Текст книги "Jericho Iteration"

Автор книги: Allen Steele

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“So I figure it’s just a software glitch,” he continued, sweeping his dreadlocks back from his face, “and go back to what I was doing before … except now I can’t access the SAR. At least not right away … it took me two or three minutes just to pull up the opening screen, and that was after running through all the different startup commands.”

“Hmm …”

He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, man. Twilight zone shit. So I get suspicious and I start thinking to myself, y’know … Jesus, maybe the disk is infected with a virus or something.”

He turned around in his chair and pointed to the telephone wall jack next to his desk. I saw now that the flat gray cord was lying on the floor beneath the jack, its module disconnected. “So the first thing I do is yank the plug, just in case it really was a virus and someone is trying to call in while I’m doping out this thing.”

“Good idea,” I murmured. If Jah’s hardware had been infected with a virus and he didn’t know exactly how it had been transmitted to his computer, then it made perfect sense to isolate his system. Jah was anything but discourteous to other users, although it was a good thing he wasn’t a sysop for even a minor BBS; otherwise, dozens of other computers might have been infected by now. “So what happened then?”

“Now it gets really weird.” He held up a finger. “I opened a window into my antigen subroutine and asked it to check the system.” He shook his head. “It comes back and tells me it can’t find anything. No viruses, no missing batches or boot sectors, no nothing. According to my computer, I’m clean as a whistle. But I’ve still got the creeps, so I do this …”

Before I could ask, he turned back to the computer and used its trackball to log into a program on the directory. A moment later the opening screen of his search-and-retrieve program flashed on; when its menu bar was up, he moused a subroutine listed as VR SEE and toggled it open. “Okay,” he said, “now here comes the interesting part. Put that on.”

He pointed to a department store mannequin propped up against the wall next to the desk. The dummy was African-American and female; it was decked out in some exotic black lace lingerie straight out of any kid’s favorite wet dream. I had to wonder which one of Jah’s girlfriends had donated this little bit of nothing to his trophy room.

“Uh, Jah … I hate to tell you this, but-”

“The helmet,” he said impatiently. “Put the HMD on.”

I looked at the mannequin again. Right. A head-mounted display was propped on the dummy’s bald head, almost neutralizing the sexual effect. The HMD vaguely resembled a bicycle helmet except for the oversize opaque visor. A slender cable led from the back of the helmet to the serial port on Jah’s computer. A pair of naugahyde datagloves were draped around the dummy’s shoulders.

I picked up the HMD and weighed it in my hands. “Is this really necessary?”

Call me an old fart, but I dislike tripping in cyberspace. I was a kid when the first Virtuality arcades opened in St. Louis; although some of my fellow mall rats used to spend their weekends in the VR simulators, hunting each other through bizarre three-dimensional landscapes or waging war in giant robots, the experience had always left me disoriented. Riding the roller coasters and whirligigs at the Catholic diocese fair was fine, but being thrown into a cybernetic construct tended to make me nauseous.

Sure, I know the old saw about cyberspace being what you do when you’re on the phone, but making a phone call is so prosaic that you seldom think twice about it. VR tripping … that’s like skydiving to me. Some people dig it and some people don’t, that’s all.

“Hey, I did it,” he replied, as if he had just jumped off an old railway bridge into the Missouri River and now wanted me to experience the same rush. “Don’t worry, it won’t toast your brain. Now c’mon … I don’t know how much longer this is going to last.”

What’s going to last?I wanted to ask, but Jah was gnawing at the bit: a teenager eager to show off to an adult who might appreciate this sort of thing.

I reluctantly donned the thick datagloves, then I took a deep breath and pulled the helmet over my head. Jah adjusted the padded visor until it was firmly in place against my eyes.

“Okay, kid,” I said. “Show me what you got.”

And he did.

For a few moments, there was only darkness … then the universe was filled with iridescent silver light, featureless yet fine-grained, as if I was looking at a bolt of electronic silk that had been wrapped around my head. After another second the backdrop faded to dull gray; as it did, a small silver square appeared directly in front of me, a gridded plane floating in null-space.

“Okay,” I heard Jah say, “that’s a representation of the computer’s memory. Each box you see on the matrix is a different program or file I’ve got stored on this thing … touch it and you’ll come in closer.”

I hesitated, then raised my right hand and watched as its computer-animated analog rose before my eyes. I curled my fingers and pointed straight at the matrix and suddenly found myself hurtling forward …

“Hold on!” Jah yelled. I heard his chair scoot back from the desk, then his hands grabbed my shoulders.

“Maybe you ought to sit down for this,” he said as he guided me into the seat. “Okay, that better?”

