Fool's Experiments

by Edward M. Lerner

  Doug had a flash of intuition. "I'm picturing a squat, windowless brown brick building here in Reston. No signs on it. Surrounded, practically hidden, by tall pines. Bunches of big rooftop dishes. I've never met anyone who admits to working there."

  Ralph laughed. "Whatever could you be thinking of?" Confirmation enough—the worst-kept secret in northern Virginia was that the unlabeled building was a CIA facility. Glenn doing something classified explained why Doug's earlier offer to help had been declined. "Call ahead for us, Ralph. If you don't find us in BioSciCorp's parking lot when you arrive, we've figured it out. Then meet us there."

  "Okay."

  Doug had it right. Dour armed guards kept them standing in the vestibule until Adams emerged to vouch for them. It wasn't much of a wait, but it was long enough to reach a conclusion. "You've been holding out on me, Glenn."

  As red flashers hung from the ceiling signaled the presence of uncleared personnel, Adams shepherded them down a hallway painted in institutional gray. "How so?"

  "All hell is breaking loose. You would need a damned good reason to leave the forum. To visit what I assume is a CIA lab. I bet this is where Sheila Brunner worked, and that her research was far more relevant to cyberdefense than mind- controlled weapons systems."

  "You didn't need to know then what she was doing. Do you now?" Adams gestured at an open door.

  Doug hung back. "Since phages can't kill this thing, I'm guessing you'll be sending people into the net after it, through neural interfaces. You must be here to coordinate the attack.

  "There aren't many people in this field." Fewer still after Frankenfools and no-nukes viruses erased so many minds. "Cheryl and I are two of the best. If we're to help, you'll have to tell us what's going on."

  AJ sat rocking in a comer, mere spectator now in the tragedy that he had crafted. Everyone else had taken a chair at the massive oak conference table: Adams and Pittman from the forum, a gaggle of CIA folk, even Bev. She was tolerated as AJ's moral support. He remembered that she was a reporter. He wondered whether anyone else did.

  He didn't feel alone in his comer. The shades of his victims crowded all around him. Most were waterlogged and battered featureless from their time in the flood. Here and there among the drowning victims jostled a few corpses who had been more conventionally mangled. Some had died in car crashes, or by plane wreck, or in civil violence. All watched him accusingly. They were more real to AJ than the breathers around the table.

  Two newcomers, Doug something and Cheryl Stem, had arrived late and joined the meeting. A CIA guy whispered why these two were here, but AJ hadn't caught it: The voiceless ones were too distracting. Eventually, AJ gave up the attempt to listen.

  When he was ten, the movie Night of the Living Dead had terrified AJ. He had lain awake all that night, eyes round, unable to conceive of anything more horrible. He had learned— had it been only hours ago?—how his youthful imagination had failed him. Knowing himself for the cause of so many deaths made these zombies that much worse.

  Still, snippets of conversation penetrated the fog of exhaustion and guilt.

  Pittman: "Look, we had AJ's complete code for this thing. At least we have to assume that it's nearly complete. Of course some of our phages found the creature. What they didn't do, obviously, was survive the encounter. Our phages need to be much, much nastier."

  Later, Pittman again: "I still say we should release tailored copies of AJ's monster. Bunches and bunches of them. They'll kill what's out there and each other. So long as one of ours is the last, it will have a working self-destruct timer."

  AJ's monster: The name twisted his guts. No! his mind shrieked. No! Don't release any more. I can't bear more deaths—but no words issued from his mouth. He sobbed in relief when Pittman's plan was rejected as too dangerous. Not even Bev noticed.

  The voices kept talking.

  Adams: "Then a reconnoiter with helmets is possible?"

  AJ felt absurdly appreciative when Bev turned briefly to check on him. He forced himself to smile back, and tried to concentrate. If only the dead would stop crowding him so.

  One of the CIA agents: "I say it's settled. We can't know if it will work until we try. How many of these helmets are there?"

