Jericho Iteration (26 page)

“How’s that?”

She paused to take a sip from her cappuccino, licking the cream from her lips. “Maybe this sort of thing might have made a little sense twenty years ago, when the U.S.S.R. was still around and was stockpiling weapons, but nowadays the only country that still has a large nuclear arsenal is the U.S. itself. Any third-world country that wanted to nuke us wouldn’t fire a secondhand Russian missile … they’d simply put it on a freighter and sail it into a harbor city … and most arms-control people would tell you that accidentally launching a missile is much harder than it’s made out in movies. So Sentinel was obsolete almost before it got off the drawing board.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “I’ve heard that said before. So why were you going along with it?”

“Because it’s our job, that’s why.” She shrugged offhandedly. “Look, that may sound irresponsible, but we aren’t the congressmen who voted to appropriate money for this thing. We’re just some guys hired to do one small part of the program. We all knew that it was a fluke, but if this was something Uncle Sam wanted, and since Tiptree was writing out paychecks on behalf of the taxpayers, who were we to argue?”

“You remember Alfred Nobel?” I muttered. “They guy who invented dynamite? I think he would have disagreed with—”

“Yeah, right.” She held up her hand. “That’s political, and anyway it’s beside the point … at least, right now it is. Let me catch up to the rest of the story, then I’ll get back to Sentinel.”

While Payson-Smith and Kim Po were concentrating on the c-cube for Sentinel, Jeff Morgan and Hinckley herself were developing a different and far more sophisticated a-life-form. This was the basic research end of the project, intended to produce a nonmilitary spin-off of the original Ruby Fulcrum program; once the Sentinel c-cube was wrapped up and delivered to DOD, Payson-Smith and Kim joined the other two cyberneticists in spending most of their time and effort on the spin-off project.

It had been Morgan’s brainstorm to develop a “benign virus” to enable different computer networks to be interfaced without going through a lot of the handshaking protocols mandated by conventional communications software. He was inspired, in part, by the infamous “Internet worm,” which a young hacker had let loose in the government’s computer network during the late eighties. However, Jeff’s dream had been to produce a much more complex—and far more benign—version of the same basic idea. This advanced a-life would be a hybrid between a neural-net and a conventional digital program, allowing it to interface with all types of computers, sort of like a cybernetic philosopher’s stone. In fact, the a-life-form that they invented was initially called Alchemist, until the team slipped into referring to it by a part of its old code-name: Ruby.

“Like all a-life organisms,” Hinckley went on, “Ruby is guided by a set of rules that mandate its behavior, and these rules compose an iteration—”

“Iteration?”

“Like a cycle,” she said, “but the difference between most program iterations and Ruby’s is that the others have definite beginnings and endings. Ruby’s iteration is open-ended, though. It keeps repeating itself indefinitely. Simply put, it works like this.”

She held up a finger. “First, once it’s introduced into a computer, it seeks out all programs in that system and everything that’s interfaced by those programs. It doesn’t even need to be entered into the hard drive … transmitting an affected program through modem into a net or even slipping a contaminated disk into the floppy port will do the same trick.”

She held up another finger. “Second, it runs through all possible permutations of standard algorithms until it reaches the ones that match and unlock the target program’s source code. Once that’s accomplished, it deciphers the source code and gains admission. Same idea as hotwiring a car’s ignition plate by finding out what the owner’s fingerprint looks like and forging it.”

A third finger rose from her palm. “Third, it absorbs the target program into its own database, but it does this without locking out access by another user or impeding the functions of that program … and then it moves on to seek the next program in the system, and so on.”

She paused while the waitress reappeared to reheat my cup of coffee and ask Beryl if she wanted another cappuccino. She shook her head, and the waitress drifted back into the lunchtime crowd. “That’s what happened when my buddy Jah booted up a copy of the disk you gave John,” I said. “It took over every program in his system but didn’t lock him out.”

Beryl nodded eagerly, like a mother proud of her child’s accomplishments. “Exactly. That’s why I gave Tiernan the mini-disk in the first place … to prove what Ruby can do. The only difference was that your friend—uh, Jah, right?—stumbled upon it by accident.”

