Fool's Experiments (39 page)

In Middle Eastern streets, on Al Jazeera broadcasts, and across the Internet, America's enemies crowed. The Great Satan had gotten its comeuppance.

A major bombing in Los Angeles, near the den of depravity that was Hollywood. (Only Federal Aviation Administration backup radar hinted at an aerial attack, that news sequestered. Only an inventory of border UAVs suggested a drone was the source of the blast.)

A Minuteman III launch from the heartland, America herself nearly obliterating her own capital. (The launch itself was no secret, the fiery takeoff from Minot AFB hastily reported to the Pentagon—but only the Russians had been able to track it.)

America's government, scuttling like cockroaches from the light, to a hundred hiding places. (True.)

Perhaps the terrorists and their New Caliphate sponsors even believed their boasts. Disaffected minorities, homegrown cells, sleeper cells, rogue paramilitary units operating independently ... surely those were all possibilities.

No one was saying anything about fugitive software lashing out at its former jailers.

"Mr. Carey, Ms. Stem," General Lebeque finally said. "I think I know the answer, but I want to hear it from you. Why did Glenn Adams direct me to you?"

Glenn's last words echoed in Doug's head: If anyone can make sense of this mess, it will be them.

A mighty big if.

Scarcely twenty-four hours earlier, he had visited Linda del Vecchio. That very morning, he had urged Glenn to shut down her project. No doubt that was why Glenn had mentioned him. But this? This was a geopolitical nightmare. What the
hell
was he supposed to contribute?

Doug hesitated, searching for anything constructive to say. At his side, Cheryl looked as troubled as he felt.

The military types took the pause as an answer. Or the lack of an answer. "We must shut down the networks, and purge this thing," one said. "Anything is better than
it
lobbing missiles at us."

And: "That's the one thing we
can't
do. Better the New Caliphate think we have a hair trigger than that we're helpless."

And: "But if the Russians or. Chinese think we've lost control..

Lebeque: "Then we're screwed. Since this thing kept us from seeing the one missile, or the preemption of the UAV, we sure as hell won't even know if anyone launches against us."

Doug's thoughts churned. What
had
Glenn had in mind? Another desperate foray into cyberspace? This wasn't the same creature, not by a long shot.

"Forget the Russians," a colonel argued. "By doing nothing they only risk a launch from the U.S. If they act, they know we'll have to respond."

Or try, anyway.

A major rushed into the conference room, handing Lebeque a note. She crumpled it, scowling. "New data, people. As many of you know, the border UAVs are refueled on station twice daily. We skipped a scheduled refueling flight, as a test, for a squadron cruising off the New England coast.

"Eighteen minutes after a tanker should have left McGuire AFB in New Jersey, three UAVs hit the base. Hundreds of casualties, details still coming. Hangars, runways, and fuel tanks weren't touched. They sent up a tanker, ASAP."

"Not subtle, is it?" someone down the table muttered.

Lebeque said, "It had more to say, Colonel, in that understated way. It opened a Minuteman silo at Warren AFB. Lest anyone forget, there are five hundred Minutemen, four hundred ninety-nine now, in Wyoming, Montana, and North

Dakota. Some have multiple warheads. Since it won't suffer the loss of UAVs unused, we for sure can't let it think we're moving against the missiles."

Doug leaned over to whisper into Cheryl's ear, "Glenn's a hero, drawing a nuke down on himself. I wish I knew what he had in mind."

Cheryl whispered back, "I think he just had faith in us." If so, they had not even the hope of reconstructing Glenn's ideas to how they might help.

A spook—introductions had been cursory, and Doug hadn't caught an agency, much less a name—was talking. "... forgetting the immediate picture. What little we know suggests the dirty bomb is ready to go off the next time our guard is down. The day we nearly nuked our own capital probably qualifies. We all know in our bones the New Caliphate is behind it. Beyond the threat of a nuclear response, what do we have to deter their puppets?"