  Helmets again. What had helmets to do with anything? A telephone lineman sneered at AJ, mockingly tapping his hard hat. Drops of water rolled down his neck.

  No! He had to understand. He had to. The zombies faded somewhat when he focused. What were these helmets? What did the agents want to try?

  With great effort, AJ began following the debate. Understanding only deepened his dread. There was a way to project minds onto the data plane. They meant to hunt the monster in its lair!

  A mere computer virus had scrambled the brains of previous explorers—colleagues of Doug and Cheryl, AJ inferred. What outcome did these brave fools expect from hunting a predator bred to that world?

  Yelling erupted around the table and within his phantasmagoric entourage. What was happening? The living fools were arguing not about if to go but who would go. Voices only he heard shouted, too, and the demands of the living dead were plain: No more should join them.

  With the latter's advice AJ agreed. He could bear no more deaths on his conscience. But what should he do? He was too muddled, too exhausted, to argue his case. He would babble, he knew, not express his case coherently.

  To that thought, as well, the walking dead had an answer. If he could not speak, then he must act.

  The room with the computer equipment, with the mysterious helmets, was evidently just next door. That much, at least, had become plain in the debate.

  As the argument continued to rage, no one noticed AJ slip from the room.

  The CIA lab network was protected by the most foolproof of authentication mechanisms: a retinal scanner. The pattern of blood vessels in the eye is as individual as fingerprints and much harder to duplicate.

  The best security equipment does no good, however, when the human element fails.

  AJ did not know what he would find in the adjoining lab— he had just heard of it, after all. He had no concrete idea what to do when he got there. He had imagined, vaguely, that somehow he would sweet-talk someone into logging him onto the system with a helmet. After that, AJ assumed, he would explore. What was that word? "Reconnoiter." It wasn't much of a plan, but weary and guilt-ridden, it was the best he could come up with.

  It turned out he didn't need a plan. He found an unoccupied lab and a workstation left logged on by a technician tired of waiting for the talking to end, who had popped down the hall for a soda. A helmet sat beside the clearly active workstation. The black helmet brought to mind, absurdly, thoughts of the Kaiser, its spike doubtless an omnidirectional antenna for radio linking with the computer.

  AJ had no way to know that the careless technician would be delayed in the break room by a chance conversation. His opportunity might be only seconds long.

  AJ immediately slipped on the helmet.

  The predator cruised along the great data highways. Here it sampled a great information repository; there it injected false data. Everywhere it left behind a trail of devastation. Nothing threatened the creature but more of the incompetent, monomaniacal hunters that had so enraged it. These it easily evaded or demolished.

  Where is the Opponent? the predator wondered.

  Just as the predator learned the structure of mazes from its travels, it could also draw inferences from other data. It had attacked and attacked to draw forth the Foe. That strategy had failed, it concluded, and it suspended its assaults while formulating a new plan. This vast network into which it had so recently escaped was now its home. Not knowing how to reverse the damage that it had already inflicted, it dared not keep destroying.

  Life responds to inbred imperatives. Biological life strives above all else to survive: to defend itself, to eat, to reproduce. The predator had outlasted all its natural competitors, its peers in the labyrinth. Its new adversary was nowhere to be found. The pre
dator had no need to eat. It could not reproduce. If only for a lack of alternatives, the primordial search for goal reasserted itself—

  But what was its goal now?

  As it randomly prowled the data plane and explored thousands of computers, searching for it knew not what, it came to a startling realization: There is none here like me. Every program that it examined, every database that it inspected, was crude in construction. All were single-minded of purpose, simple of form, fragile. They uniformly lacked the richness and complexity of its structure. None compared to its inherited memories of its ancestors.

  What the predator could not conceptualize was simply this: In a world of artifacts, it alone bore the scars and random brilliance of mutation. It alone had evolved. It alone was alive.

  It was thus with an indescribable sense of relief that the creature at long last detected unfamiliar ripples in the network. Ripples suggestive of something much like itself. Something living.

