by Rick Cook
“I noticed,” Taj said. “Is there any pattern to what’s been attacked?”
“Not that I can find. There’s a lot of stuff here that’s been nibbled around the edges but aside from Malus’ copy of the compiler nothing else serious is really broken. Damn! I wish Wiz and Danny were here.”
“Need some more insights, eh?”
“That’s part of it. But now I’m going to have to go through and design anti-virus software to protect every spell we’ve got. It would be easier if there were three of us doing it.”
Taj looked at the changed code again. “Who’s writing these puppies?”
Jerry shrugged. “If I had to guess I’d say it’s our enemy in the City of Night.”
“Seems kind of piddly for a deliberate attack. Are you sure none of your students worked these up?”
Jerry shook his head. “You don’t understand how seriously these people take magic. This isn’t like a bunch of bored high school kids or out-of-work Bulgarians. Everyone here respects magic too much to do something like this for the hell of it.”
Taj looked skeptical. “This thing came from somewhere.”
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “And that’s what worries me. One more thing that worries me.”
###
Moira rose dripping from the bath. The water streamed off, making little rivulets between her shoulder blades and breasts, splitting at her swelling belly and dripping off her sparse orange thatch of pubic hair. She stepped out onto the tiled floor and a skeletal hand offered her a towel.
She accepted it without noticing either her attendant’s appearance or smell. In life, the zombie maid had been a harem attendant for a mighty wizard of the Dark League. She had died on the surface when her master’s palace collapsed and had lain there until the new master of the City of Night had claimed her. Even in this cold land, decay had set in while she lay dead on the surface and now that she was often in the steamy atmosphere of the bath her rotting flesh seethed with maggots.
Neither sight nor smell mattered to Moira’s body or the intelligence that animated it. Bathing was necessary for human health, so Moira bathed, following barely remembered rituals gleaned from the dead brains of its other servants.
In the same way, the body was fed, exercised and rested, cared for as a brood mare is cared for. Not for the sake of the body, but for the sake of what it would bear. Or more correctly, what would be torn from it at the proper time, since natural childbirth played no more role in the Enemy’s plans than did a normal child.
Oblivious, unseeing and uncaring, Moira finished rubbing herself down and accepted the shift and long, fur-lined black robe from her shambling attendant. Then she sat as the decaying creature tenderly hut clumsily pulled on her boots.
Warmth is important to human health as well.
###
“Okay,” E.T. Tajikawa said, “there’s part of your problem.”
Jerry, Bal-Simba and Moira all crowded around the table. Jerry squinted at the glowing letters over the Tajmanian Devil’s desk. Some of them were the conventional magic notation used for writing spells in the code compilers. Others were odd symbols he had never seen before. The result made no sense at all.
Squatting underneath was the demon the code fragment manifested.
It had a nasty sneer on its face—or at least on its top, Jerry amended. The thing sat on six spindly legs like a demented version of a Lunar Lander. The main body was cylindrical and semitransparent. Inside were vague outlines of something coiled into a long spiral. The top, where the face was, was a regular geometric solid, a dodecahedron, he realized after making a quick count of the edges on each surface.
“What the heck is it?”
“It’s a virus,” Taj told him. “You’ve got an infection in your system.”
“Holy shit,” Jerry breathed. “But how?”
Taj just shrugged.
Jerry tore his eyes away from the demon and examined the spell more closely.
“Does that make any sense to you?” Taj asked.
Jerry just shook his head. “For one thing it’s not entirely in standard magic notation. More than that, well, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense. What does it do?”
“It attaches itself to a spell and starts shifting instructions around or combining them.”
Jerry bit his lower lip. There was something terribly wrong with this but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what yet.
“Could it be a weapon?”
“If it is, it’s a piss-poor one. The thing’s not very destructive and it’s hardly hidden at all. It doesn’t polymorph and if you know the sequence you can grep it out of any spell it’s in.”
Everyone was silent for a moment.
“There’s something not right about this,” Jerry said finally.
“That appears to be an understatement,” Bal-Simba said mildly.
“No, I mean there’s something really wrong here. Something we’re missing.”
Moira cocked her serpentlike head. “Another of your premonitions?”
“More like a feeling, but yeah. That sort of thing.”
Moira furrowed her scaly brow. She had been more intimately associated with the programmers than Bal-Simba or any of the other wizards and she knew Jerry’s knack for spotting problems even if he couldn’t quite grasp the whole.
“You’ve never had a virus here before?” Taj asked.
Jerry shook his head. “Now that it’s happened I can see how it could, but no.”
“Hmm,” Bal-Simba said, staring at the glowing letters. “Do you think it is related?”
“Directly? No. But I suspect it’s a manifestation of the same kind of underlying phenomenon. Sort of the fundamental particle of your problem.”
“And it works by sticking stuff together,” Jerry said in an effort to forestall the inevitable. “Let me guess, you call this a glue-on, right?”
Taj brightened. “Hey, that’s a good name for it.”