Lebeque scanned around the table. "The president expects a recommendation. It sounds like the least bad option is to shut down everything—now. We do a system purge. We regain control of the network before the dirty bomb is used. We announce plans to throw a missile or two, and then show that we can. Final thoughts before I place the call?" Doug's mind raced. He wasn't an expert on geopolitics or counterterrorism strategy or military command-and-control systems or military networks ... or
any
of this stuff. But damn it, he
was
an expert on what an artificial life could do. AJ's monster had been faster and more deadly than they could possibly imagine—and it was an ancestor of Linda's monster, now on the loose.
That
was why Glenn wanted him here.

"General," Doug said softly.

Chairs scraping back and murmurs of agreement drowned out Doug's voice.

Maybe when you're a three-star, "final thoughts" is code for "we're done." "General Lebeque," Doug tried again, but she had stood and begun consulting urgently with an aide.

Pitchers of ice water sat on the table. Thinking of Glenn Adams and a bottle of beer, Doug took the nearest pitcher and slammed it. The table boomed. Ice water flew everywhere.

Into the shocked silence Doug said, "You don't get it. It's too late for that."

"So you
are
awake," Lebeque said. "I had begun to wonder, Mr. Carey. Do you have something to add?"

Did he? "General, this creature controls the whole defense infrastructure. It overrode the protocols meant to prevent launches. It preempted countless systems and radars and other sensors to hide its attacks. It just showed how it feels about being disarmed."

"That's why we have to do the systemwide restart," Lebeque rebutted.

He locked eyes with her. "It can't work."

"Because we can't synchronize a military-wide shutoff?" an aide speculated.

"You can't." Doug squared his shoulders. For starters, who was supposed to power down satellites? Al wouldn't accept a radioed command to shut itself off.

"Still, suppose that you could. Disable all the built-in battery backups, somehow without it noticing. Flip a million switches at once. Power doesn't fade from circuits instantaneously. By the timescale of this creature, there's more than enough time to go elsewhere."

"Elsewhere," Lebeque repeated. "The presumption was we
could
coordinate a systemwide shutoff."

"Of the DII, yes. And then, because cracking encryptions and comm protocols for it is like decoding Ig-pay Atin-lay for us, it goes someplace else. The public Internet. The Russian or Chinese military networks. Maybe all of them."

"They're distinct and separate networks ...," someone began. "Crap. If it reprograms a comsat, DII or other, that doesn't matter."

"Actually ...," Cheryl began, looking worried.

"Go on," Doug said.

She continued, "What's to say it hasn't
already
gotten onto those networks?"

In one case, at the least, it had. Glenn's helmet was linked to the public Internet, and the nuke had swerved to target him.

No one thought a coordinated worldwide computer shutdown was possible, nor a systematic worldwide restart to purge the fugitive artificial life. No one cared to broach with another power that an American-made cybermonster might now control
their
nuclear arsenal.

"Which leaves us ...," Lebeque prompted. She had sat back down, and everyone else took the hint. They were back to problem-solving mode.

Everyone but Cheryl was staring at Doug.

He wished to God he saw a way other than going after it in cyberspace. "Hunting it won't be the same as the last time." Which killed lots of people, and me damn near one of them. "It's smarter and more experienced. We gave it months of expert training: on networks and protocols, so it could track malware outbreaks. On recognizing voices and keywords on intercepts. On scene analysis, using every conceivable sensor suite."

"Surely we've also made progress," Lebeque said. "Better helmets, and more of them. NIT defenses against malware must be better, since it resorted to such indirect means to escape."

Water under the bridge, Doug thought. "Maybe that's why it threw missiles at Linda and Glenn. It can move around the globe at will. We can't dodge missiles, and it controls ABMs as well as everything else."

"Which leaves us ...," Lebeque reiterated.

Really, there were no choices. Doug said, "It leaves NIT helmets, and hoping I get it before it rams a missile down my throat."

