by Vic Grout
“So, is this what you need?” asked Larry. “Is this enough data? Can you work with this?”
Jenny nodded. “Yes,” she replied, then stopped and reconsidered. “At least, I can’t ask for anything else as far as input data is concerned. The question now is whether I can actually figure out how to calculate the disconnect-set.”
“Is that going to be hard?” asked Scott, glancing at Larry with an expression that was difficult to interpret.
“It might be,” admitted Jenny. “I won’t know until I try. It would have been easier, of course, if I could have aimed for the optimal smallest set. But these eight nodes that can’t be removed are going to make the algorithm harder. I’ll see.” She turned back to the screens, took up a pencil and supported her head in her other hand. Bob moved closer in on her right to watch her work, hoping to be of some help if needed.
“Please remember that that smaller disconnect set is not to be calculated,” Larry reminded her. He and Scott took up positions on each side of Jenny and Bob as they worked.
*
When Andy and Aisha reached the end of the tunnel, two more guards immediately read their security passes and checked their biometrics. The process was repeated by a mounted scanner at the exit door into the empty transit area. Their two escorts – appropriately thanked, in very polite terms – remained.
Passes and biometrics were automatically checked a final time as they left the transit area and they emerged to the bottom of the set of steps they had descended the night before. In mid-afternoon, however, enough daylight reached to their level to be able to make out the rungs and their destination above their heads. Andy guided Aisha towards them and set her on her way.
To this point, he had succeeded in hiding his pain from her. But, as he climbed the ladder behind, he struggled not to yelp as his mangled leg – and surrounding areas – rubbed and jolted up the steps. By the time they had both reached the top, and stepped aside onto solid earth, although he had succeeded in not crying out as such, there had been sufficient sound of discomfort for her to ask:
“Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” he lied. “Leg’s just playing up a bit.” They found their way to the shed door and emerged into a cold January sun.
“Did you get it checked out properly?”
“Aye; sort of.”
Aisha’s concerns leapt instantly. She was about to force the question considerably harder when a call interrupted her.
“Hey guys! How you doin’?”
They turned towards the road, now visible to Andy as a simple dirt track. An old truck stood beside it, a non-descript brown, possibly grey, in colour. Just showing, in faded and scratched coloured paint on the side door, was a sign reading ‘Chuck’s Auto’. A man in his thirties, wearing faded jeans and a white t-shirt, stood beside it. Andy led Aisha towards him and put out a hand.
“Good thanks. I’m Andy, and this,” a wave to his side, “is Aisha.”
“Nice to meet you folks. I’m Chuck. I run the garage, gen’ral store, café, bar – and just about everythin’ else – in town. Hop in. I’ve come to take you for a beer!”
*
Jenny continued to work on the ‘European Theory’ in the main lab, assisted by Bob where he could. Scott and Larry looked on. She realised quickly that she was in some difficulty. She had expected some obstacles but what she was trying to do was proving even harder than she had anticipated.
To calculate an optimal (smallest) disconnect-set was simple enough. She could adapt a known cut-set algorithm to factor in the S Parameter, then use this, not to fragment It completely but, to bring Its S value down to a level that took Its complexity and level of connectivity, and thus Its consciousness, away – but that was not what Don wanted. Instead she was going to have to calculate a constrained disconnect set, to achieve the same purpose, but which did not include eight key, identified, essential facilities (including the OI).
This was where it was proving difficult. Jenny initially sketched out a simple algorithm on paper, then quickly coded it into the machine in front of her. Her program took its input directly from the spreadsheet and, to help follow what it was doing, displayed its workings – its changing node sets – on the large network map. There was the normal debugging process to get it to run at all but, fairly soon, she managed to produce some output. Thinking ahead to giving the information to someone to somehow implement the disconnect-set (physically remove the identified nodes), she rewrote the code to dump the final results directly to a text file. So far, so good.
However, when she ran the algorithm the first time, it did not work. The final node set looked credible – and it did not include the eight disallowed ones – but the resultant S value was still too high: It would still be alive with only those nodes removed. She returned to the code and found mistakes. She made some modifications and tried again. This time, although the S value came down enough, the disconnect-set was huge – over two hundred nodes. That would be impossible to implement and she knew, instinctively, that there must be much better solutions. She kept trying with modifications to both the algorithm and the code.
But she could make no progress. However she attempted to adapt the process, her program gave either too large an S value or too large a disconnect-set. Finally, she abandoned the keyboard altogether and returned to her pencil and paper, staring occasionally at the network map to try to understand what the essential trouble was.
And, eventually, she did. It was the nature of the problem itself that was defying efficient solution. Of course, many such hard problems were known to exist in computer science but in this case it seemed to be a unique combination of the underlying graph problem and the S Parameter theory behind it, which was causing the difficulty. In particular, the nature of the constraints – the eight non-removable nodes – was making it apparently unsolvable. Either the S value or the size of the node set would be too large using her current algorithm.
