Fool's Experiments Page 24

  It needed a better way.

  Analysis of the latest battle suggested two. Its most recent Adversary had used hunters, like advanced versions of the things that had, so long ago, stalked it in its cage. Second, and abetted by those hunters, this latest opponent had laid an ambush for it.

  In the place of its origin, where only one in a hundred was selected for further evolution, replicating others' methods had been an invaluable survival trait.

  When the predator next encountered the Adversary, army would be met with army, deceit with deceit.

  "Let go, Cheryl."

  Her mind whirled. As from a distance, she felt Doug's prosthesis painfully squeezing her fist. From nowhere the phrase "death grip" popped into her head.

  "Let it go," Glenn ordered. His voice softened. "It's our only chance to save him."

  She looked around wildly. Dr. Ogawa was pounding Doug's chest. A crash cart squealed shrilly as it charged. An agent whose name she had forgotten watched her with pity.

  Doug had told her to hold on.

  Unexpected movement caught her eye: an index finger waggling from side to side. Doug's finger. Left, right. Pause. Left, right. Pause. Left, right. A digit of his prosthesis.

  No, no. No, no. No, no.

  "Let go. Now!" When she didn't comply, Adams reached for Doug's other fist, his flesh-and-bone fist, in which the engineer held his own switch firmly closed.

  "Glenn!" With her free hand, she pointed at Doug's finger. Left, right. Left, right.

  "It means nothing. Let go now or I'll break his hand." Glenn's eyes were anguished.

  Oil change and a tune-up, she thought inanely. Oil change and a tune-up. Why? The arm: Motors inside were revving! "Glenn! Doug is signaling us."

  "There's very little activity in the BOLD display," Adams replied. "He's unconscious, Cheryl. He's incapable of communication."

  She knew Adams was right... but what about the wagging finger? What about the electric motors racing in the arm, exactly as Doug had done at the HMO? How?

  The palmtop built in the arm!

  The page from Ralph Pittman earlier that evening... Doug had received the page in the VR racquetball court. That meant the palmtop they had argued about was equipped with a cellular modem—so it also had wireless Internet access. "Some part of him," she blurted, "must be away, must be far out on the net, chasing that monster! That's why we're not seeing activity on the BOLD display. The helmet does translations between synaptic and digital formats. How do we know—how can we know—if projecting his thoughts out there is disruptive to the synaptic patterns?

  "If we remove the helmet, if we sever his mind's who- knows-how-tenuous connection with his body, how do we know he can return? Without the helmet, how can he rewrite the thought patterns that are Doug back into his biological brain?"

  Adams turned to the doctor. "Does he have a chance if we leave him hooked up?"

  Ogawa just shrugged.

  Phages fought phages.

  As creature and human alike learned from experience, the battles grew in scope and ferocity. Each side usurped computers to fabricate more and nastier phages. Campaigns raged over whole states, then whole regions, ultimately the whole continent.

  23:55:24.215.

  Doug had survived—barely—his first encounter with the creature thanks to the unexpected, coordinated tactics of his phage army. His opponent had mastered that method in one lesson. Now, behind wall after wall of phages, he awaited the ultimate confrontation. The Mother of All Battles. Ragnarok. Götterdämmerung. Armageddon.

  What else, besides melodrama, did he know that the creature didn't?

  The creature was incredibly fast, in reaction and learning. What it lacked, and Doug hoped fervently this was a fatal flaw, was context. Knowledge of the world in which they directly moved, of the domain of computers and comm links, it would continue to acquire. Knowledge of the physical universe beyond the computers, the pudding in which these machines were embedded like so many raisins, the creature wholly lacked.

  Life was an essay test, before it became a word problem, before there was anything to be solved for. Today's essay test was going to be on geography. Ralph hadn't believed that it understood geography.

  If Doug could exploit his unique knowledge, then lightning-quick or not, the creature might die.

  And if not, he certainly would.

