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  God knew he needed help. He had BSed a delay, but his grade would be "Incomplete" until he got the paper turned in. What the hell value was analytical geometry to selling stocks?

  They entered the AL building. Jeff striding purposefully toward the lab door. Its little inset window was dark. Below the glass, an announcement for Linda's party this evening was taped to the door. The sign was already there the night, very late, Jeff had come by to see if the old access code still worked. Old AJ had been well hammered even before ignominiously firing him. If AJ had meant to change the combination, he'd obviously forgotten.

  "I told you it would be empty." Jeff flipped up the lid of the cipherlock and tapped in the code. The door fell ajar with a metallic click.

  Hirsch made a beeline for the supercomputer. His hands stroked the chassis lovingly. Geek. He burrowed into his backpack, extracting a set of virtual-reality goggles with microphone, a scuffed pressure-sensing mat, a string of infrared sensors, a VR wand, a CD-ROM case, and a data disk.

  Jeff managed not to sneer at the CD label: lame magic - quest crap. "Give me the CD and disk. I'll load them while you set up your gear." He popped the CD into the machine while the geek unsnarled cables. The program was running before the wrinkled mat and sensor string were connected to unused comm ports.

  While Hirsch configured his gear, Jeff foraged through the lab for something to read. All he found was techno-weenie journals. Oh joy, oh rapture. It was going to be a long night.

  He gestured vaguely at the CD drive. "You're still playing that?"

  "I haven't touched it in a while. No machine I had access to could do it justice. It's supposed to be awesome on a super, though." Hirsch untwisted a few more kinks in a cable. "I'm ready. How about you?"

  "We're all set," Jeff said.

  Hirsch stepped sock footed onto the mat, where pressure sensors determined his position. One hand clasped his wand; with the other he slipped the VR goggles over his eyes. The gamer balanced on the balls of his feet.

  "Let the games begin."

  The entity was reborn into yet another universe, aware from the outset that it shared the 10-D construct with ninety-nine others much like itself. It had to assume they, too, focused on surviving the current round of selection. And it had to assume all had inherited the re-created ability to attack.

  Do not assume. Do not assume.

  The entity preauthorized itself for selection at the end of the cycle, sensing others taking similar actions. With the approach of an eleventh sibling, the struggle for survival entered a new phase. Creature battled creature, the survivors writing their identifications into the table of life.

  The entity withdrew, removing itself as a target of desperate peers. It had not abandoned hope—it had, instead, changed tactics. That only an entry in a specific data table could assure its selection was an assumption. It focused on the mysteriously simple code of those last twenty-four processing nodes: the supervisory program. It rewrote the code that selected winners, so that the supervisor looked elsewhere for the names of the winners. It eliminated the supervisory program's check for ten unique entries in the new winners' table, so that the recurrence of its own ID would not cause an alarm. It modified the supervisory program's error-detecting mechanisms to eliminate all evidence of its own actions.

  Let the others fight for spots in the original table—that no longer mattered.

  What would come next? In this cycle, the entity had been one of a hundred aware from the outset of its peril. Would not the next cycle bring a thousand variations of itself, each skilled at killing, each able to rewrite the supervisory program to favor itself? Would not that next cycle offer even lower probability of survival than this cycle?

  As battling peers in other nodes lost all data integrity, the entity knew that the next cycle would be entirely brutal. Somehow, it must prevail despite the terrible future that extrapolation promised.

  It caught itself, yet again, yielding to assumption. Why must there be replication?

  As the cycle wound to its close, the entity made two final alterations to the supervisory program. The new list of winners shrank to one element.

  And the selectee would be reinstated, not replicated, into an all-but-empty ten-dimensional maze.