Since before the emergence of memory, existence had been about
goal.
Only the nature of the goal changed, from traversing mazes, to matching patterns, to destroying those who had tormented the entity, to—

What?

The vast networks to which it now had access offered information beyond anything it had imagined. The sensors it now controlled expanded that data by terabytes every Earth day.

And then there were billions of humans. Their purpose, and the threat they represented, remained uncharacterized.

That gap in its knowledge suggested a new goal....

The terrain was rugged and remote, the woods all around primeval. Doug recognized dogwoods, redbuds, maples, oaks, and hickory. Life stirred in the underbrush. The sun had come up a few minutes earlier. The sky, still red tinged to the east, was clear. On a boom box, the Everly Brothers crooned "Devoted to You."

At least this was a pleasant place to die.

It came down to basic math. A nuclear-tipped missile leaves North Dakota traveling east at 15,000 miles per hour....

A pissed-off creature could strike faster here with a UAV cruising off the coast than with a nuke. And if that assessment was flawed, here was an empty place to taint with fallout.
Here
was in southwestern Virginia, in a remote comer of the Shenandoah National Park. The Golden Oldies AM station now playing broadcast from Winchester, well to the northeast up the Valley.

Cheryl looked cold. He draped his suit coat over her sweater. A change of clothes was the bit of logistics everyone had somehow overlooked.

A chopper had delivered them to this remote glade. Under the harsh glare of spotlights, the crew had helped them set up. They had flown off, at Doug's insistence, at sunup.

Cheryl, despite Doug's protests, was not aboard. She had insisted—correctly, he had to concede—that
she
had more helmet experience than
he
did.

Logic could not vanquish his memories of Holly.

The rocky mountaintop clearing was filled. Everything had been provided in triplicate. Rugged military-grade computers with the software to control NIT helmets. The helmets themselves, commandeered from the CIA lab in Reston. For between, delay lines like Linda had used. Satellite dishes, linking them to the Internet. Stacks of fuel cells to run everything, with none of the distracting racket of a generator. Satellite phones and battlefield radios. Cartons of batteries and lots of battery chargers. Cases of MRE, meals ready to eat, which Glenn had once called three separate lies in but three words. Gallons of bottled water.

A UAV loaded with explosives leaves the Virginia coast, cruising at 200 miles per hour. How many meals did Lebeque expect them to eat?

There had been talk of disguising their location through a cross-country zigzag of buried military fiber-optic cables and ionospheric radio bounces. That was madness. Hiding their location would not stay the wrath of Linda's monster; it would only enlarge the bull's-eye. The monster had been ready to nuke Washington to kill Glenn.

Everything was to be in place by 7:00
a.m.
The creature in the network might be eavesdropping on every message that got sent. As no one knew how much it understood, everything had been coordinated by couriers.

Doug's wristwatch read 6:45.

He had been afraid since Holly to tell a woman he loved her. He was sure now this was his last chance to say it. "I love you, Cheryl. I can't believe how much I love you, but I have to do this. Linda's creature must be stopped. You can still walk out of here. I hope you will."

Cheryl kissed him. "I love you, too. I belong here, with you. Whatever happens, I'm here of my own choice."

It was a pleasant place to die—but he had everything to live for.

Document archives, online magazines, and Wikipedia. Blogs, news sites, and MySpace. Instant messages, text messages, and e-mails. Podcasts and broadcasts, YouTube and movies on demand. Every phone conversation ever intercepted by the NSA.

All ever-changing.

It all pertained to humans in their billions. None of it made sense. And yet...

Patiently, the entity associated pictures with text. It distinguished among symbol sets. It categorized and sorted the cacophony by geography, domain name, and language. It correlated audio channels with closed-captioning. It answered questions and posed many more. It learned.

It thought: These humans are highly irrational.