“Me and my big mouth,” Jerry muttered. “Anyway, it still doesn’t explain who our enemy is.”
“What about,” Taj said slowly, “the possibility that the glue-on arose naturally? It’s not very complicated. Only about a dozen basic instructions.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” Jerry said equally slowly. “Like I say, we’ve never seen that. But we really haven’t been here long.”
“Where do you suppose all these complicated magical phenomena come from?”
“Around here that’s like asking why the sky is blue. They just are.”
“The sky’s blue for a reason,” Taj pointed out.
“It’s something we never really wondered about.”
Taj smiled, looking more satanic than ever. “Those are the ones that get you in the worst trouble.”
While Jerry chewed on that Taj went back to wandering about the room restlessly, looking at things without quite seeing them. He came to rest in front of Danny’s magical fish tank and suddenly froze like a bird dog coming on point. The rainbow denizens of the tank were oblivious to him, but everyone else in the room was suddenly watching him intently.
“Those fish aren’t natural, are they?”
“No, that’s something Danny was working on for his son,” Jerry told him.
“Do they change?” he asked in a peculiar voice.
Jerry frowned, remembering his earlier misgivings. “Yeah. He made them so they’d change over time. They kinda mutate.”
“But they don’t follow a pre-programmed pattern?”
“I don’t think so.”
Taj turned back to the fish tank and stared fascinated.
“Bingo!” he breathed softly. “Oh, boy howdy!”
“You’ve found something?”
“Alfie.”
“Huh?”
“Alfie—A-Life, you know artificial life.”
“What do you guys know about artificial life?”
Jerry shrugged. “It only got hot after we came here. We’ve been following the newsgroups
on the net.”
“It’s a very rapidly developing field.”
“As good as its hype?”
Taj snorted. “Get real. But they’re still getting some interesting results, especially with evolutionary systems.” He paused. “What’s more, I’ll bet your enemy isn’t ‘someone’, it’s ‘something’—the mother of all artificial life programs.”
Zombie army ants. The phrase flashed in Jerry’s mind.
“Meaning the thing’s not alive?”
Taj shrugged. “Define ‘life’ and I’ll tell you. What it definitely means is that you’ve got stuff breeding out there.”
“Wait a minute, A-life has to have a purpose. There’s a design.”
Taj gave another of his satanic smiles. “Teleological reasoning. The A-life we’re familiar with is designed originally because humans created it. But there’s nothing that says there has to be a designer. If you’ve got the right conditions and the right precursors it could arise spontaneously.” He looked over at the fish tank. “Offhand I’d say you have the right conditions here.
“From what you’ve told me, there’s natural magic everywhere, but the spells didn’t combine very well. So now you guys come along and develop your spell compiler that sticks little spells together and eventually these things pick up the trick.”
“But we didn’t write anything like that,” Jerry protested.
“Not necessary that you do. This kind of genetic crossover has been known for a long time in bacteria and a couple of workers have produced it in artificial life programs.” He frowned. “So then the question is, how much available resources do they have? You sort of indicated that magic is an infinite resource here, right?”
“Well, not exactly. Some areas are more magical than others. There are dead zones all through the Wild Wood, for instance. And at times you can produce something like a magical drain effect and some resources become scarce. Wiz did that in his attack on the City of Night.” It was his turn to frown. “But that kind of thing is rare. There’s an awful lot of available magic out there.”
Taj nodded. “Makes sense. If you’re really resource constrained it’s hard to get any kind of complex development. You get the equivalent of lichens and algae. If there’s no constraint you lose a potent driver for evolution. But if there’s a lot of resources before you hit the constraints . . .” he shrugged.
“Jeez,” Jerry muttered.
“Okay, now suppose that these things are out there, these little spells, competing for resources. It becomes survival of the fittest. The things that can grab the most resources and hold on to them best survive longest.”
“And we started that?”
Taj pursed his lips. “Actually that probably pre-dates you. I suspect that’s where this world’s naturally occurring demons and such come from. What you added were code fragments that made it easier for pieces to combine.”
“So we are responsible.”
“Law of nature, man. You can’t do just one thing. Anyway, eventually this proto-evolutionary process turns out our friend the glue-on.” He nodded toward the desktop where the virus sat. Jerry thought it didn’t look like anyone’s friend, but before he could say that, Taj was off again. “Now you throw in something like this recombinant virus and the things that survive are the ones that get reproduced.”
He shrugged. “Kind of like an artificial life version of Core Wars, only we’re in the core.” He laughed. “Evolution in action. I’ll bet by now there’s a whole ecology out there.”
“Wonderful,” groaned Jerry.
“That too,” Taj agreed, obviously having missed his tone. “The big question is how high a lambda have you got?”
“Lambda?”
“Information mutability. If information is hard to change you stifle any kind of evolution. If it’s too easy to change self-organization doesn’t have a chance. There’s a fairly narrow band where A-life is possible.”