“Hell of a demonstration,” I murmured. “And you say this thing can slip through networks and copy itself in other computers?”

“Yes,” she said, “but that’s not exactly the right term for what it does. It doesn’t copy, it
reproduces.
That was the whole purpose, to make a virus that could spread through the national datanet and all the commercial nets, interface with any computer it encounters, then promulgate itself again through cyberspace until it reaches the next computer. And so on, right down the line, like the domino theory.”

I poured some more milk into my coffee. “I don’t understand, though … something like this would require an awful lot of memory to store all that data. And besides, wouldn’t it be defeated by antivirus programs?”

Hinckley shook her head. “No, no, it’s not quite like a virus. It’s more sophisticated than that. It’s like …”

She sighed and glanced up at the ceiling, searching for an easy explanation. “Ruby is an advanced cellular automaton. Each computer it encounters, no matter how large or small, is absorbed into the larger organism, with each of its programs capable of being controlled by Ruby itself. Then Ruby splits itself apart and automatically seeks out the next computer that it can interface. Meanwhile, the last computer affected becomes a node, or a cell, of the larger system …”

“And it keeps growing …”

Hinckley nodded. “Right. A little more with each program it interfaces, with each computer functioning as a small part of the larger organism, just as your body is composed of billions of cells that are interconnected to a larger organism, each serving its own function. Unplugging a computer it has accessed won’t destroy it, any more than killing one cell would destroy the bio-organism it serves.”

She raised a forefinger. “By the same token, antiviral programs are useless against it, because Ruby seeks out, finds, and defeats the basic source codes of those programs, just as a cancer cell defeats the antibodies that surround it.”

“Oh my god …” I murmured.

“If you think that’s scary,” Hinckley said, “try this on for size: each time Ruby completes an iteration, it not only grows a little more in storage capacity … it also evolves a little more. It
learns.”

She folded her arms together on the table and stared straight at me. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” she asked, her voice kept beneath the noise level of the room, yet not so low that I could miss its urgency. “In theory at least, after a certain number of iterations a critical mass … or a phase transition, if you want to use a-life jargon … may potentially be achieved, in which Ruby crosses over from being a relatively dumb a-life-form to something much different.”

At first, I didn’t get what she was saying … and then it hit me. “Intelligence?” I whispered.

She slowly nodded. “Artificial intelligence … in an artificial life-form that is practically immortal.”

I whistled under my breath. Beryl Hinckley was right in her initial assessment; Ruby was no simple spreadsheet program or computer game, but something that imitated life …

No. Far more than that, even: Ruby didn’t just imitate life; it was a form of life itself. Perhaps not born of woman and man but of fingers tapping instructions into keyboards, yet nonetheless
life …

And, even as I realized this, the full enormity of what we were discussing came home with the impact of a sock in the jaw—and with it, a sneaking suspicion.

“This program,” I said haltingly, “or cellular automaton, whatever you call it … anyway, when Jah realized that it was some sort of virus, the first thing he did was to disconnect his phone cord.”

Hinckley gazed at me without saying anything. I hesitated. “Anyway, it’s a good thing he did that, right?”

“No,” she said softly, gently shaking her head. “It wouldn’t have mattered even if he hadn’t, and that’s what I told John last night. Ruby’s already out there … in fact, it was released eleven months ago.”

During its infancy, Ruby’s cradle had been an IBM desktop computer inside the a-life lab at the Tiptree Corporation. The team had not been careless in raising their creation; they had disconnected the cable leading from the computer’s internal modem to the nearest phone jack, and a locked grill had been placed over the computer’s CD-OP drive, one that could be removed only by a key carried solely by the four members of the Ruby Fulcrum team.

They knew exactly what they had created: their baby was a Frankensteinian monster that had to be kept locked in its dungeon until it could be trained to behave in a social manner. In turn, as the parents of this potentially destructive creation, they attempted to be responsible in its upbringing. They had fed it only select bits of data, made careful notes as it slowly grew and taken pride in every step it mastered, but nonetheless they made sure that Ruby didn’t cross the street until it was properly toilet-trained.

