Creative Destruction, page 17
The prosthesis slid roughly down her arm, knocked aside Glenn’s hand, and closed painfully over her fist. He said something else unintelligible.
Mercifully, someone killed the alarms on the medical monitors. She put an ear to his lips. His breathing was labored.
“Don’t ... let go ... switch.”
The switch! She’d forgotten it. She stared at her hand in horror. Why did he want her to hang on?
CHAPTER 16
The predator paused as its Adversary began flashing and wavering. The once tightly structured loci of information were spreading, dispersing, losing coherence. In previous battles, such loss of cohesion had signaled destruction. Wary of the wily being before it, the predator paused lest this was another trap.
Then, just as the predator prepared to resume its assault, new opponents appeared.
When the gateway had last opened, a swarm of attack programs had preceded its newest Adversary. From past experience, the predator had expected the phages to bumble about, scattering. They had, as it anticipated, soon disappeared.
Now, from every adjacent network node at once, the ravening packs of hunters returned.
The predator had not survived by taking unnecessary chances. It abandoned all thoughts of an immediate kill to fight through a pack of phages to safety.
~~~
His chest on fire, Doug’s mind flipped helplessly between inside and outside worlds.
For a while, the alarms and shouts in the lab sounded more insistent with each return to the lab. For a while. Sensations began to collapse inward to the pain that was destroying him.
No! He fought back against the gathering darkness. The inner world sharpened in focus, beckoned. Through his earphones, Cheryl called to him. She was out there, somewhere, invisible because of his eye-covering helmet, holding the mate to the dead-man switch clutched tightly in his sweaty hand.
As his timed attack finally reached the creature, sending it fleeing with phages nipping at its flanks, inside became more real than outside.
Dangling hair brushed his cheek—Cheryl crouched over him? Lifting an arm to reach for her, the pain in his chest almost split him in half.
That way only death awaited him.
He retreated to the inside. The metropolis shook all around him, falling prey to his distraction. In the distance, his body convulsed.
Time was running out.
His groping arm found hers. “Don’t let go,” he called, but knew he’d achieved barely a whisper. Something stabbed into his chest. His hand slid down her arm, knocking something—someone?—aside. He grabbed her hand and squeezed. The boxy switch distorted the shape of her fist. “Don’t ... let go ... switch.”
He still had hopes of slaying the beast ... but his body was collapsing from the stress. As phages from his factory raced after the predator, he thrust his mind after them. His memories, his fears, his dreams rushed at the neural interface. Within the adaptive electronics of the helmet, data structures blossomed, firmed, reinforced each other. A pathway opened. Faster than conscious thought could accomplish, the helmet imprinted the data patterns that were him onto the nearest computers. It was the reverse of the long-ago Frankenfools viral attacks.
His mind, alone as no sentience had ever before been, snapped free and whole into the data plane. His only company in that strange universe was an utterly implacable enemy.
CHAPTER 17
23:53:26.538, replied a nearby operating system to Doug’s query. Almost midnight. Images of soon-to-die satellites came unbidden to his mind’s eye.
Now that he’d seen the creature up close, he had few illusions about killing it before the Europeans’ deadline. Killing it at all was problematical enough.
Still, his mind accelerated a thousandfold by its new, wholly electronic implementation, he had a plan. With an army of new-and-improved phages arrayed around him, he set forth.
~~~
The predator transited forty-six computers before terminating or eluding the last of its insistent pursuers. Some hunters it killed outright; most it destroyed by the desperate expedient of crashing parts of the network as it passed. It was dissatisfied with that procedure despite its efficacy: Between its attempts to lure out the Adversaries and its battles with them, it had destroyed thousands of nodes. That some nodes returned inexplicably to life did nothing to ease its concerns.
It needed a better way.
Analysis of the latest battle suggested two. Its most recent Adversary had used hunters, like advanced versions of the things which had, so long ago, stalked it in its cage. Second, and abetted by those hunters, this latest opponent had laid an ambush for it.
In the place of its origin, where only one in a hundred was selected for further evolution, replicating others’ methods had been an invaluable survival trait.
When the predator next encountered the Adversary, army would be met with army; deceit with deceit.
~~~
“Let go, Cheryl.”
Her mind whirled. As from a distance, she felt Doug’s prosthesis painfully squeezing her fist. From nowhere the phrase death grip popped into mind.
“Let go,” commanded Col. Adams. “It’s our only chance to save him.”
She looked around wildly. Dr. Ogawa was pounding Doug’s chest. A defibrillator cart squealed shrilly as it charged. An agent whose name she’d forgotten looked at her with pity.
Doug had said to hold on.
Unexpected movement caught her eye: a finger waggling from side to side. Doug’s finger. Left, right. Pause. Left, right. Pause. A digit of his prosthesis.
No, no. No, no.
“Let go. Now!” When she didn’t comply, Adams lunged for Doug’s other fist, his flesh-and-bone fist, in which the engineer held his own switch firmly closed.
