Fool's Experiments Read online

  No, not that kind of an evening at all. Doug was about to suggest that he drop her off, sure that neither the CIA nor the forum planned any further activity tonight, when somewhere in the building screaming started.

  Then all the lights went off.

  Expressions around the conference table were grim. AJ's death had been bad enough, but everyone, to some degree, had rationalized it away. He had been exhausted, wracked with guilt, an academic unaccustomed to action.

  What Ralph had just experienced permitted no such rationalization.

  The thing on the network had effortlessly slain four experienced operatives. The novel cause of death—cyberpattems translated and transformed by NIT helmet, then written over formerly rich synaptic structures—was at once fascinating, nauseating, and unimportant.

  As though enraged by the encounter, the creature had gone on another rampage. There were hundreds of disasters, of which the most visible was the spectacular crash of the Northwest regional power distribution system. Parts of four states and British Columbia would be without power for hours.

  Ralph claimed the chair at the head of the conference table. Along both sides of the table, new agents studied him, seeking clues to whatever lay in wait. To avenge your buddies was an obligation of duty and honor. To dive into a nameless meat grinder was entirely different.

  Across the table, Doug and Cheryl sat silently. Adams, wooden faced, sat next to Cheryl.

  Ralph cleared his throat. The palsy in his arm had faded a bit, following treatment as though for a petit mal seizure. He took little comfort from the bland assurances of Agency physicians that he would probably recover normal function. Eventually. How the hell would they know? Any of them ever been brain-fucked by an electronic monster?

  "The colonel"—Ralph nodded at his boss—"asked for a debrief. Don't expect to like it, although there is one valuable bit of data. I paid for it," and he flapped his injured arm, "so I hope it's helpful. There was some information crossover when it attacked. That thing is one of a kind as far as it knows. And no way will it ever replicate itself—it knows a clone will instantly be its deadliest enemy. AJ got that part right."

  "Does this thing have any concept of geography?" Doug asked abruptly.

  What an odd question, Ralph thought. "I don't have a clue." Or did he? "Not geography, exactly, I don't believe. Proximity, sort of. Why?"

  "Explain about proximity," Doug persisted.

  Ralph considered. "I sensed it knew the time spent moving between computers, that it preferred short hops to long ones." The creature had to understand routing tables, to get around the Internet. It wasn't terribly surprising that its understanding encompassed transmission delays.

  "That preference is logical, given what we know of the thing's breeding." Doug's eyes narrowed in concentration. "Its ancestors for countless generations were the fastest through the mazes—otherwise they weren't chosen to reproduce. That's probably why it remained in densely networked North America long enough to get trapped, instead of jumping by satellite or undersea cable to, say, Asia or South America."

  "Why?" Ralph tried again.

  "Only thinking out loud, Ralph. You know me—I don't deal well with loose ends." Doug shrugged. "Sorry. I didn't mean to hijack the meeting. Go on."

  After recapping the disastrous encounter, Ralph opened the session to discussion. The questions flew fast and furious, coming mostly from the presumptive second wave of attackers. He answered just as rapidly.

  "With proper training, which the technicians will give you, yes, you acclimate quickly. In minutes, maybe less, you can start moving around the data plane. The folks who designed the helmets deserved better than they got." What they had gotten was brain-wiped, courtesy of viruses that were like baby bunnies compared to what Ralph had just barely escaped.

  "I can't describe what the data plane 'looks' like. It may not have an appearance in any objective sense. Everything is so odd that your mind, abetted by your helmet, plays tricks on you. What truly scares me is how that subconscious editing must hide things, critical things, from view. We might have seen it faster if we'd been watching with unbiased 'eyes.' "

  The agents hung on each word, more stoic the longer he spoke. Stoic? Fatalistic.

  "Fast?" He laughed, and it wasn't a pleasant sound. "I can scarcely believe how fast that thing is. Still, you should know that we, people, are much quicker in there, too. More precisely, brain plus helmet is quicker. The neural net within the helmet is so adaptive, it automatically learns and takes over repetitive mental chores for you—and transistors run rings around our old-fashioned neurons. The problem is, you have to adapt to that speedup. You must retrain your reflexes. AJ's monster, on the other hand, evolved in there.

