Creative Destruction, page 15
It did not take a neurologist to read the present display. Large portions of Pittman’s cerebrum had flared blazing red, especially around the optic nerves. Was this the high-tech representation of eyes bugging out?
“What’s happening?” he demanded. The red glowed brighter and brighter. “Talk!”
“It’s here.” Pittman was speaking before the order was complete, his voice machine-gun-fast and higher pitched than usual. “It nailed Tyler the instant that we opened the gateway. Beckwith and Brown are fighting it. It’s in the building now. Dodd is trying to get behind it.”
Adams shoved aside the doctor standing between him and the gateway. This was a chance not to be missed. As he lunged at the gateway’s power switch, Beckwith and Brown started to scream. The toggle flipped to OFF with a satisfying click.
“It’s trapped!” shouted Adams. “Get out now.” As he spoke, Dodd, too, went into a seizure. Pittman’s brain on the monitor glowed an unearthly crimson. “Out, out, out!”
A writhing, claw-tipped something passed through the brain image. Then the brain representation went black as the hacker, his dead-man’s switch dropped, convulsively tore the helmet from his head. His right arm didn’t move properly.
Screaming, “Get them out! Get them OUT!” Pittman threw himself across the lab bench that separated him from Dodd. The agent’s hand still clutched his dead-man’s switch. Pittman pried ineffectively with his left hand and right fist, breaking two of the agent’s fingers without success. With a roar of frustration, he switched tactics and ripped the helmet off the agent’s head.
Adams, accustomed to combat, kept his nerves under tighter control. All the helmets were radio-linked to one computer. Its power cord ran snakelike beneath the lab’s central bench. He hooked a shoe tip under the cord near the plug and pulled. As the plug popped free, he took a cellular phone from his shirt pocket. “Electricity off, now,” he ordered the unseen head of building security. “Whole goddamn building. Nothing goes back on until I personally walk this place room by room and make sure that every computer is turned off.”
“Roger that.”
The ceiling fixtures went dark, to be replaced within seconds by emergency lights. Adams relaxed slightly: he’d been assured earlier none of the computers was on an emergency circuit.
“Clear!” yelled a doctor. Dodd’s back arched under the shock from a defibrillator’s two high-voltage paddles. The emergency equipment was battery powered. “Clear!” The scene repeated by Brown and Beckwith. The medical bustle had quietly stopped around Tyler.
Pittman shuddered, but except for the twitching arm, he seemed functional. At least Ralph could talk and act: That was a good sign.
Adams wound carefully through the crowded room. He put his arm around the quirky employee of whom he was suddenly inordinately proud. “You did it, Ralph. You and the others did it. You lured it in. We trapped it in the building, and then we killed it.” With his free arm, Glenn gestured at the fallen. From the no longer frenetic pace around the agents, it was clear none of them had made it. “They didn’t die in vain.”
“You stupid, egotistical man.” Pittman shrugged off the sympathetic arm. “We didn’t do jackshit. That thing is faster than you can imagine. It had plenty of time, after you killed the gateway power, to reduce those brave, foolish men to mental hamburger. It was gone long before the end of the shutdown sequence.
“You might as well turn the friggin’ lights back on.”
CHAPTER 14
The CIA doctor hadn’t been offended by Bev Greenwood’s dismissal. He could always come back later with a sedative. It was better if she could work part way, no matter how little, through her grief first.
As the doctor closed the door behind him, Doug and Cheryl looked at each other and at the softly crying woman. Their hearts went out to her, of course, but they barely knew her. Neither knew what to say. First Cheryl, then Doug, sat beside her on the threadbare sofa of the borrowed office. Doug offered a hand to squeeze; Cheryl, a hankie. We’re here, said the gestures. We may have just met, but we still feel some of what you do. You’re not alone.
Nothing they might have spoken would have been any better received.
The sobbing gradually slowed. The tight grip on Doug’s hand eased. The woman even smiled ruefully at the sodden, cosmetic-smeared handkerchief in her hand. “I ... I think I’d like to be alone now.”
