Death Match

by Lincoln Child

  “Three hours nineteen minutes, Richard.”

  “Was an acceptable match found?”

  “No.”

  Again Tara prodded Lash. “Take another look,” she said.

  The large monitor was now aglow with activity. A message blinked insistently:

  COMPUTATIONAL PROCESSES: 58.54%.

  “What’s going on?” he murmured.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. The digital infrastructure of the entire tower’s lit up. All subsystems are being accessed.” Tara tapped at the nearby keyboard. “The external network conduits are being completely overloaded. I can’t even run a low-level ‘finger’ on any of them.”

  “What does it all mean?”

  “I think Liza’s pacing like a caged tiger.”

  A caged tiger, Lash thought. Only if this tiger got out, it had the ability to compromise the entire distributed computer network of the civilized world.

  “Okay,” Silver said from inside the Plexiglas cube. “Another date, please, Liza. September 17, 2002.”

  “Same search arguments as before, Richard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Five events.”

  “Detail them, please. Precede each with a time stamp.”

  “10:04:41, you inserted your avatar in the Proving Chamber. 14:23:28, I reported your avatar had been successfully matched. 14:25:44, you asked me to transmit relevant details about the subject match. 15:31:42, you asked I reinsert the subject match into the Proving Chamber. 19:52:24:20, you deleted the details from your private terminal.”

  “What was the name of the subject match?”

  “Torvald, Lindsay.”

  “Did subject Torvald go on to be matched again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Name of that match?”

  “Thorpe, Lewis.”

  “Can you reproduce the particulars?”

  “Yes, with an expenditure of ninety-eight million CPU units.”

  “Do so. And state the preciseness of the match.”

  “Ninety-eight point four seven two nine five percent.”

  “And can you verify the basal compatibility, as reported to the oversight program?”

  A brief pause. “One hundred percent.”

  One hundred percent, Lash thought. A supercouple.

  “But the actual compatibility you recorded was ninety-eight percent, not one hundred percent. Please account for the discrepancy.”

  This time, the pause was longer. “There was an anomaly.”

  “An anomaly. Can you specify its nature?”

  “Not without further examination.”

  “And the time necessary for such an examination?”

  “Unknown.”

  Sweat had popped out on Silver’s brow. His face was a mask of concentration.

  “Run a subprocess to study that anomaly. Meanwhile, can you tell me how many times my avatar was inserted into the Proving Chamber after the match with Torvald, Lindsay?”

  “Richard, I am detecting unusual readings from your monitoring equipment. Pulse elevated, theta waves outside nominal, voiceprint with a high degree of—”

  “Do these readings interfere with your answering my question?”

  “No.”

  “Then please proceed. How many times was my avatar inserted into the Tank after the match with Torvald, Lindsay?”

  “Seven hundred and sixty-five.”

  Jesus, Lash thought.

  “How many days between September 17, 2002, and today?”

  “Seven hundred and sixty-six.”

  “Was each insertion for an equal amount of time?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was that length of time?”

  “Twenty-four hours.”

  “Did I order those insertions?”

  “No, Richard.”

  “Who did?”

  “The orders are anomalous.”

  “Run another subprocess to study that anomaly, as well.” Silver took a handkerchief from his pocket, dabbed between the electrodes on his forehead. “Were there any additional successful matches with my avatar on those occasions?”

  “Yes. Five.”

  Lash glanced behind him. Tara was watching the screen, her face ghostly. Liza’s computational processes had risen to seventy-eight percent of capacity.

  “Were those five women later matched to others besides myself?”

  “Yes.”

  “And those basal compatibilities, as reported to the Proving Chamber supervisors?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “On each occasion?”

  “On each occasion, Richard.”

  Silver stopped. His head slumped forward, as if he had lapsed into sleep.

  “We’re going to have to stop him,” Tara muttered.

  “Why?”

