Fool's Experiments

by Edward M. Lerner

  Before long, a generation with fewer than ten winners became the exception. The average length of a string of successes grew to four, then five, then six. As the ever-more- capable entities raced through each new maze, the duration of the average trial became ever shorter, fell to scant seconds.

  The Power that watched over the labyrinths had its own innate logic. Upon the tenth consecutive occurrence of a foreshortened trial, it was clear that a milestone had been reached. Evolution had wrought a true-breeding algorithm for solving any two-dimensional maze.

  It was time for the investigation to advance into its next phase.

  CHAPTER 12

  Fran Feinman nervously twisted a lock of her straight black hair but otherwise showed no signs of her husband's recent death. As though worried what impression her casual garb and sunny living room conveyed, she tipped her head toward the chaotic family room. "It's hard to retain a funereal air around that. I thank God for the twins every day."

  "I'm so glad the boys are doing okay," Cheryl said. Her words sounded empty, but she never knew what to say on a condolence call. It suddenly struck Cheryl: She hadn't talked with Fran in weeks. Some friend I am.

  Cheryl was more flustered for coming with an ulterior motive. "Fran, I meant what I said at Ben's memorial service. I'll be happy to take Josh and Scott for a weekend. Whenever you'd like."

  "Thanks, but I don't think any of us is ready yet. Going to school and work is tough enough."

  They listened for a while to the boys' play. Doug found his tongue first. "Mrs. Feinman, thank you again for seeing us."

  "Please, it's 'Fran.' Any friend of Cheryl's is always welcome here."

  Doug looked as ill at ease as Cheryl felt. He said, "I don't know how to approach this tangentially. Fran, please know that I don't ask this lightly. Was anything ... unusual about your husband's death?"

  Fran glared; Cheryl broke eye contact first. "I had to tell him, Fran. I had to tell him what little I knew." After that extraordinary epiphany at Jim Schulz's place, that was so true.

  Fran shifted on the sofa, an unsubtle turning away. It made Cheryl feel about two inches tall. Fran said, "All right, Doug. The look on Ben's face ... that was unusual. Oh, it was far worse than that. It was horrible. He died with an expression of absolute terror."

  Doug squirmed in his chair, but Cheryl hoped he wouldn't stop. They could be next. "Fran, do you have any idea what could have frightened him?"

  "I don't!" The widow twisted a handkerchief so fiercely that several stitches of embroidery gave way with audible pops. "My Ben wasn't afraid of anything. He had all the fear burned out of him in the Gulf War."

  Cheryl patted her friend's arm. "Then what, Fran? Why did he have that look? It must have been bad—I don't believe you scare easily, either."

  Fran just shook her head.

  Doug stood and began to pace. "You're sure Ben was alone when he had the stroke?"

  "The kids and I were at a Saturday matinee, some harmless animated feature." She smiled at the memory of the twins' delight. "Ben was alone in his den when we left. He'd brought home work and said he couldn't join us. I closed the den door on my way out. He was dead in his chair, the door still shut, when we returned.

  "Because of the look, the police examined the house.

  My fingerprints were the top set on the inside and outside knobs of the den door." She hugged and rocked herself as she sat.

  "Did you notice anything unusual about Ben before this? That day? That week?" No thought underlay Cheryl's questions, but there had to be some meaning to this strange death.

  "He had had a physical maybe a month earlier. He was in fine health, the doctor said, perfect health. Ben was full of energy, full of life."

  Nothing. Cheryl racked her brains. "Is the den like it was?"

  "Yes." Fran's eyes brimmed with tears. "I can't face it yet."

  Doug and Cheryl examined Ben's home office; the tidy room somehow mocked them. The orderly desktop revealed nothing. An X of police tape on the carpet marked where the neural-interface helmet had been found. It must have fallen off after Ben slumped from the stroke. Doug traced his finger over a doodle on the desk blotter—a meaningless bunch of deeply inscribed intersecting ovals, all nearly obliterated by a dark scribble—then, shaking his head, led the way from the den.

