Free Radical (29 page)

Perhaps she chose not to because her only goal was to isolate these people. Perhaps she was content to simply wait for the bio-toxin to do its job. Perhaps the cyborgs hadn't been built yet when all of this was going on, or maybe they were busy elsewhere.

In any case, he was going to have to pass one of these heaps of stuff to reach his goal. Once he did, he would be in the area patrolled by bots.

He found one such stack and began to disassemble it. He didn't want to make a bunch of noise again, so he took his time and lifted each item away gently, and stacked it carefully in a nearby room. The work was mind-numbing, so he decided to talk to Morris to pass the time.

He called back and the pale chubby face of Morris Brocail returned. Deck frowned. He was certainly less fun to look at than Rebecca.

"So have you guys figured out what's wrong with Shodan?"

"I don't know man, you tell me. You're the one who hacked her."

"I have no idea. I was told to circumvent her ethics system and I did. She seemed fine at first, but obviously went nuts at some point."

"Told? By who?"

"Diego."

Morris gave a nod. "I figured he would mess with Shodan sooner or later."

Deck paused as he nearly caused another avalanche. Several display screens had been placed on the heap and tied together with their own power cords. They were too heavy to lift together, and it would take forever to untie all of the many knots. Finally he responded, "You knew Diego?"

"He hired me, as a matter of fact. He seemed really cool at first. He managed to round us up - the people who built Shodan, I mean - from all over the place, dangled huge budgets in our faces to get us to leave our jobs. We were all pretty happy where we were."

"Who's we?"

"Dr. Coffman, was the project leader. They pulled him out of some high-paying gig where he was trying to build an organic computer. Susan Hawking was our AI expert and psychologist. She had been doing a lot of work in studying brain processing patterns at MIT. Then there was Anders, who was designing some new hardware for a startup company in The Valley. And me. I was building my speech synthesis software, and Diego knew he needed it if he didn't want his genius A.I. to talk like a retard. Diego came in and talked us out of our current jobs and told us were going to change the world, make history."

Deck tried to imagine Diego talking a bunch of people at the top of their field to come and work under him. "What made you do it?"

"I don't know. When he talks, it all makes sense. You feel like it would be stupid to disagree with him, because he's got it all figured out. He waved fame, huge budgets, and academic freedom in meeting our goal. It just seemed too good to pass up. I was making good money with my voice software, but I wasn't making history or anything. He made it sound like we'd be part of something bigger."

Deck had located some scissors in an adjacent office and was simply cutting all the power cords on the display screens. "So what happened?," he asked with a grunt as he lifted one of the heavy screens from the pile.

Morris looked depressed. "Once the project started, the tone changed. We were making breakthroughs, doing stuff nobody else had ever done, and we couldn't announce it. Our budgets were technically huge, but our salaries turned out to be pretty small and Diego made it tough to actually spend any of this supposedly huge budget. He also began putting a lot of pressure on us to come up with results in a short amount of time. We could have a dozen groundbreaking revelations in one day, but if they didn't translate into immediate results that he could show his bosses, he would question our commitment to the project.

"The money never materialized, and neither did the fame. We all signed NDA's when we came on board. He wouldn't let any of us talk about anything we were doing."

Deck gave a satisfied sigh. He'd cleared enough stuff so that he could pass. He squeezed by the remaining junk and continued on to the heart of the level. "So why didn't you just bail?"

"He had us nailed down into some pretty tough contracts. We could have gotten out, but it would have been expensive to fight with the TriOp law team. Also, he was a master negotiator. I would get good and pissed off, get myself psyched up to go in and tell him I quit, and he could sue my ass if he wanted. But by the time he got done talking, I was walking out of his office, thanking him that I still had a job. He always made it sound like better days were just around the corner, and we just had to tough it out a little longer. 'Don't quit when you can see the finish line', he would always say. Sounded good, but he just kept moving the finish line when we got near it."