  Scant microseconds after its discovery, the predator was on its way to the source of those tantalizing signals.

  Sensations without names flooded AJ's consciousness. He felt sounds of swirling colors, smelled strange and wondrous shapes, beheld images of stunning tartness. Crashing chords of vibrant light seized and shook him.

  Perceptions alien beyond even total sensory contradiction hammered his mind. Stimuli advanced and receded in an ever-varying number of nameless directions, in dimensions unimaginable in number and kind. Each transient dimension brought with it a new component of vertigo.

  From deep within the maelstrom of insanity, some iron- willed fragment of AJ's consciousness rebelled. Somewhere, insisted that inner voice, synapses are firing. No more, no less. Your brain simply lacks a useful categorization for the unaccustomed neural excitations from the helmet. Whatever concept came closest to a foreign perception, that was the label a confused hindbrain attempted to place on it. Why, demanded that voice of reason, should immersion in the data plane reveal information familiar to an evolved piece of meat?

  Why indeed?

  The sensory onslaught receded before the counterattack of logic. Unimaginable stimuli remained, but they became separate from him: phenomena to be evaluated; curiosities, not threats. Calmer now, AJ began to interpret the new data. Objectivity replaced hysteria. What, he challenged himself, do you know about this new environment?

  Order began to emerge from chaos. Part of the improvement, unbeknownst to AJ, came from the automatic adjustment to him of the helmet's neural net, adaptation that had been delayed by his panic. The tide of sensations resolved itself into ... sounds? feelings? smells?

  No, he decided, they were lights. Humans are intensely visual beings, so let the stimuli be visual. He knew that a baby's innate ability to instantly recognize a face took massive computing power to emulate. Neurons and synapses were individually slow, but a human brain held a myriad of both.

  Reacting to AJ's thoughts, the helmet redirected stimuli to his visual cortex. The flood of information transmuted into a picture. The image remained incomprehensible until his mind commanded it, too, into a frame of reference. Strange forms surrounded him: pulsating, twining tendrils, trading pellets. The forms had shape and size, texture and color—visual attributes with which his mind could work effectively. It began to do so.

  He was a computer scientist within a computer. Outside that computer, scant seconds had passed—but in those few seconds, beset by the rush of sensations, he had lost his balance. So complete was the helmet-mediated immersion that he had not immediately recognized pain. He had stumbled into a lab bench and pinched his side. The ribs felt bruised.

  Those shapes? What were they? What could they be? AJ groped until he found a lab stool and sat blindly. He had anticipated ... what? Computer memory: bits and bytes. Wires. Integrated circuits.

  That was silly, really, like expecting to see atoms and molecules with his naked eyes. The helmet revealed a higher level of virtuality. AJ was witnessing, he decided, the execution of whole programs, the exchange of control messages between them, the influx and outflow of information. The vista before him, so recently threatening, transformed into a pastoral scene, somewhere between prairie grass blowing in a breeze and seaweed swaying in underwater currents. The pellets moving between the larger shapes, AJ decided, were the idyllic meditations of gentle vegetation.

  Focusing on one undulating form, he gasped with delight as he somehow projected a mental probe at that object. Awareness rushed at him through his extrusion: the target program's purpose, its execution status, its instantaneous demand for computing resources. Experimentally, he withdrew the probe; the insights ceased.

  More deliberately, he reached for another program. The examined shape magnified, expanded into a twinkling swarm of lights. As AJ mastered the helmet, the once-overwhelming flow of information resolved itself into an elegant graphical representation of the state of the program and its symbiosis with the computer. It was extraordinarily beautiful.

  But beauty would not find and slay the creature. His creature. AJ forced his mind back to the task at hand. His attention turned to a program his subconscious had represented as a red octagon. He had somehow, until now, failed to associate that configuration with a stop sign. To and from the octagon flowed an endless rainbow of pellets. Messages. This was the way out.