But there was a way. Until now, she had been starting with the eight nodes as fixed out of the disconnect-set. Running a simple extension of a cut-set algorithm gave her an initial solution. She then tried to improve this, in a repeating loop, to eventually produce a node set which was both small enough and had a low enough S value. The problem was, it never worked! The initial solution was awful and did not improve much through iteration. Perhaps she could try it the other way around.
Starting with an unconstrained node set – allowing any nodes, it would be simple to produce a solution that was pretty small (it might even be optimal) and had a low enough S value. She could then apply the iteration in reverse to make small changes to the nodes: invalid nodes would be taken out and new ones swapped in. Eventually, after just a few loops, the eight disallowed nodes would be out of the disconnect-set and what was left might be sensible.
The only problem was that Don had said explicitly not to calculate the smaller node set. She could not help a slight glance sideways at Larry, then the other way at Scott. Would they notice if she coded this in – just as an initial solution? Bob was peering intently at her pencil scribbles. Did he understand what she was thinking? If she just calculated the smaller node set, at the start of the program, but did not save it anywhere, would that really be going against Don’s instructions? Would anyone know? And just how much did she care for anyone else’s rules right at that moment?
Bob quietly took the pencil from her hand and drew a line around a small number of nodes on the network diagram she had drawn. They were not eight in number and they were not the disallowed set but she had a feeling she knew what he was trying to tell her. Scott and Larry did not appear to be interested in her working notes, or even particularly, the code. They were merely watching what results were being produced as actual output when the program ran. Bob continued to draw: he put a small tick next to the nodes he had circled, then drew a much larger line around a larger number of nodes. He drew an arrow from the small set to the large one then finished off with a larger tick. He looked
into her eyes and gave the tiniest of nods. She understood.
Making the changes to the code was not difficult. Firstly, she disabled the output to the graphical display so the node sets would not be shown during run-time. A simple algorithm would initially produce an approximation to the optimal disconnect-set. Then a second one would loop to swap out any of the disallowed eight and replace them with others. The ten minutes it took Jenny to code it were among the most nervous she had ever experienced. Larry and Scott watched but clearly did not understand what she was doing. Bob drew meaningless diagrams on the paper and played with the pencil to distract them further.
Soon, Jenny was ready to go. She clicked the ‘Start’ button and the program ran. After an initial period of approximation, a small trace counter in the corner of the screen read, n = 17. ‘Damn’, she thought; that was the size of the smallest disconnect set – the number of nodes in it: she had meant to hide that! However there was no response from Larry or Scott. She pressed ‘Return’ to start the second phase. The counter changed as she watched – and as the invalid nodes were swapped out: n = 17; n = 21; n = 25; n = 28; n = 31; n = 33. A green message flashed on the – now otherwise inactive – network map to indicate that the S Parameter target had been reached and none of the banned nodes were in the set. She pressed ‘Return’ a final time and the details of thirty-three nodes were written to the text file on the other screen. She leaned back in her chair and pointed at the result.
“Done.”
*
Aisha and Andy sat at a small table in front of a steel and wood construction with ‘Garage-Store’ written on a sign at one end and ‘Coffee-Beer’ at the other. The rest of the small town led away, in broken clusters, for perhaps fifty yards along the track on both sides in each direction. The truck with ‘Chuck’s Auto’ on the door stood in front. A few people in working clothes went about their business: building, repairing, mending and cleaning as best they could. There was less technology here to go wrong but RFS was never entirely absent. As they contemplated the relative peace and quiet and stared out across the desert beyond, Chuck emerged from the shack with a tray. He placed a glass of pale beer in front of Aisha and handed Andy a coffee.
“As ordered, folks,” he grinned. “On the house, as instructed.”
They thanked him. He moved to leave them but hesitated, curiosity appearing to get the better of him. He hovered, uncertain; then eventually broke the silence.
“So, what you guys up to?” he asked brightly. “Folks from the base gen’rally only pass through here. They don’t stop; they don’t come here to get things from me.” He looked up and down the street and sniggered. “Unless they have to, that is!”
Aisha smiled. “So you know about the OI – the ‘base’, then?”
“Sure we do. It was the base what asked me to pick you guys up and fix you with a drink. We all know what we’re here for! To make everythin’ look normal. We’re left alone if we don’t shoot our mouths off.” He indicated other people in each direction with a wave of his arm. “Many of these folks is really military anyway. This ain’t a favourite place to be stationed for four months at a time ‘in disguise’ but they’re here to keep an eye on us.”
“But you’re local?”
“Well, there ain’t no-one exac’ly local to this town. This wasn’t here fifteen years ago. But, yup, I’m from not far away. Me and a few dozen others here; about the same number as military.” He asked again with renewed confidence.
“So, what you guys up to?”
“We’re just visiting,” answered Andy. “We fancied a break from the base; and here we are.”
“Well enjoy!” Chuck responded dubiously. “Ain’t a whole lot to do around here! Even the weird stuff ain’t so bad. You’ll be waiting a long time for excitement ‘round here!”
As he spoke, his attention faltered and his voice tailed off into silence. His gaze drifted from Andy’s face to a point over and beyond his left shoulder. Andy turned to look.
