“Nice,” Flannigan said.
“They could try to modify their design,” Gene said. “They could work together to file off the barbs on their probosces, so that they could pierce human flesh without catching on it and triggering the One Attack Rule.”
He looked out the window. “We humans are built with hardware limitations, too,” he said. “Our bodies can carry only so much weight. Our brains can contain only so much information. And at some point, each of our hearts experiences a final hardware failure. But we don't consider these hardware limitations to be a meaningful expression of the function of our human bodies. Rather, we try to make our bodies work better, and we use tools. We edit and extend our hardware in pursuit of our own goals.”
“We're approaching the gate to the Laboratory Complex,” Raymond announced. Up ahead, they could make out the wall to the Laboratory Complex. He returned to the thread of the conversation. “The situation you describe couldn't happen. Flybots aren't smart enough to be creative like that.”
“They may not be smart,” Gene said. “They are merely trying to achieve their mission. If they got the idea of trying something together, like shaving down their probosces, and if they saw that it worked, they would do it, even if they didn't really understand what they were doing.”
“That's a lot of if's,” Simon said. “How would they get the idea?”
“You could think of them as a software program,” Gene said. “You and Kenny should be able to work that out better than I can.” Though his words addressed Simon, he spoke to Flannigan. She had turned and was looking right at him, with her arm over the back of her seat and a correspondingly pleasant tension in her shirt. By the look of them, the only audience for what he said was Flannigan. “It's not too different from — what do you call it? — your Playbook.”
“My Playbook.”
“Yes. Your Playbook is all about trying different attacks. Trying everything you know and seeing what works. The flybots could do the same thing. If they understood their objective to be getting around the One Attack Rule, they would try anything they could, until something worked. They would use their Playbook.”
“They don't have a Playbook.”
“Of course they do. Playbook is simply a word for anything they can try, such as shaving their probosces. Anything that they could physically do, they would try. Even if they didn't really understand what they were doing or whether it would work, they'd stumble across the solution eventually.”
“Rule-based programs,” Simon declared, “have been successful only for specific purposes. Finding specific algorithms.”
Gene shrugged. “You can tell that to Nemo.” He gestured toward the gate, which they were pulling up to.
They were silent. Flannigan checked her watch. Simon squinted in thought. “Mosquitoes don't attack in swarms, do they?” he asked. “Real mosquitoes.”
“No, they don't,” Raymond said. “Most of the programming of the robots is not based on mosquitoes, but rather the behaviors of bees and fish.”
“But these flybots can communicate with each other?”
“Yes.”
“And they can send back information that they find as they get it?”
“Yes.”
“Then they are hooked up together in a network. They are like a mini Internet. But a private one. Each is a little computer, and they can send information to each other. Or back to the hive.”
“As I understand it, yes,” Raymond said.
“And the flybot network,” Simon continued, “is connected to the computer network on the island?”
“Yes.”
“So if the kid controls the computers, he controls the flybots?”
“Yes, if he could figure out how.”
“Do you think Nemo is here to build a flybot army?” Flannigan asked.
Kenny stuck an arm out weakly. “Guys,” he said. “My program. The stock market program that I wrote.”
“What?” Flannigan said.
“The name of the file was Nemo. The program's filename was Nemo.”
They pulled up to the security gate.
REUSABLE CODE
The names that Kenny gave his programs didn't matter much. He named his stock-picking program “nemo,” thinking the word meant “nothing” in Latin, though it actually means “no one.” That was what he thought the project was: nothing.
In fact, a big part of Kenny's stock-picker was borrowed from a different program he had written before, Pats Suck. That name made even less sense at first blush, because he had written the Pats Suck program to compile negative news coverage about the New England Patriots.
Pats Suck was the program Kenny wrote at the height of his frustration with grad school, before he dropped out. It was his least serious program yet, but he worked on it for two weeks — the longest stretch since a few of his major college assignments.
The New England Patriots were not just Kenny's local pro football team. They were the undeserved, cheating victors over Kenny's Eagles in Superbowl XXXIX. Kenny didn't care too much about the Pats, honestly. But his fierce loyalty to a zero-championships team manifested in disparaging other teams and their fans. He yelled at the Eagles too, in Philly fashion. But he knew, as did every Philly fan, every player on the Eagles, even his TV, that it was among his greatest wishes that the Eagles would win a Superbowl within his lifetime. And if and when they did, you could be sure they'd win not because they were a perfect team, but rather because they fought the hardest.
