visiting; he did not adjust to different time zones easily and wasn’t one to take weekends off, so everyone who wanted to work with him had to get in early.