In the clear blue sky, a ragged, slightly curved, fiery line was being drawn from a distant, indistinguishable point high up – towards the ground. A blazing object was visible at its head, extending the arc towards the desert plain. Small pieces of flaming debris detached along its way and traced out smaller paths, mostly disappearing into the air without trace. But the centre object continued on. As it came closer, its size became clearer. It was larger than they had realised; the parts breaking away were not small either, and some of these were now surviving too. A distant whine became audible.
“What the heck?” cried Chuck.
“What is it?” asked Aisha. “What are you looking at? What is happening?”
“Missiles?” asked Andy.
“Nope; ain’t no weapon,” Chuck answered decisively. “Wrong shape – wasn’t made for this to happen. This here’s something fallin’ outa the sky!”
The object – whatever it was – struck a point out into the desert about three miles away. The whine stopped. An explosive flash appeared and a ball of sand erupted to quickly engulf much of it. A split-second later, the deafening crash reached their ears and the ground shook below them. A few flaming spirals broke off and reached out to the side; patches of burning remains could be seen for hundreds of yards around. A few parts, which had detached in the air, also came down randomly – the closest less than half a mile away – and created their own secondary impacts. Within a few seconds, all was quiet but over a range of perhaps ten square miles the desert was dotted with burning debris and scattered with clouds of displaced sand.
Chuck looked on, initially stunned. Gradually, however, an expression of understanding crept into his face. His teeth formed a firm, determined grin and he began to nod his head, slowly. Eventually, he spoke.
“Satellite,” he whispered clearly, still nodding.
Chapter 28: Lies
Don Bell stood, with Jerry Austin beside him, staring at a piece of paper. On it were thirty-three lines of tabulated text.
“So guys, you’re saying this will do it?” he asked.
Jenny and Bob both nodded. She answered.
“Yes, that’s the smallest disconnect-set I can find that doesn’t contain any of the eight nodes that can’t be taken out.”
Don eyed her suspiciously, and looked at the rest of his team, as he spoke. “And you haven’t calculated any that do?”
“No,” she lied. Scott and Larry nodded to support her.
“OK good,” Don smiled. “So, if we turn off these thirty-three sites, that will kill your sentient Internet?”
“No!” Bob insisted. “Just powering them down logically isn’t enough. You’ll need to physically disconnect them from both the Internet and power grids.”
“Jeez, that’s going to be difficult!” Don exclaimed.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, you knew that!” Jenny exploded. “Don’t pretend that’s news!” Bob did his best to steady her as the others held a small debate in the corner of the room. They returned after several minutes. Jerry wore a despondent expression.
“OK guys,” Don said, “we’re still all on the same page here.” He produced his widest grin to date. “This is just going to take a bit more authorisation. Also we’re going to have to figure out how we’re actually going to do it. Give us one more hour and we’ll be ready to go.”
Jenny appeared to be on the verge of a meltdown.
*
Aisha and Andy were on their way back to the tunnel entry point in Chuck’s truck. There had been further satellite ‘downs’ over a period of thirty minutes after the first impact, over almost as much of the desert as could be seen. They were perhaps parts of the same system, which had broken off higher in the atmosphere; it was impossible to say – but, for now, all was quiet. As on the first journey into town, Andy had tried his hardest to disguise the difficulty he had climbing into the truck’s cab.
“So how do you know that was a satellite – or satellites?” he asked Chuck.
“Don’t see mu
ch else it could be, really!” he laughed. “Bombs gen’rally don’t fall to pieces before they hit what they’re aimed at. Ain’t no planes left. So what else is up there?” He looked up and grinned mockingly but then relented to a softer, apologetic tone. “Plus, folks, I do confess, there’s been stories of stuff like this elsewhere this mornin’!”
“Where?” Andy and Aisha cried in unison, thinking of the OI, but Chuck guessed the cause of their concern.
“Not the base, guys: you’d see that from here easy if there was anything big. No: on the radio ‘bout two hours ago. Heard some story about something coming down on Vegas. Someone said ‘satellite’. Hard to get the details b’cause everythin’s broke but sounded like a direct hit – big one.”
They both went through the same thought processes independently: relief that their friends were probably safe for now; horror at the thousands – maybe tens of thousands – who would have died in Las Vegas; shame that the former mattered to them more than the latter. They held each other tightly, not realising how closely they were also converging to the same conclusion.
*
‘Beep’ S = 0.906.
The delay was more than the hour Don had promised. Jenny’s frustration had slowly tempered into a bitter acceptance that Andy may have been right: that obstacles to progress – to action – were being deliberately thrust into their path. Eventually Don and Jerry returned to the main room with what appeared to be further prevarication.
“OK guys,” Don started, holding his palms outward in a defensive gesture: it was clear they were not going to like this. “We’re moving again but we’re going have to take it slow.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning we’re still waiting on authorisation to pull out your disconnect-set – and we may not get that until tomorrow.” Jenny boiled but Don continued. “Also, our tech guys all over the world are still figuring out how exactly we’re going to get rid of these thirty-three nodes completely. That’s not going to be easy in at least a third of the cases – maybe more.”