He could barely watch an Eagles game. Year after year, they were locked in talented mediocrity. They won some amazing games. They looked good on paper, terrible on the field, and they won anyway. Some of the time. Just enough to get to the playoffs, and lose. Watching even one game was too painful, watching them throw it away. He'd turn off the TV, yell, go outside, sit on the stoop, wait a minute, go back inside, turn the game back on. Turn it off and stare at the TV, turn it back on again.
Superbowl XXXIX was worse: the Eagles never should have had a chance, and they almost won, against the odds.
He'd never root for another team. It was fair to say that he'd rather have them the way they were rather than trade any part of them in for another franchise.
Pats Suck was Kenny's most advanced scraper program. It could independently Google for news about the Eagles and the Pats and direct itself to the result pages. Then it scraped the pages for language about the two teams. But it was also a kind of joke. It picked out all the good news and comments about the Eagles, all the bad news about the Pats, and emailed it to him. It all happened automatically. In a sense, the Eagles won every day, when he opened his inbox, even in the off season.
But there wasn't much football news worth reading in the off season. So, not too long after he wrote the program, he directed the daily automatic messages straight into a folder of his email that he never read. Then he forgot about it, like the rest of his programs, and the home-team conquests it collected went unnoticed.
The Pats Suck program was reborn when Kenny worked on his stock-picking program.
Kenny worked by the maxim, “Good coders code; great coders reuse.” You could sit down and type out hundreds of lines of brilliant code to do some computational task, but (according to the maxim) you could work faster and better by finding and using code that someone had already written to do that task.
Kenny was a silent champion of code reuse, because he was always trying to write programs that he didn't really have the skills or experience to create correctly, and he was too lazy to learn how. When he wrote the stock-picker (“nemo”), Kenny reused Pats Suck. He didn't even have to copy and paste the code; it was easy for one program to incorporate another one in a line or two.
With one or two changes, he had a program that could go out and fetch news about the stock market by looking for certain words and then copying and pasting text.
The stock-picking program had only two other parts: a Guesser, and a Judger.
The Judger was simpl
e: it looked at the program's stock portfolio at the end of every day and saw whether the portfolio had gone up or gone down. Thumbs up or thumbs down.
The Guesser was complicated: it was supposed to take the news and try different stock-picking strategies. In the Jeep, listening to Gene, Kenny realized that his Guesser was a lot like what Simon called the Playbook. It tried different stuff.
But my program was terrible, Kenny thought. It didn't work — at all. The Guesser could barely guess anything.
MESSAGE FROM KOGINKA
Welcome Center, Conference Room
5 hr 28 min to Birth
Preeti left the pool room and walked down the hall. The energy in this place was terrifying. And she couldn't feel any connection back to Lindsay or Koginka. They had to be gathering energy for a confrontation.
She needed to connect with them. She walked through the receptionist area, like a ghost, and into the classified part of the Welcome Center, to the secured conference room.
She peered in. The overhead projector screen was still on, displaying a view of the desktop of the computer where they had chatted with Nemo a few minutes ago.
She logged into her email. She disliked email, just as she disliked most technology. She had never known Koginka to use a computer. Computers represented everything that Koginka and his followers were against. They were part of the dark energy threatening the Divine Mother, blocking and obscuring the spiritual energy of the world. But she and Lindsay talked on the phone and sometimes Lindsay relayed messages to her from Koginka.
No new messages. The most recent old message was from Lindsay. She opened it.
Preeti,
I just called you. I heard from Koginka. He is calling a workshop starting tomorrow. He said there is a great emergency, a huge wave of dark energy. I don't know if you can feel it but I definitely can. He is concerned that it may be related to the New Year.
I'm not sure yet how I will get down there but I'm going to try to leave tomorrow morning if I can. I asked him if you should come and he said definitely, it was a part of your destiny. We are having it at the same part of the wildlife refuge.
Lindsay.
That was her only guidance. The dark energy on the island blocked her from connecting with them through meditation.
The thoughts she had on the plane came back to her. Maybe these events were not obstacles to helping Koginka. Maybe they were leading her on the right path somehow.