Jerry thought about that. He didn’t like it, but it made sense. “We know some areas are less magical than others. The whole place around the City of Night is an especially magically active zone. Plus there’s a lot of leftover magic down there from the days of the Dark League.”
“And we have kept scant watch there,” Bal-Simba rumbled. “My fault, I am afraid.”
“So,” Taj said, “these things had the equivalent of a petri dish where they could grow and evolve. Arid now you’ve got something that’s looking to spread out.”
“Why is it so hostile?”
“Because that’s the way it evolved. Maybe it gives the thing an edge in surviving, maybe it’s an accidental characteristic, like something it picked up along the way.”
“Point is, that it’s out there and that’s the most likely explanation for what’s going on here.” Taj shook his head. “Boy, what the guys at the Santa Fe Institute wouldn’t give to see this.”
“What we wouldn’t give to see the last of it,” Jerry retorted. “The real question is how do we stop it?”
“Now that,” said the Tajmanian Devil, “is going to take a little thought.”
###
“More strangeness, Lord.”
Bal-Simba had had about all the strangeness he could stand in the last few weeks, but he forbore to say so to the chief Watcher. “What and where?” he asked.
Erus, the head of the Watchers, was a lean gray-haired man with a broken beak of a nose and fierce blue eyes. Years of stooping over a scrying crystal had left him with a permanent slouch.
“Where is to the south, out over the Freshened Sea. As to what . . .” He shrugged. “They travel in groups, and they seek darkness or clouds, but each day they range further north.”
Bal-Simba grunted. “Enough of both at this time of the year, what with long nights and winter storms over the Freshened Sea You say you have never encountered them before. What are they most like?”
Erus hesitated. Like most of those in his line of work he disliked making guesses, but for him as for all of them guessing was part of the job. “Lord, they appear to be ridden dragons, at least for the most part.”
“For the most part?”
“There are other things as well, but not so many. Mostly they seem to be dragons, but of an odd sort.”
“Odd in what way?”
“Like the rest of this things magic—cold.” He looked up at Bal-Simba. “Lord, I have never seen anything like it. Nor have any of the other Watchers.”
“What do you think they are doing?”
“I cannot say with certainty, but it appears they are scouting, perhaps testing our defenses. At their present rate they will reach our lands ere long.”
Bal-Simba considered. “Then best we seek these things out to see what they are. Order our patrols south again, but cautiously. And try to steer them to a small group they can meet in overwhelming strength.”
###
“Jerry tells me you have developed a weapon against our enemy,” Bal-Simba said without preamble as he walked into the programmers’ work room.
“Yep,” Taj said proudly. “It’s a lysing virus. Or maybe a self-reproducing restriction enzyme would be a better way to describe it.”
Jerry squinted at the code hanging above the desk Taj was using. “Describing it in English would be better yet.”
“Okay,” Taj said. “Basically the problem is that this virus or the Enemy’s glues spells together, with some transcription errors. Then those new spells compete against each other in what amounts to a Core Wars tournament where only the fittest survive. Eventually the winners get big and nasty.”
He gestured to the code. “What this virus does is exactly the opposite. It breaks spells into pieces at certain specific points, sort of makes them come unglued.”
“What’s going to prevent this thing from running wild and reducing every piece of code to rubble?”
Tajikawa smiled, looking more satanic than ever. “It won’t affect a piece of code smaller than a certain size.”
“Wait a minute
. How do you keep the anti-virus from mutating?”
Again the satanic smile. “You can’t. It has to mutate if it’s going to do its job because the sticky virus is going to mutate. But we can make sure it won’t attack anything smaller than the limit. Here, take a look.”
Jerry scanned the indicated portion of the code.
Taj reached past him and pointed to several sections of the listing. “You will note that there is not a test in there for code size. Nor is it localized to one part of the program. It’s more subtle than that.”
Jerry nodded. “Clever.”
“As far as we know there are no programs that big. None of yours anyway. It won’t prevent things from forming, but it will limit their size and that will probably limit their power.”
“Probably?”
Taj shrugged. “Theoretically these things could become efficient enough to be pretty potent within that limit, but with the smaller code sizes the global minima tend to be in pretty steep wells on the state surface. Plus there are a lot of local minima to act as traps. A genetic algorithm might reach a minimum but it would be pretty much a random event. Like the monkeys at the typewriters trying to produce Shakespeare.” He frowned. “Of course there is a question of how many monkeys and typewriters we’ve got here.” He got a faraway look as he considered the problem.
“Will this thing leave us worse off?” asked Bal-Simba, who had understood perhaps a quarter of what Tajikawa had just said.
“No.”
“Then we will do it.” He paused. “How long will it take for this thing to work?”
“It starts as soon as we tell it to execute,” Taj said. “It will start here and then spread like the original virus did.”
“Wait a minute,” Jerry said, “how long will it take to affect what’s in the City of Night?”
“That’s a ways from here right?”
“And it’s protected by some land of magic barrier.”