Doctor Who (22 page)

‘Peri,' said the Doctor, ‘we're not talking about a lost puppy. The component has the potential to wreck your civilisation in
a very short space of time. What's worse, it's affecting Swan's already unpleasant mind.' He steepled his fingers. ‘It probably interferes with the brain's opiate receptors. Like a particularly powerful addictive drug. You saw how desperate her friend Luis was to retrieve it.'

‘It makes them want to own it?'

‘That's right. For our lost
idiot savant
, it's become a survival mechanism. It needs to be sheltered and fed and supplied with technological toys.'

Peri said firmly, ‘I want to talk to those guys.'

The Doctor sat back from the speakerphone. Peri hesitated, but Ghislain's voice said, ‘We are listening.'

‘What will you do with it when you get it back?' she asked.

‘We will return home with it. It will be put to normal use.'

‘What about your colony world?'

‘A new slow packet has already been launched. Its guidance systems now include Earth and its radiosphere on their charts.'

‘What is normal use, anyway?'

‘Be assured the component will be healthy and busy, as will its offspring. Such devices are an integral part of our society.'

Peri looked as though she'd tasted something sour, but the Doctor said, ‘Is it worse than training a dog for police work?'

She admitted, ‘It's gotta be better than whatever Swan's planning to use it for. All right, Doctor. Let's send that kid back home where it belongs.'

‘If it's sitting in Swan's bathtub,' I said, ‘why don't we just go and nick it?'

‘Because I wouldn't advise it,' said the Doctor, and wouldn't say more.

¹
A stable orbit point between the Earth and the sun, ideal for placing satellites.

SWAN WAS WELL
aware that something was happening in her head. Her guess was that the creature was releasing pheromones, those chemicals bugs use to attract mates.

It took to the terminal in her kitchen like a fish to water. It seemed to understand the keyboard moments after the rippling tentacles in its fur had moved across the letters. It began to type commands, imitating what it saw on the screen, generating one error message after another, faster and faster, until its commands began to make sense and the machine began to respond.

Swan watched, leaning back against the kitchen sink, both hands gripping the cold metal rim. It was just an animal. How could it possibly understand letters and numbers? How could it possibly turn them into commands? What kind of secret superproject had she got her hands on?

The monster was
programming.
It had created a file and was pounding in lines of code as fast as the machine could take them, building up a huge set of instructions. Swan could only catch snatches of the code as it flashed past. The monster seemed to be debugging as it went, running little bits of the program over and over until it was satisfied with them, then adding them to its massive project. It was learning only slightly faster than it was producing output.

The system crashed a few times as the big hairy bug tested its lengthy program. Each time it restarted the machine,
massaged it a little to fix whatever it had broken, and then started its tests again.

Swan was cold and her arms were stiff by the time her furry baby was done. It just stopped, with the same abruptness with which it had started, and sat back a little from the machine. The rippling in its fur quieted for the first time she could remember.

She wasn't sure how it would react when she picked it up out of the seat, but it seemed quite happy to be carried back to its bathtub. She poured in the milk crate of Legos. At once it started picking them up, the tentacles moving them along its surface until it was half-covered in coloured plastic shapes.

She sat down at the computer in the kitchen. The seat was still a little warm.

Swan tried to analyse the code, but she couldn't seem to stay on task. She played with pens, she rearranged the mess of cords behind the table, she even washed up some coffee cups. Twice she found herself halfway up the stairs.

If she was going to get any work done, it would have to be at the office.

Three times she had to stop herself from turning the car around and racing home. But after a few hours in the office, she was sure her head felt a little clearer, she had more perspective.

Somewhere deep in her head, she knew that no-one was going to take the creature away from her. It was hers now, and it knew it.

It took Swan about fifteen minutes to hack a program for her Unix box that would display the pictures from her home cameras. After that, every quarter of an hour, she checked on baby. Improve the picture quality, add some sound, and you'd have a dandy software package to sell to nervous parents.

She picked through the creature's code. The printout ran to hundreds of pages; she had stuffed them Into a couple of
binders. She had forgotten the last time she slept. Teaspoons full of instant coffee held under her tongue helped keep her focussed on the problem.

The simplest thing would be to just run it and see what it did. Swan wasn't quite ready to take that step yet. Not on her computers. And not on the network, where any weird effect was liable to spread from one machine to another, all of them pointing back to her. She didn't want to let this puppy loose until she was sure she knew how to control it.

Swan sat back from the screen, scratching her scalp with a ballpoint. The start of the program didn't make sense. It poked around in the computer's memory, as though trying to make a map of it, finding out things which it must already know. But it was tightly written, deliberate. The hairy bug had refined and refined the code until it was pared to an elegant minimum.

Was this program the whole point of the monster's existence? By planting it in front of her home terminal, had she detonated its payload?

It didn't make the slightest bit of sense. If the Reds or anyone else wanted to sneak a program into American computers – or vice versa, for that matter – a hormone-secreting, Lego-obsessed
Sesame Street
monster was not the way they would try to accomplish it. I mean, who would think to put it in front of a computer in the first place? Or would it have waited for her to take a nap, and then clumped down the stairs to reach her machine? Or had its cloud of chemicals somehow instructed her in what to do?

Was she being used?

The temptation to fire up the program and let it run struck her, and she couldn't be sure if it was some sort of mind control, or curiosity, or just plain exhaustion. No. She'd keep decoding
the program until she knew what she was playing with.

It was instinct that told her the mainframe was running a little slowly, a subconscious awareness that commands were taking a fraction of a second too long to be executed, a change in the rhythm of the machine.

She brought up the logs on her screen. They didn't show anything unusual – no-one else on the system, no record of anyone trying to dial in from outside.