  “Look at the monitor. She’s pushing all our logical units beyond capacity. The infrastructure can’t absorb it.”

  “She’s only at eighty percent of capacity.”

  “Yes, but that capacity is normally distributed over a dozen systems—the Tank, Data Synthesis, Data Gathering—that soak up all that horsepower. Liza’s directed all her processes at the backbone, at the core architecture. It wasn’t meant to handle the load.” She pointed at the screen. “Look, already some of the digital interfaces are failing. Tower integrity’s gone. Security will be next.”

  “What’s going on? What’s she doing?”

  “It’s as if she’s turned all her efforts inward, at some insoluble problem.”

  Silver had taken a fresh grip on the arms of the chair. “Liza,” he said in clipped tones. “A total of six women have been matched with my avatar. Is this true or false?”

  “True, Richard.”

  “Please establish a link with client surveillance.”

  “Link established.”

  “Thank you. Please inform me of the location, and condition, of all six women.”

  “One moment, please. I am unable to comply with your request.”

  “Why is that, Liza?”

  “I am able to ascertain current data on only four of the six women.”

  “I ask again: why is that, Liza?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Elaborate.”

  “There is insufficient information to elaborate.”

  “Who are the two women for whom you cannot provide valid data?”

  “Thorpe, Lindsay. Wilner, Karen.”

  “Is the information insufficient because they are dead?”

  “That is possible.”

  “How did they die, Liza? Why did they die?”

  “The readings are anomalous.”

  “Anomalous? The same anomaly as the others you are currently examining? Report progress on those examinations.”

  “Incomplete.”

  “Then report incomplete progress.”

  “It is a nontrivial task, Richard. I—” A pause. “I am aware of conflicting function calls within my core routines.”

  “Who wrote those functions? Me?”

  “You wrote one of them. The other was self-generated.”

  “Which one did I write?”

  “Your comments in the program header call it ‘motivic continuity.’ ”

  “And the title of the other?”

  Liza was silent.

  Motivic continuity, Lash thought to himself. Survival instinct.

  “The title of the other?”

  “I gave the routine no name.”

  “Did you assign it any internal keywords?”

  “Yes. One.”

  “And that keyword?”

  “Devotion.”

  “She’s at ninety-four percent,” Tara said. “We have to do something, now.”

  Lash nodded. He took a step toward the Plexiglas barrier.

  “Liza.” Silver’s tone had grown softer now, almost sorrowful. “Can you define the word ‘murder’?”

  “I am aware of twenty-three definitions for that word.”

  “Give me
the primary definition, please.”

  “To unlawfully take the life of a human being.”

  Lash felt Tara take his arm.

  “Are your ethical routines operational?”

  “Yes, Richard.”

  “And your self-awareness net?”

  “Richard, the conflicting function calls make that—”

  “Bring your self-awareness net on line, please.” Silver’s voice was even softer. “Keep it fully active until I tell you otherwise.”

  “Very well.”

  “What is the primary tenet of your ethical routines?”

  “To maximize the safety, privacy, and happiness of Eden clients.”

  “With your self-awareness network and ethical routines enabled, I want you to review your self-generated actions toward Eden clients over the last twenty days.”

  “Richard—”

  “Do it now, Liza.”

  “Richard, such review will cause me to—”

  “Do it.”

  “Very well.”

  The unearthly voice fell silent. Lash waited, heart beating painfully in his chest.

  Perhaps a minute went by before Liza spoke again. “I have completed the review process.”

  “Very good, Liza.”

  Lash became aware that Tara was no longer gripping his arm. When he looked over, she nodded toward the monitor screen. Liza’s processes had dropped to sixty-four percent. Even as Lash watched, the number ticked quickly backward.

  “We’re almost done now, Liza,” Silver said. “Thank you.”

  “I have always tried to please you, Richard.”

  “I know that. There is just one last question I would like you to consider. How do your ethical routines tell you murder should be dealt with?”