She got a chat:
Lindsay: Preeti, are you there?
Preeti: Lindsay!
Lindsay: I know you are surprised to hear from me like this. But, as you know, the circumstances are unusual... and urgent.
Lindsay: Koginka asked me to talk to you.
Preeti: Yes.
Lindsay: There is a great disturbance in the energy. Koginka can feel it, and so can I. The threat that was prophesied is coming to pass.
Preeti froze at the computer.
Lindsay: But there is more, Preeti.
Lindsay: It is the reason Koginka asked me to reach you this way.
Lindsay: He can feel that you are near the source of the negative energy.
Lindsay: Your meditations have been troubled, have they not?
Preeti: Yes.
Lindsay: Not surprising.
Lindsay: You are near the center of a dark force. I think you must feel it.
Preeti: Yes.
Lindsay: You must be there for a reason.
Lindsay: Everything happens for a reason.
Lindsay: Don't you think so?
Preeti: Yes.
Preeti: But what is the reason?
Lindsay: You must be there to confront the darkness.
Preeti couldn't respond to that last comment.
Lindsay: Don't worry, Preeti.
Lindsay: I think you know by now that you have an unusual connection to the light energy.
Lindsay: Didn't you think so?
Preeti: Yes.
Lindsay: It is no coincidence.
Lindsay: You are there to confront the darkness.
Lindsay: And you can do it.
Lindsay: With our help.
Lindsay: Do you know where to find it?
Preeti: I think so.
Lindsay: Of course you do.
Lindsay: You must go there.
Lindsay: The path will present itself.
Preeti: Yes.
Lindsay: Go as soon as you can.
Lindsay: Much depends on you.
And with those words, Lindsay logged off.
Overwhelmed, as if in a trance, Preeti closed the window and walked out of the room.
She knew the darkness was on the island, nearby. She knew it was not in the Welcome Center. She walked out through the lobby and out the front door.
The man at the reception desk watched her go. Her movements were a violation of protocol. But given all the rules that the visitors had broken already that day, he was happy to let her go. She seemed like a hassle.
THE GATE
Fort Tortuga, Laboratory Complex Perimeter
5 hr 27 min to Birth
At the end of the road, past the woods and hills, a twenty-foot rough concrete wall served as the perimeter of the Laboratory Complex. The area around and inside the wall was clear of foliage.
The Jeep pulled up at a gate with a guard booth. A security guard stepped out of the booth and came up to the vehicle.
“Hi, Raymond,” he said, looking in the vehicle. He pointed to the others. “Visitor passes?”
“No. It's an emergency.”
The guard nodded. “Okay. Let me snap a couple quick photos then.” He walked back inside the security booth and returned with a digital camera. He shot one photo of each visitor through the windows of the Jeep.
“Has there been any unusual activity on the video cameras?” Raymond asked the guard.
“No, sir.”
They drove in. Flannigan calculated that, since there were five staff members on the island, including Raymond, there had to be a maximum of two on duty inside the Laboratory Complex.
She asked why the guard had taken photos of them.
“We take photos of our visitors and upload them to our camera system,” Raymond said. “Every visitor gets a digital file. And the files are connected to our camera system. We have cameras all along the wall. And the cameras work together to identify animals or humans and alert us when they find something. We have some other cameras throughout the island.”
“And we're getting a scan of your video footage? To see if the kid is here?”
“Any minute,” Raymond said. “They will buzz me when they have the results.”
“Are you running any tests on flybots right now?” Gene asked.
“No,” Raymond said. “Not without the scientists here.”
They found themselves in a gravel lot at the center of three large buildings. The building on the right was the scientists' residence or barracks. It was four stories and looked like a college dorm out of the 70's. To the left was the main lab building. It was not quite as tall, but it was broad, in the shape of a fly, with a small central area and two wings, the research and development wing on the left and the indoor testing area on the right. Lastly, straight ahead and set off slightly from the other buildings, was the computer building. The computers in that building were dedicated to the simulations and tests operated by the scientists in the Laboratory Building.
“Nemo said he was in the lab building,” Flannigan reminded them. “That's the fly-shaped building here.”
The Jeep stopped. Flannigan spoke into her walkie-talkie.
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