Fool's Experiments

by Edward M. Lerner

  Somewhere around a score of 8-6, he achieved that rare state of automatic play that made the game so rewarding. Step, step, stroke. Ball shooting like lightning across the court, then as quickly returning. Step, step, stroke, and back it goes again. Stroke, stroke, stroke. He wasn't really there, nor was she. Some part of his mind knew where the ball was, and the walls, and the drifting color zones that changed the motion of the ball.

  While reflexes maintained volley after long volley, his thoughts entered a free-floating state not unlike a good lawn mowing. Racquetball with Cheryl—it was a simple thing, really. He could not remember when he'd last had such a good time. Stroke, step, step, step, stroke. Amazing how her game had improved since they had played the once. His arm was cooperating tonight, too. Step, backhand slam. Nothing like your arm going haywire to impress a woman.

  He stumbled as the memory struck home. That damned Class of '10 virus had done a number on his arm all right— luckily he'd only had to revert a week for an uninfected backup. His next stroke came an instant too late, with a weak grip, and Cheryl clobbered the ball.

  As she caught her breath before serving, Doug tried to push everything from his mind. Something teased his memory, something that he sensed was vital: a state of mind like just before he recognized the cartoon atom. He forced in and out a few deep breaths of his own. He lost the next volley but regained the trance state.

  Step, step, stroke. Dash to the rear court for her return. Step, step, smash. Shuffle forward. Balance on the balls of the feet. Step, turn, backhand. He played on autopilot as images crowded his mind. The Pac-Man-like Class of '10 virus.

  Neural-interface circuits. Atoms, spinning atoms, galaxies of atoms. Nerve impulses, in his brain, traveling along his spinal cord and down his arm. Pac-Man chomping up screens full of information, computers filled with data. Stop signs and traffic lights.

  Step, step, stroke. Sensors in his arm transforming electrochemical impulses into electrical signals the prosthesis could manipulate. Pac-Man racing down his arm. Step, pivot, stroke. Neural nets in the prosthesis learning to recognize, in hours of biofeedback sessions, which transformed nerve impulses meant "bend my wrist" and "open my hand" and "wiggle my fingers." Pac-Man reversing: racing up his arm, up his spinal cord—

  With a holler, Doug tossed his racquet into the air. The ball shot past him as the racquet turned end over end. He caught the handle, as it fell back to earth, with what he felt to be great panache.

  "Why did you do that? It was the best volley we've had all day!"

  "Sorry." He shrugged. "But if you can spare a few minutes from the game, I think I know what's been happening to our colleagues."

  Doug and Cheryl had been playing racquetball at BSC, where the VR court time was free. Now they retreated to his office. Behind the closed door, the smell of sweaty clothes and sweating bodies should have been overpowering. She didn't notice.

  "Are we at risk?" Cheryl lowered herself gingerly onto a chair. Without a hot shower, her muscles were already seizing up.

  "You, no. Me, possibly—but I doubt it."

  She wondered how he could be so sure. "Explain it to me."

  "It's a virus."

  She leaned forward, glowering. "Ben Feinman was a friend, a good friend. I find that in very poor taste."

  "No, a computer virus." Doug retrieved a rolled schematic drawing from his desk. "My arm. Remember how our Class of '10 friends made my arm lock up?" At her nod, he continued. "Think about a virus attacking through a neural- interface helmet."

  "Oh ... my ... God." She shuddered. "Can a computer virus do that?"

  "When the Class of '10 virus hit, I got some weird sensations through the prosthesis just before it froze. I was so mad, and there was such a crunch finishing the NSF proposal on time, that I put the incident out of my mind."

  He unrolled the schematic. "You know there's a neural network between the main microprocessor and the nerve sensors."

  "Sure. For filtering," she said. A zillion cells all metabolizing meant tons of electrochemical noise. "The neural net is always learning how better to dredge useful signals out of that noise."

  "I tend not to think of it this way, but what trains the arm also works on other neural nets." Doug tapped his upper arm, the back of his neck, and, most emphatically, his forehead. "Biological neural nets. Neuron nets. My nervous system. The motor cortex.