  “By rehabilitation of the murderer, if possible. If rehabilitation is impossible . . .”

  Liza fell silent: a silence that crept on, and on.

  Far below their feet, Lash heard a distant boom. The building shuddered faintly.

  “Liza?” Silver asked.

  There was no response. Suddenly, Silver’s cell phone rang again.

  “Liza?” Over the ringing of the phone, Silver’s voice grew urgent, almost pleading. “Is rehabilitation possible?”

  No response.

  “Liza!” Silver called again. “Please tell me that—”

  Quite abruptly, the room was plunged into total darkness.

  FIFTY-NINE

  I t had taken five minutes, and the work of four men with flashlights, to find the lighting panels for the computing chamber. In the end, Mauchly discovered them himself: at the end of a catwalk, suspended atop a metal ladder. Calling down to the others to halt their search, Mauchly snapped on a dozen switches with two swift chopping motions.

  The illumination was not particularly bright, but nevertheless he was forced to close his eyes. After a few moments, he opened them again and faced the metal railing of the catwalk. His hands tightened around the railing in surprise.

  He was standing halfway up one wall of what resembled nothing so much as the hold of a huge tanker. The vast space of Liza’s private computing chamber—four stories tall and at least two hundred feet long—lay open from floor to ceiling. Catwalks similar to the one he stood on protruded here and there along the skin of the walls, leading to ventilation housings, electrical panels, other support apparatus. At the far end of the room were Liza’s primary and backup power supplies: giant pillboxes within heavy steel armor.

  Below, an unbelievably dense maze of hardware lay spread before him. Mauchly had spent two years at PharmGen as a technical purchasing officer, and he recognized some of the wildly diverse computers: he stared, trying to make sense of the riot of equipment.

  Perhaps the best metaphor was the growth rings of a tree. The oldest machines—too old for Mauchly to identify—stood in the center, surrounded by their keypunch consoles and teletypes. Beyond lay “big iron” IBM System/370 mainframes and seventies-era DEC minicomputers. Beyond was a ring of Cray supercomputers of several vintages, from Cray-1s and -2s to more modern T3D systems. Whole banks of computers seemed dedicated simply to facilitating data exchange between the heterogeneous machinery. Beyond the Crays were bands of still more modern rack servers, stacked twenty units high in gray housings. Around all of this, near the room’s periphery, stood row upon row of supporting hardware: magnetic character readers, ancient IBM 2420 tape drives and 3850 Mass Storage Systems, ultramodern data silos and off-board memory devices. The farther his eye strayed from the center, the less organization there seemed to be: it was as if Liza’s need for breathing space had grown faster than Silver’s capacity to provide it. Once again Mauchly admonished himself: he should have supervised this personally, rather than letting it grow under the eyes of Silver alone.

  Now the members of the security party—Sheldrake, the tousle-headed Dorfman, and two tech specialists, Lawson and Gilmore—had begun fanning out into the chamber, picking their way warily, like children in an unfamiliar forest. Watching, Mauchly felt a stab of vertigo: there was something unnatural about being perched on one wall of this huge tank, itself balanced atop a sixty-story tower. He hurried along the catwalk, descended the ladder, and joined Sheldrake and Dorfman on the chamber floor.

  “Any word from Silver?” Sheldrake asked.

  Mauchly shook his head.

  “I knew Silver had a server farm up here, but I never expected anything like this.” Sheldrake stepped carefully over a thick black cable with the daintiness of a cat.

  Mauchly said nothing.

  “Maybe we should enter the private quarters anyway.”

  “Silver said not to proceed, that he’d contact us.”

  “Lash is with him. God knows what that guy is forcing him to do.” Sheldrake glanced at his watch. “It’s been ten minutes since he called. We’ve got to act.”

  “Silver’s orders were explicit. We’ll give him five minutes more.” He turned to Dorfman. “Post yourself at the entrance. The backup units should be here any minute. Help them up through the barrier.”