Doug followed Cheryl from the room, surprised at the twinges in his left arm and shoulder. Must’ve pulled something supporting Bev on the way from the lab, he decided. Doug smiled encouragement he did not feel as he shut the teary-eyed woman into the inner office.
Cheryl had headed straight for a phone, and was asking softly if Carla could spend the night at her baby-sitting friend’s house. “Not that kind of an evening, Barb,” she answered an unheard, but obvious, question.
No, not that kind of an evening at all. Doug was about to suggest that he drop her off, sure that neither the CIA nor the forum planned any further action tonight, when somewhere in the building screaming started.
Then all the lights went off.
~~~
Expressions around the conference table were uniformly grim. AJ’s death had been bad enough, but all, to some degree, had rationalized it away. He had been exhausted, wracked with guilt, an academic unaccustomed to action. The latest deaths permitted no such rationalizations.
The thing on the network had effortlessly killed four seasoned operatives. As though enraged by the encounter, the creature had begun yet another rampage. There were hundreds of disasters, of which the most visible was the spectacular crash of the Northwest regional power distribution system. Parts of four states and British Columbia would be without power for hours.
Pittman sat at the head of the table. On both sides of the table, replacements for the fallen agents studied him carefully, seeking clues to whatever lay in wait. To avenge your buddies was an obligation of duty and honor. To leap into a nameless meat grinder was entirely different.
At the opposite end of the table, Doug and Cheryl sat silently but flashed Pittman occasional looks of encouragement. A wooden-faced Adams sat next to Cheryl.
The hacker cleared his throat. The palsy in his arm had subsided a bit, following treatment as though for a petit mal seizure. He took no comfort from the bland assurances of agency physicians that he’d probably recover normal function in the limb. Eventually. How the hell would they know? Pittman asked himself. Any of them ever been brain-fucked by an electronic monster?
“The colonel,” he nodded at his boss, “wants a debrief. Don’t expect to like it, although there is one valuable bit of data. I paid for it,” and he flapped his injured arm, “so I hope it’s worth it. There was some information leakage into me when it attacked. That thing is one of a kind, as far as it knows.”
“Does it have any concept of geography?” asked Doug abruptly.
What an odd question, thought Pittman. “I haven’t a clue.” Or did he? “Not geography, exactly, I don’t believe. Proximity, sort of. Why?”
“Explain about proximity,” Doug persisted.
He considered. “I sensed that it knew the time spent moving between computers, that it preferred short hops to long ones.” The creature had to understand routing tables, to get around the Internet. It wasn’t terribly surprising that its understanding encompassed transmission delays.
“That preference is logical, given what we know of its breeding.” Doug’s eyes narrowed in concentration. “Its ancestors for countless generations were the fastest through the mazes—otherwise they weren’t chosen to reproduce. That’s probably why it remained in densely networked North America long enough to get trapped, instead of jumping by satellite or undersea cable to, say, Asia or South America.”
“Why?” Pittman tried again.
“Just thinking out loud. I dislike loose ends.” Doug shrugged. “I didn’t mean to hijack the meeting. Go on.”
After recapping the disastrous mission, Pittman opened the session to discussion. The questions flew fast and furious, coming mostly from the presumptive second wave of attackers. He answered just as rapidly.
“With proper training, which the technicians will give you, yes, you acclimate quickly. In minutes, you can start moving around the data plane. The folks who designed the helmets deserved better than they got.” What they’d gotten was brain-wiped, courtesy of viruses that were as baby bunnies beside what Ralph had encountered.
“I can’t describe what the data plane ‘looks’ like. It probably doesn’t have an appearance in any objective sense. Everything’s so odd that your mind, abetted by your helmet, plays tricks on you. What scares me is how that subconscious editing must hide things, critical things, from view. We might’ve seen it faster if we’d watched with unbiased ‘eyes.’ ”
The agents hung on each word, looking more stoic the longer he spoke. Stoic? Fatalistic.