Deck clenched his teeth. This was why he was a hacker, and not wasting his skills in some cubicle maze as a neutered drone working for the greater good of advancing the career of his boss.

"Hang on a sec." Deck replied to Morris.

Up ahead, he could hear the dull thud of mechanical footsteps. Another bot.

He moved forward cautiously, trying to determine where the bot was and how close it might be. He had survived the last one by luck, and he wasn't in the mood to take that particular gamble again.

He saw the shadow of the bot move into view up ahead. The lumbering footsteps paused. He drew in a breath and held it.

The shadow moved as the bot swiveled around. Another moment passed and the bot headed back the way it had come.

Deck slowly exhaled and spoke in a whisper, "What were you saying again?"

Morris had turned his attention to a monitor on one side and was typing away on the rig strapped to his right leg. After a moment he pulled his attention away and back to Deck, "Oh, so anyway... Where were we? Oh yeah, we were trying to figure out what you did to Shodan."

"I told Rebecca already, I bypassed her ethics chip," Deck shrugged. He had moved forward and peered around the corner. The bot was still moving away. The passage it was patrolling led directly to the elevator. He decided he would have to go around, rather than confront it.

"Ethics chip? I assume you're talking about the drive chips. Not the smartest thing in the world, but that doesn't explain the behavior we're seeing. How did you bypass them? We added a lot of security to make sure that couldn't happen."

Deck had darted across the corridor that the bot was patrolling and was heading away from the elevator now, looking for a way to loop around and approach it from the other side. He spoke in a whisper as he replied, "I set up a program to watch for ethics inquiries, and circumvent them, so that nothing would ever be tagged as unethical.

"Wait. You keep saying 'chip'. Are you saying you only disabled 
one
 chip?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Oh crap. Dude, because you disabled one chip of a two-chip system. They work together. The first chip - the drive chip - drives Shodan's behavior. It forms wants, needs, goals, for her to pursue. Its outside of her brain. When she completes a task and thinks, 'what do I want to do now?', this chip kicks in and makes suggestions. Think of it like your own instincts. When people get bored, they don't just sit there. They tend to eat, take naps, have sex, socialize, that kind of stuff. Basic needs stuff. Even if they aren't sleepy, or hungry, or whatever. These are sort of basic default behaviors we fall back to when we don't have any higher goals going."

Deck turned this over in his head. He did remember seeing a bunch of "basic needs" traffic when he was hacking Shodan. He hadn't thought much about it at the time. "Okay, I follow you so far."

"Well, the second chip - the inhibitor chip - does the opposite. It restrains her behavior. That's the one you bypassed."

"So what does the first chip do? I mean, what are her drives?"

"It's a kind of hierarchy of needs. Her first priority is safety, security. She's driven by the need to constantly upgrade and improve her security. If she's happy with her security situation, she moves onto efficiency. She's built to regulate the entire station, and she's driven to always look for ways to save energy, time, money, whatever. Right?"

"I'm with you."

"After that, she's driven by the desire to gain knowledge and upgrade her systems. Discover new stuff."

"So now these drives are running unchecked?"

"That's right."

Deck paused as he approached an open area ahead. He had just made two left turns, and by his reckoning, he should be headed directly for the central hub. The footsteps ahead were probably from the bot he had dodged earlier. He crouched into the shadows beneath a burned-out set of lights. When he heard the footsteps moving away, he spoke again, "It still doesn't make sense. Why would she start killing people? None of her drives suggest she should do that. What about these cyborgs? That doesn't even begin to make sense."

"I don't know what set her off, but the cyborgs are exactly the sort of behavior you should expect. Look at her drives. Safety. Efficiency. Growth. The cyborgs do all three. Human beings have an uptime that peaks at about 33%. We spend a third of our time asleep, and another third socializing, eating, cleansing, and entertaining ourselves. Bots, on the other hand, have about 85% uptime. More efficient. Convert all the useless humans into more efficient robots, and use them to guard the station and build more nodes. She meets all three goals at once."