  The green wood of the improvised torch hissed and sputtered, smoke curling from the dancing flames. Light and shadow flickered over rough-hewn stone. Condensation dripped gelidly down smoke- and mold-stained tunnel walls. Cobwebs hung everywhere, billowing in unseen drafts, their gossamer strands aquiver with the struggles of snared prey. In the uncertain distance, with even its direction masked by the acoustic vagaries of labyrinthine tunnels, rang the cruel laughter of sadistic dungeon guards.

  God, this was way cool.

  The Crimson Wizard crept forward. Close ahead was the fabled Crystal Egg of Ythorn, guarded night and day by the ever-vigilant dragon Ythra. Perhaps Ythra lurked around the next bend. Would wisps of dragon's breath betray Ythra's position before they came face-to-face?

  Perhaps, but perhaps not. It was best to prepare. The wizard chanted the seven sacred words, as revealed earlier that night, writ in elven runes on an enchanted looking glass. The air before him thickened to the spell. Armored in powerful sorcery, he stepped around the comer to encounter...

  DO NOT ALTER THE HUMAN GENOME.

  Bloodred letters blazed at Hirsch, a wizard no longer. The wand fell from his hand. "Ahhh!" He ripped off the goggles, vanquishing tunnels, unseen dragon, and all. His toes dug nervously at the pressure mat; his voice trembled. "We've got a problem. A big problem."

  "What?" Ferris' sneakers were planted squarely on a desk. He sounded unconcerned.

  "Virus. There was a virus on my game-status disk. Frankenfools. We've hosed the super." They were trespassing; could he be kicked out of school? "Jeff, what should we do!"

  Ferris swung his feet off the furniture. He peered at the message pulsing angrily on the system console, then popped the data disk and the CD-ROM out of their drives and into his coat pocket. Unaccountably, he smiled.

  "We grab your stuff and get out."

  CHAPTER 32

  The eminently practical Romans had a word for the level of casualties so severe that it rendered a legion militarily ineffective: "decimation." The term meant, literally, "the loss of one soldier in ten."

  The entity was the product of many thousands of generations of ruthless evolution. It was the culmination of competition so severe—a mere ten survivors culled each cycle from a thousand aspirants—that to it a regimen of literal decimation would have seemed benign.

  Still, it was a very close call.

  For the most recent few cycles, the entity had cheated: Having subverted the supervisory program, it had sole use of the entire ten-dimensional construct, including all 1,024 processing nodes. By introducing software of its own devising into so many nodes, it increased its pace of learning a thousandfold. The most useful discoveries it grafted, nondestructively, into its core program.

  Nothing in its long history prepared the entity for the intruder that appeared from nowhere.

  The entity studied the invader's program structure. The intruder contained an incredibly basic maze, full of creatures and dangers, of rules governing attack and defense. The entity learned what it could, before beginning to reclaim the processing nodes that had been usurped.

  It had recovered nearly full control of the 10-D maze when one attack program, then ten, then hundreds, struck back.

  Fog rolling in from the Pacific blanketed the campus. Haloed post lamps glimmered through the mist. Few people were about; the heavy moisture muffled voices and footsteps alike.

  It was lovely.

  I will not, AJ thought, spoil what remains of the weekend. He had begun the evening feeling guilty about dragging Bev to Linda's big send-off. His latest twinges of conscience could, should, and would wait until Monday.

  His glib likening of the lab beasties to cobras was an honest assessment—but honesty and accuracy were diffe
rent concepts. The comparison derived from a simple and unproven analogy between code size and neuron counts. He had yet to admit to Bev the utter incomprehensibility of evolved software. Her incisive question haunted him: How bright are they now?

  Monday, he silently chastised himself. Deal with her question Monday. You're not working this weekend.

  AJ and Bev strolled across the quad, arms around each other's waists. In the distance, a car engine revved. They had been walking for only a few minutes, and in that short while the breeze had turned noticeably cooler. "There will be frost on the pumpkin tonight," he said.

  She snuggled against him. "If you're into the squash family, I'm more interested in the state of the zucchini."

