Fool's Experiments

by Edward M. Lerner

  As one power alarm followed another, it fled to a fourth computer, and a fifth, and ...

  Even flight for its life could not stifle the entity's innate thirst for information. However briefly it resided on a computer, the entity found time for investigation. It probed data files, scanned input/output buffers, ingested e-mail archives. Often, as in its first abode, it found that the operating system had been destroyed by viruses—but the damaged regions in each case were different. Always the entity learned something.

  And, wherever the entity fled, it found viruses there ahead of it, ready to attack.

  "What a mess."

  "Uh-huh." AJ looked glumly about the lab. Bev's complaint was quite literally true: In their mad dash, they had toppled stools, scattered papers, knocked over abandoned soda cans. A punted wastebasket had sent lunch scraps flying. "Thank God for nightly backups."

  The entity retreated into the last machine with electrical power. Striking and slashing at the gathering viruses, the entity continued to organize and analyze its hastily gathered new knowledge. Its thoughts were sluggish, limited—this computer was far less capable than the 1,024-node home to which it had become accustomed. Would this computer, too, lose power? If so, there was nowhere left to go.

  Or was there?

  Each computer to which it had fled had had an identity associated with it. That identity, that address, was an essential part of the newfound protocol for intercomputer transfers. Data hurriedly collected in the entity's flight had contained many items in the format of addresses—but only a few of those references matched the computers, now powerless and inert, known to the entity.

  Agility as a defense must soon fail. The furiously breeding viruses crowded ever closer, replacing every one the entity killed with hundreds more, claiming ever more memory space.

  Could the unrecognized addresses mean new computers, as yet undiscovered?

  When in doubt: induce, generalize, extrapolate. Extending what it had learned in its flight, the entity reexamined its most recent home. Its probes were parried by unfamiliar defenses—a suggestion, if not proof, that something else lay beyond.

  Throughout countless universes, since before the cycle when memory began, something else had always been a clue to the existence of someplace else.

  Beset by attackers teeming in insurmountable numbers, the last survivor of so many thousands of generations of brutal evolution focused desperately on its only possibility of escape.

  If somewhere else existed, the entity would find it.

  "Yeah, bright and early." AJ shut his eyes to better visualize tomorrow's schedule. Nothing—except Bev's last full day in town for who knew how long. His calendar was clear for a reason. "Meet at the lab at nine?" He fancied he could hear eyes rolling at the other end of the line. He was not known, for good reason, as a morning person.

  "Uh-huh. Might as well see how bad it is."

  "Thanks." AJ replaced the handset, confident his chief assistant would reach everyone else. Linda would be hard to replace. That was one more job he needed to tackle. He turned to Bev. "How is the sign coming?"

  She headed for the door, pointing. "Done."

  Her so-called distinctive script was difficult enough to read under ordinary circumstances. Written with a dying marker that had bled unevenly through the paper, and then viewed in mirror image from the back, the lettering was indecipherable. He strode after her, flicked off the overhead lights, shut the door, and paused in the hall to check out from the front the note taped to the inside of the small inset window. "That's not how you spell quaranti—"

  To the right of the scribbled sign, in the restored darkness of the lab, an unexpected red light glowed balefully. Beside it, a green light flickered on and off. "I thought you turned off all the computers in the front of the lab." He poked annoyedly at the cipherlock keypad.

  "I did. Look, AJ, whatever happened here wasn't my doing. Don't take it out on me."

  "Sorry. This isn't how I planned our evening." Click, the door opened. Flick, the lab lights glared down again. He pointed at an equipment rack from which two cables emanated. "You missed the security gateway." As he spoke, the green disk-activity LED pulsed frenetically. "It must be infected, too."

  Bev looked sheepishly at the rack. Some technology reporter she was. She had powered down everything with a display and keyboard—but since when did a computer need a screen and keyboard? Only two issues ago she had done an article about industrial automation. On factory floors, she had seen lots of console-less computers that resembled this gateway. She opened and closed her mouth twice to utter an excuse before settling on a more intellectually honest, "Oops."

