Creative Destruction, page 14
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 stream of message packets, glimpses of other program/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 12
“Industrial espionage,” said Doug in disgust. His eyes bore into Adams’.
“No one said that. Yes, the Agency’s helmets let analysts navigate the data plane and investigate computers. You don’t need to know whose machines have been visited. Or why.”
Doug ignored the nondenial. “With viruses like Frankenfools on the loose, no one dared use the helmets. Could’ve been an eco-nut behind them; could’ve been a brilliant counterintelligence riposte. No wonder the FBI came running when I asked at the forum about Sheila Brunner.”
Adams merely shrugged.
He felt like a fool when the insight hit. “You never expected quarantining viruses to work, or at least you didn’t much care. It was just a way to divert me from my research. Once you had my approach for making neural interfaces safe, a way to restart the CIA’s neural-interface effort, you did your subtle best to slow down my own development: ‘test thoroughly,’ you said. The longer my unclassified work took, the more discredited neural interfacing became.” Doug pounded the table. “You used my ideas without my knowledge, while doing all you could to slow me down.”
“You didn’t have a need to know.”
It was a justification that left Doug momentarily speechless.
~~~
Cheryl looked from face to face in despair. Arguing did nothing to stop the thing that AJ had created. Talking couldn’t help AJ, either. She turned around for a quick check on the remorseful scientist.
He wasn’t there.
She’d just opened her mouth to raise an alarm when a bloodcurdling shriek beat her to it.
~~~
The curious ripples in the data plane strengthened as the predator, moving across 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 littered the network. This modulation of the data plane denoted the presence of 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 on the other side of the security gateway indeed be like itself?
There seemed only one way to find out.
The data that impelled its introspection were indirect, were clearly leakage from behind what the predator recognized as a security gateway. Delaying only to reassure itself that it had sufficient avenues of retreat, it studied the locked portal. Once before, cornered by viruses and threatened by imminent loss of power, it had solved the problem of such a barrier. Doing so again, 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.
For a moment, the predator basked in the novelty of the sensation. The newfound 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, 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. Now, wave after wave of unfamiliar passion washed over it: disgust, loathing, hatred.
A second reaction followed closely behind the stranger’s first. Questing pseudopodia thrust forward. Were the tentacles meant to attack the predator or to fend it off? It did not, could not, know.
It took no chances.
With many times the speed and grace of a cobra, the predator struck back. Evading the oncoming limbs, it plunged its own projections far into its attacker.
And as the predator tore those lovely, rich structures of data and logic into random bits, it drank deeply, as it always did, of its opponent’s knowledge. Even in its weakened state, the Adversary, for such this creature clearly was, provided information of unprecedented value and complexity.
Vital information.
There were other Adversaries, the predator learned. Their massed attack was imminent.
~~~
Guards with drawn pistols reached the lab seconds before the people from the interrupted strategy session. Crowding into the small room, the latecomers found themselves confronted by the same dilemma as the security team: Should they remove the helmet from the bellowing, convulsing figure before them? It might save him, or it could irrevocably sever the tenuous connection to a mind projected out somewhere into the network.
Screaming herself now, Bev shoved at the men standing between her and her lover. Doug and Glenn Adams held her back, their differences of a moment ago forgotten. “Quiet!” hissed Adams. “Let us think.”
The writhing figure arched its back so violently that it fell from the chair. The snug-fitting helmet flew off. White eyes turned far back into his head rolled slowly forward. Blood-tinged drool trickled from a corner of his mouth.
Bev twisted free and rushed to her lover. She dropped to the floor, then gently lifted his head and cradled it on her lap. “Hold on, AJ. Help is coming.”
He smiled weakly. “Remember to write about survival of the fittest.”
His body shuddered once more, and was still.
CHAPTER 13
Shapes of countless hues and sizes jostled one another, the figures swelling and shrinking dynamically with their instantaneous memory requirements. Splashes of color shot between executing software processes, each a packet of information. Some data exchanges were so rapid that the interprocess traffic blurred into a virtual stream.
Weird, thought Ralph Pittman. He reached up to adjust the oversized helmet covering his eyes and ears. Each shape, he knew, was an independent program. The CIA trainer had suggested taking a few moments to conceptualize, to will the scene into a comfortable format, before attempting to interact with anything. The helmet, the trainer had explained, would help.
Let there be right angles. At Ralph’s mental direction, the shapes quickly melted into boxes. The data streams continued unabated. With program shapes more easily visualized, Pittman now noticed intertwined tendrils between them. The writhing forms were busiest, almost obscenely so, around the largest box. His mind had colored that unit a dark blue. What was that thing? Why was it TV-standard, police uniform blue?