  "Even while I learn to operate the arm, it learns how best to signal joint positions and plastiskin pressures back to me. What I so casually call 'training the arm' is nothing so simple. The prosthesis and I are symbiotic. Every time I think I've achieved better performance, what's really happened is that each side of the partnership has learned to better communicate with the other. The arm's neural net translates both ways between digital data and synaptic patterns." Cheryl rested her chin on her hand in thought. She knew far better than Doug how a state-of-the-art neural-interface helmet was built. She had designed much of the helmet that, he would have her believe, might have helped to kill Ben Feinman. Now she wrestled with Doug's theory, applying her knowledge of that helmet. She looked for a flaw and found none.

  "I'm not using a neurally interfaced device, so I'm safe. You're using only the prosthesis, and the nerve branch up your arm seems far too narrow a comm channel to pass a threat. But a helmet wearer ..."

  Ben, like Doug, had started out with biofeedback training. How many times had she seen Ben with electrodes taped to his head, thin wires snaking to an oscilloscope? Day after day of learning to concentrate his thoughts until he could steer the glowing phosphorescent dot wherever on the screen he chose. Hell, everyone at the office had tried it. A chill ran down Cheryl's spine as she realized what might have happened had not Ben been the quicker study.

  In her too vivid imagination, her old boss, her good friend, sat with his eyes closed, wearing his helmet. Signals from the lab computer passed through a neural net to Ben; his thoughts, his reactions, returned through the neural net to complete the experiment. If nothing came across—as had, at first, so often been the case—Ben would groan or mutter or curse, then open his eyes to see on-screen what text or image he should have received. Then he would sketch on the touchpad what small impression, if any, he had gotten through the helmet.

  Other times it would be Ben's job to send. That, too, hadn't worked at first. Again Ben would chastise the machine, then key in or trace directly whatever he had attempted to mentally transmit via the interface helmet.

  How many training sessions had she monitored? How many experimental runs had it taken before Ben and the supervisory program in the lab's big server had really communicated? Months, she knew. She wasn't sure exactly how many, because Ben had gotten secretive toward the end. Moody. Something had been on his mind. My God, in his mind.

  "Are you all right?" Doug asked.

  She waved him to silence. Training—first Ben and then Doug had talked about training. That wasn't right, not really. Neural nets weren't smart, couldn't think, couldn't be taught. It was whimsical to speak of them learning. No, a neural net was only electronic circuits modeled after bunches of neurons, just another way to process inputs into outputs.

  What a neural net did best was adapt. Optimize. Mindlessly it moved away from any output state that feedback rated as wrong for its current inputs. Mindlessly it adjusted toward a state that feedback rated as better. Being electronic, a neural net adapted fast.

  Ben's corrections via the keyboard and touchpad: That was the feedback that drove the optimization. Later, the neural net in the helmet had adapted directly to the perceived success or failure of a signal to pass through it, in either direction. Doug's arm was like that, she remembered. It distinguished smooth from jerky motions and it automatically reinforced whatever worked.

  By the time of his death, Ben had stopped using a keyboard. His helmet, like Doug's arm, had achieved selfadaptation.

  Her mind's eye panned back to encompass first two spectral computers, then three, then many. Lightning bolts co
nnected the machines, stylized communications links. One of the computers, she saw, harbored a nasty, slithering object—the visualization of a virus. The creature slunk through the network of her imagination. It was mindless and fast. She wanted to cry out a warning as it crept ever closer, but she was frozen. Finally, the virus was here, and it butted up against the neural interface itself.

  When Doug called to her, she did not hear him. She was lost in a nightmare of her own making. As though it had found another comm line to transit, another computer to infect, the virus kept butting against the neural interface. Unlike any boundary it had ever encountered, however, this boundary adapted. This boundary taught itself how best to modify itself so that signals on one side would pass—reformatted, but with absolute fidelity in content—to the computer on the opposite side. This boundary helped.

  When, in her mind's eye, the virus slithered across the oh, so cooperative boundary into one more computer and began its attack, she screamed.

  For the latest computer to be invaded by the virus was Ben Feinman's brain.