“Uh, yeah … thanks.” I hadn’t even noticed that I had lost my balance. The flat square had expanded into a transparent three-dimensional cube made up of dozens of smaller cubes. It resembled a crystalline version of some mind-fuck puzzle my dad used to have, a plastic toy where the idea was to shift the interlocked pieces until all four colors were on the same side … yeah, a Rubik’s Cube, except now I could see all the way through the thing.

“Okay,” Jah said, “you see the matrix clearly now? You see all the packets?”

“Yeah, I see it.” Each box-or packet, to use Jah’s term-in the matrix was labeled with a different alphanumeric code; those would be the programs stored in the memory. Yet, as I slowly orbited the cube, I could now see that not all the packets were silver; closer to its center, a small nucleus of packets were cream-colored, and as I watched, one of them suddenly turned silver.

“It’s changing color,” I said.

“That’s been happening since I first accessed the matrix,” Jah said. “When I looked at it the first time, only a few of the packets were silver, and the rest of ’em were white … but the ones that had turned silver were the system drivers. Everything else is the other files and programs on this machine.”

“A virus?” I asked, and I heard him grunt. “But you said your antigen program hadn’t discovered any-”

“Nothing it could detect,” he said. “But even that’s been absorbed by this sucker … and believe me, Scud is the best virus hunter-killer you can find.”

I shook my head. That was a mistake; the cyberspatial construct swam back and forth before me. I clutched the armrests with my hands, fighting a brief spell of vertigo. “I don’t get it,” I said after the cube was dead-center in front of me again. “If this program’s still working, then it must not have been taken over yet …”

“Oh, no,” Jah replied. “ProVirtual-the program we’re using now-was one of the first to go, and that’s the weird thing. Everything the virus has taken over still works as it did before. It’s just … well, here, let me show you. Back away from the matrix, willya?”

It took me a second to understand what he was asking me to do. Then I tentatively raised my hand again and pointed to a bit of blank space above the cube. At once, I zoomed to a higher orbit above the matrix; it diminished slightly in size, but I could still see the entire thing.

“I’m booting up an old game I erased from memory a couple of months ago,” he said. “It’s called MarzBot … pretty stupid once you got it figured out … anyway, I’m taking the master disk and throwing it into the floppy drive, not the hard drive. Now watch this …”

Off to one side, I saw a small isolated packet appear off to one side of the matrix, as if it was a displaced cream-colored electron. For a second, nothing happened …

And then something happened.

Almost quicker than the eye could follow, a bridge extended itself outward from the cube: a string of silver packets, following a weightless pattern that, during its zigzagging motion, vaguely resembled the L-shaped movement a knight takes upon a chessboard. Before I could take a breath, the bridge had connected with the isolated packet of information containing MarzBot. There was the briefest moment while the packet still remained off-white.

Then it turned silver.

Then it was sucked straight into the cube as the bridge collapsed in upon itself, reeling in the packet like a fisherman towing in a trout that had taken the bait. Within a second, the MarzBot packet was gone …

And the cube was slightly larger.

“Goddamn,” I said. “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Jah said quietly. “The computer did it by itself. I haven’t touched the keyboard since I slipped MarzBot into the floppy port and hit the ENTER key. The virus reached out to the program, broke through its copy-protect subroutine, accessed its source code, and absorbed the game … all in the time it took for us to watch.”

I pulled off the HMD, shook off the aftereffects of VR decompression, and stared at the monitor. The image of the matrix cube on the computer screen was much flatter now, less lifelike than what I had seen in cyberspace … yet it was no less threatening.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

“Fuckin’ A, man.” Jah was staring at me, his eyes wide with fear. “This thing is the balls. I don’t know what you found, but it’s no ordinary virus. It can’t be detected, it can’t be fought off, but it takes over anything that even gets close to it.”

He pointed at the screen. “I’ve tried everything I could throw at it,” he said, his voice filled with both anger and awe. “Other antigens, Norton Tesseract, Lotus Opus … shit, even a shareware disk containing a virus that someone once gave me as a gag … and it swamps every program I’ve given it.”

Jah shook his head in wonderment. “Whatever it is, it’s one hungry son of a bitch. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was-”

The antique Mickey Mouse phone on his desk buzzed, interrupting his train of thought. Jah swore under his breath as he bent backward to pick it up; he listened for a moment, then cupped a hand over the receiver.

“It’s Dad,” he said. “He wants you to come upstairs right away … says that he just got a call from someone who wants to talk to you.”

I was still staring at the monitor, watching as the last few packets in the matrix went from white to silver. “Is it important?” I murmured, not wanting to distract myself with a call from some yahoo. It’s not very often you get to look the devil straight in the eye. Jah asked his father if it was urgent, then he cupped the receiver again.

“He says it came from someone named Beryl Hinckley,” Jah said. “She wants to meet you an hour from now.”

16

(Friday, 12:06 P.M.)