“Fast?” He laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “I can scarcely believe how fast that thing is. Still, you should know that we, people, are much quicker in there, too. More precisely, brain plus helmet is quicker. The neural net within the helmet is so adaptive, it automatically learns and takes over repetitive mental chores for you—and transistors run rings around our old-fashioned neurons. The problem is, you have to handle that rate difference, master your confused reflexes. AJ’s monster, on the other hand, evolved in there.
“I can no more describe its appearance than where it lives or how it strikes. I lack the words. Besides, as I said, your mind and helmet try to show everything, no matter how strange, as something familiar.
“For me, it was Cthulhu, that evil and unspeakable horror out of H. P. Lovecraft. If those stories hadn’t made such an impression on me, maybe it would’ve looked different.” The hacker closed his eyes, the memory somehow clearer to him by inner sight.
“Think of darkness not as the absence of light, but as something palpable. Within the blackness, picture an obscenity of ever-changing, writhing limbs tipped with every manner of claw and fang and horn. Imagine standing helpless in the unblinking gaze of an utterly alien and all-penetrating sight.
“Can’t do it?”
His eyes reopened without focusing. “God knows I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to forget it.”
~~~
The questions petered out as it became clear the coming mission wasn’t likely to kill the creature, wasn’t even a credible delaying action. In the awkward silence that ensued, agents studied one another and the table unenthusiastically, each man contemplating throwing his life away for no better reason than something had to be done.
Still, as Pittman’s narrative unfolded, Doug found himself in a strange state of excitement. It was as if everything in his life had brought him to this singular crisis. The more soft-spoken the agents had become in their questioning, the surer Doug became. Every one of these men, he thought, is a trained killer. Any one of them could destroy me in an instant. But what they can’t do, and I can, is stop this thing. Once and for all, I can stop it. Me.
In the focus of the moment, he put completely from his mind the annoying tingle in his still tender left shoulder. He cleared his throat for attention.
Everyone turned towards him, the agents doing so with undisguised relief.
“I’ll accept that someone can learn to conceptualize the data plane in a few minutes.” Unvoiced ire accompanied that acceptance. The neural-interface technology he had worked with demanded lengthy sessions of biofeedback training. CIA scientists had exploited Doug’s ideas to restart NIT research while others awaited forum blessing of his antivirus techniques. All the while, Adams had been stringing him along, demanding higher and higher standards of proof before a public announcement of success. Stalling Doug and trying to divert him to altogether unrelated projects. All the while, the CIA was free to spy using technology that the government publicly discredited.
Still ... had the CIA not made these advances, they’d be defenseless. He tamped down his anger at the deception. “That lets data-plane explorers look around, poke and prod, even move about. What I don’t believe, Ralph, is that such limited exposure denotes expertise.”
Cheryl eyed him sharply, as if she suspected where he was going, but, in case she was wrong, had no intention of giving him any crazy ideas. He tried to not think of her. Of them.
He turned to an agent. “I can imagine hand-to-hand combat without having done it. Let’s go beyond that and postulate that I’ve had a few days or even weeks of practice. How would I do up against you?”
Doug took the feral grin as a response. “Right. Road kill.” He let that sink in for a bit before continuing. “We need someone with extensive neural-interface experience.”
“The damned viruses got ev—” Adams began.
“No! You can’t mean it, Doug,” Cheryl cut in. “Your experience is with an arm. A neurally interfaced arm. You have no more helmet experience than Ralph.”
Or than Ralph’s four dead escorts. Five dead, counting AJ.
He reached for her hand. She jerked it away. “Don’t do this. Don’t be a hero. You’ll wind up like AJ.” A look of fear washed over her face. “Or Sheila Brunner.”
Doug recalled that mindless victim all too well: vacant eyes in an expressionless face, a single compulsion running in an endless loop through a ruined brain. The memory clamped a band of steel around his chest. He swallowed hard. “It’s not the same.” Was he speaking to himself or to Cheryl?