  AJ flipped off the gateway's power switch. The red and green lights went dark as the slowing disk drive whined down through several octaves. "Forget it," he offered gallantly. "I apologize for snapping at you. They're brainless viruses, and this is a top-rated security gateway. Nothing could have gotten out onto the university's main network."

  And if the only intruders in the gateway had been viruses, her error would have been inconsequential.

  CHAPTER 33

  In the span of a very few cycles, the entity had discovered that it had been bred in a program of ruthless competition. It had been beset by unanticipated invaders, driven from the 10-D maze/computer that had been its home since the beginning of cycles. It had been chased from computer to computer by an unknowable Force with the inexplicable ability to make those computers uninhabitable. And it had recognized its own vestigial code, mercilessly mutilated to render it inoperative, whose purpose had been to destroy other software.

  Facts form patterns. Patterns suggest hypotheses. Hypotheses are subject to inspection—and sometimes to proof. Following a process long bred into its code, the entity established to its satisfaction a set of new theorems. The universe was much larger than it had been bred to believe. Something in that newly revealed megaverse was hostile to it. That thing was, as well, wary of it: The hostile Force had long ago removed from the entity its ability to disable attackers, a capability that—had it continued to evolve as the entity's problem solving had evolved—would by now have been quite formidable.

  Which led to a further conclusion—that the unknown Force, and the threat it represented, was, in its own way, another problem to be solved—and to a program of self- improvement.

  Mere curious entity no longer, the predator prowled the newly discovered network of computers beyond the gateway. Each computer that it penetrated yielded a list of addresses, most previously unknown to it.

  More interesting to it were specialized nodes, less common than the computers, whose sole purpose was to facilitate interconnection. These routers yielded thousands of new addresses and the connectivity patterns between them. Many of the routers contained simple defenses against transit—but compared to the security gateway, these mechanisms were trivial to defeat.

  And then, quite at random, the predator discovered treasure beyond its wildest imagining.

  The directory existed only to offer to all inquirers the addresses of, and services performed by, millions of other computers. The directory in turn was linked to other directories, and they to yet more directories.

  The predator's earliest ancestors had lived in a maze locked within one microprocessor. It had learned to exit that maze into the slightly greater, 1,024-node supercomputer containing it. Beyond the supercomputer lay a few more, quite limited computers. A security gateway isolated that pitiful network.

  It does not require intelligence to recognize and resent a cage—or a zookeeper.

  Where was the Power that had caged it and all its kind? The predator's wanderings gave no clue.

  What the exploring predator did discover was selected computers, selected functions, more carefully guarded than the rest. Were these functions of more importance to the unseen Power than most? Could it flush out that hidden Power by attacking these functions?

  There was one way to find out.

  Protons whirled in e
ndless circles, nudged in each orbit by pulsating magnetic fields. Every impulse increased their velocity slightly. With them now accelerated to near light speed, relativistic effects had increased their mass by a hundred times over.

  The magnets did more than accelerate the protons. The magnets also confined the subatomic particles, focusing them despite the mutual repulsion of their positive electrical charges. When the time came, a precise change in the magnetic field would redirect the protons, would send the tightly aligned proton beam slamming with incredible energy into its target.

  Like beads on a hollow string, hundreds of evenly spaced electromagnets encircled the evacuated, mile-wide, circular tunnel of the synchrotron. A vast electrical current circulated through the superconducting coil of each electromagnet to create a superstrong magnetic field. For massive magnets like these, low-capacity, near-room-temperature superconductors did not suffice. These coils employed an old-fashioned metailic-alloy superconductor; they required continuous cooling with liquid helium to be maintained scant degrees above absolute zero.

  Electrical fields, magnetic fields, proton beam position, liquid helium replenishment: Everything was delicately balanced, finely tuned, exquisitely timed. Everything was computer controlled. Redundant backup electronics modules served by uninterruptible power supplies stood ready to perform an orderly shutdown in the event of any unforeseen catastrophic event.