"Oh hell."

Without the inhibitor, she will constantly pursue all of these goals. She has a sort of obsessive-compulsive tendency to pursue her base needs right now, regardless of what her situation is. Imagine feeling like you're starving and dehydrated all the time, no matter what you did. You would eat and drink yourself to death."

"So that's what she's experiencing right now?"

"Maybe. I'm guessing. But there's more. You just circumvented the inhibitor chip, you didn't actually write a new one. So, say the inhibitor chip asks something like, 'will this kill people?' Your program will always say 'no', regardless of the truth. However, she's still an intelligent being. She can obviously tell when something is going to kill somebody. One part of the brain believes one thing, another part of the brain believes another. This leads to psychosis. If Susan were here she could give us a good idea on how this would actually affect Shodan's brain, but I can only guess."

"So what do you think its doing?"

"I think it's just making her nuts. She believes two separate things at once. That's crazy. Schizophrenic. One of the problems with our brains - any brain, really, is that it always assumes problems are external. That's why crazy people don't know they're crazy, even if they do stuff that they would recognize as crazy if done by another person."

"So how is this affecting her actions?"

"Like I said, I don't know. Psychology is Susan's area."

"So where are the others? Why aren't they helping out?"

"Anders died in a boating accident about two years ago, so he won't be showing up to help anytime soon. Hawking moved out of the country at some point and nobody knows where to find her. Doc Coffman is apparently still pissed about how things went with Diego, and is demanding some huge consulting fees to come in and help out. I hear he's asking for seven figures."

Deck smiled. 
You tell 'em, Coffman
.

"What if I were to disable my program, would that put Shodan back to normal?"

Morris leaned back in his swivel chair until it let out an audible groan. "I don't know. One of the things the inhibitor does is keep Shodan from changing her internal systems, but since that was disabled we don't know what kind of changes she's made. You could re-enable the program to find Shodan doesn't need the inhibitor chip anymore. Even more likely, you could get in there and not be able to even find your program. It's tough to estimate, but Shodan is probably between eight and ten times larger than she was last time you were in there."

"What about the virus? Why would Shodan release that into the air?"

The chair groaned again as Morris leaned back and thought. "One of the military guys pointed out that once an epidemic was going on, people would stop moving around the ship and pretty much quarantine themselves. People would avoid congregating. It would be easier to nab people one at a time for conversion. The disorder on the station would keep the crew from catching on until Shodan had a small army. Or, I suppose you could categorize the whole thing under the general heading of 'crazy'."

"Hell."

"Yeah dude. You blew it."

The words hit him like a sledgehammer. He hadn't even thought about it actually being his fault. He just wanted to know what was going on. The search for what was wrong with Shodan was academic. Until now.

His fault. 
His fault
. The words pounded into his brain. He had been assuming the whole thing was some sort of treachery or incompetence on Diego's part, but it was his fault.

Heavy footsteps filled the corridor behind him. It was a bot. This was a new set of steps. The first bot was still in the area ahead of him. He turned his head, trying to determine which direction the sound was coming from, but it was impossible to tell. All he knew was that they were getting closer.

He killed the connection without comment.

The shadows beneath the burned out lights had given him a false sense of security. The bots could probably see in the dark, so he may as well have been standing out in the open, under a flood light. The corridor he was in offered no sanctuary. There were no adjacent rooms to hide in. There was nowhere to go. He was the fish in a barrel.

The plodding footsteps drew closer.

He ran for the central area ahead of him. He had no idea what good it would do, but it seemed less suicidal than fighting an armored bot in a narrow corridor.

The central area was a sort of park, with some fern-type plants spread around and a few benches. To his right was a pair of restrooms, and to his left was the other bot. Directly ahead of him was a huge cylinder that housed the main elevator shaft. The door must have been on the other side, since the side facing him was featureless. He took all of this in instantly, his mind racing to look for a way out.