The midday lunch rush in Clayton was just beginning as I climbed out of the rickshaw cab I had caught at MetroLink station and paid off the driver. The kid folded the money I gave him and shoved it into his fanny pack without so much as a word, then pulled out into the four-lane traffic of Central Avenue, playing a quick game of chicken with a streetcar as they rounded the corner of Forsyth together.

Long before St. Louis’s county and municipal governments had merged, Clayton had been a small metropolis in its own right, a prosperous “edge city” just west of Forest Park. Now it had become St. Louis’s uptown business district, its high-rise office buildings constituting a second skyline several miles from the riverfront. Compared to downtown, though, most of the damage suffered by Clayton during the quake had been cleaned up months ago, thanks in no small part to federal relief money. A few small offices had been condemned, a couple of side streets were still impassable, but otherwise it was now hard to tell whether this side of town had been affected at all by New Madrid.

No wonder. Clayton had always looked like a little piece of Los Angeles, disassembled from Beverly Hills and airlifted, brick by pink granite brick, to greater St. Louis. Yet I had never much cared for this part of the city. Despite its sleek postmodern veneer, Clayton was still a ghetto: ten square blocks of overpaid tax accountants, corporate lawyers, and executive vice presidents, an arrogant Disneyland for the aging yupsters and young MBAs who strutted down the sidewalks, each heading for his or her next opportunity to score big bucks. Although ERA troopers were invisible during the day, they were always out in force at night to keep Squat City refugees from taking up residence in the alleys and doorways of the social gentry who called Clayton home. Fall from grace, though, and you fall hard; some of those refugees probably used to live here, too.

The weather had turned bad; the blue skies of early morning had given way to pale gray clouds as a late April cold front began to move in from the west. Offices were letting out for lunch hour as I made my way down Central Avenue’s crowded sidewalk to Le Café François, about halfway down the block from the county courthouse.

It was your typical business-lunch bistro, already packed with salesmen and secretaries, and it took me a couple of moments before I spotted her. Beryl Hinckley was seated in a secluded booth at the back of the restaurant, nursing a cup of cappuccino as she furtively watched the door. Upon spotting me, she gave no overt sign of recognition other than to nod her head slightly; I cut my way through the dining room and slid into the booth across the table from her.

“Hi,” I said. “Long time, no see.”

“You’re late,” she said coldly. “If you’d been any longer getting here, I would have left.”

I shrugged. “If you wanted a reporter, you should have asked for one who owns a car.”

Or one who had changed his clothes or taken a shower within the past twenty-four hours,I might have added; her nose wrinkled at my slovenly appearance. It wasn’t my fault; she had given me barely enough time to catch the Green Line train out here, let alone clean up a little.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said calmly. “This will have to be quick. When we’re through here, you’re going to walk me down the block to the courthouse, where I’m going to find a judge and request that he place me in protective custody.”

“What?” Had she told me instead that she planned to throw herself off the Martin Luther King Bridge, she couldn’t have caught me more by surprise.

“I’d prefer to surrender to a federal circuit judge,” she went on, “but the federal courthouse is only three blocks from the stadium. Since the whole point is to avoid being captured by ERA, I’ll have to settle for a state judge.”

“Whoa, wait a minute, lady … back up a second. Why are you-”

I was interrupted by a young waitress coming by to offer me a menu. I was hungry and could have done well with a burger and fries, but I shook my head and asked for coffee instead. The girl gave me a sweet smile and sashayed away.

“Did you bring your PT?” she asked when the waitress was out of earshot. I reached into my pocket and pulled out Joker. “Good. I picked a public place for this interview because it’s the safest option right now, but we still don’t have much time.”

I placed Joker on the table between us but didn’t switch it into audio-record mode just yet. “On the contrary,” I replied, “I think we’ve got all the time in the world. At least long enough for us to have coffee and get to know each other a little better-”

“Mr. Rosen …” she said impatiently.

“Y’know, the usual stuff. What high school did you go to? How did you like the Muny the other night? What did you say to my best friend that got him killed? That sort of thing.”

The muscles in Hinckley’s jaw tightened; she looked as if she were about to explode, but she was forced to remain calm while the waitress returned to place a mug of black coffee in front of me. “I’ve done a little checking on you since we met,” I went on after the girl had vanished again. “Found out a few interesting things, like the fact that you’re a research scientist at Tiptree, involved with the Ruby Fulcrum project for the company’s Sentinel program, and that your boss, Richard Payson-Smith, is currently being sought by the feds in connection with two murders.”

I picked up the cream pitcher and diluted the coffee with a dash of milk. “Also, you’ve been in hiding since last night,” I said as I stirred the coffee. “Given the neighborhood we’re in, you must have taken the Green Line out here, then checked into either the Radisson or the Holiday Inn … registering under an assumed name and paying for the room in cash, of course, since you were smart enough to take out all that money from your credit cards last night.”

