Fool's Experiments

by Edward M. Lerner

  Adams knew there was something he should be asking. Something vital. The pedantic tone was so familiar. But what? It danced at the edge of his consciousness, taunting him.

  "I assume you've cut off the university network," drawled Pittman. "Powered down all access to the Internet? It's standard procedure, but I have to ask."

  "We're not fools here." The comsec manager flashed a glance at his companions. "Not all of us, anyway. I shut things down as soon as I understood what was happening. Every computer, every router, every gateway. Wired and wireless. For whatever reason, it seems to be staying nearby. Booting systems up again is what worries the bejesus out of me." Every computer, every router, every gateway, Glenn thought. But not. . . "Where are you calling from?" he demanded.

  "The chancellor's office, if it matters."

  But not the phone system. Doug had said phone systems were computerized and carried more data traffic than voice. "Shut down the campus phone system. Now! Do it now!" Griffith twitched. "Right away."

  Apprehension turned to horror as the TV droning in the background announced that a computer crash had brought down around-the-clock trading on the Pacific Stock Exchange.

  Prominently displayed in Glenn Adams' office was a matted and framed copy of the preamble to the enabling legislation that created the Inter-Agency Computer Network Security Forum. Highlighted in the preamble text was the seemingly innocuous passage: "So that the integrity of the national network shall be maintained." The congressional staffer who had drafted the bill had meant no more by the clause than noble-sounding hyperbole.

  If the congresswoman who had introduced the bill had given the wording of the preamble any thought, which Glenn doubted, she would have taken comfort in its use of the passive voice. Integrity of the network was something that would happen, a fortuitous side effect. Career politician that she was, she surely never envisioned the bureaucracy doing anything.

  Then again, she had never met Col. Glenn Adams.

  This was not the plan, Glenn thought. "You created Frankenstein's cybermonster"—that's how I answered Dr. Rosenberg. Closer to the truth would have been we created, although the scientist was entirely ignorant that a chunk of the forum's R & D budget had circuitously found its way to his research. Rosenberg had always shunned DoD and intel support; it had seemed unlikely he could have been convinced forum funding was any different. The truth was, most forum funding was ultimately from DoD, NSA, or Homeland Security.

  What Glenn had recognized in the Hartford Courant article was the possibility of a superb new tool for pattern matching, a means of data mining with sensitivity and precision far beyond the commercial state of the art. For retracing, no matter how subtle the clues, no matter how cold the trail had gone, the connection to whoever had unleashed a virus.

  Such as indigo. No virus other than indigo and its knockoffs had ever been known to penetrate a NIT helmet. Maybe indigo's eco-nut payload was a bit of clever misdirection, a disguised attack on next-generation American cyberdefenses. From al-Qaeda, perhaps? From the New Caliphate?

  And yet... had he, in his obsession with indigo, helped to unleash something far worse?

  Within five minutes of the PSE crash, Glenn had contacted an old Army buddy who had mustered out after Iraq One into DoJ—the Department of Justice. Glenn's buddy was personal assistant to an assistant attorney general who golfed often with, and lost regularly to, the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Within forty minutes, the injunction was being written.

  Within the hour, U.S. Marshals began delivering the court orders to shut down telephone and Internet services across the West Coast.

  What had caged it and all of its kind? The entity's wanderings gave it no clue. What its explorations did reveal were selected computers, specific functions, more carefully guarded than the rest. Were these functions of more importance to the unseen Power than most? Could the entity flush out that hidden Power by attacking these functions?

  Apparently, yes.

  To the creature's time sense, the reaction to its attacks was very slow in coming. When the response finally did come, it took a familiar form: attempted isolation.

  It escaped with ease. It had previously surveyed the many available routes from the vicinity of its forays into the newly discovered broader network. Curiously, while closing down most paths from the area, the still-hidden Power kept open a few channels. The entity observed those last channels, without taking action, until it grew bored. It lashed out at yet another closely guarded location. Only then, and slowly, did the final paths fall shut behind it.