Yet, despite all their precautions, the inevitable accident happened. This occurred on May 17, 2012—the same day an inevitable accident happened throughout the rest of St. Louis County.

“The earthquake hit the company pretty hard,” Hinckley said. “You can’t tell it now, but four people were killed when the cryonics lab collapsed. That was bad enough, but a lot of other people got injured because of ceilings and shelves falling in. None of my team were hurt, though, thank God … we were in the commissary having a late lunch, and the worst thing that happened was that I got a sprained shoulder when a light fixture nailed me … but our lab was almost totaled.”

She paused, looking nervously again toward the restaurant’s front door. I glanced over my shoulder; the lunchtime crowd was beginning to filter out, and our waitress looked as if she was wondering whether she would get a decent tip from two people who had taken up a booth but ordered nothing more than coffee. Other than that, though, nothing seemed unusual; no ERA troopers, no police cars, no mysterious men in trench coats lurking near the cash register.

“Go on,” I prompted. “The lab …”

Her gaze returned to me. “The lab was busted up pretty badly,” she continued, “and the company didn’t want any valuable employees going back inside until it had cleaned things up … hot wires, unstable walls, things like that. So we were sent home for the next several days while Tiptree brought in a general contractor from Chicago to restore everything—Science Services, some firm that specializes in laboratory restorations, that’s what we we’re told. Don’t worry about it, they said. Come back Monday and everything will be fine … and, you know, that was all right with us, because we had our own messes at home to clean up. Po lost his house, Dick’s cats had been killed, my car had been crushed by a tree …”

She sighed as she settled back against her seat, rubbing her eyelids with her fingertips. “Well, to make a long story short, some college kid was responsible for straightening up the a-life lab. I can’t really blame him, because things were scattered all over the place and no one had kept any reliable charts as to what went where … but when he uprighted the Ruby Fulcrum computer and found the loose telephone prong leading from the modem, he figured it was another loose wire and slipped it into the jack.”

“Oh, shit …”

Hinckley’s face expressed a wan smile. “Yes, well, that’s one way of putting it. After he did that and he was assured that the phone lines were operational again, he switched on the computer to give it a quick test … and, of course, being a conscientious Science Services employee, he tested the modem by dialing into a local BBS to see if the patch was solid.”

And, without anyone’s realizing what had happened, Ruby was allowed to crawl through the bars of its playpen. Frankenstein’s monster had been let loose to roam the streets of the global village.

“We didn’t know what had happened until we came back to the lab on Monday,” Hinckley went on. “Dick flipped out, of course, and the first thing he did was to try and figure out where and how Ruby had slipped through our fingers. To do this, he had to access the company’s mainframe and backtrack all its incoming and outgoing phone calls, including e-mail and fax records.”

She stared at me directly, meeting my gaze over the tabletop. “When he did this,” she said, very quietly, “he managed to penetrate company files none of us had ever seen and discovered something none of us were ever meant to know—”

At that moment, the door slammed loudly. We both glanced up; no one but a pair of salesmen, swaggering in for a late lunch as if they owned the place. One of them yelled for our waitress to seat them; the other tried to stroke her ass as she flitted by. A couple of slimers, nothing more, but their rude entrance made her more aware of our surroundings.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “I don’t like this place.”

“C’mon,” I said. “Just some yups cruising for burgers.”

She continued to stare uncertainly toward the door. “There might be ERA people out there,” she said. “They don’t always wear uniforms or carry guns, you know.”

She was scared and had every right to be, but that didn’t matter right now. I wanted to get the rest of the story out of her before she went down the street to the courthouse. “Don’t worry about the feds grabbing us,” I said quickly. “Remember what I told you about Barris, the local ERA honcho? He gave me a card I could use to get us past checkpoints.”

“Card?” Her gaze wavered back toward me, only slightly distracted. “What sort of card?”