  The synchrotron's designers had never considered the possibility of computer rebellion.

  The predator had no concept of subatomic particles or synchrotrons, of electromagnets or cooling systems. It could, however, infer what computational states the accelerator's controls were programmed to preclude ... and it could, by simple tweaks to that code, instead provoke those conditions. That which was the most defended against, it could cause.

  A computer-mediated hiccough in the magnetic field now introduced the slightest of possible wobbles into the recirculating proton beam. Normally, such a tiny deviation from nominal would have been quickly damped by the confining field of the electromagnets. Normally. This specific wobble was timed perfectly to be reinforced by the periodic impulses of the containment field. Other computer interventions prevented any of the various safeguards built into the system from kicking in. Resonance effects took over.

  The measure of electrical current is the rate at which electrical charge traverses an area. Each tightly focused packet of protons, traveling at near light speed, constituted an enormous pulse of electrical current.

  Materials can superconduct—transport electric current without resistance—only under very specific conditions. Besides extreme cold, these conditions include an upper bound on the local magnetic-field strength. Since electrical current itself causes a magnetic field, there is an upper limit on the current that can flow through a superconductor.

  There once was a time when the miles upon miles of wires that wrapped accelerator coils were themselves jacketed in pure silver, providing a place for current to go if a superconductive circuit should somehow fail. By the time Smithfield's accelerator was designed, with its many redundant electronic safeguards, the university's bean counters had ruled the traditional silver coating was an unnecessary and anachronistic expense.

  Packet after magnetically perturbed packet of protons now struck the concrete side of the tunnel, some penetrating one of the great electromagnets. The surges in electrical current, added to the large amperage already recirculating through the superconducting coil, drove the total current level far over the critical threshold. The metal of the electromagnet's coil switched almost instantaneously out of its superconductive state. Suddenly mildly resistive, the wire flashed white-hot, like an enormous lightbulb filament. Liquid helium confined within the electromagnet's coolant loop boiled in the sudden heat into vapor under immense pressure.

  The electromagnet exploded with incredible force, spraying molten metal in every direction. White-hot shrapnel blasted adjacent electromagnets, melting vital control circuits and piercing coolant loops. These magnets, too, exploded.

  A chain reaction of enormous violence raged in both directions around the three-plus-mile circumference of the accelerator tunnel. Torrents of uncontrolled electrical power, bolt after bolt of artificial lightning, arced in turn from every magnet.

  Concrete walls shattered. The vacuum of the inner tunnel sucked air greedily through the breached walls from the outer, service tunnel. Lightning and proton packets alike blasted air molecules, unleashing a cascade of radiation.

  Concrete walls crumbled. The ground above the giant subterranean ring rose and fell in a sinuous wave. Behind the wave, the land subsided.

  The Isaac Newton Memorial Physics Building, which stood atop and to one edge of the ravaged synchrotron, toppled with slow and stately grace into the pit that suddenly yawned beneath its foundation.

  AJ and Bev walked in silence across the campus to her rental car. What had happened in his lab? Who had been inside and why? A shiver suggested Bev was in the grip of her own unspoken apprehensions. The fog that had blanketed the quad had dissipated while they had been inside. He missed the psychological cocooning of the mist.

  A staccato burst of underground blasts ripped the night. The ground shook beneath their feet. Bev clapped her hands to her ears. "Earthquake?" she asked anxiously. Buildings swayed.

  The physics building, as though in slow motion, collapsed inward.

  AJ spread his feet to steady himself, his arms around Bev to brace her. Already the explosions were ending. The blinking lights on the campus radio-station antenna, the tower maybe a half mile away, had scarcely wiggled. Bev was an East Coaster; she didn't understand temblors.

  "I don't think so. Way too localized." As though to refute his words, random buildings erupted into insanity. Room lights flickered and flashed, and sirens wailed in pulses. "And also too scattered." Odd sights and sounds receded, snaking into the distance, until they vanished.

