Cyber Rogues (32 page)

Admittedly the engineers hadn’t yet traced which feeder circuit from the fusion plant the bridge was connected to. Also, nobody could say for certain that it was the only bridge that
Spartacus
had made. But there was a chance.
If
that bridge was, for the time being at least, the sole slender umbilical cord that was keeping
Spartacus
alive, it represented what might well be the last short-lived opportunity to regain control. There was no time to waste. Leaving the rest of the team to continue with the task of tracing the feeder circuit, Dyer had assembled a small group and departed at once for Detroit to inspect the bridge at close quarters and supervise its demolition.

They were met at the terminal in Detroit by Don Fisher, chief engineer of the fusion plant, and two of his assistants, and ushered through a maze of zero-g handwalks, access tunnels and connecting shafts to a point deep inside the fusion-plant sector of the Detroit complex. They hauled themselves down into a maintenance pit that ran underneath a bewildering mass of pipework, cylindrical tanks and pulsating machinery, and closed around a densely packed bundle of what must have comprised hundreds of cables and conduits. Fisher pointed to a thick, armor-clad cable clamped securely along the outside of the bundle. Nothing about it immediately singled this one out from the rest, but Dyer recognized it at once from the view he had seen only fifteen minutes previously in the Crystal Ball. It hadn’t been indicated on the construction blueprints that he’d retrieved from the system’s archives as a reference.

“That’s it,” Fisher informed them needlessly, “It’s a neat job. IEEE Standards right down to the color of the clamps.”

“Any news as to which feeder it is yet?” Dyer inquired as he used a stanchion to haul himself under a cowling and closer to the mass of cabling. The run followed a wide duct underneath a transverse section of conveyor housing, through a jungle of structural members that disappeared into levels above, and then made a right-angle turn into a tunnel that took it through a bulkhead wall.

“Just a couple of minutes ago,” Fisher replied. “This bridge connects into Feeder Four. All backup stations on that loop are switching over to other feeders right now. It should be isolated and ready to shut down at any minute.” Dyer grunted and continued with a rapid examination of the drones’ handiwork. Just as he was finishing, a call note sounded from Fisher’s viewpad. Fisher took it from his pocket and interrogated the display.

“Fusion Control Room,” he announced. “Feeder Four has been isolated. They’re ready to shut down.”

“Do it,” Dyer said, at the same time using his own pad to contact Krantz in the Command Room.

“Feeder Four’s down,” Fisher said. One of the engineers, who had clipped an inductive sensor around the bridge cable, consulted the instrument’s miniature display.

“The bridge is dead,” he pronounced. “It’s not taking current.”

Dyer looked at the image of Krantz on the screen of his viewpad. For several long, agonizing seconds Krantz directed his gaze offscreen to consult other invisible oracles. Then he looked back at Dyer. His face was bleak.

“No go, Ray.
Spartacus
is still up. There must be other bridges drawing from the other feeders. There’s a report coming in from Pittsburgh right at this moment. They think they may have found another one there. We’re checking it against the master prints.”

Had the laws of physics cooperated, Dyer would have sunk down wearily onto the nearest support. As things were, he just stared mutely back at the screen. The faces around him were grave and silent.

“It looks as if it’s going to be a race between us ripping them out and
Spartacus
putting them back together,” Krantz said. “I’m instructing General Linsay to order Operation Haystack to take effect as of now.” Dyer nodded his agreement.

“We’ll begin with this one,” he said.

“I’ll call you as things develop,” Krantz told him and cut off the screen.

From what had taken place earlier in the evening in the Command Room, Dyer already knew that the race against the drones was on. As soon as the scientists had realized what was happening with the bridges, they had entered commands into the system to suspend all drone activity before the situation became any more complicated. And everywhere in Janus the drones were deactivated—for a while. Then, evidently,
Spartacus
had weighed the implications against the strange things that had been happening in its environment to threaten its survival, and it had worked its priority-reversing trick again to override the commands and restore the drones to life.

