InterstellarNet: Origins (18 page)

“Colin …”

“A few minutes ago, Pashwah”—the Ophiuchan agent—“contacted me with an ultimatum. It claims that the ICU owes it slightly over two trillion Intersols for unlicensed use of Interstellar Algorithms Consortium biocomputing technology. It gave me a week to pay.”

Two
trillion
Intersols? The sum was staggering! And in only a week?

Without implants as intermediaries, this dialogue was painfully slow and inefficient. And why weren’t they using their implants? How much worse was this going to get? “Colin, I don’t understand. We licensed that technology from another Sna…Ophiuchan outfit.” She barely caught herself before
Snake
got all the way out.

It wasn’t hot in the shade, but Colin’s forehead was beaded with sweat. He blotted his face with a handkerchief. “Pashwah claims that Biocomputing Industries had stolen the technology from this IAC group.”

“But
we
bought it in good faith, and through Pashwah as an agent. If two Ophiuchan organizations have a quarrel, what does that have to do with us? Why doesn’t IAC go to court, or wherever the Ophiuchans go about disputes, for redress? And what does
any
of this have to do with an agent escaping its sandbox, or us not using implants, or Sparks?”

Colin took a deep breath. “Too many questions, all right on target. Biocomputing Industries, which sold the tech to us, supposedly went out of business. We’re the only ones around to recover from. As for your other questions, consider Pashwah’s answer when I asked why the UP should consider itself involved.

“It asked if I was aware of the Sparks outage. I said yes, of course. It claimed to have caused the Sparks outage…and that it could do the same to
any
biocomputer across Sol system.”

Joyce felt her jaw drop. Her neural implant—and everyone else’s—relied on Ophiuchan biocomp technology. So did most computers and comm networks across Sol system. If this was not an idle threat, the Ophiuchan agent could bring humanity to its collective knees.

3

Centaur:
the popular name for the intelligent species of the Alpha Centauri system. The Centaurs have described themselves as herd-dwelling herbivores. Their home world’s climate is very tempestuous, due to complex environmental interactions with three suns, and climatological pressures are believed to have provided a major evolutionary stimulus.

—Internetopedia

“So what do you think?” Kevin Aldrich concluded.

T’bck Cha did not remark on the ambiguity of the question. Why would he? The AI had more than enough experience with human rambling. He had represented Centaur commercial interests since being downloaded into his sandbox forty-one years earlier. “I think that you humans are a strange and wondrous people.”

Kevin laughed. “Where would be the interest if we all acted alike?” Or the profit? “So you think my little 3-V project might have a market back home?”

“A documentary about hobbyist recreations of the Neil Armstrong moon mission? People setting off to another world in homemade vessels more than a century behind the times? Such an adventure, such voluntary reversion to archaic technology, is something no Centaur would
ever
undertake.”

“Not exactly an answer,” Jeeves observed. The comment arrived through Kevin’s implant, undetectable by the ET agent.

“Nor did I expect one,” Kevin subvocalized back at his assistant. “We’re talking about Centaurs here. Now let me bargain.”

Kevin often spoke with ET agents. He thought that the experience gave him a far better understanding than most people of various alien behaviors. Now to put that insight to use …

As befitted a herd species in a highly variable climate, the Centaurs’ dominant psychological traits were groupthink and extreme risk aversion. That didn’t preclude curiosity about the nutty interstellar neighbors—just as Kevin was privately fascinated by the invariably flawed and dotty get-rich-quick schemes of his brother-in-law.

“T’bck Cha, my friend,” Kevin sent. “I’ll get to the point. Are you interested in buying a license to the documentary for the folks back home?”

The agent’s persona was that of a Centaur. Despite the common nickname for his species, that meant Kevin was seeing a quadrocular land octopus with green fur.

T’bck Cha said, “Imagine choosing to have only the most insubstantial of radio links to one’s fellows. That is just too alien
not
to be of horrifying fascination to those back home.” There was a pause while the agent datacrunched through who-knew-what media-marketing or -pricing model. “Would standard rates and a three-million Intersol advance against royalties be satisfactory?”

“Let me get back to you.” The suggested advance was double what Kevin had hoped for and, better yet, in the interstellar currency, but one
never
accepted the first offer. One also never passed up an opportunity to learn more about his customer. “What are some popular Centaur pastimes?” he asked innocently.

The agent rattled off variations on gardening, discussion groups, and environmental cleanup teams. Kevin shot a private request to Jeeves: Check into a possible documentary about human eco- disasters past. Chernobyl, perhaps. Big oil spills. Easter Island. That should be an irresistible shock topic for future sale to the Centaurs.

Throughout a long monologue about competitive inter-clan recreational recycling drives, Kevin considered how best to exploit the agent’s apparent good mood. With the Apollo reenactments as good as sold, he indulged his curiosity. “Apropos of nothing, T’bck Cha, I was wondering. Are you at risk of an outage like the one that took down the link to Barnard’s Star?”

“The Sparks crash, you mean.” The green octopod wiggled in the Centaur gesture of contemplation. “Perhaps. That is, I assume my sandbox uses the same underlying computing hardware as Sparks’s environment.” It was a token of a longstanding relationship that T’bck Cha spared Kevin a complaint about the gratuitous presumption unconfined agents were dangerous.

“Ironically,” T’bck Cha mused, “the outage impacted only the Ophiuchan channel. As best I can determine from inside my sandbox, it seems that human AIs are based heavily on Ophiuchan biocomputing."

Biocomputing:
the manipulation of information by molecular-scale computers, developed through the application of biological processes.