Swan stepped out of her office and headed for a printer in the corner of the cubicles. She had inserted a command into the system that printed out a hard copy of the logs every five minutes. She lifted a handful of the blue-lined tractor-feed paper and ran her eyes over the last half-hour's records.

There. A fourth person was logged into the system. He had immediately edited the logs when he arrived, leaving only the paper copy to give away his presence.

Look at his connect speed! He wasn't coming in over a modem. He was talking to the mainframe through one of its terminals. Swan's scalp prickled. He had to be
right here.
But where? There were around forty terminals in the building.

It took her a few more minutes, a little more digging in the system, to work out which terminal he was using. She couldn't use the normal commands any sysadmin could use to find out who was where doing what: he would have noticed her in a moment, and fled. She finally grabbed the information from an error log, a single line written by the system when he'd made a typo.

The noise of the compute centre, the breathing of all those machines, was enough to mask the sound of the door swishing open. She could see the backs of three heads, three people working in the company's mainframe. She knew the number and location of every terminal in the room.

She walked right up to Bob. He was so intent on what he was doing that he simply didn't notice her. She watched over his shoulder as he patiently tried one trick after another, trying to grab root. Each time, he bumped up against one of her security fixes, and crossed off his tactic from a hand-written list.

Swan caught her bottom lip between her teeth. There was one she'd missed – he was in her account! Without a pause, he listed her files, spotted the new and huge program created by the monster, and set up an ftp session to transfer a copy of it somewhere else. She had to restrain herself from grabbing his shoulders and flinging him away from the terminal, spinning in his chair. She had to see where that file was being sent to.

He only looked up when the security guard she'd called clumped into the room, his billy club banging against the doors as they slid open. Bob froze when he saw her, his mouth locked open in shock, his hands curled over the keyboard like claws.

ROBERT SALMON SNR
was not impressed.

He drove from the centre of Washington to meet us in a parking lot in Crystal City, close to TLA. The Doctor, looking serious in his dark suit, shook hands with Salmon Senior. ‘It's good to meet you face to face at last. I only wish the circumstances were better.'

Bob's father was a scowl above a moustache, keeping his temper under control while he dealt with the crisis in good military fashion. When the Doctor introduced Peri and I, he dismissed us with a glance. ‘Maybe you can explain why my boy is in trouble with the police. He was mighty vague about it.'

‘Mr Salmon,' said the Doctor, ‘Bob has been helping me to investigate a serious threat to your nation's security.' He was choosing his words carefully. ‘He rose to a similar challenge as a very young man.'

‘Yes, he did. But everything we did five years ago was authorised. There was never any reason for the police to be phoning me about my son.'

‘I can't say too much,' said the Doctor, ‘but the stakes are much higher this time.' Mr Salmon's eyebrows lifted; last time the stakes had been nuclear blackmail.

‘You can say a whole lot more, Doctor. You can explain why it's necessary to involve a vulnerable young man in your mission. You can explain just what threat makes that a responsible thing to do.'

The Doctor said, ‘For one thing, Mr Salmon, your son is an adult capable of making his own choices. And for another –'

Peri said, ‘Shouldn't we go and get Bob out of jail?'

The Doctor and Mr Salmon both glanced at her. Peri's voice dropped, but she stood her ground. ‘He is waiting for us.'

‘You're right, of course,' said the Doctor. ‘Mr Salmon, I'm quite prepared to pay for Bob's release from custody.'

Robert Senior wanted to say ‘Don't be ridiculous,' but instead he said, ‘That won't be necessary.'

And so young Bob was extracted from the clutches of the law, having spent an educational night in the tank, and driven back to his parents' house in the ‘burbs. Father and son didn't say a word to one another in the car, but Bob asked, ‘Is Mom here?' as Salmon Snr rattled the keys in the lock.

‘No. I didn't call her.' Bob sagged with relief into a kitchen chair, but his father said, ‘It's up to you to tell her yourself.'

‘Oh.'

Mr Salmon pulled out a chair, then stood for a few long moments, his hand on the back of it, stroking the wood. Finally he sat down.

‘As soon as you moved out of this house,' he began, ‘your life was your own. If you want to skip work and run around the countryside chasing UFOs, it's none of our business.' Bob knew better than to interrupt. ‘But as soon as your mother and I become involved, it's our business too.'

Pause. ‘Dad,' said Bob, ‘I have never bullshitted you in my life. Have I?' Mr Salmon's mouth flattened beneath his moustache in a look of irritation. Bob rushed on, ‘You know I would never do anything like that without a meaningful reason. I wish you could have been with us when we visited Ritchie.'

‘Who's this Richie?'

‘It's a place,' said Bob. ‘A little town. A piece of technology got loose there and it's done a lot of damage. We're trying to stop it doing any more damage.'

‘When you broke into that building,' said his father, ‘did you understand what you were putting on the line?'

‘I didn't break in. I just walked in. All she's got on me is trespassing.'

‘That could be a lot if you're trying to convince a computer company to hire you,' said his father.

‘I know. Swan has got me by the prairie oysters. She can make a lot out of that little charge. I knew when I went in there that she could wreck my career or my chances of college. A couple of days ago I wouldn't have dared to get anywhere near her. But she's got something that's at least as dangerous as what Professor Xerxes tried to put in your program when I was fifteen.'

‘Convince me,' said Robert Senior.

‘Xerxes was only aiming to corrupt one program. Imagine if he had been able to install a trapdoor in
every
machine. The military, the colleges – and it doesn't matter which box they have or what system they're running on it. Swan has something that can break into all of them. And once that thing gets loose on ARPAnet, it'll be like the tapeworm in
Shockwave Rider
. There'll be no way to stop it or stamp it out except to kill the net itself.'

‘What about vaccinating the computers before that can happen?'