  "I can no more describe its appearance than where it lives or how it strikes. I lack the words. Besides, as I said, your mind and helmet try to represent everything, no matter how foreign, as something familiar.

  "For me, the creature was Cthulhu, that evil and unspeakable horror out of H. P. Lovecraft. If those stories hadn't made such an impression on me, maybe it would have looked different." Ralph closed his eyes, the memory somehow clearer to him by inner sight.

  "Think of darkness not as the absence of light but as something palpable. Within the blackness, picture an obscenity of ever-changing, writhing limbs tipped with every manner of claw and fang and horn. Imagine standing helpless in the unblinking gaze of an utterly alien and all- penetrating sight.

  "Can't do it?"

  His eyes reopened without focusing. "God knows I'll spend the rest of my life trying to forget it."

  The questions petered out.

  It was clear to Doug that the coming mission was unlikely to kill AJ's monster, that it wasn't even a credible delaying action. In the awkward silence that ensued, CIA agents unenthusiastically studied the table and one another, each one contemplating throwing his life away for no better reason than something must be done.

  Still, as Ralph's narrative had unfolded, Doug found himself strangely excited. It was as though everything in his life had brought him to this singular crisis. The more disheartened the agents grew in their questioning, the surer Doug became. Every one of these men, he thought, is a trained killer. Any one of them could vanquish me in an instant. In this world. But what they cannot do, and I can, is stop this thing. Once and for all, I can stop it. Me.

  In the focus of the moment, Doug put completely from his mind the annoying tingle in his still-tender left shoulder. He cleared his throat for attention.

  Everyone turned toward him, the agents doing so with undisguised relief.

  "I'll accept that someone can learn to conceptualize the data plane in a few minutes." Unvoiced ire accompanied that acceptance. The neural-interface technology Doug had worked with required lengthy sessions of biofeedback training. CIA scientists had exploited his ideas to restart NIT research while everyone else—while he—awaited forum blessing of his protective techniques. All the while, Adams had been stringing him along, demanding higher and higher standards of proof before a public announcement of success. Stalling Doug and trying to divert him to altogether-unrelated projects. All the while, the CIA was free to spy using technology that the government publicly discredited.

  Still... had the CIA not made these advances, the world would now be defenseless. Doug tamped down his anger. "That lets data-plane explorers look around, poke and prod, even move about. What I don't believe, Ralph—no offense to you—is that such limited exposure denotes expertise." Cheryl eyed Doug sharply. Did she suspect where he was going? He tried to not think of her. Of them.

  He turned to an agent. "I can imagine hand-to-hand combat without having done it. Let's go beyond that and postulate that I've had a few days or even weeks of practice. How would I do up against you?"

  Doug took the feral grin as a response. "Right. Roadkill." He let that sink in for a bit before continuing. "We need someone with extensive neural-interface experience."

  "The damned viruses got e
v—," Glenn Adams began. "No! Doug, you can't mean it," Cheryl cut in. "Your experience is with an arm. A neurally interfaced arm. You have no more experience in a helmet than Ralph had."

  Or Ralph's four dead escorts. Five dead, counting AJ. Less practice than the CIA techs who all refused to go in. Doug reached for Cheryl's hand.

  She jerked it away. "Don't do this. Don't be a hero. You'll wind up like AJ." Horror flooded her face. "Or Sheila Brunner."

  Doug recalled her all too well: vacant eyes in an expressionless face, and a single compulsion endlessly looping through a ruined brain. His heart pounded.

  He swallowed hard. "It's not the same." Was he telling himself or Cheryl?

  "What I have, and no one else here, or anywhere, has, is years of practice with neural interfaces. I'm not just now learning to use them. Ask these guys," and Doug gestured at the watching agents, "if in the martial arts you think before each punch thrown or blow parried."

  "Do you really want to do this, Doug?" Glenn asked.

  Doug said, "No, I don't want to. I have to."