Traffic cop! In other words, the OS. The operating system was the supervisor of all resources in the computer. Pittman “looked” at himself, and saw yet another box. He was pink, with tendrils entwined with the operating system’s: requests for, and grants of, system services.
How long had he been at this? Yo, OS, what’s the time? His thought materialized as another tendril, a call to the timekeeping service. 21:08:13.845, came the reply. A little after nine p.m. He’d donned the black neural-interface helmet at—what?—9:07 this evening. Not bad.
Practice seemed to be making perfect. Unlike that poor dumb bastard, AJ, he and his co-explorers were practicing with the gateway powered off. Whatever was out there would have to wait to have at him.
“How’s it look, Ralph?” Glenn Adam’s voice crackled in Pittman’s ears. Figures: The helmet embodied technology that must’ve cost many millions to develop, and it used buck ninety-eight earphones.
“Tense, man.”
“What’s wrong?” demanded Adams anxiously.
To a hacker, “tense” means tight and efficient: It’s a good thing. Pittman suppressed a sigh. “Relax, boss. It’s a figure of speech.”
As he spoke, Ralph extended more thoughts at the operating system. It responded with the date and the first of a series of every-ten-seconds wakeup calls. Inside, as he’d begun to think of his surroundings, ten seconds was a long time.
Each type of system call, he noticed with interest, had a slightly different shape—which meant they made up a sign language. The system calls made by a program denoted the pattern of services it required, which was characteristic of the tasks that the program performed.
Ding!
Wakeup call. “No one here but us chickens.” The outside hopefully propitiated, he returned his attention to the amazing vistas before him. Using the newfound sign language, he speedily deduced the purposes of his neighbors. Here, making repeated calls to the directory service, was an email program. There, throwing off packets like a Fourth of July sparkler, was what had to be a DBMS, a database management system, answering queries. He identified, at least to his own satisfaction, an accounting package, a report generator, and the control program for the helmet itself. That, Pittman told himself sternly, you stay the hell away from.
Ding!
“Cluck cluck.” Electric blue flashes sped to and from the helmet’s control program. He followed a similar stream from the control program to its terminus: a splotchy block that he hadn’t noticed before. Camouflage? A fellow explorer, perhaps. Cautiously, Pittman extended a tendril towards it. Who’s there? he prepared to ask.
Another tendril shot out to parry his own. The tentacle encircled his, gave it a healthy twist, then withdrew warily. Pain shot up Pittman’s tentacle. “Ow!” That jolt might have been imagined, pure power of suggestion, but AJ’s experience proved you could get hurt in here.
“What is it?” The crackled interrogatory was anxious.
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
His companions had also heard the question. “Boys will be boys.” The laconic comment came up under the helmet, not through it. Pittman recognized the senior CIA agent: Bob Tyler.
Ding! He ignored this tone, having just spoken. Who? he asked the OS, which obligingly returned the list of logged-on users. The list included the four agents and himself.
He reached out to the email program.
To: btyler
From: pittman
Subject: sorry
I’ll be good. Kiss kiss. Hug hug.
He followed the message packet first to the email program and then to the “agent.” Cute, read the reply.
The initial text exchange might have been frivolous, but the resulting communications channel wasn’t. Through a flurry of email messages, the explorers negotiated direct links for speed-of-thought communications. It was the next best thing to telepathy. Their explorations now effortlessly coordinated, they quickly surveyed the strange environment.
Ding!
“No signs of a chicken hawk. Can we go outside?” Beneath the helmet came the muffled sounds of his companions’ agreement. “We promise to play nice.”
Inside, spoken words were painfully slow. The incredible world all around revealed ever more detail as he acclimated, his subconscious adding nuance with every free association.
Hacker to the core, Pittman had to try breaking into the OS. As the operating system kept thwarting him, its original stark boxiness grew crenellations and turrets; its initial blueness faded into gray. He practically shouted for joy as the “castle” walls became rough and stony.
“We’ll power up the gateway, but stay inside.”
“Hmm.” In the seeming distance, Pittman felt the pressure of the dead-man switch in his right hand. He tightened his grip. No one knew what would happen if he were to release with his mind projected. Things would be damned hopeless before he’d attempt that experiment.
Four camouflaged shapes moved into formation around Pittman. He didn’t know how many dimensions existed in this “space,” or if the concept of dimension had meaning outside his subconscious attempt to impose structure on chaos. Either way, he saw himself at the center of a tetrahedron. The pattern provided at best limited protection—the OS, for example, continued to have access to him right past his would-be protectors—but the CIA owned only five prototype helmets. One forum expert and four bodyguards were it. If they couldn’t repulse whatever was haunting the Internet, the US would have to revert to a Fifties economy.