Her eyes widened in outrage; for a moment there I thought steam would come whistling out of her ears. Except for the ATM transactions, the last bit was sky blue guesswork, but there was no sense in letting her know that. I was getting under her skin, which was exactly what I meant to do.

“Of course,” I continued before she could interrupt, “I could just get up from this table and leave. That’s mean sticking you with the bill, but I think paying the tab is the least of your worries right now.”

I picked up the mug and took a sip. “Good coffee. So what do you say we cut the crap, okay?”

I was bluffing. If I had a pair of brass handcuffs, I would have fastened her ankle to the table and threatened to flush the key down the men’s room toilet unless she spilled her guts. This woman had put me through hell in less than forty-eight hours after I had met her; besides getting a little cheap gratification from watching her squirm, I wasn’t about to let her waltz into some judge’s private chambers until she told me every nasty secret locked in her head.

Hinckley stared at me silently, her dark eyes smoldering with repressed anger. “One more thing,” I said, and this time I wasn’t bluffing. “I hold you responsible for John Tiernan’s death. If he hadn’t gone to Clancy’s to meet you last night, he’d still be alive now. But he took the bullet-or a laser beam, whatever-that was meant for you, and that really pisses me off, so don’t give me this ‘just a few minutes, then I gotta go’ routine. You owe me, sweetheart.”

She blinked hard a couple of times, then took a deep breath and slowly let it out again. “Mr. Rosen,” she said, her tone a little less imperious now, “the person who shot your friend-and it wasn’t Richard-didn’t miss. He’s looking for me now, but he meant to kill Tiernan. He was the intended target, not me.”

“Bullshit.”

“No bullshit.” She shook her head. “There’s a conspiracy behind all this, and the last thing the people behind it want is public attention. Despite whatever you think you may know, trust me … you don’t know anything.”

I wasn’t about to argue the point. I didn’t know anything, and I was counting on her to give me the answers, but before I could ask she clasped her hands together above the table and pointed a finger straight at me.

“One more thing,” she said, “and this is why I’m in a hurry. There’s four people they want to see dead … and you’re one of them.”

I felt my heart skip just a little. “And the only way we’re going to get out of this alive,” she said, “is if you shut up and listen to what I have to tell you. Understand?”

I believed her. All of a sudden, this pretentious and socially correct little Le Café François was no longer as safe or secure as it seemed when I walked in through the door. In fact, it felt as if I were sitting in the center of a sniper’s crosshair, drinking great coffee and waiting for someone to squeeze the trigger.

I slowly nodded my head, and she gestured toward Joker. “Good. Now turn on your PT. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

Before she got started, though, I filled her in on much of what I already knew.

Although it was an abridged version of what I had related to Pearl a few hours earlier, it included the fact that Barris and McLaughlin had pressured me into stating that I would help them track her down, as well as Payson-Smith and Morgan. I was barely through telling her about being sworn to secrecy with regard to Ruby Fulcrum, though, when she began to shake her head.

“The name’s right,” Hinckley said, “but the details are all wrong. Ruby Fulcrum exists-I told you that when I first met you-but it’s not exactly what they claim it is.”

The four scientists who had been assigned to the Ruby Fulcrum project, she went on to explain, were all specialists in artificial intelligence-or perhaps, more specifically, a branch of AI research called “a-life,” or artificial life: computer programs that mimicked all activities of organic life-forms, including the ability to learn on their own.

As Cale McLaughlin had told me, the primary objective of Ruby Fulcrum had been to devise a c-cube system for Sentinel 1.This was to be an advanced program-since it was based partly on neural-net systems, even the word programitself was almost as archaic as calling a modern automobile a horseless carriage-which, once installed within the satellite’s onboard computer system, would learn on its own how to distinguish between ballistic missiles carrying real warheads and those launched as decoys. However, the long-range goal of the project had been the development of a self-replicating a-life-form. Although a-life R amp;D had been conducted, albeit on a smaller scale, by university and corporate labs since the 1980s, this was the first time a major DOD-funded research effort had been directed at this sort of cybernetic technology.

“The first part of the project was easy to come by, relatively speaking,” Hinckley said. “Richard and Po were principally responsible for coming up with an a-life system for Sentinel, and they managed to conclude most of their research about a year ago-”

“And Payson-Smith wasn’t opposed to it?” I asked. “I mean, he wasn’t against the military application?”

“Is that what they told you?” Hinckley looked at me askance, blowing out her cheeks in disgust. “Yeah, Dick’s such a dove, he has his father’s old RAF medals framed in his office just so he can swear at them.” She shook her head. “If anything, he was the most hawkish member of the team, even if he thought the whole concept of an orbital antimissile system was a little daft.”

“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.”