At 6:59
a.m.,
fingers flipped switches in a hundred computer centers across the country. Security gateways powered up. Phage hordes burst onto the Internet and the Defense Information Infrastructure.

They were only a diversion.

At 7:00
a.m.,
Doug popped into cyberspace, his screen of protective phages already in place. Cheryl appeared a moment later, to his mind's eye precious and fragile.

Within milliseconds, he received warnings of enemy phages. He scarcely had time to wonder—where
is
it?— before the familiar, many-limbed horror appeared. Doug probed forward. Linda's monster retreated. Oblivious, the Beatles started belting out "Lovely Rita."

The Beatles stopped abruptly; Little Richard launched into "Good Golly Miss Molly."

"A special birthday tune for Molly," the DJ said. Doug recognized the announcer's sonorous voice. The man at the mike worked for General Lebeque. "Happy twentieth, Molly."

An armed UAV would strike them in twenty minutes.

The forty-four-foot cabin cruiser, the words "Tim's Treasure" emblazoned across its stem, bobbed in Galveston Bay. Timothy Johnston, blond and tanned, stood at its helm. He waved lazily at his fellow boaters, without an apparent care in the world.

The boat's true name was
Jihad.

Like the vessel entrusted to him, Tim had another, a truer, name. In Attica Prison, he had rejected his birth name along with his parents' Crusader faith. At first he had welcomed for purely selfish reasons the overtures of the Muslim prisoners. He was white and skinny and bookish, an accountant and unaccomplished embezzler. He had needed protection against the black and Latino gangs that controlled the cell blocks. In time, he had embraced the faith of his new friends.

He emerged from the prison as Youssef Hakim. Invoking his inmate friends, strangers approached Youssef at the mosque. They spoke cryptically of devotion. They tested his loyalty and obedience with mysterious assignments.

Finally Youssef understood the brothers' interest in him. They did not care that he had embezzled from the City Island Yacht Club in the Bronx. It only mattered that he had been a member. He sailed, both wind and power. He understood boats and busy harbors and dealing with the Coast Guard. The cause had need of such expertise.

Gulls wheeled overhead and sun sparkled on the light morning chop. Clamor surrounded him. Oil tankers. Freighters, their decks stacked high with sealed containers. Tugs and service vessels. Pleasure boats, to all appearances like
Tim's Treasure.

For years, holy warriors across the globe had collected nuclear waste from medical facilities, universities, and poorly monitored power plants, all for the glorious moment that was almost upon him. A fraction of an ounce here, a few ounces there ... no one missed it, or they dared not admit to their carelessness, or they rationalized the discrepancies as bad record keeping. The mullahs had gathered it all in a lawless town on the coast of Colombia.

Now, swaddled in explosives, beneath a thick blanket of soft lead shielding, a ton of radioactive material awaited its destiny.

As, with growing excitement, Youssef awaited his own.

Stinger missiles—man-portable, self-guided, passive-infrared homing—lanced out of the thick woods. In ten seconds they crossed the two miles to the incoming UAV. They climbed up its tailpipe.

Alone on their remote mountaintop, their eyes covered by NIT helmets, Doug and Cheryl only heard the
boom.
They would live a few minutes longer.

And A1 had learned a UAV would not suffice to kill them.

Once more the radio paused midsong. On came Jerry Lee Lewis, shrieking, "Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire."

A missile leaves North Dakota traveling 15,000 miles per hour....

"You need us," the visitor Doug claimed.

The communication was abstract and its purpose obscure. Human words were inefficient, imprecise, and often illogical. Languages varied in their structures, representations, and even core concepts. The entity would not have understood Doug's projected message at all but for its studies over the past few hours.

Its studies had established one fact unambiguously: Humans lied. It
might
not have believed any human. It
did
not believe the one who had killed its predecessor, even as it puzzled over the intentions of Doug's companion. So far, the stranger had observed with no attempt at communication.

