“But an inorganic system need never die. It can just replace parts of itself as necessary. It doesn’t exist as a species of billions of isolated individuals all trying to communicate as best they can and all having to learn the same things over and over again. Whatever part of it knows, all of it knows, and all the time it’s adding to the same database through a billion different channels at electronic speeds, and it’s got the combined processing power of a whole race to handle it. It’s like comparing a few billion isolated amoebas with the same number of nerve cells working together as a brain. What would an intelligence like that be capable of achieving, if it compared to us in the same way we compare to amoebas?”
Dyer was about to say something when his ears caught a faint hum coming from not far above. He held up a hand for silence and listened.
“I think our visitors have arrived,” he said quietly.
A sphere drone descended into sight and passed within a few feet of them as it proceeded to carry out a survey of the cable run. They made no attempt to conceal themselves while Hayes recorded its movements with a hand camera plugged into his viewpad, and the drone reciprocated by totally ignoring them. A few minutes later the labor detail showed up in the form of an assorted gaggle of various drone types and the job proceeded quickly and smoothly. The new cable was fed in through a line of temporary clamps that carried supporting rings lined by roller bearings to reduce friction from a large reel maneuvered into position about twenty feet away and just visible through the intervening tangle of machinery. After that the temporary clamps were replaced by permanent locking fixtures and the free end of the cable joined to the end of another length laid along the tunnel and worked through the joint in the bulkhead, presumably to be picked up on the other side. At the point where the two lengths met, the drones had installed a heavy-duty junction box into which they connected a data line which they had also just strung along the main cable run. The only reason for this could be to enable the switching of the box to be controlled and monitored by some remote portion of Spartacus. Here was a new innovation. There had been no junction box in evidence previously, which meant that Spartacus was not simply repairing its earlier work; it was adding to it. A second cable was then coupled to the box and routed away, but this time going along the bulkhead wall and out of sight instead of through it.
Dyer and Hayes exchanged comments freely as they watched an electric toaster plug itself into the junction box to carry out functional checks, a crab test the clamps and the spherical foreman slowly trace along from end to end for a final visual inspection. Then the act formed itself up into a ragged line and buzzed off in the direction from which it had come.
The two scientists immediately hauled themselves down to examine the junction box. Hayes began making tests while Dyer called the Command Room to update them on events and to have the bridge cable rescheduled for demolition. The Command Room in turn informed him that the suspected bridge in Pittsburgh had been confirmed and was being attended to, two more were being checked out, but the results of the Haystack search would probably not start coming in for some time. Apart from that, nothing had changed. Dyer acknowledged, cut the call and looked over at Hayes.
“Well, this is the end that picks up Feeder Four,” Hayes said, pointing toward the bulkhead. “Feeder Four is dead, which Spartacus has no doubt already found out. It looks as if it’s restored the connection anyway, because this incoming line is dead. Maybe it’s allowed for the possibility that Feeder Four could come live again . . . Now that’s smart.” He indicated the second line coming into the box and the output leading off in the opposite direction, away from the bulkhead.
“That circuit is carrying current. It means that whatever was being powered through it before Feeder Four was shut down is being powered again but without Feeder Four.”
“So it must have linked into another feeder circuit via that new cable,” Dyer commented.
“Exactly,” Hayes said with a nod. “And it’s put in a switch so that it can connect either to Four or to the new one. It’s a neat solution when you think about it. What it’s figuring out, in effect, is how to protect itself by setting up switching access to alternative feeder circuits, just like we provided for our backup stations.”
Dyer thought hard for a moment about what it all meant.
“You could be right about your inorganic superspecies after all, Fred,” he said slowly. Hayes looked up with the beginnings of a grin and then realized that Dyer was looking serious. Dyer made a vague gesture in the direction of the newly installed switch.
“We design in things like that because we anticipate possible problems,” he said. “This machine has been evolving for just a matter of days. To me that box says it’s already learning to think ahead. It’s anticipating! How many hundreds of millions of years did it take before animals became capable of that?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Dyer returned to the Command Room in the early hours of the morning to find that the team had embarked on a game of Musical Feeder Circuits, as Chris called it. The idea was similar to musical chairs and involved trying to juggle the switches in the various control rooms so that the backup stations were all hooked to one set of feeders while Spartacus was left hooked to the rest. Since nobody knew which feeders Spartacus was using, the game was played by getting all the backup stations onto one set and shutting down the others to see what happened. If the “chair” that was suddenly pulled away in this fashion turned out to be the one that Spartacus was sitting on, then it would have lost and everything would be under control again.
Unfortunately it didn’t work. Spartacus seemed to have connections to just about every one of the feeders, a suspicion that was confirmed as the hours went by and the reports from Haystack started coming in. There was no way of putting Spartacus down without it taking the backup stations with it.