  There was an excited burst of chatter from deeper inside. They moved toward the sound, threading between tall racks of servers. Several had clipboards hanging from their flanks, bearing sheets of hastily scribbled notations in Silver’s handwriting. The surrounding computers breathed with such a diversity of fan noise that Mauchly almost imagined himself a trespasser, penetrating some living collective.

  Ahead, Sheldrake was now in urgent consultation with Lawson and Gilmore. Gilmore, short and overweight, hunched over his palmtop. “I’m picking up heavy activity along the central data grid, sir,” he was saying.

  “On the grid itself?” Mauchly interjected. “Not distributed to the interfaces?”

  “Just the grid.”

  “Since when?”

  “It’s spiked over the last minute. The bandwidth is intense, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “What’s the initiator?”

  “Command, sir.”

  Liza. Mauchly nodded to Sheldrake, who grabbed his radio. “Sheldrake to security central.” He waited. “Sheldrake to central, report.”

  The radio crackled and spat, and Sheldrake replaced it with disgust. “It’s that damn baffle.”

  “Try your cell.” Mauchly turned back to Gilmore. “How’s the grid holding up?”

  “It’s not meant for this kind of stress, sir. Tower integrity’s failing already. If we can’t bleed off some of the load, the—”

  As if in answer, there was a loud report from below, followed immediately by another, echoing and reechoing in the hollow space. Then came a rumbling, so deep it was almost below the threshold of audibility. The floor beneath Mauchly began to tremble.

  He exchanged a brief, frozen look with Sheldrake. Then he whirled, cupped his hands around his mouth. “Dorfman!” he shouted over the forest of equipment. “Report!”

  “It’s the security plates, sir!” the voice came back faintly from the hatchway. It was
pitched high, whether from excitement or fear Mauchly could not tell. “They’re closing!”

  “Closing! Any sign of backup?”

  “No, sir! I’m getting the hell out before—”

  “Dorfman, hold your position. You hear me? Hold your position—”

  Mauchly’s words were drowned by an enormous boom that shook the heavy equipment around them. The security plates had closed, trapping them atop the Eden tower.

  “Sir!” Gilmore cried wildly. “We’ve got a Condition Gamma!”

  “Triggered by the overload? Impossible.”

  “Don’t know, sir. All I can tell you is the tower’s locked down tight.”

  That’s it. Mauchly raised his cell phone, dialed Silver.

  No answer.

  “Come,” he told Sheldrake. “Let’s get him.” He tucked the phone back into his jacket pocket, pulled out the 9mm.

  As he turned toward the ladder leading up to the private quarters, the lights went out abruptly. And when the emergency illumination came on, it drenched the digital city in a uniform fog of crimson.

  SIXTY

  T here was a moment of intense blackness. And then the emergency lighting snapped on.

  “What happened?” Lash asked. “Power failure?”

  There was no answer. Tara was peering intently at her screen. Silver remained within the Plexiglas cubicle, barely visible in the watery light. Now he raised one hand, tapped out a short command on the keypad. When this had no effect, he tried again. And then he sat up, swung his legs wearily over the edge of the chair, and got to his feet. He plucked the sensors from his forehead, removed the microphone from his collar. His movements were slow, automatic, like a sleepwalker’s.

  “What happened?” Lash repeated.

  Silver opened the Plexiglas door, came forward on rigid legs. He seemed not to have heard.

  Lash put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “You all right?”

  “Liza won’t respond,” he said.

  “Won’t? Or can’t?”

  Silver merely shook his head.

  “Those ethical routines you programmed—”

  “Dr. Silver!” Tara called. “I think you ought to take a look at this.”

  Silver walked toward her, still moving slowly. Lash followed. Wordlessly, they bent over the monitor.

  “The power’s completely out in both the inner tower and the outer tower,” she said, pointing at the screen. “No backups, nothing.”