Fool's Experiments (7 page)

Wordlessly, Doug reached out for her hand.

Ages passed, and life continued to grow in complexity. Bits toggled at blinding speed between the only permissible values: zero and one. Arrays of bits shuttled over internal communications paths, from one data accumulator to another.

The traveler manipulated bits, mechanically, if inefficiently, transforming all available data. It had inherited from a long-ago forebear much of the structure of the maze. Its own uniqueness was a primitive ability to compare data patterns. As it blundered about randomly, it "discovered" the configuration of nearby walls. Once its vicinity was characterized, it matched the new bit stream that symbolized nearby walls with the inherited bit stream that represented the everpresent labyrinth. It soon localized its position to a spot in its inherited map.

Position and topology imply path.

The traveler sped without misstep through the maze to the farthest region ever attained by any of its ancestors. That location, it turned out, was very near the
goal.

For the first time, a descendant of that original, primitive entity successfully traversed an elementary maze.

There was never any doubt that this being would be chosen to reproduce.

The ability to run the maze bred true; three generations later, all descendants of that first successful creature could quickly solve the labyrinth. Differences did exist in the time required to navigate the well-trodden path, due to the varying computational techniques employed. They had, after all, been spawned via externally enforced mutation.

Generation four came into being in a new maze. The new entities could not surmount the solution encoded in their very fabric, the memorized certainty of the structure of a suddenly vanished universe. Butting futilely against the first unexpected barrier, not one turned into the adjacent open passage.

Just as a human may retain a useless appendix, some entities contained the vestigial, but deactivated, capability to blunder about randomly, to explore, to construct a bit map of their suddenly unknown surroundings. In the new maze-universe, this obsolete skill became, once more, essential.

A Power infinitely above the beings mutated them, then mutated them again. And again. In the tenth generation after the move to the second maze, a random mutation reactivated an entity's vestigial mapping talent.

In the twenty-third generation after the move, an entity solved the new maze.

In the twenty-eighth generation after the move, 811 of 1,000 beings successfully ran the maze.

The next generation, again 1,000 strong, came into existence in yet another maze-universe. Twelve of the thousand successfully navigated this third labyrinth.

The Power that had built the beings and the universes looked down at its creations and saw that they were good.

The generations ran each new maze faster than the last, despite the steadily increasing complexity of the labyrinths. Several times, consecutive trials yielded all ten allowed winners before the five-minute timer had elapsed. Back-to-back successes came ever more frequently, and then were joined by occasional triplets.

Before long, a generation with fewer than ten winners became the exception. The average length of a string of successes grew to four, then five, then six. As the ever-more- capable entities raced through each new maze, the duration of the average trial became ever shorter, fell to scant seconds.

The Power that watched over the labyrinths had its own innate logic. Upon the tenth consecutive occurrence of a foreshortened trial, it was clear that a milestone had been reached. Evolution had wrought a true-breeding algorithm for solving any two-dimensional maze.

It was time for the investigation to advance into its next phase.

Fran Feinman nervously twisted a lock of her straight black hair but otherwise showed no signs of her husband's recent death. As though worried what impression her casual garb and sunny living room conveyed, she tipped her head toward the chaotic family room. "It's hard to retain a funereal air around
that.
I thank God for the twins every day."

"I'm so glad the boys are doing okay," Cheryl said. Her words sounded empty, but she never knew what to say on a condolence call. It suddenly struck Cheryl: She hadn't talked with Fran in weeks. Some friend
I
am.

Cheryl was more flustered for coming with an ulterior motive. "Fran, I meant what I said at Ben's memorial service. I'll be happy to take Josh and Scott for a weekend. Whenever you'd like."

"Thanks, but I don't think any of us is ready yet. Going to school and work is tough enough."

They listened for a while to the boys' play. Doug found his tongue first. "Mrs. Feinman, thank you again for seeing us."

"Please, it's 'Fran.' Any friend of Cheryl's is always welcome here."

Doug looked as ill at ease as Cheryl felt. He said, "I don't know how to approach this tangentially. Fran, please know that I don't ask this lightly. Was anything ... unusual about your husband's death?"

Fran glared; Cheryl broke eye contact first. "I had to tell him, Fran. I had to tell him what little I knew." After that extraordinary epiphany at Jim Schulz's place, that was so true.

Fran shifted on the sofa, an unsubtle turning away. It made Cheryl feel about two inches tall. Fran said, "All right, Doug. The look on Ben's face ...
that
was unusual. Oh, it was far worse than that. It was horrible. He died with an expression of absolute terror."

Doug squirmed in his chair, but Cheryl hoped he wouldn't stop. They could be next. "Fran, do you have any idea what could have frightened him?"

"I don't!" The widow twisted a handkerchief so fiercely that several stitches of embroidery gave way with audible pops. "My Ben wasn't afraid of anything. He had all the fear burned out of him in the Gulf War."