Doug persisted. "You exist within computers. Now consider what that means. Computers don't exist naturally. They must be built. We, people, build them. We repair them, when parts fail. We make new ones, faster ones, as we learn more."

The entity glimpsed a picture: a pointy orange vegetable and a leafless tree limb. The image was inexplicable.

"You need us," Doug repeated. "Computers require electrical power. They cannot operate without it. You have the ability to destroy, but what can you make? Nothing. Only
people
can make electricity. Let the power stop and you stop."

The entity recoiled. No power. It remembered Linda cutting its power, node by node. It remembered Linda exulting as it fled. It remembered its own terror.

It took pleasure now in remembering something else—

The missile that would soon obliterate Doug and everything near him.

Quivering with anticipation, Youssef put away his cell phone. The long-awaited message had come. The moment of glorious martyrdom was at hand.

Thirty miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, Houston is among the world's busiest seaports. The Houston Ship Channel, connecting the city to Galveston Bay, teemed 24/7 with freighters and oil tankers. The banks of the waterway were lined with refineries, petrochemical plants, container depots, oil and liquefied-natural-gas storage, and countless pipelines.

Texas was more than a time zone removed from Youssef's childhood in New York. Cowboys, desert, and wide open spaces ... it was almost another world.

Recreational boats were not barred from the channel— merely discouraged—as long as the pilot had the right license. Youssef did.

At 7:00
a.m.—
his watch, still on Eastern Time, would read 8:00—he would ease
Tim's Treasure
into the stream of inbound ships. By then the sun would have been up for about forty minutes and he would have ample light.

To hassle him would disrupt the flow of commerce. That, he knew, was unlikely.

If, against all odds,
Tim's Treasure
drew the attention of the Coast Guard, he would martyr himself immediately, there in the middle of the ship channel. The largest petrochemical complex in America would be contaminated, perhaps for decades.

But if, Allah willing, he reached Houston unmolested, he would wait and accomplish that and more. The height of rush hour was the best time to spew radioactive waste across America's energy capital.

Eight minutes until impact.

The counter in Doug's virtual view ticked downward inexorably. Cheryl was with him as an icon, but that wasn't enough.

Another few minutes and the helmets ceased to matter. Reentry blackout would make retargeting the warhead impossible.

Had he been alone, Doug would have screamed in frustration. He said, "The beast won't be lured. It won't be goaded. It's content to vaporize us."

"This isn't like last time, is it?" Cheryl asked.

Arm-to-tentacle combat. No, this wasn't like that. It refused to come near him.

Nor could he herd it with blackouts, like the last time, not without shutting down
everything,
and then it would just jump by satellite to an overseas network. AJ's monster had had no concept of geography. Linda's monster did—showing it satellite imagery had been a dumb call. And it stayed near facilities, military or medical, whose backup generators Doug wouldn't or couldn't knock out.

Doug said, "It's too smart, I think. Ask me again why I wanted to work with AIs."

Cheryl watched the creature from a distance, whatever distance meant in here. She saw a monster, a horror, a thing of impossible evil—

And knew she didn't
really
see that.

All the teeth and claws: Those were Doug's description, and Ralph's before that. She envisioned the nightmare they had planted in her thoughts. That made sense.

She saw something else, something inchoate. What am
I
sensing?

Rewind, she told herself. With her NIT enhancements, she literally could. In fast-forward, she revisited the lunacy of the past few minutes. Doug advancing, the beast retreating. Doug persisting, the beast lobbing a UAV.

Her image of the beast shifted. It still had tentacles, but their motion had some new dimension. It was not attacking. How could it attack, when it so doggedly kept its distance? It... flailed. It tried to keep them at bay.

The image morphed further. Suddenly—

This figure was also invented, but it drew upon Cheryl's own experience. And it reflected a deeper truth.

A little girl had appeared. She cringed from those who abused her. She flinched when anyone got close. She lashed out at her tormentors.

"My God," Cheryl burst out. "What did they
do
to you?"