“Glenn!” With her free hand, she pointed at Doug’s finger. Left, right. Left, right.
“It means nothing. Let go now or I’ll break his hand.”
Oil change and a tune-up, she thought inanely. Oil change and a tune-up. The arm: It was emitting a revving sound. “Glenn! He’s signaling us.”
“There’s very little activity in the BOLD display,” Adams replied. “He’s unconscious. He’s incapable of communication.”
She knew Adams was right ... but what about the finger, the electric motors racing in the arm. How?
The palmtop in the arm!
The page from Pittman earlier that evening ... Doug had received it in the VR racquetball court. That meant the palmtop they’d argued about had a cellular modem—so it also had dial-up Internet access. She blurted out an explanation. “Some part of him,” she shivered at articulating the thought, “is away. Is chasing that thing. If we remove the helmet, if we sever his mind’s connection with his body, how do we know he can make it back?”
Adams turned to the doctor. “Does he have a chance if we leave him hooked up?”
Ogawa just shrugged.
~~~
Phages fought phages.
As creature and human alike learned from experience, the battles grew in scope and ferocity. Each side usurped computers to fabricate more and nastier phages. Campaigns raged over whole states, then whole regions, finally the whole continent.
23:55:24.215.
Doug had survived—barely—his first encounter with the creature thanks to the unexpected, coordinated tactics of his phage army. His opponent had mastered that method in one lesson. Now, behind wall after wall of phages, he awaited the ultimate confrontation. The Mother of all Battles. Ragnarok. Götterdämmerung. Armageddon.
What else did he know that the creature didn’t?
The creature was incredibly fast, in reaction and learning. What it lacked, and Doug hoped fervently this was a fatal flaw, was context. Knowledge of the world in which they directly moved, of the domain of computers and comm links, it would continue to acquire. Knowledge of the physical universe beyond the computers, the pudding in which these machines were embedded like so many raisins, the creature wholly lacked.
Life was an essay test, before it became a word problem, before there was anything to be solved for. Today’s essay test would be on geography. Pittman hadn’t believed that it understood geography.
If he could exploit his unique knowledge, then lightning-quick or not, the creature might die.
And if not, he certainly would.
~~~
The predator inferred that its Adversary lacked its newfound hesitance to destroy nodes and links. In that conclusion, the creature was not precisely right. Doug knew precisely which nodes to crash, and how, and why: cyberwar jujitsu.
Tenaciously, Doug crashed swath after swath of the transcontinental electrical grid. Given awareness of the real world and real-time access to Internet directory servers, it was straightforward to find leverage points. Extending mental probes into the computers of a power plant here, a distribution control center there, he sent blackouts rolling across the countryside.
Always the predator managed to escape, exploiting small networks and mission-critical computers supported by backup batteries and diesel-powered emergency generators.
It did not know it was being herded.
Losing thousands of its own computers now to each of the Adversary’s that it destroyed, the predator’s capacity for phage production fell further and further behind. The ever-expanding armies of the Adversary crowded ever closer.
It retreated in a direction it did not know to call westward.
~~~
Utility companies across the Rocky Mountain region fought valiantly, but in vain, against recurring blackouts. On a smaller scale, the graveyard shifts of institutions fought to keep their facilities operational. Whatever was crashing public utilities was also, quite subtly, attacking backup power. Few noticed that their computerized equipment controls—contrary to their programming, and despite their cyberdefenses—switched on every bit of equipment at once, creating surges that kept tripping the circuit breakers. The backup generators, entirely independent of the Internet and safe from any direct assault, spun uselessly.
No one questioned the good fortune that kept the electrical epidemic from striking hospitals, air-traffic-control radars, and other critical centers.
The attacks swept ever westward. They reduced the night-bathed landscape first to a scattering of lights like ocean phosphorescence, then plunged it into deeper and deeper darkness as backup systems too fell prey.
The predator withdrew into what it did not know to call California.
~~~
23:57:46.102.
Great hosts of phages jostled and surged, like so many cattle in a chute, in the front rank of Doug’s usurped computers. Their numbers far exceeded the reasonable carrying capacity of the few remaining comm links to the west.
He set them loose.
The hordes rushed ahead, jamming the network ahead of him. As they raced forward, yet another segment of the Northern California power grid crashed. The creature was bottled up now in Southern California.
Armageddon neared.
~~~
Behind defensive deployments of phages, the predator grew increasingly frantic. Retreat after retreat had left it hemmed into a region so limited that it could no longer spare computing resources for the production of new agents. If additional computers were to vanish, it would actually have to begin destroying its existing forces.
It sensed the Adversary occasionally, from a distance, always behind an impenetrable array of phages. It knew now that it had been mistaken.
The Adversary was slow and hostile. It was not stupid.
~~~
23:58:56.645.