The statistics accumulated through the night to tell their story of the battle of endurance going on all over Janus between flesh and blood on the one hand, and the tireless drones on the other. The bridges were being cut as fast as they were found but they were being created faster. They were also becoming more elaborate. On top of that, the news from Detroit was that Spartacus had increased its drone-manufacturing schedules substantially, so things were not going to get any easier. Krantz had gone away to rest shortly after midnight and Dyer spent the rest of the night deputizing, which meant working with Linsay’s officers to improve the search plans and modify the personnel deployment of Haystack as Spartacus’s methods of working became better understood. They had just put out orders to draft more manpower into the operation when Krantz reappeared to resume directing. Dyer updated him on developments and then at last, when by rights the Sun should have been just rising, he announced that he was packing it in.
Fifteen minutes later, bleary-eyed and yawning, he arrived at the subway point below his bungalow in the semirural greenery of Vine County, let himself in the lower-level front door and trudged wearily up the single flight of stairs to the main entrance hallway above. The shoulder wrap draped across two of the coat pegs on the wall and the pocketbook lying on the table told him that Laura was there. He walked quietly into the kitchen, keyed an order for a hot bacon sandwich and a black coffee into the chef, and then went into the bathroom to rinse his face. When he came back into the kitchen his snack was ready. He sat down and began eating slowly, savoring the feeling of his body beginning to unwind while he turned the day’s happenings over in his mind.
“Another thing I like about you is the way you always look after your guests.” Laura’s voice sounded sleepily from the doorway behind him. He realized that he had no idea of how long he had been sitting there. His cup and plate were both empty. He turned his head and managed a tired grin.
“Hi,” he said.
Her long, tanned legs disappeared provocatively into a flimsy negligee that just managed to reach the tops of her thighs. Beneath the wisp of material, the ample curves of her body were thrown into t
antalizing silhouette by the light from the open doorway of the bedroom behind her. She came into the kitchen, kissed him on the side of the face and sat down on a stool across the corner of the table from him.
“So what’s been happening?” she asked. “I haven’t heard any bombs dropping yet.”
Dyer summarized briefly what had gone on since late the previous evening.
“But so far it’s acting smart, but purely passively,” he said. “It’s restricting itself to devising better ways of responding to power cuts. It hasn’t shown any sign yet of conceiving the notion that something outside itself is responsible for the cuts. You can stand right in front of a drone and take a cable out and it won’t do anything until the power actually disappears. Then all it’ll do is call up its buddies to fix it. Spartacus hasn’t connected the cause with the effect yet.”
“You mean it still sees the world through wires,” Laura said.
“Something like that.”
“I thought it saw through drones and things too. How come it’s not smart enough to figure out what’s doing it?”
“Oh, it’s programmed to respond to certain patterns connected with certain procedures, that’s all. Before it could do what you said, it’d have to evolve a whole concept of itself existing in a space in which other objects exist as well that can interact with it. It’s like it takes a baby time to figure out that there’s a world around it and some things in that world are parts of itself and some things aren’t.”
“Like FISE?”
“Uh huh.”
“But Spartacus’s smarter than FISE.”
“True, but it’s got a hell of a lot more of a complicated world to figure out than FISE had.”
“I see.” Laura fell silent and thought to herself for a while. Dyer shifted his eyes toward her and began tracing the curve of her breast absently with the tip of his finger, slowly circling the point where the hard dark nipple pressed proudly against the material.
“You said ‘yet,’ ” Laura murmured. “Does that mean you think it will?”
Dyer shrugged.
“I’m not sure anyone really knows what to think anymore. After what’s been happening tonight I’ll believe anything.” He slid his hand up to her shoulder and touched her cheek “Let’s go to bed.”
Laura looked at him in surprise.
“Seriously? You look a little like something that just woke up in a funeral parlor and decided to take a walk.”
“Our days might be numbered,” he told her as he stood up and slipped an arm around her waist. The lights extinguished themselves as they moved out of the kitchen.
Minutes later he tumbled into a bed that was delightfully warm and felt a cool arm slide itself around his neck. He lay back in the darkness and let the softness of the sheets draw the tension and fatigue out of his body. Laura’s body was warm and fragrant beside him, her hand stroking gently on his chest . . . and then sleep hit him like a pile driver.
The viset by his ear was shrieking insistently. Emergency tone! Still semi-comatose he groped for the panel and moved it toward him. It was Krantz.
“Two of the backup stations have just lost power,” Krantz said shortly. “The only thing left now that’s handling life-support in Sector Two of Detroit and half of Berlin is Spartacus, so we’ve had to lay off trying to shut it down. You’d better get over here right away.”
Dyer was already climbing into his clothes when Laura opened her eyes and blinked herself back to wakefulness.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Trouble with the backups. I’ve gotta go to the CBR. I’ll see you sometime later.”