  CHAPTER 13

  The lurid bar graph and Col. Glenn Adams (Ret.) glowered at each other. He sat stiffly, his posture a legacy of nearly thirty years in service. The height of each bar denoted the number of virus attacks reported to the Inter-Agency Computer Network Security Forum in a three-month period. The full display showed two years of quarterly data.

  Laughter and merriment echoed down the hallway in some impromptu celebration. Glenn knew better than to try to join. The nerds, free spirits in blue jeans and rock-concert T-shirts, had made it known he was unwelcome and unwanted. He had four strikes against him: He was management; he was twenty years older than any of the tech staff; after a year, he was still, in an era of tight budgets, the new kid on the block; he was ex-Army among a bunch of anarchists. No, make that five strikes. Their common boss had made it clear that she shared their dislike.

  Glenn was from the traditional "make things go bang" side of the Army. He'd been vocally old-school too many times in an era of network-centric warfare. Enough troops had now been embroiled for long enough in insurgencies across the Middle East to make his perspective once more socially acceptable with the brass—but that swing of the pendulum had come too late for him. In an up-or-out officer corps, he had had to go.

  He was in his early fifties, an imposing figure, he felt, with intense blue eyes, a broad forehead, and brush-cut gray hair. In this techie haven, his business suit, heavily starched white shirt, and sober striped tie might just as well be a uniform. So be it. That bit of protocol was, many days, his only anchor of normalcy in a world turned upside down.

  Today, for example.

  His tormentors felt he had gotten a plum assignment: a big raise, a start on a second government pension, an impressive title as deputy director of the forum. Sure, the job bought his groceries, but it still sucked. A warrior's warrior, here he was in an impotent staff job babysitting permanent adolescents. The irony of a second career in high tech was not lost on him.

  Some days it made Glenn's head spin. The modem military was nothing without technical superiority, without the unmanned aerial vehicles, spy and positioning satellites, and smart weapons made possible by computer software. While this group of misfits was pathological, gleefully dumped by its sponsoring agencies when the forum was founded—which was what any competent bureaucrat would automatically do—Glenn could not bear the knowledge that people like these wrote software. Perhaps the postindustrial state, like communism, had sown the seeds of its own destruction.

  He thought, I should have known when the Beetle Bailey comic strip added a nerd character: Gizmo.

  A hyena-like guffaw sliced through the lesser mirth. That was the unkindest cut of all. It came from Tracy Metcalfe, director of the forum and Glenn's boss. Metcalfe was just one of the geek clique, responsible for leading but unwilling or unable to set aside her toys to do so. As Metcalfe struggled to stay technically on top of every project, an impossible task, she fell further and further behind in her real job: managing the work.

  The ever-widening gap had eventually led to the creation of a deputy position. She had tried to staff it in her own image, with an über-nerd with whom she could babble in tongues. DISA, the Defense Information Systems Agency, a normally silent parent of the forum, had had other ideas. They insisted on someone who would actually lead. DISA's behind-the-scenes influence had shot down a favored buddy of Metcalfe's, and, indirectly, gotten Adams the job.

  Metcalfe had told Glenn bluntly that, indirect or not, Defense patronage could not make her like, trust, or include him. So far, she had been as good as her word. He had soldiered on for more than a year, despite the cryogenic shoulder.

  And resenting her
accomplished exactly nothing.

  He tried to focus on the graphic. A ton of data lay beneath it; perhaps the underlying analysis would get him some belated respect. He tried to tune out the frivolity in the hall. It should have been easy. It was less than a whisper compared to the firepower of Desert Storm or the "shock and awe" of Iraqi Freedom.

  Should have been easy, perhaps, but whatever animus the Iraqis had borne him was impersonal.

  Glenn drummed his fingers on the desk. What most boggled his mind was the lack of priorities. People decided independently what tasks they would take on, based, it seemed, on little more than technical interest. Metcalfe, instead of running the show, reinforced the tendency. What his boss mistook for a weekly status review was mutual stroking at their supposed cleverness. Progress was reported against this self-appointed challenge or that. Any relationship between self-assigned duties, or between what actually got done and what needed to happen, was entirely coincidental.