Darkness at last washed over Southern California. Scattered pin pricks of light were left behind; these now blinked out, one by one. Phages died by the millions as their host computers lost power.
Racing desperately from one dying computer to the next, the predator took refuge in what it did not know to be a university hospital. Spared from assault, the backup diesel generator there held all in-house voltages rock steady. The hospital was on the campus of one branch of the far-flung University of California. A unique private data network linked the institution to other hospitals in the university system.
At the dawn of radio, broadcasters sent radio signals beyond the horizon, even across the ocean, by bouncing them off the ionosphere. In an era of comsats and transoceanic optical fibers, bounced shortwave was a technique only radio amateurs, hams, continued to use.
The military had long worried, with good reason, about the vulnerability of its comsats. One proposed backup method, still under research, bounced signals off the ionized trails of meteors high in the atmosphere. No single track remained ionized for long, but the steady shower of celestial dust provided such trails in abundance.
The UC Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering held a defense contract to build such a system. A prototype was in “beta test,” friendly user field trial, between campuses of the university.
As Doug’s phages surged forward in insurmountable numbers, the predator flashed through what had once been a satellite dish. Within two milliseconds, the creature had bounced off an ionization trail to emerge from another dish at a sister campus in Northern California.
Behind enemy lines.
~~~
23:59:03.426.
Aw, shit!
The rout of phages from an unexpected direction announced the sudden presence of the creature in Doug’s relatively unguarded rear. He hurriedly sent reinforcements and retreated to a safe position that he’d reconnoitered earlier.
Reports back from Southern California soon made clear what had happened: a bolt hole hidden inside a hospital. His basic decency could kill him yet.
23:59:11.538.
But not today, dammit!
Sending phages to herd the predator, he kept fewer by his side than at any time since the start of the battle. Fewer, even, than he’d had at the opening of the gateway back in Reston.
The creature jumped at the bait.
~~~
23:59:23:551.
In a pure war of attrition, satisfactory position plus superior resources determined the outcome. The Adversary held overwhelming advantages in both. An opportunity to do battle one on one was too precious to be missed.
The predator charged down a lightly defended path, brushing aside or ignoring the hunters that tried to stop it. If its assault failed, those few hunters would be the least of its worries. The Adversary retreated, sacrificing phages. The predator steadily drew closer.
Just as the creature thought ultimate victory was in its grasp, its Adversary shot through a portal so quickly as to almost disappear.
~~~
23:59:31.596.
Doug had, throughout the battle, carefully stayed clear of all supercomputers. These were expensive and comparatively rare machines: the odds were in his favor that the creature had not encountered one since AJ’s lab. The existence of a particular supercomputer was one more fact he hoped the predator had not discovered. His continued existence now depended on it.
With the creature hot on his virtual heels, he entered the superconducting, liquid-helium-cooled, massively parallel processing, mega-supercomputer that was the pride and joy of Lawrence Livermore Labs.
His mental processes boosted another thousandfold, Doug turned to do battle with the creature.
~~~
23:59:46.792.
Combat to the death. Tentacles and tails slashed. Hands grabbed and ripped. Data structures shuddered and collapsed.
Possession of the mega-super gave Doug a tactical edge not unlike defending from the top of a hill. Advantages were easier to spot, more quickly seized. Grappling closely with the enemy, he was able, from his superior position, to limit the punishment that he was taking.
Limit. He could slow the damage; he couldn’t prevent it.
Though his mind was now imprinted into an electronic network, his species’ biological evolution could yet kill him. Some absurd corner of his mind summoned the energy to be amused that even at electronic speeds, he could not, figuratively speaking, find the coordination to rub his stomach and pat his head at the same time. More to the point, while the mega-super gave him the performance boost to more rapidly move his limbs, he was still self-limited to fighting with two “arms.” There was more to the image of his opponent as a many-tentacled monster than memories of old horror movies: The predator was inherently capable of doing many things at once.
As it fought its way forward, the creature began capturing and allocating individual processors of the mega-super to its many semi-independent components. The flailing tentacles became faster, deadlier. More and more, their knife-edged tips sneaked past Doug’s defenses, slashing the boundaries of his persona.
The ranks of phages protecting him from the creature grew thinner and thinner. Ever more of the creature fought its way onto the mega-super.
Just a little longer, thought Doug, just a moment. Presentation is everything.
~~~
23:59:53:798.
The predator pressed after its Adversary, sensing imminent victory. Each processing thread that it forced into the supercomputer narrowed the Adversary’s computational advantage. Its flashing limbs hacked apart phages faster than they were replaced. Backward and ever further backward retreated the Adversary, finally uncovering a block of input/output ports it had been guarding zealously.
The creature eagerly ingested a newly disclosed routing table. The Adversary’s stubborn defense of these I/O ports suddenly made sense: one of them was a testing portal, a loop-around path to another part of the same machine. The predator could be at its Adversary’s unguarded rear, away from the last of the phages, within nanoseconds. From there, it could not lose.