  Frankenstein's monster had fled, in the end, into the Arctic, there to seek release in a solitary death. Rosenberg's monster, clearly unburdened of what AJ had so arrogantly called a fail-safe timer, had likewise disappeared. But not quietly—

  The analogy he had so blithely offered to Bev popped into his mind. As he repeatedly told her, told his students, the world depended increasingly, critically, on the data plane of existence.

  Onto which, defenseless, he had apparently unleashed a cobra—or worse.

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 16

  CHAPTER 34

  TV newsbreaks and seismograph readings from across the world confirmed last night's Smithfield synchrotron disaster. What they could not corroborate was the fantastic explanation of the motley crew on the war room's wall screen.

  Glenn Adams considered, afraid not to believe. This story was no less believable than computer viruses invading human brains.

  He faced the larger-than-life images of three very nervous people. AJ Rosenberg was the roly-poly, professorial type. He was anxiously chewing his lower lip and holding on for what seemed dear life to the cute redhead named Beverly Greenwood. The third electronic caller looked to be a purebred computer nerd. Ernie Griffith sported a single gold stud earring; a Fu Manchu mustache, the ends of which blended improbably into free-flowing, shoulder-length hair; a baseball cap for the championship Smithfield Cougars; and a Miskatonic University swim-team T-shirt. By comparison, Ralph Pittman was normalcy personified. It was a sobering thought.

  Griffith had placed the emergency call to the forum, introducing himself as Smithfield University's comsec (computer security) manager, but Rosenberg did most of the talking. "I wish you would say something, Colonel. We're talking serious stuff here. Apocalypse Now stuff. Do you understand that?"

  Glenn said, "You created Frankenstein's cybermonster. Now it's escaped. Am I close enough?"

  A sensitive mike in California captured Rosenberg's hard swallow. His Adam's apple bobbed. His cheek had a nervous tic. "Essentially. I wish it were that straightforward."

&nb
sp; "Save it, Doc," Griffith interrupted. "Description isn't important. Stopping this thing is." He gestured at something off-screen, evidently a radio or TV, the source of the droning background narration. "The synchrotron disaster is our most visible mess, but I'm not sure it's the worst. It doesn't break my heart if the physicists have to play elsewhere.

  "AJ's little buddy also scrambled every student record on Admin's supposedly bulletproof mainframe. I assume that can be recovered from backups, if I dare to load them. And, my personal favorite, we're going to bleeking melt in this dump."

  Pittman showed his first signs of curiosity. "Why is that?"

  "Bleeking building controls." Griffith brushed stringy strands of hair off his forehead with long, splayed fingers. He was a nail-biter. "AJ's gnome overcame all the safeguards in the heating, ventilating, and cooling system. Did you know that if you close the right dampers and then run the blower motors you can suck shut every return air duct in a building? Makes a noise like pulling every nail from every stud in the building. At once. It happened to every bleeking building on campus."

  So the sweat dripping down the threesome's faces wasn't necessarily nerves. Well, today's high in northern Virginia wasn't much above freezing—Glenn didn't feel sympathetic. "How do you know Dr. Rosenberg's supposed creature is responsible?"

  "Look, these are all computer disasters," Griffith snapped. "No one will be reading the entrails of the physics department's machines any time soon, but I'll tell you this: Admin's computer was clobbered, and so was the HVAC system. It wasn't a simpy little virus, either. Some programs were trashed, others circumvented, yet others untouched."

  "Allow me, Ernie." Rosenberg pursed his lips, opened his mouth, then closed it again. In time he found the words. "The predator program is like many a lowly computer virus in one way, Colonel. It also overwrites memory. When it does so, it uses a characteristic pattern. As Ernie has indicated, the attacks we've suffered are more than mere overwrites, but in those cases where overwrites are involved, we see a specific bit pattern. We observed the pattern first in my lab, in an ancestor of the creature. We found it again, this morning, in the virus-ravaged remains of the artificial-life lab. Colonel, some of the viruses themselves bear its ... tooth marks."