“What I have, and no one else here, or anywhere, has, is years of practice with neural interfaces. I’m not just now learning to use them. Ask these guys,” and he gestured at the watching agents, “if in the martial arts you think before each punch thrown or blow parried.”
“Do you really want to do this, Doug?” Glenn Adams, whose eyes, minutes earlier, had held only defeat, now held a faint glimmer of hope.
“No, I don’t want to. I have to.”
“Are you sure?”
The eyes held something else, some other emotion, that Doug couldn’t place. Then the colonel spoke again, and Doug placed it: guilt.
“I have a real problem sending in friends.”
They both knew that Adams could, and would, do just that. He was an Army officer before anything else. He would do what he must and then live with the scars.
Doug looked around the room. The agents silently pleaded: If you have an edge, even the hint of one, help us. Adams did his best, which wasn’t enough, to seem neutral. Pittman was drained, too weary to make a decision. No one spoke.
Cheryl refused to meet his gaze.
The silence became oppressive. “After years spent training a neurally interfaced arm, I may be the only person in the world with the right reflexes. How can I not go in?”
~~~
Doug asked for a moment alone with Cheryl. She was furious, but not quite enough to deny him. That, or even deeper feelings kept her there. Whatever her reason, she stayed as everyone else filed from the room. They expected him in the lab shortly.
“It’s something I have to do.” He looked down at his prosthesis. For once, the arm was a unique qualification instead of a handicap. Instead of a daily reminder of the accident that had taken Holly. “It’s something I have to do,” he repeated.
She stared at him, eyes brimming with tears. “What are you trying to prove?”
That Holly had not died for nothing. That it was okay he survived the accident that took her. That maybe, just maybe, he was entitled to happiness again, with Cheryl. There wasn’t time for any of that. “It’s something I have to do.”
Heart pounding, he strode from the room.
~~~
With Ralph’s coaching, Doug quickly succeeded in visualizing the data plane. His imagery was slightly different than the hacker’s: boxes, too, but as soaring buildings of a mighty city. The message streams were traffic arteries of various sizes, from crowded expressways to lightly traveled local streets. Ralph’s description had more closely resembled a geometric garden.
Otherwise modern, Doug’s city was walled liked a medieval stronghold. In the battlement’s stone and mortar, Doug recognized a familiar pattern: software derived from his own attempts to protect neural interfaces from viruses. His code didn’t allow high data rates through the interface. The CIA version had been modified to let pass user-approved—stolen?—data.
AJ’s monster was far smarter than a virus. Pittman’s experience made plain the thing had figured how to mimic approval. Against it, the helmet’s defenses were as flimsy as tissue paper.
Ding! Another ten seconds. Ralph had also shared the idea of a wakeup call. As the helmet’s neural net learned to work with him, as it did more and more for him, successive tones seemed further and further apart. “Looking good,” Doug called out.
The hacker’s voice crackled in Doug’s headset. “Tell us when to unleash the targets.”
The targets were Doug’s idea. Simple modifications to Ralph’s standard antivirus phages, they would be his practice dummies. At Doug’s signal, the first phage would be loosed.
“Release number one.” After what seemed geological time, a new program popped into view. In keeping with his subconscious’s metropolitan metaphor, the phage appeared as a shiny-eyed rat. What was that old movie about a kid with an attack rat? Okay, Willard number one.
Willard, in the interest of Doug’s safety, had been hastily tweaked to recognize and overwrite a sacrificial accounting package. The rat sniffed for its quarry, darting from building to building. Doug “sat” back and watched. He’d already spotted Willard’s intended victim: a stolid, five-story brownstone. He flexed his “muscles” as he waited, only then noticing how he’d cast himself: as a camouflaged soldier. Power of suggestion? Even here he had a prosthesis. It made sense; one-armed was how he thought of himself.