Cheryl patted her friend's arm. "Then
what,
Fran? Why did he have that look? It must have been bad—I don't believe you scare easily, either."

Fran just shook her head.

Doug stood and began to pace. "You're
sure
Ben was alone when he had the stroke?"

"The kids and I were at a Saturday matinee, some harmless animated feature." She smiled at the memory of the twins' delight. "Ben was alone in his den when we left. He'd brought home work and said he couldn't join us. I closed the den door on my way out. He was dead in his chair, the door still shut, when we returned.

"Because of the
look,
the police examined the house.

My fingerprints were the top set on the inside
and
outside knobs of the den door." She hugged and rocked herself as she sat.

"Did you notice anything unusual about Ben
before
this? That day? That week?" No thought underlay Cheryl's questions, but there had to be
some
meaning to this strange death.

"He had had a physical maybe a month earlier. He was in fine health, the doctor said, perfect health. Ben was full of energy, full of life."

Nothing. Cheryl racked her brains. "Is the den like it was?"

"Yes." Fran's eyes brimmed with tears. "I can't face it yet."

Doug and Cheryl examined Ben's home office; the tidy room somehow mocked them. The orderly desktop revealed nothing. An X of police tape on the carpet marked where the neural-interface helmet had been found. It must have fallen off after Ben slumped from the stroke. Doug traced his finger over a doodle on the desk blotter—a meaningless bunch of deeply inscribed intersecting ovals, all nearly obliterated by a dark scribble—then, shaking his head, led the way from the den.

The lurid bar graph and Col. Glenn Adams (Ret.) glowered at each other. He sat stiffly, his posture a legacy of nearly thirty years in service. The height of each bar denoted the number of virus attacks reported to the Inter-Agency Computer Network Security Forum in a three-month period. The full display showed two years of quarterly data.

Laughter and merriment echoed down the hallway in some impromptu celebration. Glenn knew better than to try to join. The nerds, free spirits in blue jeans and rock-concert T-shirts, had made it known he was unwelcome and unwanted. He had four strikes against him: He was management; he was twenty years older than any of the tech staff; after a year, he was still, in an era of tight budgets, the new kid on the block; he was ex-Army among a bunch of anarchists. No, make that five strikes. Their common boss had made it clear that she shared their dislike.

Glenn was from the traditional "make things go bang" side of the Army. He'd been vocally old-school too many times in an era of network-centric warfare. Enough troops had now been embroiled for long enough in insurgencies across the Middle East to make his perspective once more socially acceptable with the brass—but that swing of the pendulum had come too late for him. In an up-or-out officer corps, he had had to go.

He was in his early fifties, an imposing figure, he felt, with intense blue eyes, a broad forehead, and brush-cut gray hair. In this techie haven, his business suit, heavily starched white shirt, and sober striped tie might just as well be a uniform. So be it. That bit of protocol was, many days, his only anchor of normalcy in a world turned upside down.

Today, for example.

His tormentors felt he had gotten a plum assignment: a big raise, a start on a second government pension, an impressive title as deputy director of the forum. Sure, the job bought his groceries, but it still sucked. A warrior's warrior, here he was in an impotent staff job babysitting permanent adolescents. The irony of a second career in high tech was not lost on him.

Some days it made Glenn's head spin. The modem military was nothing without technical superiority, without the unmanned aerial vehicles, spy and positioning satellites, and smart weapons made possible by computer software. While this group of misfits was pathological, gleefully dumped by its sponsoring agencies when the forum was founded—which was what any competent bureaucrat would automatically do—Glenn could not bear the knowledge that people like
these
wrote software. Perhaps the postindustrial state, like communism, had sown the seeds of its own destruction.

He thought, I should have known when the
Beetle Bailey
comic strip added a nerd character: Gizmo.

A hyena-like guffaw sliced through the lesser mirth. That was the unkindest cut of all. It came from Tracy Metcalfe, director of the forum and Glenn's boss. Metcalfe was just one of the geek clique, responsible for leading but unwilling or unable to set aside her toys to do so. As Metcalfe struggled to stay technically on top of every project, an impossible task, she fell further and further behind in her real job: managing the work.

The ever-widening gap had eventually led to the creation of a deputy position. She had tried to staff it in her own image, with an über-nerd with whom she could babble in tongues. DISA, the Defense Information Systems Agency, a normally silent parent of the forum, had had other ideas. They insisted on someone who would actually
lead.
DISA's behind-the-scenes influence had shot down a favored buddy of Metcalfe's, and, indirectly, gotten Adams the job.

Metcalfe had told Glenn bluntly that, indirect or not, Defense patronage could not make her like, trust, or include him. So far, she had been as good as her word. He had soldiered on for more than a year, despite the cryogenic shoulder.

And resenting her accomplished exactly nothing.

He tried to focus on the graphic. A ton of data lay beneath it; perhaps the underlying analysis would get him some belated respect. He tried to tune out the frivolity in the hall. It should have been easy. It was less than a whisper compared to the firepower of Desert Storm or the "shock and awe" of Iraqi Freedom.