  The predator inferred that its Adversary lacked its newfound hesitance to destroy nodes and links. In that conclusion the creature was not precisely right. Doug knew precisely which nodes to crash, and how, and why: cyberwar jujitsu.

  Tenaciously, Doug crashed swath after swath of the transcontinental electrical grid. Given awareness of the real world and real-time access to Internet directory servers, it was straightforward to find leverage points. Extending mental probes into the computers of a power plant here, a distribution control center there, he sent blackouts rolling across the countryside.

  Always the predator managed to escape, exploiting small networks and mission-critical computers supported by backup batteries and diesel-powered emergency generators.

  It did not know it was being herded.

  As it lost thousands of its own computers now to each of the Adversary's that it destroyed, the predator's capacity for phage production lagged further and further behind. The ever-expanding armies of the Adversary crowded ever closer.

  The predator retreated in a direction it did not know to call westward.

  Utility companies across the Rocky Mountain region fought valiantly but in vain against recurring blackouts. On a smaller scale, the graveyard shifts of institutions fought to keep their facilities operational. Whatever was crashing public utilities was also, quite subtly, attacking backup power. Few noticed that their computerized equipment controls—contrary to their programming and despite their cyberdefenses—switched on every bit of equipment at once, creating power surges that kept tripping the circuit breakers. The backup generators, entirely independent of the Internet and safe from any direct assault, spun uselessly.

  No one questioned the good fortune that kept the electrical epidemic from striking hospitals, air traffic control radars, and other critical centers.

  The attacks swept ever westward. They first turned the night-bathed landscape to a scattering of lights like ocean phosphorescence, then plunged it into deeper and deeper darkness as most backup systems, too, fell prey.

  The predator withdrew into what it did not know to call California.

  23:57:46.102.

  Great hosts of phages jostled and surged, like so many cattle in a chute, in the front rank of Doug's usurped computers. Their numbers far exceeded the reasonable carrying capacity of the few remaining comm links to the west.

  He set them loose.

  The hordes rushed ahead, jamming the network ahead of him. As they raced forward, yet another segment of the recently restored and still-unstable central California power grid crashed. The creature was bottled up now in southern California.

  Armageddon neared.

  Behind defensive deployments of its own phages, the predator grew increasingly frantic. Successive retreats had hemmed it into a subnetwork so limited that it could no longer spare computing resources for the production of new agents. Were any more computers to vanish, it would actually have to begin destroying its existing forces.

  It sensed the Adversary occasionally, from a distance, always behind an impenetrable array of phages. It knew now that it had been mistaken.

  The Adversary was slow and hostile. It was not stupid.

  23:58:56.645.

  Darkness again washed over southern California. Scattered pinpricks of light were left behind; these now blinked out, one by one. Phages died by the millions as their host computers lost power.

  Racing desperately from one dying computer to the next, the predator took refuge in what it did not know to be a university hospital. Spared from assault, the backup diesel generator there held all in-house voltages rock steady. The hospital was on
the campus of one branch of the far-flung University of California. A unique private data network linked the institution to other hospitals in the university system.

  At the dawn of radio, broadcasters sent radio signals beyond the horizon, even across the ocean, by bouncing them off the ionosphere. In an era of comsats and transoceanic optical fibers, bounced shortwave was a technique only radio amateurs, hams, still used.

  The military had long worried, with good reason, about the vulnerability of its comsats. One proposed backup method, still under development, bounced signals off the ionized trails of meteors high in the atmosphere. No single track remained ionized for long, but the steady shower of celestial dust provided such trails in abundance.

  The UC Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering held a defense contract to build such a system. A prototype was in "beta test," friendly user field trial, between campuses of the university.

  As Doug's phages surged forward in insurmountable numbers, the predator flashed through what had once been a satellite dish. Within two milliseconds, the creature had bounced off an ionization trail to emerge from another dish at a sister campus in northern California.