  The small office became confining, claustrophobic. Doug and Cheryl separated to shower, then went outside for a walk. The sky had clouded up since they arrived; they had the bike paths under the trees mostly to themselves. Good— this conversation wasn't anything Doug wanted overheard.

  She shivered. He put an arm around her shoulder—and she flinched inched. Had she recoiled from his gesture, or the slick feel of plastiskin, or the memories his prosthesis must now awaken? He didn't know. He doubted he would want to know.

  She trembled beneath his hand. She had helped to develop Ben's helmet. Did she blame herself? Doug knew he would excoriate himself.

  "Doug?"

  "Hmm?"

  "Why the atom? What does that mean?"

  Bicyclists spun around a blind curve, sending them scurrying aside, giving Doug a moment to pick his words. "Ben scribbled over his drawing, wiped out part of it."

  "No atom, then. I still don't get it."

  Doug thought about poor Fran Feinman, about what they could tell her. He thought about the final moments of confusion, of the fury coursing through Ben Feinman's brain as the invader did its work. Its damage. Its killing.

  "We saw an atom; we just didn't recognize it. What Ben obliterated was the nucleus."

  Cheryl shuddered. She saw it, too, now. She knew all too well which virus had been the most adaptive, most resistant to eradication, had time and again reduced BioSciCorp's files to ravaged repositories of a single phrase repeated over and over. The same phrase that, she realized, must echo without end, without pause, in what little mind remained to Bob Cherner. In tones of weary wonder, she recited it. "Stop nuclear now."

  CHAPTER 17

  Glenn poured a fresh mug of coffee, his third since arriving. It was scarcely nine. Waking at what his wife called oh dark hundred was a habit deeply ingrained; he had carried the schedule over into his new civilian career. On this Monday morning he had the forum offices in Rosslyn, Virginia, largely to himself.

  As he gazed down from the break-room window to the traffic snarl that was I-66, off-key whistling caught his ear. The tune was just barely recognizable as "Mood Indigo." Ralph Pittman. Wonderful.

  "Ah, there you are." The lanky programmer rounded the comer into the break room. He shepherded before him two strangers: a tall, dark-haired man and a petite, very pretty woman. Unlike their escort, both visitors wore conservative business attire. "Mr. Carey, Ms. Stem, this is Colonel Glenn Adams. Glenn, I found these two in the lobby. They would like to talk with someone about the 'no-nukes' virus." Behind the strangers, out of their view, Pittman rolled his eyes and with an index finger traced small circles beside his ear. "You're the expert, so I'll leave them in your capable hands." He retreated as he had arrived, whistling Duke Ellington.

  The visitors seemed normal enough, but judging from Pittman's dumb show, they had a bee in their collective bonnet. Glenn mentally shook himself by the lapels. When had he begun to rely on Pittman's opinion?

  "Coffee?" Glenn asked. When they nodded, he found and filled two Styrofoam cups, eyeballing for grounds what little elixir remained in the carafe before topping off his own mug. Pointing to the sugar and creamer, he advised, "Doctor them up, and then we'll go to my place."

  Glenn closed his office door and waited. His male visitor sighed. "Colonel, I have a strange tale to tell. I hope you'll hear me out before you pass judgment. To help sustain the willing suspension of disbelief, keep in mind that between us Ms. Stem and I have four computer-science degrees and collectively more than twenty years in the industry. We've both published extensively in our specialty, which is neural- interfacing technology."

  Adams accepted two lists of publications. "Okay. By the way, call me Glenn."

  The man relaxed a bit. "Fine, and we're Doug and Cheryl. Your Mr. Pittman said you were familiar with the 'no-nukes' vims."

  Painfully familiar, only Glenn thought of it as indigo. And hardly his Pittman. "Overwrites hard drives with an anti- nuclear power slogan."

  Cheryl nodded. "That's the one."

  "Law enforcement aside, it's mostly off the forum's scope." The party line made Glenn seethe. "The antivirus product companies got the template for no-nukes into their definition files right away, though it's hard to stay rid of. Keeps morphing enough to elude old defenses."