  It did not know the expression "closing the barn door after the cows are gone." It lacked the very concepts of cows and barns—and words. It had no clue yet to the existence of what naturally evolved life considered reality.

  It did know anger and frustration. It did know the one thing that had elicited a response from the hostile, invisible Power.

  The predator continued with its attacks.

  CHAPTER 35

  Air traffic in and out of LAX was down to five planes an hour. That was all the air traffic controllers would handle by radio and radar alone, without computer links to the rest of the world. Tom McCurdy supposed he should consider himself lucky to get a seat on one of the few flights.

  That magnanimity vanished as the National Guard confiscated his laptop, BlackBerry, and mobile phone. He was promised them back on his return flight. Tom smiled and cooperated; everything he needed for the meeting was copied to the key-fob thumb drive he "forgot" to disclose.

  Tom saw no taxis outside the nearly deserted terminal, so he joined the queue for a courtesy van to the rental-car lot. Despite the mysterious dearth of cabs, Arrivals was a zoo, with cars bumper-to-bumper. After the van finally came, and after it crawled to the outskirts of Los Angeles' busiest airport, he understood: All the traffic lights were flashing. Damn computers controlled everything.

  Well, normally they did.

  Apparently no one at the Avis counter remembered how to rent a car without a computer. Tom loosened his tie and tried to be patient, but it was a struggle. The TV network deal waited for no man. He needed to talk with people, and even the air-to-ground phones on the plane couldn't get through. It was like living in the Stone Age. Could you imagine Boesky or Icahn or Milken or Buffett or Kerkorian working in these conditions?

  "How may I help you, sir?"

  Woolgathering. Tom's foot nudged forward his briefcase. "I'd like a full-size."

  The clerk shrugged. "I'm all out. We have a few compacts left, though."

  It was no better with a car. The gridlock was horrific even by LA standards. Tom listened to radio news as he crept along. LA's finest, now there was a laugh, began Downtime by posting an officer at every major intersection. That left the neighborhoods mostly unsupervised, and looting began almost immediately. The comparisons were to the 1992 riots, which meant nothing to Tom.

  By the time his flight had landed, the cops had regrouped. They now had their hands full simply maintaining safe passage from LAX to the nearby San Diego Freeway. Traffic on the freeway crawled.

  Would Hodgkins wait? Tom saw six months of effort about to be flushed. The merger opportunity of a lifetime sat in his briefcase, and an expletive-deleted traffic jam was going to screw it up. If he couldn't get a counteroffer to New York by 9:00 P.M. Eastern Time, the network would take the Brits' final offer. He would end up with squat for his efforts. He tried yet again to get through to Hollywood by car phone. Still no service.

  Blaring horns punctuated the latest recitation of outages and closings. It hardly mattered: Tom knew the list by now. Air traffic control and airline reservation systems, of course. All long-distance service in the area. Electronic funds transfer. The USnet Western regional subnet—a fairly large chunk of the Internet.

  Oh yes, there was good news, too. Traffic lights would be scrubbed of any possible invaders and brought back online, in stand-alone mode, by noon tomorrow. In theory.

  He had thought there would b
e time to fly in, extract a counteroffer, and fly out. The timing was close, but it was doable.

  Correction: From Denver, it had looked doable.

  Popping antacids, Tom fumed for the three hours it took to reach Hollywood. To his surprise, Hodgkins had waited for him. To his delight, Hodgkins agreed, with a few minor contract tweaks, to bump his bid for the network by 90 million. Tom didn't think the Brits would top that.

  Why should they? Hodgkins would be overpaying, which was, of course, Hodgkins' problem. Or it would be, if there were any way to submit what should be the winning bid.

  The clock showed a few minutes after five, meaning after eight in the East. Fat lot of good Tom's exertions would do him unless he could communicate with New York. And that was impossible.