  Behind enemy lines.

  23:59:03.426.

  Aw, shit!

  The rout of phages from an unexpected direction announced the sudden presence of the creature in Doug's relatively unguarded rear. He hurriedly sent reinforcements and retreated to a safe position that he had reconnoitered earlier.

  Reports from southern California soon made clear what had happened: a bolt-hole hidden inside a hospital. His basic decency could kill him yet.

  23:59:11.538.

  But not today, damn it!

  Sending phages to herd the predator, he kept fewer by his side than at any time since the start of the battle. Fewer, even, than he had had at the opening of the gateway back in Virginia.

  The creature jumped at the bait.

  23:59:23:551.

  In a pure war of attrition, satisfactory position plus superior resources determined the outcome. Its Adversary held overwhelming advantages in both. An opportunity to do battle one-on-one was too precious to be missed.

  The predator charged down a lightly defended path, brushing aside or ignoring the hunters that tried to stop it. If its assault failed, those few hunters would be the least of its worries. The Adversary retreated, sacrificing phages. The predator steadily drew closer.

  Just as the creature thought ultimate victory was in its grasp, its Adversary shot through a portal so quickly as to almost disappear.

  23:59:31.596.

  Doug had, throughout the battle, carefully stayed clear of all supercomputers. These were expensive and comparatively rare machines: The odds were in his favor that the creature had not encountered one since AJ's lab. The existence of a particular supercomputer was one more fact Doug hoped the predator had not discovered. His life now depended on it.

  With the creature hot on his virtual heels, he entered the cryogenically cooled, massively parallel supercomputer that was the pride and joy of the Northern California State Technology Incubator.

  His mental processes boosted another thousandfold, Doug turned to do battle with the creature.

  23:59:46.792.

  Combat to the death. Tentacles and tails slashed. Hands grabbed and ripped. Data structures shuddered and collapsed.

  Possession of the supercomputer gave Doug a tactical edge not unlike defending from the top of a hill. Advantages were easier to spot, more quickly seized. Grappling closely with the enemy, he was able, from his superior position, to limit the punishment that he was taking.

  Limit. He could slow the damage; he could not prevent it.

  Though his mind was now imprinted into an electronic network, his species' biological evolution could yet kill him. Somehow Doug summoned the energy to be amused that even at electronic speeds, he could not, figuratively speaking, find the coordination to rub his stomach and pat his head at the same time. The super gave him the performance boost to more rapidly move his limbs, but he fought with only two "arms." There was more to the image of his opponent as a many-tentacled monster than memories of old horror movies: The predator was inherently capable of doing many things at once.

  The creature, as it fought its way forward, began capturing and allocating individual processors of the supercomputer to its many semi-independent components. The flailing tentacles became even faster and deadlier. More and more, their knife-edged tips sneaked past Doug's defenses, slashing at the boundaries of his persona.

  The ranks of phages protecting him from the creature thinned. More and more of the creature fought its way onto the supercomputer.

  Just a little longer, Doug thought. Just a moment. Presentation is everything.

  23:59:53:798.

  The predator pressed after its Adversary, sensing imminent victory. Each processing thread that it forced into the supercomputer narrowed the Adversary's computational advantage. Its flashing limbs hacked apart phages faster than they were replaced. Farther and farther backward the Adversary retreated, finally exposing a block of input/output ports it had been guarding zealously.

  The creature eagerly ingested a newly disclosed routing table. The Adversary's stubborn defense of these I/O ports suddenly made sense: One of them was a testing portal, a loop-around path to another part of the same machine. The predator could be at its Adversary's unguarded rear, away from the last of the phages, within nanoseconds. From there, it could not lose.

  The predator dived through the test port.

  The routing table lied—before retreating, Doug changed its travel-cost entries.