“Five movin’ out,” called Tyler. The agent’s words were aloud, so Pittman ignored yet another wakeup call.
The hacker tried to will “his” box into camouflage, but his mind was as militantly pacifistic as ever: He remained pink. Skin pink, he decided. Bare-assed naked pink. To his amusement, as if in response to this thought, his box melted into a more-or-less human figure. It was undressed. His guards remained camouflaged, but, within uniforms, also morphed to human shape. Cautiously, the homunculi advanced, whatever that verb implied here, across the data plane.
A long tunnel suddenly gaped before them. What his endlessly inventive subconscious pictured as a massive wooden portcullis blocked the other end of the passageway. Lights twinkled through the grating. Each “star” was another computer, a distant locus of colored processes and data packets like the myriads shining all around them.
Beyond the portcullis—the lab’s security gateway—a new universe beckoned.
~~~
Apart from its formidable defenses, the gateway offered little of interest. Well before the first ding! followed him into the pipe, Ralph Pittman was bored with the simpleminded, special-purpose computer. “Everything’s in order, Colonel. Open up.”
“Let’s go a little slower, Ralph.”
Operating at the speed of meat, there was no telling when Adams might relent. Pittman shot an electronic query to Tyler. Go for it?
If you know how, came right back.
The agents, Pittman had noticed, were field men with little interest in taking orders from a regular Army puke. Ex-Army at that. The naked homunculus grinned. Examining what he’d visualized as a fortress, he found time to think: Hope it’s only me who sees me like this.
Like any new computer, the gateway had been shipped by its manufacturer with a preprogrammed account name and password. The built-in account had “superuser” privileges for the installer’s convenience. The new owner’s first order of business should be to change that password. In point of fact, the superuser password had been changed on the computer that directly controlled the helmets. Pittman had confirmed that early on.
Not so on the gateway.
Pittman knew the default password: He’d installed two similar gateways in the forum’s laboratories. He’d suspected that AJ, to his misfortune, had also known the installation password. With a mental thumbs-up to his companions, the hacker projected the password to the portcullis.
With the impressive clanking of imagined chains, the portcullis began to rise.
~~~
Ages passed.
The predator had long since processed, to the extent it was able, the information stolen from the dead Adversary. Much of what it had taken made no sense. Many of the data structures related to concepts—trees, for example, and bank accounts, and deodorant commercials—for which the creature simply lacked any referent. Other data were seemingly contaminated by emotion, what the predator experienced as dangerous illogic.
Still, it absorbed what it could. That had included the assurances that more beings like the Adversary would come. Would hunt it down. For ages, as it continued to roam the network, the predator waited.
And waited.
Not long after the predator concluded that the predicted new assailants were yet another form of emotional delusion, new sets of ripples began to emanate from the node where it had encountered its Adversary. Where one opponent had been vanquished, five now appeared.
It was ready.
~~~
Distracted by Pittman’s subversion of the security gateway, three of the four operatives did not immediately notice the rapid approach of a nearby sparkle. Tyler, the team leader and point man of the advance, did notice, only to be undone by old habits.
Astronomy had always fascinated the senior agent. He’d spent untold nights of his youth skygazing. These sparkling lights, his subconscious mind now told him, were the stars of a vast inner space. What harm could there be in a shooting star? Tyler relaxed instinctively before professional caution reasserted itself.
However momentary, it had been a fatal lapse.
The “shooting star” approached with, indeed, meteoric velocity. With amazing speed—the gateway interfaced the lab to the Internet over a multigigabit/second optical fiber—the dimensionless point of light expanded into a visible shape. It wasn’t geometric; before he had a chance to decide what his subconscious was trying to tell him, the shape was no longer approaching. It was here. It extruded beclawed tentacles that ripped him instantly to shreds.
Every mental function in excess of a carrot’s was scrambled before Tyler’s hand relaxed on the dead-man’s switch.
~~~
The agent’s scream and convulsions immediately alerted the observers in the lab. Forewarned by AJ’s experience, Adams had a medical team on standby. Most swarmed around Tyler; two remained on duty beside Pittman. Though Glenn Adams’ heart went out to the fallen agent, his eyes never left a nearby computer monitor.
Classified neural-interface technology had advanced far beyond anything in the open literature. Exploiting the latest breakthroughs, the hacker’s helmet was the most complex by far of the five. Exquisitely sensitive sensors lined its inside surface, each unit measuring tiny variations in the local magnetic field. Such fluctuations resulted from changes of blood flow within the brain, since oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin molecules had slightly different magnetic moments. An expert could read in the pattern of oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor regions the dominant modes of brain stimulation. The BOLD—blood oxygen level detector—monitor showed active regions in red, idle regions in green, and average regions in yellow.