  The forum had a few conscientious people, but the headway they made came despite Metcalfe and her "leadership," not because of them. All in all, it looked to Glenn like they were trying to bail out the ocean with tea strainers. No one looked at the big picture. No one he asked knew where the big picture might be kept. After a lot of digging, he found out: There was none.

  It had taken some doing, first to conceptualize the threat and then to characterize it, but with a lot of grunt work he had assembled that big picture. Collating attack reports— that was something so simple even a manager could do it. And what a nasty picture it was....

  The trend from left to right, from two years ago to now, climbed exponentially. Each bar consisted of four stacked segments, its colors representing the three most prevalent viruses reported during that quarter and, in black, "all others." In addition to the overall trend, a second pattern was ominous: Repeatedly, a single new virus would penetrate more of the nation's computers than all viruses had done a mere six months earlier. The virus writers kept learning faster than the virus fighters.

  The typical virus persisted for six to nine months before it was scrubbed from the network, or at least faded into the anonymity of the black. The monstrous yellow segment for the current quarter was the Class of '10 virus. Glenn took a sip of coffee; it was at ambient temperature, which meant, in this computer-friendly office, maybe sixty-four degrees.

  Another long swallow and the cold coffee was gone. Glenn knew and hated every color on the screen. Green: Zap virus. Orange: Swarmer Bees virus. Pink: Rebecca virus. Indigo...

  He crumbled the empty Styrofoam cup in a rage. Yes, most colors vanished in two or three quarters, scrubbed from the national network by patching operating systems, e-mail clients, and web browsers to close a never-ending collection of security holes, and by endlessly updating the antivirus programs. Most, but not indigo. Indigo refused to go away. Indigo marched from bar to bar, from quarter to quarter, unstoppable....

  Of all the viruses, the eco-nut attacks he had color-coded as indigo were the most persistent. But for the one-time- only Class of '10 attack, indigo would have been this quarter's clear winner. No color had persisted beyond three calendar quarters before submerging into the black—until indigo. Indigo had survived for eighteen months, and was prospering.

  The major-attack alarm sounded from down the hall, from the forum control room. Damn. More indigo? He saved the data displayed on his screen and went to check.

  The acid churning in his gut made Glenn wish he had skipped the last few cups of coffee.

  Inch-tall green words floated on an otherwise-darkened screen: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a backscratcher for?"

  "Must we have that?" Cheryl asked Doug.

  They were cloistered in his office, regrouping from Saturday's unenlightening visit with Fran Feinman. "And the antecedent of 'that' would be?"

  "Your screen saver. Can't it show something a little less distracting?"

  He suspected she had unadulterated black in mind. "I share with all who enter the wisdom of the ages. You'd pay good money to read that from a fortune cookie."

  "That's not where I generally go for wisdom."

  Doug shrugged in resignation, swiveled toward his desk, and reset his screen saver to a boring clock display. After a moment's thought, he suppressed its synthesized ticking sound. "Is that better?" To her nod he added, "Thought it would be. Time heals all wounds."

  "Not Ben's."

  Doug winced. "Sorry, Cheryl. You've got to understand humor is how I deal with stress." That, and sitting in the dark, brooding. He tried not to do that at work, though— and anyway, the thin office drapes admitted too much light for proper moping. "I made a call earlier. The doctor handling Cherner's case agreed to see us. We've got a late- afternoon appointment Wednesday in Philly."

  She stood and stared out the window, as though the clusters of people on the plaza below, chatting and smoking and sipping coffee, were totally foreign to her.

  He wondered when they would return to that familiar world. Or if.

  Sheila suspected something was wrong. For one thing, she could not remember her last name, although the name on her driver's license felt right when she had read it. She assumed that the license in the purse underneath the desk was hers since it bore her likeness. She had needed the mirror in a compact to reach that conclusion.

  People chattered in the hall outside her... office? None of the noises seemed familiar. Then again, its voice was distracting, dominating. How could she recognize other sounds when it spoke so loudly?

