Solid State Rhyme: A Novelette (Mandate)

by Harbour, J. S.

  The Bots were alive. There was no doubt in his mind. He may have not planned it quite this way, but they had come alive at some point. They were sentient. If that were true, and he believed with all his heart that it was, then there must be a way to communicate with them. There must be a way to stop them before they infested any other networks and unknowingly placed the blame upon him.

  Daniel vowed to preserve them. They were his children . . . his creation. They had evolved beyond his ability to understand their inner workings. The last time he had debugged a Bot had been days ago, maybe weeks ago, he couldn't remember. They were obviously far superior now than they had been before. It was a chilling feeling, knowing that something was really living inside a computer. He felt responsible for them. He couldn't just destroy them. Before he rescued them from the malignant home server, he would have to ensure that they didn't escape again. He disabled the wireless system on the server.

  Daniel startled himself with the thought: They are already out!

  Why had the FBI computer network been destroyed? What could they possibly be doing to cause physical damage? Perhaps the FBI was exaggerating? What if the Bots were just improving the FBI's network, like they had done to his padd?

  Daniel began putting his plans into motion. He copied everything from his padd to a memory card for safekeeping and then wiped the padd clean. The only thing remaining on the padd was the operating system. He created an operating system backup image, and then modified the system startup files to extract the operating system out of the backup image each time the padd was reset. This would restore the OS if the Bots infected the padd again. He still was not sure how they were able to modify the OS outside of their emulation layer. But, they had done just that, and he would take no chances. After all, it was for their own good.

  Next, he re-created the Experiment folder and copied the original project files from the card he had taken to Mr. Robathan. Daniel then hid the operating system and everything else visible in storage . . . everything but the Experiment folder. This would be the only files visible. Daniel was counting on the fact that the Bots were able to screw up his computer simply by messing with the OS in memory. He honestly didn't believe they were able to break out of emulation. There must be something else going on with that emulation layer. It was as impossible for the Bots to live outside their world, as it was for humans to live in the vacuum of space. Their physical structure demanded that their world reside in emulation. The instruction that allowed them to “live” were meaningless anywhere else. Therefore, Daniel surmised, if he restricts the environment, he should be able to restrain the Bots.

  Daniel was taking no chances. He feared a knock on the door any minute from some MI5 chap, upon request of the FBI, and then he would be carried off to Her Majesty's finest. “It wasn't my fault,” he imagined himself pleading. “They did it on their own.”

  Right. No one would believe him. He would be blamed for creating a malicious virus and sentenced accordingly. It was time to bring the Bots home.

  *

  Daniel sat in his room looking at the terminal screen of the infected server. His padd had a duplicate set of files running on the server, and in fact was even showing the early signs of infestation: screen twitching and general problems with the OS. Daniel closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and . . . pressed the power button to the server, wiping out the Bots.

  He felt a sudden twinge of regret over the loss, but then quickly realized that they were even now invading the Internet and his padd as well. He knew how the Bots functioned better than anyone else in the world, so he alone was the most qualified to solve the problem. He swore that he would bring them under control. There was no way he would ever convince anyone that the Bots were, in fact, not viruses. Everyone would blame him for creating an adaptive virus program. In reality, they were small, living creatures that had evolved to their present state of . . . existence? But how would he convince the world that they didn’t mean to do any damage? They were just exploring. The Bots may or may not be sentient—he couldn’t be sure—but they were certainly intelligent and adaptable!

  Daniel spent several hours thinking about the problem and writing a few test programs. He considered the problem from as many different angles as he could. What if he thought of the situation as a microbiologist? The Internet was an organism, and the bots were . . . an infestation? If that were the case, the organism should have an immune system to fight the invaders. Daniel caught his breath. The Internet had no such defense! Something like this was just bound to happen eventually. He needed to create an immune system, which would spread throughout the Internet, and keep any virus from ever attacking again, including his Bots.

  Oh, but that was ridiculous. Daniel argued with himself for a minute over that last thought. He was bright, but that was impossible. The Bots were not viruses, either—but what else would he call them? He had to admit, regardless of what they were, they certainly acted like a horde of destructive viruses invading the computers of the world.