  "Do you believe that it's dangerous?" Doug studied him closely.

  "Yes, although I'm in a minority here."

  "Does that make you question your conclusion?"

  Glenn grimaced. "No, although it's been strongly suggested that reconsidering would simplify my life."

  "Group think?" Doug said. "Consensus is a poor substitute for thought. Tell the herd to eat shit—a hundred billion flies can't be wrong."

  Glenn tamped down a laugh. That he liked Doug had no bearing on his credibility, did it? "Tell me your story. I'll try not to prejudge it."

  It was a commitment that Glenn found increasingly difficult to keep. Doug spoke for ten minutes, occasionally checking a detail with his companion. Within two minutes, Adams wondered if "coconspirator" wasn't the more appropriate term. Could Pittman have put these two up to this ... prank? Glenn remembered Pittman rolling his eyes at the two visitors, but that could have been a red herring, playacting.

  When Doug wound down, Glenn tried to summarize. "So this is your story? You claim that the 'no-nukes' virus attacks people through neural-interface helmets, that it scrambles not only computers but also brains. The virus' attack mode, overwriting memory, can leave human victims dead or insane. Brains aren't wired exactly alike, because of genetics and differences in what and how people learn. That makes what memories get overwritten the luck of the draw. The design of the specific helmet and the learning previously done by its neural network may also influence the nature of the attack."

  Cheryl leaned forward. "This isn't a story, and we're not claiming anything. We're telling you that it's happening. The forum has to put out an advisory bulletin warning people. We've got to stop this research, at least until we can eradicate or defend against the virus."

  If Doug and Cheryl—assuming those were their real names—had been put up to this and Glenn bought into it, what little credibility he had ever had at the forum would be shot. He could be laughed out of his job by lunchtime. Then again, what if, incredibly, these two were for real? "It's a little soon to tell anyone anything."

  "Look, damn it, it's happening." Doug's voice grew in intensity even as it fell in volume. "Now. People are dying, and worse. Did you not hear the part about Bob Cherner? Far from too soon to act, it's already too late for him."

  Either these two deserved Oscars or they believed what they were saying. Sincerity does not equal truth, of course. "Why the 'no-nukes' virus? Why can't any virus cross the neural interface?" Unspoken, but deeply felt, was the question: Why is it just my virus?

  "Perhaps other viruses are involved, too. Christ, that would be scarier still." Doug stood and considere
d. "I doubt it. Look, Feinman's and Cherner's attackers were obviously 'no-nukes.' No-nukes has been infecting and reinfecting the computers in our office for over a year. The morphing behavior you mentioned probably makes 'no-nukes' especially well suited to training neural nets.

  "But why speculate? Why don't you forum sloths get off your spreading obscurocratic asses and find out who's behind it? Maybe then you can answer your own damn question."

  "Sit down and calm down," Glenn told him. The smartass attitude wasn't helpful. Cheryl, he noted, shot her companion a scathing look that meant the same thing.

  Doug ignored them both. "What will it take to convince you?"

  The story was so fantastic—what would it take? A sign from God, perhaps, or a note from the president. "You say that Cherner and Feinman were attacked at home. And what about, um . .Glenn paused to check his notes, "Yamaguchi? She was in an auto accident. Surely you don't claim she was testing a neural-interface helmet while she drove. Of all the cases you've mentioned, only Friedman fell ill in her office."

  "She was killed," Doug corrected. "Home or office doesn't matter. And the victim was networked into a larger computer than the one at her desk." Doug's face flushed with anger, and a blood vessel throbbed in his neck. "Ben Feinman told his wife he'd brought work home. Perfectly normal to access the office computers from home. Or...

  "Or he could have been computer gaming. Hell of a great way to play. That would explain why no one from Ben's office ever asked Fran for anything back but the helmet. He was merely playing hooky from a Saturday matinee with the kids."

  Could it possibly be true? Glenn was hopelessly conflicted. After preaching for so long the dangers of indigo, of no-nukes, vindication far more compelling than he could have possibly imagined might just have appeared. But if it was true ... how unspeakably horrible.