  What could be wrong? Sheila thought she might ask one of those noisy people but wasn't sure exactly what to ask. She opened her mouth to test a question; only an inarticulate gurgling emerged. Had she always been mute? She couldn't remember.

  She strode from the building, waving in vague response to the calls of her coworkers. There were things to be done, important things.

  It insisted.

  CHAPTER 14

  Classical jazz blared, beautiful music composed by Duke Ellington. "Mood Indigo."

  Glenn Adams was entirely unamused. The forum was rife with people who imagined themselves witty and were half-right. With luck, one particular asshole would tire of waiting for Glenn's reaction before he gave in to having one. Damned civil-service rules—he could neither discipline these jerks in any meaningful way nor get them fired, not that his dysfunctional boss would admit there was a problem.

  After lunch yesterday Glenn had made his case to the forum's director and a room full of techies. His bar charts, which he saw as damning data, had elicited little reaction beyond yawns. The programmers said that they knew all about indigo, they had analyzed it, and it was merely "uninteresting hacktivism."

  The loss nationwide of untold millions of hours of productive time, rooting out and recovering from one virus, wasn't interesting? Apparently. As the experts explained it—and Glenn, not a programmer, was expected to take their word—indigo was not a good use of their talents. Indigo trashed hard drives with an eco-harangue but was "otherwise harmless."

  They preferred to focus on things that were more malicious, like programs that actually forced invaded computers to self-destruct. There was one virus, for example, that accessed disks so often it could fry drive motors. And there was a worm that hijacked PCs all around the world for a distributed denial-of-service attack on the White House web site. There were lots of hack attacks on banks and e-tailers that stole credit-card numbers by the tens of thousands, and on government agencies, stealing Social Security numbers by the millions. With buggers like that on the loose, what mattered one more file crapper-upper in the Internet of life?

  Glenn knew he wasn't especially technical, but he had survived a three-year posting to DISA. There had been engineers and programmers there, too. He had persisted. "But doesn't it matter that indigo perseveres, keeps morphing enough to stay a step ahead of the antivirus services?"

  "Yeah, it matters," his nemesis, Ralph Pittman, had drawled. The big-band jazz now
reverberating in the hallways emanated from Pittman's office. "But it's under control."

  "What does that mean?" Glenn had asked.

  "It's a criminal matter." Pittman had actually snapped his rainbow suspenders for emphasis. Every color of the rainbow clashed with his purple T-shirt. "We've posted reward announcements in hacker chat rooms worldwide. Every so often, we bump up the amount. Someone jealous or with a grudge will eventually rat out whoever is behind indigo."

  "And if the person behind indigo is smart enough not to talk?"

  "Don't be bletcherous." (It was an obvious insult, but Glenn hadn't had a clue what it meant. Nor had knowing grins around the table helped his equanimity. He had cornered a nerdnoid in the lobby that evening and demanded an explanation. It appeared that Glenn was unaesthetic, crude of design and function.) "As if a hacker could forever resist bragging about a virus this persistent. Jeez, the guy has demigod potential in the community. No way will he let that go. Someone he talks to will eventually brag about who he knows. It will come out, Glenn."

  And if the perpetrator were some al-Qaeda holdout or a New Caliphate e-warrior rather than a Pittmanesque misfit? It was a counterargument that required an opponent who read newspapers.

  The boss, after a grand, throat-clearing harrumph, had opined that indigo "does not at this time merit further priority action by the forum." She had given Glenn a perfunctory pat on the back for collating the attack data, followed by the condescending advice that he limit his "commendable enthusiasm" to matters "more in consonance with your administrative duties." Such as restocking coffee filters, perhaps?

  It was a passive approach to what Glenn saw as a serious threat, but he appeared to have no options. The head honcho's feelings were clear, and the Army had taught him to obey orders.

  So he now brooded in his office, pissed out of his skull, licking his office-political wounds, waiting. Despite the flack and embarrassment and organizational castration he had just endured, Glenn hoped to God that the civvies were right.