  "Are you sure?" Glenn's eyes held something besides hope and respect, another emotion that Doug couldn't place. Then Glenn spoke again, and Doug placed it: guilt.

  "I have a real problem sending in friends," Glenn said.

  Yet Doug knew Glenn would do what he must and then live with the ghosts.

  Doug looked around the table. The agents silently pleaded: If you have an edge, even the hint of one, help us. Adams did his best, which wasn't enough, to seem neutral. Ralph was drained, too weary even to express an opinion. No one spoke.

  Cheryl refused to meet his gaze.

  The silence became oppressive. Doug said, "After years spent training a neurally interfaced arm, I may be the only person in the world with the right reflexes. How can I not try?"

  Doug asked for a moment alone with Cheryl. She was not quite angry enough to deny him. That, or even deeper feelings kept her there. Whatever her reason, she stayed as everyone else filed from the room. They expected him in the lab shortly.

  "It's something I have to do." He looked down at his prosthesis. For once, the arm was a unique qualification rather than a handicap. Instead of a daily reminder of the day he lost Holly. "It's something I have to do," he repeated.

  Cheryl stared at him, eyes brimming with tears. "What are you trying to prove?"

  That Holly had not died for nothing. That it was okay he survived the accident that took her life. That maybe, just maybe, he was entitled to happiness again, with Cheryl. There wasn't time for any of that. "It's something I have to do."

  Heart pounding, he strode from the room.

  With Ralph's coaching, Doug quickly visualized the data plane. His imagery differed slightly from the hacker's: boxes, too, but arrayed as soaring buildings of a mighty city. The message streams were traffic arteries of all sizes, from crowded expressways to lightly traveled local streets. Ralph's version had more closely resembled a geometric garden.

  Otherwise modem, Doug's city was walled like a medieval stronghold. In the battlement's stone and mortar Doug recognized a familiar pattern: software derived from his own attempts to protect neural interfaces from viruses. His proof-of-concept code didn't allow any high data rates through the interface. The CIA version had been extended to let pass user-approved—stolen?—data.

  AJ's monster was far smarter than a vims. Ralph's experience made plain the thing had figured how to mimic user approval. Against what Ralph described the helmet's defenses were as inconsequential as wet tissue paper.

  Ding! Another ten seconds. Ralph had also passed along the idea of a wakeup call. As the helmet's neural net learned to work with Doug, as it did more and more for him, successive tones seemed further and further apart. Doug took that adaptation as a good sign. "Looking good," he called out.

  Ralph's voice crackled in Doug's headset. "Tell us when to unleash the targets."

  The targets were Doug's idea. Simple modifications to Ralph's standard antivirus phages, they would be Doug's practice dummies. At his signal, the first phage would be loosed.

  "Release number one." After what seemed geological time, a new entity popped into view. In keeping with his metropolitan metaphor, the phage manifested as a shinyeyed rat. What was that old movie about a kid with an attack rat? Okay, Willard number one.

  Willard, for Doug's safety, had been hastily tweaked to recognize and overwrite a sacrificial accounting package. The rat sniffed for its quarry, darting from building to building.

  Doug "sat" back and watched. He had already spotted Willard's intended victim: a stolid, five-story brownstone. Doug flexed his "muscles" as he waited, only then noticing how he had cast himself: as a camouflaged soldier. Power of suggestion? Even here he had a prosthesis. That made sense: One-armed was how he thought of himself.

  The artificial arm swung ominously. Be careful in here, Doug told himself.

  Ding! "Little guy is still nosing around. Ugly fella." He tracked the phage as he spoke. "It'll find the accounting program any second now." A second seemed like roughly forever.

  Why wait? Doug flicked the "prosthesis" at the "rat." Correction: red splotch. He had been a tad vigorous: The brown- stone now had a hole punched through one wall. "Oops. Don't know my own strength."

  "What?" Ralph said.

  "Never mind. Anyway, that was me who trashed the accounting program. I trust you've got a backup?" Without waiting for a response, Doug added, "Release target number two."