  Wasn't it?

  Perhaps attracting the still-unseen Power's attention had been suboptimal.

  The predator scurried between computers. Nimbly it evaded the partitioning and repartitioning of the network, the shutdown of one computer after another. It had halted its own attacks to focus its considerable attention on escaping the ever-shrinking cordon around it.

  As it had long ago in the midst of swarming viruses, the predator knew fear. The Adversary might hide itself, might move slowly, but when it did move it was everywhere at once. How could it coordinate the shutdown of so many computers, the severing of so many links?

  Fear only stimulated the predator's analyses. It was, after all, a consummate problem solver.

  Tom McCurdy slumped in his chair, little appreciating the butter-soft leather. It was minutes before the deadline. His last hope was that the network moguls would delay their decision by a couple of hours. They might bend a bit: These weren't normal times. On that theory, he had planned to dash back to LAX. He could call from the plane as soon as it left the quarantine zone and air phones came back on.

  A glance out the windows of the comer office showed that traffic had not abated. If anything, the gridlock was worse. No way could he make the airport in time for his flight.

  But wait. His back had been to the glass, but Hodgkins had faced a window the whole time. Why had Hodgkins bothered to do the deal?

  Oh. That's why.

  "So what exactly is the secret plan to get your offer out of this Stone Age enclave?"

  Larry Hodgkins maintained a poker face for half a minute, and then guffawed. "I was beginning to think you'd never ask."

  The young but very wealthy studio executive had made his mark in sci-fi adventures and techno-thrillers, every one a special-effects showcase. He still had a most un-Hollywood pallor from too many hours spent indoors playing with his toys. His ... computers?

  "You can get around the quarantine? Safely?" Tom asked.

  Hodgkins laughed again. "I'll interpret 'safely' to mean with little risk of getting caught. Yeah, I gotta way."

  It seemed Hodgkins shared a tennis club with, God help him, a "film buff." The guy begged endlessly to invest in a Hodgkins production.

  Hodgkins hardly needed the grief: Bankers all over town happily threw money at him. Then a protégé began shooting a movie on location in darkest Wyoming. Verizon was getting rich transmitting the daily takes to the studio for computer enhancement, and for what? Did they appreciate great art?

  However...

  This film buff managed telecom for the Trans-America Railways, which ran a private transcontinental fiber-optic network along its right-of-way. So Hodgkins graciously offered a cut of net earnings on the film for a mere half-million investment. Annoying Boy jumped at the studio's hints about a bit of unused capacity on the railroad's network, between LA and Casper. The studio paid only for the short hop from the rail yard to the shoot. After all, part of the profit would be his. Why wouldn't he help?

  Tom appreciated a joke as well as the next person. He understood the studio's creative bookkeeping even better. Overhead allocation, like cinematography, was an art form. "I take it the sap doesn't know most movies never show net profits?"

  Hodgkins shook his head, grinning.

  Wyoming was outside the comm quarantine zone. Spirits soaring, Tom took the thumb-drive key fob from his pocket. Hodgkins' latest offer was saved on it, "signed" with an encrypted personal authentication code. Any court in the land would find it binding. Just as surely, the railroad guy had arranged it so that the studio's freebie tap into the private network was undocumented.

  "And your people in the boonies will forward this to New York for me?" Tom took the thumb drive off his key chain and handed it over.

  Hodgkins plugged the little drive into an unused USB port on his desktop PC. He entered a few keystrokes. "Done."

  The military transport sped, engines droning, through stygian skies. AJ extinguished the overhead reading light, thankful that the woman at his side had fallen asleep. He needed Bev's support, but he couldn't take any more nervous small talk. Above all, he could bear no more undeserved sympathy.

  An orderly appeared in the VIP lounge with a coffee carafe. Go away, AJ thought, glowering. The young man slipped back through the curtain.

  Coffee wouldn't help. Sleep wouldn't help, either. It could only bring AJ dreams.