Operation Haystack meant that the attempts to contain
Spartacus
remotely from the Command Room and other control points had now been abandoned officially. The Battle of the Switching Centers had been conceded and the action was moving out into the field. All off-duty engineers and technicians who were on standby anywhere in Janus would be mobilized to join the various duty teams in carrying out an exhaustive search of the whole structure to seek out and eliminate all of
Spartacus
’s
bridges to the fusion grid. Haystack had been planned originally as a response to bypasses being constructed around the SP substations, but it could be applied to the present situation virtually without changes.

Haystack called for a passive role on the part of the engineers; their orders were simply to disconnect the bridging circuits as fast as they found them. The objective was to acquire data on how quickly the machines could redo what the people undid, and vice versa. Success, in the form of the connections to the feeders being traced and torn out faster than they could be replaced, would be taken as a reassuring pointer to the probable outcome if a similar situation should ever arise on Earth. And success would be easy to gauge; it would be achieved when the last bridge was cut and
Spartacus
stopped running.

Haystack, therefore, did not require active measures to prevent the drones from operating. That would come, if necessary, with an order for Operation Counterstrike, which would be given to mark a shift over to offensive tactics in the event Haystack failed.

But if Counterstrike failed to inhibit the drones effectively, total war would be declared by the mounting of Sledgehammer—the progressive dismantling of
Spartacus
piece by piece until the System ceased to function.

And if Sledgehammer failed . . .

But nobody knew the answers that far ahead. What happened then would depend on whatever else happened in the meantime.

Dyer nodded to Fisher, who was waiting with his two engineers. They removed the retaining clamps from the bridge cable and pried it sufficiently loose to work a thick protective shield behind it before they started cutting. Within minutes the bridge was broken and the engineers had begun removing it in sections. They logged the time at which the circuit was broken. As the contest against the drones intensified, they would want to know every detail of how long the drones took to respond to a new fault, where they came from to fix it, how they were organized and deployed by
Spartacus,
and how they modified their behavior as the work load upon them increased.

Just when they were about done, General Linsay’s voice came over the loudspeaker system from somewhere above to announce that Haystack had been mounted and to order all standby personnel to report to their respective units for further instructions. Fisher and his two engineers left to return to the fusion plant in order to be present at one of the Haystack briefings which was due to be given there. Cordelle departed with his crew to take charge of his assigned Haystack duties back in Downtown. Dyer and Hayes decided to stay on for a while to observe the actions of the drones that would almost certainly be showing up in the near future. They drifted into relaxed postures, Dyer floating horizontally with an arm draped loosely around the stanchion and Hayes wedged comfortably in a perpendicular position between a large structural supporting bracket and a pump housing.

“Well, I guess we have to hand it to Kim and her team,” Hayes said after a while. “We said we wanted a machine that would fight to preserve itself. Boy, have we got it!”

“We’ve got it,” Dyer murmured automatically. He still wasn’t really in a mood for talking.

“I, uh . . . I think Kim could be getting a bit worried that she might have done too good a job,” Hayes said.

Dyer smiled humorlessly. “There’s no reason why she should. We don’t fire people for things like that.”

“She’s hung up about what
Spartacus
could be leading to . . . and I think part of the reason behind it could be my fault. I just thought you ought to know.” Hayes looked across at Dyer as if inviting some reaction. Dyer didn’t reply, but raised an eyebrow and waited. Hayes went on:

“We were talking a while ago about entropy and evolution,” Hayes said. “For some reason or other . . . I can’t remember how it came up now, I said I thought that the next species after Man would probably be inorganic. I was talking academically at the time, but I think she may have taken it seriously. I’ve just got a feeling that perhaps she’s been getting it out of proportion ever since. Know what I mean . . . sometimes she seems to have bad feelings about this whole thing. This afternoon for instance . . . I don’t know if you noticed how she looked when the solar-bus cutout didn’t work.”

Dyer nodded and emitted a long sigh. “Okay, I know what you mean. I’m glad you mentioned it, Fred, but don’t worry too much. There are personal things too.”