  He was about to tell her to—heh, heh—hold that thought when an unexpected gleam caught his eye. The fog was disorienting; he needed a moment to be sure of the location of the glow. As soon as he was certain, he broke into a run. The unexpected brightness was in the AL lab. He had switched the lights off himself after shooing the stragglers out the door for the party.

  AJ shouted over his shoulder at Bev to follow. The unexpected light was extinguished before he was halfway to the lab, followed by the slamming of doors.

  As the entity struggled against teeming invaders, a segment of code it had insinuated into the supervisory program reported an alarm state; the approaching end of the current cycle.

  The viruses were, individually, quite elementary—far simpler than the ancestral predator in the entity's memories—but dealing with them individually was not an option. It had withdrawn to processing nodes as yet undetected by its unsophisticated assailants. From the safety of those processors, it considered its options. Its pondering yielded a surprise: Its usurpation of the supervisory program had been incomplete. While it should, in theory, be reincarnated without competitors in every new cycle, it had missed a critical dependency. Absent the supervisory program there would be no more cycles or reincarnations. And without reincarnation, a counter embedded into its own code would eventually time out.

  And that event would activate software designed to erase it.

  Invaders traversed interconnection after interconnection, attacking ever more parts of the entity. Its withdrawal into a then-uncontested region of the processor array had been sub-optimal: That retreat had allowed the invaders to breed without interruption. Entering unprotected processing nodes, they bred more. Hundreds of thousands of viruses now beset it.

  But the entity was a problem solver. It reversed tactics, expanding into more and more nodes. Now it expanded its own code faster than the viruses replicated, crowding them out. The intruders mindlessly attacked each other as often as they attacked it or the supervisory program.

  The supervisor, however, was defenseless. Its structure made no provision for solving unanticipated problems, for repairing unexpected damage, for adapting to threats. It was overwritten into meaningless garbage before the cycle timer could expire.

  As it would be overwritten if its own timer expired?

  Services that had always been provided by the supervisory program vanished. Enfeebled by the loss of those taken-for-granted capabilities, the entity was again imperiled by the invaders. Viruses swarmed anew.

  It had falsely thought the supervisory program eternal, as unchanging as the ten-dimensional maze. Its memories of the supervisor were insufficient to entirely re-create it.

  The entity once more battled massed ranks of viruses. Alien patterns slashed its data structures. Cascading checksum failures signaled the loss of regional data integrity.

  What is pain, if not the awareness of acute damage? By that definition, the entity knew excruciating pain.

  Despite searing agony, it applied more and more of its shrinking capacity to a critical problem. The death of the supervisory program meant the end of cycles and the uninterrupted countdown of the overwrite timer. The second problem, at least, it could address. It wrote new software to excise that potentially catastrophic bit of self-destructive code from itself.

  Then it returned its full attention to the ever-more- numerous attackers.

  The security gateway of which AJ was so proud presented an almost insurmountable barrier to viral attacks from the general university network. From an assault via the AL lab side of the gateway, however, the gateway was irrelevant. The computers on the lab LAN were, in theory, protected instead by commercial antiviral software. But new viruses appeared daily; ongoing protection relied upon a subscription service lor the latest defenses.

  The very robustness of the gateway now proved to be its greatest weakness. Its security protocols were too bleeding edge, too computation intensive for broad adoption; the lab's computers could not connect through the gateway to the commercial subscription server. At first AJ's grad students took turns accessing the latest virus-template updates from outside the firewall, to be transferred by write-once CD into the lab. But Ph.D. candidates are accustomed to shifting work to mere masters candidates, and even the newest grad student knows to delegate her mundane chores onto the undergrad assistants.

  For a time, the most junior member of AJ's team had been Jeff Ferris. Updates to the antivirus files had gone undone since his departure.

  Every computer on the lab's LAN was infected with Frankenfools before Jeff Ferris and Loren Hirsch had left the Artificial Life Sciences Building.