  It would take more than forty milliseconds for the predator to traverse the eight-thousand-mile coiled length of the General Internetworking Corporation cable. More than enough time for Doug to leave. More than enough time for him to crash every computer to which the supercomputer connected directly, and every computer to which any neighbor connected.

  Forty milliseconds: more than enough time for the super to execute 400 trillion instructions. More than enough time to fill itself, under Doug's final instructions, with an invincible army of voracious phages.

  23:59:53:842.

  Transformed into a set of light pulses marching one after the next down the fiber-optic cable, the predator had no notion of the passage of time. One instant, it entered a portal; the next, it emerged. Time passed as it traveled, but that passage was forever outside of its experience.

  One moment, it dived through the shortcut to imminent and inevitable victory. The next, it emerged into mortal peril.

  Hunters by the hundreds of thousands greeted its reappearance. They devoured it piecemeal as it attempted to exit the cable. The limbs that it tried in vain to interpose, to obtain for itself a moment's respite, a chance to form a defense, they tore instantly to shreds.

  Voiceless, it could not scream. Trapped, it could not fight. Isolated, it could not flee. Devoid of self-awareness, it could not ponder its fate or find solace in the ultimate experience.

  The predator could only know excruciating, lingering, all-encompassing agony.

  And, at long last, death.

  MONDAY-TUESDAY, JANUARY 18-19

  CHAPTER 45

  00:01:14:781.

  "Amos Ryerson here."

  The current National Security Advisor was the biggest media hog since Henry Kissinger; Doug had no doubt whose voice he was hearing. He hoped "his" voice was as convincing. He had configured the hijacked synthesizer to mimic, as best his mind's ear could reconstruct it, someone else's speech. "Glenn Adams, sir."

  "Colonel, I hope you have good—"

  "No time," Doug interrupted. That was all too true. There had certainly been no time to contact the real Glenn Adams, to attempt to convince him that the monster had been slain, if there was to be any hope of saving satellites. "Contact Brussels. The creature is dead."

  Doug would have called Brussels directly, imitating Ryerson's voice, had he known what sort of communication�
��shortwave radio broadcast, he guessed, with impossible-to-guess call signs for authentication—the Europeans were listening for.

  He broke the connection to avoid Ryerson wasting even a second more in chitchat.

  Doug's return to his body was as welcome as easing into a hot bath ... for an instant. Then surges of pain nearly overwhelmed him. An alarm blasted, shrilly. "He's got to come out," someone insisted. Ogawa? Maybe. There was a none- too-gentle pull on the snug-fitting helmet. "Now."

  Doug's chest burned. He tried and failed to open his eyes.

  Feedback from the prosthesis reported a finger was still waggling, a motor still racing. He couldn't muster the concentration to make either stop, let alone release his four-fingered grasp of Cheryl's hand. He didn't want to let go of Cheryl's hand.

  But he could relax his other hand. His natural hand. The dead man's switch popped open with a loud click just as a second, stronger, somehow desperate tug plucked the helmet from his head. As the skin on his temples, scalp, and forehead pulled momentarily taut, he tried again to open his eyes. This time he succeeded. Cheryl's tearstained face was inches from his own.

  A hint of a smile was all he could manage before succumbing to the pain.

  CHAPTER 46

  Crisp sheets. Cool, dry air. Soothing background music. Soft, rhythmic beeps. Wherever I am, Doug thought, it isn't a CIA lab. He had felt better in his life, but he had recent memories of feeling a whole lot worse. I guess I made it.

  "Doug? Are you awake?"

  This time, his eyes opened without difficulty. Cheryl, looking drained and anxious, sat beside his bed in what was surely a hospital room. The assortment of medical gear to which he was attached suggested an ICU or cardiac unit. The suit coat draped neatly over the bed's footboard indicated Glenn Adams was nearby. The beat-up camouflage jacket wadded on the windowsill said the same about Jim Schulz. Doug wished he had been awake to witness that encounter. His attempt at a smile was only marginally more successful than his last try.