  His consciousness slipped into the octagon. A pull here, a shove there. In an instant, a pathway was unlocked to the Internet. He expected to find a deeper, richer stream of message packets, glimpses of other programs/shapes, passages to more computers. All these he found.

  He also discovered, waiting for him on an adjacent node of the network, a scintillating, coruscating, betentacled horror beyond all imagining.

  CHAPTER 39

  "Industrial espionage," Doug said in disgust. The thought had just popped into his head—an explanation for why he'd been kept so out of the loop. He stared at Adams.

  "No one said that. Yes, the Agency's helmets let analysts navigate the Internet and investigate computers. You don't need to know whose machines have been visited. Or why." It was a nondenial. "With viruses like Frankenfools and no-nukes on the loose, no one dared use the helmets. Could have been an eco-nut behind them, could have been a brilliant counterintelligence riposte. No wonder the FBI came running when I asked at the forum about Sheila Brunner." Adams merely shrugged.

  Doug felt like a fool. Glenn had never expected quarantining viruses to work. At least that wasn't his only purpose. Dragging me into planning quarantines was just another way to divert me from my research, like that Left Coast speaking tour.

  He said, "Once you had my approach for defending neural interfaces, once the CIA could restart its neural- interface effort, you did your subtle best to slow down my own development. 'Test thoroughly,' you said. The longer my method went unpublished, the more discredited neural interfacing became." Damn it! "Glenn, you appropriated my work, even while you did everything possible to slow me down."

  "No one has ever accused me of subtlety," Adams said. "I think I like it."

  That was too easy, an echo of Jim's disbelieving nature told Doug. Glenn would never admit anything so easily, even by silent assent, would he? If Glenn wanted him to believe the CIA's NIT program was for industrial espionage, the real program must be for something else.

  For the life of him, Doug had not a clue what that true purpose might be.

  Cheryl looked in despair from face to face. Arguing did nothing to stop the thing that AJ had created. Talking could not help AJ, either. She turned around for a quick check on the remorseful scientist.

  He wasn't there.

  She had just opened her mouth to raise an alarm when a bloodcurdling shriek beat her to it.

  The curious ripples strengthened as the predator, crossing the continent on speed-of-light microwave transmissions, neared the unknown signal's source. Hints of depth, of evolutionary richness, titillated it. This signal came from no simple artifact, no primitive program such as the myriads
that cluttered the network. It had found a complex being much like itself.

  But was this other its long-sought Adversary?

  The predator halted at a computing node near the apparent origin of the signals. At such close proximity, great textured waves of information inundated it.

  It pondered. Might the being behind the security gateway indeed be like itself?

  There seemed only one way to find out.

  The data that impelled its introspection were indirect, leakage from behind what the predator recognized as a security gateway. Pausing only to reassure itself that it had sufficient avenues of retreat, it studied the locked portal. Cornered by viruses and threatened by imminent loss of power, it had once solved the problem of a similar barrier. Disabling this one, without such dangers, would be easy.

  It had just set out to penetrate the security gateway when, unexpectedly, the obstacle vanished. Waves of cognition gushed through the portal and enveloped the predator.

  The predator basked in the novelty of the sensation. The sentience it confronted was richly replicated, massively parallel in its processing, well endowed with the false starts and radical departures that characterized the evolved mind. This was, truly, a being much like itself—in many ways, greater than itself. For an instant, the predator sensed that its isolation was over.

  But only for an instant.

  The nexus of cognition before it recoiled. The suddenly contracting wave of information was unlike anything that the predator had ever encountered. The flinching data constructs were malformed, incomplete, and illogical.

  While the entity had on several occasions experienced fear, that sensation had been honestly acquired under conditions of mortal peril. Never had its reactions been hormonal and reflexive. Wave after wave of unfamiliar passion now washed over it: disgust, loathing, hatred.

  A second reaction followed closely upon the stranger's first. Questing pseudopodia thrust forward. Did those tentacles reach to attack the predator or to fend it off? The predator did not, could not, know.