  Two was faster than one, by design. Three was faster than two, and four was quicker still. Doug had no problem dispatching this whole series of phages. Along the way, his targets morphed from small rat to snarling junkyard dog. Along the way, too, discarding the military conceit, Doug had willed his avatar into a more familiar form. He took a few trial swings: Doug Carey, Ninja racqueteer. The "racquet" felt natural in his "hand," which meant long-trained hand/eye reflexes, and the neural wiring in his motor cortex that implemented that learning, were read by the helmet. It was the adaptation he had counted on.

  Ding! "Let's move to the next phase." Phase two phages didn't stalk unsuspecting and defenseless programs. The next phages would respond to a keyword. Once Doug emitted a message packet containing that keyword, the phage would come after him.

  "Wait a sec," Glenn suggested. "The BOLD display shows you're a bit agitated."

  "I can't imagine why." Eight... nine ... ten. Ding! "About that phage, guys? I march to a different drummer in here."

  A keyboard click released the phase-two drone. Hey, dude, Doug thought at it.

  The wolflike phage stiffened at the keyword "dude." It spun, ready to attack, jaws slobbering. Doug deftly smashed it. The next two fell as easily.

  "You all right, Doug? Your heartbeat is way up."

  It took a moment to remember he was wired to an EKG. "Yeah, yeah, Glenn. Fine. Keep 'em coming." The immersion experience was so real Doug thought nothing of his shortness of breath. He was working hard, wasn't he?

  "Probably only the excitement." The doubting voice was that of a CIA doctor. Ogawa?

  "Okay, Doug," Glenn said. More keystrokes. "Final phase." A pack of phages popped all at once into the metropolis. At Doug's challenge, they pivoted en masse and charged. He had run out of animal analogies: These things were just hideous. Teeth and talons predominated.

  "Jesus, he's fast," he heard Pittman say, wonder in his voice. Ralph was stationed at a display showing status reports from the phages. "I couldn't move like that in there. Neither could the agents in there with me. Not even close. Maybe Doug is right."

  Doug laid about with the racquet that was, from daily practice, an extension of his arm. Whirling and weaving like a dervish, he zigzagged through the pack and back again. As he moved, he whacked the swarming creatures like so many large and grotesque VR racquetballs. The phages were quick and mean but fragile: One or two blows disabled any attacker.

  AJ, had he been there, would have pontificated that the phages were programmed,
were mere artifacts displaying that distinctively human obsession with efficiency. He would have explained that nature preferred conservatism to efficiency, that evolution retained what worked and added to it: survival through massive redundancy. Smiling ironically, no doubt, he would have said that he had planned the maze runners to evolve in that way. No, AJ's creature would not be another frail and flimsy pushover.

  But AJ could no longer remind anyone of anything.

  "Got...'em ... all."

  "Are you okay?" Glenn sounded unhappy. What did his boss see on the med displays?

  Ogawa was evidently watching the same instruments. "Calm down or—" The doctor had no time to complete his threat.

  Rapid footsteps approached, followed by Cheryl's voice. "I've been watching CNN. Things are grim on the Internet, and the European Union is panicking. They've already disabled every transatlantic link from their side. If the disasters don't end by midnight"—less than an hour away—"they'll take steps to make our isolation permanent and complete.

  "They're going to start taking out comsats."

  CHAPTER 42

  CNN had only part of the story. First, the Europeans weren't panicking. Second, they had company in reacting. Countries around the globe had severed surface and undersea links to the United States and disabled satellite ground stations. They insisted that the crew aboard the International Space Station power down its transmitter.

  The EU, Russia, China, and Japan could do more—and now they did. They were jamming or laser-blinding satellites with line of sight to North America. Every satellite, from communications, to environmental observation, to space telescope, had comm capability. So the space-capable powers were now targeting every satellite that the monstrosity loose on the Internet might seize—

  And that included spy, missile early warning, military comm, and global positioning satellites. All that made those different was the robustness of their security algorithms. Who was to say the creature wouldn't break those encryption algorithms and seize a military satellite?