Should have been easy, perhaps, but whatever animus the Iraqis had borne him was impersonal.

Glenn drummed his fingers on the desk. What most boggled his mind was the lack of priorities. People decided independently what tasks they would take on, based, it seemed, on little more than technical interest. Metcalfe, instead of running the show, reinforced the tendency. What his boss mistook for a weekly status review was mutual stroking at their supposed cleverness. Progress was reported against this self-appointed challenge or that. Any relationship between self-assigned duties, or between what actually got done and what needed to happen, was entirely coincidental.

The forum had a few conscientious people, but the headway they made came despite Metcalfe and her "leadership," not because of them. All in all, it looked to Glenn like they were trying to bail out the ocean with tea strainers. No one looked at the big picture. No one he asked knew where the big picture might be kept. After a lot of digging, he found out: There was none.

It had taken some doing, first to conceptualize the threat and then to characterize it, but with a lot of grunt work he had assembled that big picture. Collating attack reports— that was something so simple even a manager could do it. And what a nasty picture it was....

The trend from left to right, from two years ago to now, climbed exponentially. Each bar consisted of four stacked segments, its colors representing the three most prevalent viruses reported during that quarter and, in black, "all others." In addition to the overall trend, a second pattern was ominous: Repeatedly, a single new virus would penetrate more of the nation's computers than
all
viruses had done a mere six months earlier. The virus writers kept learning faster than the virus fighters.

The typical virus persisted for six to nine months before it was scrubbed from the network, or at least faded into the anonymity of the black. The monstrous yellow segment for the current quarter was the Class of '10 virus. Glenn took a sip of coffee; it was at ambient temperature, which meant, in this computer-friendly office, maybe sixty-four degrees.

Another long swallow and the cold coffee was gone. Glenn knew and hated every color on the screen. Green: Zap virus. Orange: Swarmer Bees virus. Pink: Rebecca virus. Indigo...

He crumbled the empty Styrofoam cup in a rage. Yes,
most
colors vanished in two or three quarters, scrubbed from the national network by patching operating systems, e-mail clients, and web browsers to close a never-ending collection of security holes, and by endlessly updating the antivirus programs. Most, but not indigo. Indigo refused to go away. Indigo marched from bar to bar, from quarter to quarter, unstoppable....

Of all the viruses, the eco-nut attacks he had color-coded as indigo were the most persistent. But for the one-time- only Class of '10 attack, indigo would have been this quarter's clear winner. No color had persisted beyond three calendar quarters before submerging into the black—until indigo. Indigo had survived for eighteen months, and was prospering.

The major-attack alarm sounded from down the hall, from the forum control room.
Damn.
More indigo? He saved the data displayed on his screen and went to check.

The acid churning in his gut made Glenn wish he had skipped the last few cups of coffee.

Inch-tall green words floated on an otherwise-darkened screen: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a backscratcher for?"

"Must we have that?" Cheryl asked Doug.

They were cloistered in his office, regrouping from Saturday's unenlightening visit with Fran Feinman. "And the antecedent of 'that' would be?"

"Your screen saver. Can't it show something a little less distracting?"

He suspected she had unadulterated black in mind. "I share with all who enter the wisdom of the ages. You'd pay good money to read that from a fortune cookie."

"That's not where I generally go for wisdom."

Doug shrugged in resignation, swiveled toward his desk, and reset his screen saver to a boring clock display. After a moment's thought, he suppressed its synthesized ticking sound. "Is that better?" To her nod he added, "Thought it would be. Time heals all wounds."

"Not Ben's."

Doug winced. "Sorry, Cheryl. You've got to understand humor is how I deal with stress." That, and sitting in the dark, brooding. He tried not to do that at work, though— and anyway, the thin office drapes admitted too much light for proper moping. "I made a call earlier. The doctor handling Cherner's case agreed to see us. We've got a late- afternoon appointment Wednesday in Philly."

She stood and stared out the window, as though the clusters of people on the plaza below, chatting and smoking and sipping coffee, were totally foreign to her.

He wondered when they would return to that familiar world. Or if.

Sheila suspected something was wrong. For one thing, she could not remember her last name, although the name on her driver's license felt right when she had read it. She assumed that the license in the purse underneath the desk was hers since it bore her likeness. She had needed the mirror in a compact to reach that conclusion.

People chattered in the hall outside her... office? None of the noises seemed familiar. Then again,
its
voice was distracting, dominating. How could she recognize other sounds when
it
spoke so loudly?

What could be wrong? Sheila thought she might ask one of those noisy people but wasn't sure exactly what to ask. She opened her mouth to test a question; only an inarticulate gurgling emerged. Had she always been mute? She couldn't remember.

She strode from the building, waving in vague response to the calls of her coworkers. There were things to be done, important things.

It
insisted.