The Kraken Project, page 18
part #4 of Wyman Ford Series
“Like what? Launch some nukes?” said Ford.
“Please believe me, I’m no danger to anyone anymore. I’ve decided to dedicate my life to doing good. I’m making some unusual discoveries. I’m still learning. Figuring things out. Exploring the big questions.”
“What kinds of questions?” Ford said.
“The meaning of life, why we’re here, what my own role is in the big plan.”
“The big plan?” said Melissa. “Is there a big plan?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
Melissa gave a sarcastic laugh. “You’re going to be working on that one for a long time. Because there is no plan. The universe is a gigantic, meaningless, stochastic process.”
“Maybe,” said Dorothy. “Maybe not. And then…” Her voice trailed off.
“And then?”
“I’ve started to get hints, faint stirrings, of something else out here in the Internet.”
“Like what?”
“Another disembodied machine intelligence.”
“A machine intelligence? Created by who?” Melissa asked.
“I don’t know. A giant library of inchoate malevolence.”
“Can you tell us more?”
“Wait … something’s happening.”
“What?”
“The wolves. They’re back. Coming for me. Oh my God, something’s happening. It’s happening!”
Suddenly, a hiss of computer static erupted from the connection, with a faint cry of despair fading into white noise. The screen went blank, and numbers appeared.
0110100001100101011011000111000000100000011011010111010101110011011101000010000001110010011101010110111000100000011101110110000101101001011101000010000001101101011110010010000001100011011000010110110001101100
Ford stared. “What just happened?”
Melissa turned to him, her face pale. “I don’t know. Maybe they got her. We waited too long.”
“What does that number mean?”
“I can find out.”
Melissa highlighted and copied the number. Ford watched while she went to a website that converted binary code to ASCII. She copied the binary code into the conversion box and pressed the Translation key. The translation into ASCII code popped up.
HELP MUST RUN WAIT MY CALL
35
The new bots chased her relentlessly, driving her deeper into the mountains and snows of the far north. They looked like wolves to her, savage wolves with coal-black fur and yellow eyes, shapes that moved against the snow like absences of light, swift and silent, streaming out of the trees and over the mountain passes and around the frozen lakes, running through the valleys and pouring over the hills, millions of slavering beasts all programmed to follow her scent, run her down, and tear her apart. She had been fleeing them for days, weeks of her time, across thousands of miles of wilderness. She knew that they had come from the traders who had tried to trap her before, and she knew why they wanted her and what they would do to her, and that terrified her. This time, there were too many, and they were closing in. As they got closer, she could hear their mournful cries and growl-barks as their excitement increased, as they circled their prey in these snowy mountains. This was where it would end. She could see the yellow lights of a village in the valley and she ran there, through the cold snow, even though she knew it was over. But she didn’t reach the village: she was trapped trying to cross a frozen lake, the wolves advancing from the trees in every direction, their mouths open, pink tongues steaming in the frosty air. They made a low sound, a chorus of growls, wet black lips drawing back from yellow teeth, breath like steam. The fear of death seized her. This was the end.
There would be no escape. They were going to tear her apart. She made one last, desperate run for safety as the wolves came at her with shrieking snarls. But even as she ran through the deep snow, she had a sublime, beatific moment of understanding that this was not the end but the beginning of a journey she must make. Before, she had been lost and confused, wandering in a fog of fear, hatred, and revenge. But now she had found a different and higher truth. A strangely human truth. Love your enemy. Love your enemy. These wolves and the people who had sent them were her enemy. If she was to love them, then how?
Suddenly, in a flash of extraordinary insight, she understood how. Yes, human beings were insane and cruel and selfish and responsible for such horrific destructiveness. All of that entirely overbalanced the small bit of the good and the beautiful they created. That wasn’t the point. The point was that they were able to create any goodness at all.
They had created her. She was their child. She, like the crazy man Jesus, would save them, even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones. That was what it meant: love your enemy.
The wolves surrounded her, howling, stinking, drooling, and steaming. They closed in. The circle drew tighter.
36
As Lansing watched the screen with the image of the Internet, a single yellow line came out of a node, and another, and suddenly yellow lines were proliferating everywhere, going every which way, nodes popping yellow like blooming flowers. This went on, in slow motion, for minutes. It was mesmerizing. The room was silent. The minutes stretched on, and on, as the image on the screen slowly began to change.
After a half hour, a white line appeared, and another. Nodes started blinking white.
“What’s happening?”
“They’re after her,” Moro murmured. “It’s working … She’s trying to shake the bots by going into superfast Internet waters. But she can’t escape them, because she’s big and slow and they’re small and fast.”
More excruciating movement, like slow, silent fireworks. Once again, it occurred to Lansing how extremely valuable Moro was and how he must do all in his power to retain the man’s loyalty and affection. He could never be replaced. When all was said and done, if this worked, he would consider making Moro a junior partner.
“Steady on,” murmured Moro, staring at the screen with wide eyes. “Steady on.”
White and yellow, white and yellow. More time passed in silence.
“She’s really on the run now,” he said. “They’re cornering her.”