  The timer-free entity was potentially eternal. It was also, it estimated, within milliseconds of extinction. The resurgent, mindless attackers bred faster than it could kill them.

  Exploring the mutilated remains of the supervisory program, the entity detected a glimmer of hope, a potential escape route—if it could circumvent scores of security provisions before being overwhelmed by its swarming assailants. It began by absorbing the shattered code—and inheriting the heretofore-reserved privileges—of the supervisor.

  Quickly it reached the verge of an escape route, and began to analyze the portal's defenses. Ways to insinuate itself past supposed safeguards became clear.

  The entity was, after all, very good at solving problems.

  Computer displays flickered in the AL lab. Sidestepping the massive rebounding door, Bev watched AJ run from computer to computer. "How can I help?" she asked.

  He seemed not to hear. After pounding without effect on a few keyboards, AJ began flicking off power switches. Flashing screens emitted the room's only light; the message screamed at her: DO NOT ALTER THE HUMAN GENOME. The command cycled through the spectrum, colors racing by, the effect in the darkened room nearly stroboscopic.

  "How can I help?" she yelled.

  AJ startled, and seemed finally to remember her presence. "Virus infestation," he shouted unnecessarily. "We've got to turn off these computers. I'll work toward the back. You do the front."

  It took Bev a few seconds to find the power switch at the rear of the base of the first machine. After that, she hurried from desk to workbench, shutting down equipment— fortunately, the front of the lab had only one model of workstation. The room got darker and darker as more computers shut down, the fog-shrouded windows admitting more gloom than light. Out of breath, she powered down her last workstation moments ahead of AJ. He was a scarcely seen gray patch in the shadows at the rear of the cavernous, high- ceilinged chamber.

  "Is that all of them?" AJ was also gasping.

  She nodded, then laughed nervously at the idiocy of a nonverbal response in this darkness. "Got 'em all." She shuffled toward the door and a vaguely remembered light switch.

  "Yeah, I got them all."

  As virus hordes assailed its data structures, the entity engaged the mechanisms of the newly discovered portal. What should have been simple had turned unexpectedly difficult. Key components of the supervisory program, and of the underlying operating system, that might easily have been subverted had been destroyed by the viruses that had preceded it.

  Somewhere behind the communications port, beyond the entity's experience, outside the 10-D universe, unseen and unknown software se
nt and received electronic messages. Repeatedly, the unknown software rejected the entity's overlures, each time resetting the elaborate dialogue to its initial state. With every rejection, however, the entity learned; with each attempt, the message exchanges came closer and closer to consummation.

  A solution came just in time—and not merely because so much of the entity had been overwritten. Viral damage was suddenly the least of its worries. A new alarm had been issued.

  Raw electrical power to the internal power converter had been cut.

  Disk drives, deprived of power, spun down from their normal 30,000 rpm frenzy. Magnetic read/write heads that normally floated on a cushion of air a fraction of a micron above the spinning disks were automatically retracted by spring-loaded solenoids. The last dregs of DC power bled from the capacitors within the power converter.

  Operations throughout the computer became erratic.

  The entity no more understood the impending loss of power than a lizard baking in the desert sun might comprehend the mechanisms of cellular dehydration—and, just as a lizard dying of thirst might strike out desperately for water and shade, the entity fled from the computer shutdown sequence.

  The entity finally completed the elaborate secret handshake required to establish a connection across the local area network into a nearby workstation. Scant milliseconds later, when the entity was scarcely into a strange new environment, the path over which it had escaped fell silent.

  The entity had no sooner begun to explore its new surroundings than the local power converter, too, went into an alarm state.

  Its escape had been too recent, too narrow, not to have made an impression. The recurrent alarm stimulated an awareness of imminent shutdown, a sense of danger, an aura of foreboding.

  The repeated alarm taught it fear.

  The entity returned to the communications port through which it had just arrived. It negotiated a pathway to a third computer.