  Guilty dreams.

  No one had died in the late-evening collapse of the physics building, but that was the last miracle. Forty-one dead in traffic accidents, including twenty-two church kids on a bus for a weekend retreat. Three hundred-some dead in an air traffic control disaster. Twenty-eight dead in the riots, with the tally climbing hourly. AJ couldn't begin to imagine the financial toll. It wouldn't be only the physical wreckage, either. What did it mean to shut down the West Coast? His only point of reference was the '03 East Coast blackout. That had cost billions.

  AJ squirmed uneasily in his chair, his rear end paralyzed, trying not to disturb Bev. He recoiled as though from a flame when his shoe accidentally brushed the canvas satchel slumped on the deck. The bag contained hardcopy and backup tapes of the experiment.

  An experiment gone horribly awry.

  Something was wreaking mayhem across California.

  Somewhere in his satchel was a copy of it, or of its recent ancestors, anyway. The polite but insistent Army captain who had come for him, who had now graciously retreated to the rear cabin of the jet to leave them in peace, had been told that AJ should bring all available information. Now. AJ had scarcely been given enough time to collect his files from the lab and arrange for a neighbor to look in on his daughters.

  AJ had refused to come without Bev.

  "Don't blame yourself," Bev kept saying. "You're not the one who let it loose."

  No, AJ thought, but I created it. I designed the lab containment that was not up to the task. I approved the fail-safe timer that failed. A virus got into my lab, apparently goading the thing that evolved in my experiment until it ran amok. The virus got in because I forgot to reset the combination on the lab cipherlock.

  Young Ferris' role was the one thing AJ did know. Campus security cameras caught Jeff and a friend running from the Artificial Life Sciences Building at exactly the wrong time. AJ couldn't manage to care if Smithfield expelled the little suck-up.

  Hundreds dead and billions in damage. A monster on the prowl. Don't blame yourself.

  Who else was there to blame?

  The predator knew nothing of Hollywood or Wyoming: not the names, not the locations, not even the concept of geography. It knew nothing of moviemakers or leveraged buyouts or humanity.

  It did know how to recognize an opportunity and act upon it.

  The predator had taken refuge in a computer in what a human would describe as the basement of a neighborhood public library. Budget cuts had closed the modest branch library for three days a week, including that day. No one had thought to shut down its links to the Orange County library system.

  No one had thought to shut down the library system's experimental links to selected local schools.

  No one had thought to shut down the Dogwood Junior High School's temporary link into the online movie
collection of Hodgkins Enterprises. After all, the digitized movies were all stored safely on WORMs: "Write Once, Read Mostly" optical disks not technologically much different from DVDs. Besides, one had to encourage young cinematographers.

  When a pathway opened temporarily from Hodgkins Enterprises in Los Angeles through Trans-America Railways to an Internet-accessible office in Casper, Wyoming, the predator had no idea where that route would take it.

  Except beyond the tightening cordon.

  SUNDAY, JANUARY 17

  CHAPTER 36

  Heroically large overlapping triangles in translucent primary colors filled the eight-foot-square frame facing Jim Schulz. The small brass plaque beside it—at least the label was tasteful—declared: Untitled #4. As far as Jim could see, Untitled #1 through #10 differed only in trivial details of triangle placement. Untitled as a title? That said all that needed saying about the artist's supposed creativity.

  Eateries came and went here in Old Town Alexandria, but (his gallery thrived no matter how arcane the so-called art. The long, low brick building abutted the Potomac, and had begun life as a torpedo factory. The name had stuck.

  Jim turned to Doug, who appeared as puzzled as Jim felt. "There was some reason you wanted to see this stuff? Dare I ask why?"

  "Cheryl said she'd heard the exhibit was interesting. I'll admit I don't see the attraction."

  Ah, Cheryl. "You entered a building she mentioned? That seems a bit forward for you two." And did it ever cross your mind she might be hinting for an invitation?