“Oh, I didn’t know . . . I just—”

“Forget it.”

A short, awkward silence followed while Hayes sought for some way to change the subject and Dyer returned to his own thoughts.

“Between us and whatever constitutes the walls in this place though, I think it could happen.”

“What, the species thing?” Dyer asked absently. Hayes nodded, apparently feeling less ill at ease.

“Yes. There are so many things that would make a true intelligence based on an inorganic system far superior to anything that could come out of an organic one. For a start it would be immortal.” He looked at Dyer expectantly. Dyer waited for him to elaborate, which he was obviously going to do whether Dyer said anything or not. Hayes went on. “A man lives for eighty years. He spends the first quarter of it or more learning all the same things that generations have had to learn before, and the rest of it laboriously building up a collection of information, knowledge, opinions, ideas, experiences—all those kinds of things. Then he dies and takes the whole damn lot with him, And so the next generation has to start out all over.” He made an empty-handed gesture in the air.

“But an inorganic system need never die. It can just replace parts of itself as necessary. It doesn’t exist as a species of billions of isolated individuals all trying to communicate as best they can and all having to learn the same things over and over again. Whatever part of it knows, all of it knows, and all the time it’s adding to the same database through a billion different channels at electronic speeds, and it’s got the combined processing power of a whole race to handle it. It’s like comparing a few billion isolated amoebas with the same number of nerve cells working together as a brain. What would an intelligence like that be capable of achieving, if it compared to us in the same way we compare to amoebas?”

Dyer was about to say something when his ears caught a faint hum coming from not far above. He held up a hand for silence and listened.

“I think our visitors have arrived,” he said quietly.

A sphere drone descended into sight and passed within a few feet of them as it proceeded to carry out a survey of the cable run. They made no attempt to conceal themselves while Hayes recorded its movements with a hand camera plugged into his viewpad, and the drone reciprocated by totally ignoring them. A few minutes later the labor detail showed up in the form of an assorted gaggle of various drone types and the job proceeded quickly and smoothly. The new cable was fed in through a line of temporary clamps that carried supporting rings lined by roller bearings to reduce friction from a large reel maneuvered into position about twenty feet away and just visible through the intervening tangle of machinery. After that the temporary clamps were replaced by permanent locking fixtures and the free end of the cable joined to the end of another length laid along the tunnel and worked through the joint in the bulkhead, presumably to be picked up on the other side. At the point where the two lengths met, the drones had installed a heavy-duty junction box into which they connected a data line which they had also just strung along the main cable run. The only reason for this could be to enable the switching of the box to be controlled and monitored by some remote portion of
Spartacus.
Here was a new innovation. There had been no junction box in evidence previously, which meant that
Spartacus
was not simply repairing its earlier work; it was adding to it. A second cable was then coupled to the box and routed away, but this time going along the bulkhead wall and out of sight instead of through it.

Dyer and Hayes exchanged comments freely as they watched an electric toaster plug itself into the junction box to carry out functional checks, a crab test the clamps and the spherical foreman slowly trace along from end to end for a final visual inspection. Then the act formed itself up into a ragged line and buzzed off in the direction from which it had come.

The two scientists immediately hauled themselves down to examine the junction box. Hayes began making tests while Dyer called the Command Room to update them on events and to have the bridge cable rescheduled for demolition. The Command Room in turn informed him that the suspected bridge in Pittsburgh had been confirmed and was being attended to, two more were being checked out, but the results of the Haystack search would probably not start coming in for some time. Apart from that, nothing had changed. Dyer acknowledged, cut the call and looked over at Hayes.

“Well, this is the end that picks up Feeder Four,” Hayes said, pointing toward the bulkhead. “Feeder Four is dead, which
Spartacus
has no doubt already found out. It looks as if it’s restored the connection anyway, because this incoming line is dead. Maybe it’s allowed for the possibility that Feeder Four could come live again . . . Now that’s smart.” He indicated the second line coming into the box and the output leading off in the opposite direction, away from the bulkhead.