Laura sat up and shook her head. “Whatever it is, I’m not missing it. Got time to wait for me to get dressed?”
“Sorry. That was Krantz. He sounded panicky. I’ll see you later when you show up.” He used the viset to summon a subway car to the pickup point below the house, blew Laura a quick kiss and grabbed his jacket up off the floor. When he arrived at the pickup point and interrogated his viewpad, the display informed him that a car would arrive in thirty seconds.
With the pressure on it increasing steadily as a result of Haystack, Spartacus had been forced to resort to progressively more elaborate means to preserve its power sources. First it began manufacturing multiple-path circuits to enable any of its nodes to draw from more than one of the feeders driven by the fusion plant, and after that it stepped up its production of drones to combat the efforts being redoubled against it.
The commanders of Haystack had spent most of the night studying the unfolding pattern of developments and endeavoring to find ways of using their resources more effectively. So, apparently, had Spartacus. And it found a way of saving itself a lot of time and effort that nobody had even considered. Instead of installing new cables every time it wanted to create a connection between one point and another, it discovered that in many instances there were cables already laid over much of the desired routes—cables which it didn’t recognize as forming any part of itself or of the equipment which it controlled. So it did the logical thing and, wherever possible, began disconnecting sections of such “foreign” cables and substituting its own devices at the ends instead. Unfortunately some of these had turned out to be supply lines to the backup stations.
Dyer scanned the reports of the past few hours and digested the gist of them while Krantz finished his summary of what had been happening.
“Obviously we can’t let this continue,” Krantz said. “The situation is ludicrous! If it gets any worse we’ll end up depending solely on Spartacus. If all the backups go, we won’t be able to risk touching it without evacuating Janus.”
“We’ve had to order a stop to the bridge cutting,” Linsay told Dyer. “Searching is being continued but we’re restricting action to concentrating on getting those backup stations restored before anything else. I want to mount a limited version of Counterstrike against any drones that try to interfere with getting the backups live again.” He looked expectantly at Krantz.
“We’d like your vote on that,” Krantz said to Dyer.
Dyer turned away and let his gaze sweep around the Command Room while he considered the suggestion.
He had to admit that it made sense. With two backup stations down, the safety net that was supposed to provide protection against fault conditions or against Spartacus’s ongoing evolution taking a dangerous turn was in shreds. To refrain deliberately from any action that would help get the backup stations running again would be insane. This latest development had taken the whole experiment outside the limits of an Earth-like situation and to cheat a little in order to restore a level of protection that was necessitated only by Janus’s isolation would simply be putting things back on their proper footing. He turned back to face the other two again and nodded his head briefly.
“I agree,” he told them. “A limited Counterstrike in Sector Two, Detroit and north Berlin only. Minimum force. Jamming and obstruction to be employed exclusively as far as possible. Weapons strictly as a last resort.”
While Linsay was translating this into orders to go out to the operational units, Dyer noticed Laura slip in through the main door and walk over to start talking with Chris and Ron. As he did so he was reminded uncomfortably of Al Morrow’s antics with Pattie.
“Sometimes the ink’s just wasted on the company,” he grunted to himself.
At the two locations selected, Counterstrike proved fearsomely effective and within a matter of hours both backup stations were back to normal. In other areas, however, drone activity was allowed to continue unabated and frantic calls soon began coming in to report that the drones were threatening to disrupt other feeder circuits going to other backup stations. Counterstrike had to be extended to include offensive deactivation of all drones attempting to interfere with any backup supply lines anywhere on Janus. By midafternoon the battle to keep the Janus experiment within bounds that meant something was over. It had been won; the backup stations were once more secure. The b
attle to wrest the fusion plant back from Spartacus could now be resumed.
But the battle of the backup stations had not been fought without cost. The cost had been in time. Ever since the first emergency of the two backups going down early that morning, the active side of Operation Haystack had been suspended, which meant that a watch had been kept on Spartacus’s construction of bridges to the fusion grid but no attempt had been made to continue cutting them. The reason for this was that if the engineers happened to hit a lucky combination they might have succeeded in switching Spartacus off, but without the full backup system secure Spartacus was the only system left to maintain habitable conditions in some parts of Janus. Switching Spartacus off in that way and under those conditions would have been equivalent, in effect, to saying that a runaway TITAN could always be turned off by blowing up Earth. Since that much was patently obvious to everybody anyway, it would have achieved nothing apart from terminating the experiment at the very point where they might start learning something really useful.
So for the best part of a day Spartacus had been able to carry on with its bridge-making without hindrance. The only drones attacked during that period had been the ones attempting to hijack feeder cables that supplied the backup stations. When the scientists finally had time to take stock of things after the backup stations had been secured, they found that Spartacus had made full use of the opportunity.
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