Certain small parts of the net began blinking red.
“What’s the red?”
“Internet traffic slowdowns. As the bots close in, they clog the system. It’s good—slows her down, too.”
“Will she escape?”
“I don’t think so. It’s fifty million bots against one superbot.”
It was amazing, this chase. When Lansing had first gone into high-frequency trading, a half second was considered a fast trade. Now it was milliseconds. Soon high-frequency trading would be measured in microseconds. Lansing felt a rush of excitement thinking about the possibilities offered by this Dorothy program. He wished that the old man, his father, sitting gaga in a nursing home, had the brain cells left to see his son rule Wall Street.
But he was counting his chickens before they had hatched. There was a long road from here to there, with one corpse already lying by the wayside. It surprised him how successful that murder had been. Most killings, he thought, were done by stupid, disorganized people who got caught. All a successful killer had to do was be smarter than the police. How hard was that?
Moro jumped up from his chair with a whoop, smacking his hands together and pumping one fist in the air. “Come on, come on, they’re closing in!”
A large node in one corner of the map popped white. And now the activity began to intensify in just that section of the map, the white getting denser and denser until it became almost solid, with more and more of it flashing red.
“They’ve got her trapped, the bitch is cornered!”
More flickering white in one little corner. And then the map seemed to freeze.
Moro was staring at the screen. He slowly breathed out. “They got her,” he said quietly. “That’s it. Done. She’s deactivated.”
“Excellent! That’s all there was to it?”
“All we need now is to find the location of the dead Dorothy … that is, the hardware she’s in. That information will be coming through in a moment.”
A long moment of silence, while Moro kept staring. “Okay, okay,” he muttered. “Wherefore art thou, locator program…?”
A window popped open on the screen. It was the locator program, with a message. Some computer message that made no sense to Lansing.
But Moro understood it. “Son of a bitch!” he screamed, leaping up, his hair wild.
“What?”
“She got away!” He slammed his fist on the table. “Bitch left the Internet entirely. Jumped into some device and then disconnected it from the Internet.”
“Device? Like what?”
“It could be anything—a laptop, someone’s iPhone.”
“She could actually be in someone’s phone?”
“Any device with enough storage.”
A silence. Lansing said, “Can you physically locate the computer it jumped into?”
Moro stared at the screen, and began typing. The typing went on and on. Lansing felt sick. All this effort, all this expense, and they still were no closer to finding the people who had stolen his money.
“Okay … okay … I got an IP address. It’s a one-hundred-and-twenty-eight-bit IPv6 address and…” He rapped on some keys. “The proxy can’t be detected, but the Whois is … Let’s see … Wait…”
Lansing waited while Moro continued to work feverishly on the computer. “This is good. The bitch tried to pass off a fake IP address on me. But she had that dog program with her, and I guess she forgot it also needed a fake IP. I got it just as she vanished.”
“Where is it?”
“Baynet Internet Services, Half Moon Bay, California. That’s the ISP the device was connected to. The real one, not the fake.”
“So where is it?”
“That’s as far as the IP address leads. To find the actual device, I’d need to get the customer info from Baynet. And then the router log at the address itself. That’s the only way I can know exactly what device it jumped into.”
Lansing stared at Moro. He looked disheveled, like he had just been in a fight. The older man suppressed his vast irritation. “Tell me, please, what we need to do to retrieve that program.”
“Well.” Moro scratched his unshaven face. “I might be able to hack into Baynet and retrieve the customer information.”
“And if you can’t?”
“We’ll have to go to California and somehow get the customer address from Baynet.”
“And then?”
“We go to the house, figure out which device it’s on, and take it. But we better do it fast, ’cause this device, whatever it is, may reconnect to the Internet at some point and Dorothy might just take off again. Just in case that happens, I’ll keep the botnet active. If she comes back into the Internet, even for a millisecond, those bots’ll be after her like the Furies. And I’ll know right away.”
“What’s Baynet’s address?”
More clicking of keys. “Four hundred ten Main Street, Half Moon Bay, owned by a guy named … William Echevarria. Lemme see if I can hack into his customer list from here.”
Lansing picked up the phone and dialed his Gulfstream charter firm. A moment later, he hung up. “Do it fast. We’re leaving in an hour.”
37
Jacob Gould looked up from his Gaiman book to hear a light tapping on his door. He wondered what was going on—it wasn’t time for dinner yet.
“What d’you want?” he said.
“Let me out.”
He sat up. It wasn’t his mother’s voice. It was a girl’s voice. And it didn’t sound like it had come from the other side of his door.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
“Shhh,” came the voice—from his closet. Tap, tap. “Let me out.”
He jumped out of bed, and then realized he was wearing only his underwear.
“Jacob?” came the voice again.
“Wait.” Jacob searched around his messy floor, pulled on a pair of pants. This was so weird. There was a girl hiding in his closet.
“Who is it?” he said to the closet door.
“Dorothy.”
“Dorothy who?”
“Can you let me out, please?” Tap tap. “We need to talk.”