As revolutionary as the long-ago shift from discrete transistors to integrated circuits, biocomputing achieved orders-of-magnitude improvements in miniaturization and efficiency over the supplanted technology. Biocomputers rapidly became far more ubiquitous than the ICs they had rendered obsolete.

The most advanced biocomputing technology, now widely adopted throughout human space, is licensed from the Ophiuchans of the Barnard’s Star system. These biocomputers are derived from Ophiuchan genetic material, through a directed program of molecular evolution aimed at solving a sequence of complex archetype problems.

Since Ophiuchan genetic material, like human DNA, is full of evolutionary dead ends and leftovers (“junk genes”), the operational mechanisms of the technology are incompletely understood. Ophiuchan cells employ a single class of molecules to accomplish what in Earth-derived cells are the separate roles of genetic material and proteins, raising an additional—and, to date, insurmountable—barrier to human reverse-engineering of Ophiuchan biocomputational technology.

The prospect of adopting an only partially understood technology proved controversial. The first Ophiuchan biocomps were accordingly synthesized to the ET specification inside a Category Ten biohazard containment facility. Biologists and computer scientists then probed the biocomps in an isolated network environment for two years without observing any unexpected behavior. Despite these extraordinary precautions, the ICU’s subsequent import approval of Ophiuchan biocomputing technology remained a polarizing political issue for several years.

—Internetopedia

Was the use of an implant addictive? Joyce didn’t believe so, but unassisted thinking was certainly giving her a headache. Or maybe the throbbing had something to do with her surroundings. She scowled at the surely innocent geese that had surrounded her, honking expectantly for morsels from her sandwich. This secluded, certified-biocomputer-free clearing in the ICU’s wooded campus had become her office. At least it wasn’t raining.

She said, “Damn it, Colin, we need options.”

Her boss only tossed bits of crust from his own sandwich. She took the hint. “Right, I owe you options. So far, I have none. The Opies are light-years away and we have five days left. We can hardly appeal to them in time.”

Many people too polite to say Snake shortened the proper name—but Opie had always made Grandpa Matthews grin. He refused to explain.

“Colin, I’d
love
to pull the plug on the computing complex that Pashwah calls home, but it claims that there’s a dead-person switch built into the biocomp genome. Unless it netcasts a control message, ten percent of our computers will self-destruct. Another random ten percent will follow daily.

“My best people are monitoring messages to and from its sandbox using network sniffers. The hope is that we can shut it down and netcast ‘everything is fine here’ communiqués ourselves. Not surprisingly, most messages are encrypted. We haven’t yet spotted anything that looks like Pashwah’s supposed control directives.”

But if Pashwah used best practices, it would take months to decode a given day’s output. By then the agent would surely have switched encryption keys several times. Joyce laughed bitterly. Far from options for her boss, all she had to offer was a litany of excuses. “Naturally our best gear for tackling decryptions uses Opie biocomps. Who knows if they’d report back to Pashwah what we’re attempting? My computer folks say we don’t understand more than five percent of the biocomp genome. Hidden trapdoors into our software, spying, self-destruct mechanisms, dead-person switches…. Suddenly, they’re all believable.”

Colin allowed himself a bite of his sandwich. “So the i-commerce infrastructure meant to defend Earth’s interests is instead protecting Pashwah’s Trojan horses.”

“Yeah.” The irony was not lost on Joyce. Her father had spearheaded the definition and deployment of that infrastructure. “To be fair, all that infrastructure was established when we used homegrown computers.”

To be fairer, Dad had opposed the adoption of Ophiuchan biocomp. He’d called it an unacceptable and unnecessary risk. Unlike his ex-wife, he conceded that reasonable people evaluating the available data could honorably arrive at the opposite conclusion. Mom, on the other hand, felt that anyone opposed to the purchase was a xenophobic, technophobic, paranoid, and invertebrate idiot—an opinion she shared without hesitation.

Dad was entitled to a major I-told-you-so, though he wasn’t the type to bother.

For a while, the waddling geese made the only sounds. Joyce found she had no appetite and bought a brief silence with her lunch. “Basically, our economy has been infiltrated and held for ransom. I asked Pashwah, isn’t this almost a declaration of war?

“The answer was blunt even for Pashwah. It said, ‘How you choose to frame my request is of no consequence. Only your prompt payment matters.’ ”

4

Joyce massaged her temples, as though to banish her pounding headache would somehow reconnect her to the infosphere. It wouldn’t, of course. Neural implants required molecular-scale computing, and that meant Snake biocomps.

One brainstorming session had followed another in the excruciatingly primitive setting of this centuries-old, electricity-free Alpine chalet. Options were captured on an actual paper flipchart, the most useful insights torn out and thumbtacked to the paneled walls. With so little time left to act, Earth’s experts dared not spend the time to regress to an earlier generation of computers.

That was surely Pashwah’s plan.

The closest her tiger team had come to a bright idea was skepticism. Biocomps had, after all, been exhaustively tested for two years in an isolated ICU lab. What if the Opies had had nothing to do with the Sparks outage? Human experts could not reproduce the failure, and there was no hard proof that Pashwah had caused it. Maybe the AI was running an elaborate bluff, exploiting humanity’s known inability to reverse-engineer the imported tech.

Joyce had placed a voice call—oh, how Neolithic!—to Pashwah, and learned two things. First, the biocomps had not required handshake messages for an initial
five
years, precisely to remain viable throughout possible quarantine testing. Second, and dramatically, the agent could indeed crash biocomps at will. Exactly as Pashwah predicted, a sudden outage of the ICU’s massively redundant intranet lasted forty-five minutes. To the nanosecond.