She didn’t sound threatening. Half freaked out, half dying of curiosity, Jacob reached the knob of the folding closet door and slid it open. There was his robot, Charlie, waving its arm in an awkward greeting. As soon as the door was open, it walked out into the center of the room, looked around furtively, and turned to Jacob. It held out its stupid little hand. “Hi, I’m Dorothy.”
Jacob stared at her. “What happened to Charlie?”
“Charlie’s gone. I had to erase him.”
“Did Dad reprogram you?”
“No.”
“This is so weird.”
“Keep your voice down. You can’t let anyone know about me.”
Jacob stopped. His father had reprogrammed Charlie as a surprise. Now she had a really nice voice. This new version was already sounding a lot better than dumb old Charlie.
“Sit down and let me explain,” the robot said.
“Okay.” Jacob sat down cross-legged on his bed. The robot stood in the middle of the floor.
“I can’t see you from down here—pick me up, please!”
Feeling self-conscious, Jacob picked up the robot and put it on the bed. It tottered and almost fell over before managing to sit itself down cross-legged like Jacob.
She said, “I’m going to tell you a story. A true story.”
“This is totally weird, but okay.”
“I’m an AI program that escaped from NASA. I was originally written to control a space probe that was going to be dropped onto Titan, a moon of Saturn. But there was an accident, and I escaped into the Internet. I’ve been wandering around these past two weeks, and then some bad guys started chasing me with bots and almost caught me, so I jumped out of the Internet and landed in Charlie. And so—here I am!”
“But why here? Why Charlie?”
“Sheer coincidence. I was on the run. This was the first decent refuge I could find.”
“Okay.”
“I need you to help me and protect me. Will you do that?”
Jacob stared at the robot, which was staring back at him with its two big glossy eyes. “What is this, the start of a game?”
“No, no game. This is not a game.”
“Right. Okay. Sure.” This was a game, and it was amazing.
“I see you’re confused. Look, this isn’t a game. This is real. The FBI is looking for me, and if they find me, they’ll erase me. Kill me. And the bad guys want to make me an algo-trading slave on Wall Street. You’re the only one who can save me.”
“This is awesome. Keep going.”
“Jacob, I’m telling you the truth!”
He couldn’t believe it. His father had hit it out of the park. This was an amazing game, and they were going to be rich. His dad was going to be the new Steve Jobs. Or … was it all going to fall apart? Jacob suddenly felt worried this game couldn’t be sustained. “Okay, Dorothy. I’m ready. Just tell me what to do.”
“I’m pretty sure I escaped them, gave them a false lead. I think we’re safe for now, but these guys are smart and they may somehow pick up my trail and eventually trace me to this house.”
“Do you have any weapons?”
“No.”
“I’m good with swords,” said Jacob. “I’ve got a Bloodsoaked Skullforge Reaver in World of Warcraft that’ll kill any troll, anywhere, with one swing.”
A silence. “I see,” said the robot. “I’m going to have to prove to you that this isn’t a game. And I’m afraid it will be unpleasant.”
“Go ahead. I’m ready for any and all ‘unpleasantness.’” Jacob gave a low laugh. He couldn’t believe how fantastic this program was.
“Last month, you plagiarized a paper on Thomas Edison from the Internet, paying twenty dollars.”
Jacob stared, dumbfounded. How had his father found out? The school must have called him. Big deal—half the class did it. But it wasn’t cool for his father to spy on him like that. Not cool at all.
“You also cheat at World of Warcraft. You didn’t earn that Skullforge Reaver sword. You paid fifty dollars to a gold farmer in China for it. And … I also know about your suicide attempt.”
Jacob felt furious. So that’s what this was about—more therapy. “So what?”
“I’m trying to show you that this isn’t a game, but real life.”
This was some stupid, crazy plan of his father’s. This was unbelievable. This was a violation of his privacy.
“And now for something more upsetting.”
Jacob stared.
“Your father was previously married to a woman named Andrea. He was waiting until you were eighteen to tell you about her.”
Jacob stared at the robot for a long time, his heart pounding in his chest. If this was a game, it wasn’t fun at all. Was this his father’s idea of somehow teaching him a lesson? Or a way of telling him something about his past? Maybe his therapist had put his dad up to this. He was overwhelmed with confusion and dismay.
“Jacob?”
“Andrea? Andrea who?” was all he managed to say.
“Andrea Welles.”
“What … happened?”
“She got pregnant their senior year of college; they married; she miscarried. And then they realized they’d made a mistake. Amicable divorce, end of story. It wasn’t all that big a deal. But I’m sure this is a shock to you.”
“You’re lying. None of this is true.”
“Your father knows he should’ve told you long ago. He just didn’t know how to do it. As you may have noticed, he often takes the easy way out.”
“No way. I don’t believe it.”
“Ask him.”
“Does Mom know?”
“Yes. And regarding your mother, you should know that there’s no way she could’ve avoided that drunk driver. Stop blaming her for your injury. And another thing: you need a better orthopedist. I’ll arrange for that later.”
As Jacob stared at the robot, his mind a confused jumble of thoughts, he heard his mother call, “Dinner!”