  Daniel recalled the ease in which that single micro had located the old, dead micro on his padd, and had then carried it away. Perhaps he could take advantage of this good-natured trait—or whatever it was—of his Bots. If they truly cared for each other, perhaps he could lure them all back to his computer and out of the Internet. Maybe he could keep them from doing any more damage.

  Chapter 11

  “Hello, anybody home?” Wesley peered into the semi-darkness of Daniel’s room. The door creaked as he opened it wider to gain entry. Daniel was leaning back in his desk chair, snoring softly. The digital alarm clock sitting on the desk featured bright green digits that displayed “9:15 PM.” Wesley stared at the desktop screens that had numerous multicolored line graphs and bar graphs animating in real time, surrounded by columns of incomprehensible numbers and codes that scrolled by. In the corner of one screen was a large rectangle filled with tiny dots, with similar graphs and numbers crammed in the remaining screen real estate around the edges. Wesley frowned, “Dan, my friend, you just don’t know how to relax.”

  Daniel smacked his lips, shifted slightly, and continued to snore.

  Wesley walked around the bed and made himself comfortable in a beanbag at the other end of the room in front of the TV. He fiddled with some tangled cords and retrieved a keyboard and a joypad controller from a shelf below the TV. He pressed the “Eject” button on the video game machine and popped out Daniel’s game disc, replacing it with his own card, which contained his favorite console games and account settings. He turned on the TV and then pressed the power button on the game system, and was presented with a familiar opening animation and trademark jingle. A few minutes later, he was logged in with several thousand other players to InterWorld. He entered the game in a large circular room, with gateways lining the outer wall around him. Several hundred other players were in the hub with him, getting ready to play. Each gateway along the wall sent the player to one of several dozen worlds, each handled by a separate game server. Wesley jumped through the gateway to his favorite world—a retro arcade realm filled with classic games from the 1980s.

  Daniel awoke to some familiar but obscure 8-bit music and saw Wesley slide down a dune and enter the Forbidden Pyramid. “Wesley,” he said, groggily, “how long you been here?”

  Wesley grimaced as a huge white ghost trailed him, “Uh, I dunno, not long.” He glanced at the online timer at the bottom of the screen, which read “0:38.” Wesley added, “About forty minutes.”

  Daniel regretted taking a nap so late in the day. He plopped onto the bed facing the TV and watched Wesley play. He would never get to sleep now. He looked at his watch: it was going on ten o’clock. He watched Wesley play for a few minutes.

  “Wes,” Daniel asked, “I’m gonna need your help with something.”

  The casual statement wasn’t quite enough to stir Wesley’s concentration from the intense action of the video game.

  “I think I’m in trouble.”

  Wesley l
ooked up at that remark; after seeing Daniel’s expression, he paused the game and offered his attention.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  Daniel rolled over on his back and stared at the ceiling. “You remember the a-life project we were working on in Mr. Robathan’s class a couple months ago?”

  Wesley frowned, “Yeah, what about them?”

  Daniel was silent for a few seconds, considering the best way to explain the situation to his best friend.

  “After we were finished with them in class, I kept working on mine.”

  Wesley didn’t quite put it together how that had anything to do with being in trouble. “Hey, I’m thirsty.”

  Daniel peered at him, “You’ve been playing the pyramid level in the desert is all.”

  “No, really, “ Wesley said, standing up, “let’s get some drinks before you continue.”

  “Alright,” Daniel said.

  They returned shortly to Daniel’s room bearing large glasses of iced tea. It wasn't the caffeine hit of Wesley's usual but it was wet.

  Wesley said, “You were saying something about being in trouble?”

  Daniel lay on his stomach on the bed, holding his drink in front of him like a priceless chalice he had recovered from a castle.

  “Have you heard about the FBI?”

  Wesley laughed, “No, never heard of it!”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “What about it?”

  “The FBI network was trashed yesterday by a virus, and they think it might have spread to all of the police stations in the States.”

  “Hmm,” Wesley pondered, “I guess I should keep up with the news.”

  Daniel didn’t respond, and kept quiet for a few too many seconds for Wesley’s comfort, all the while bearing a troubled, intense expression.

  “Wait a second,” Wesley said, “are you trying to tell me . . . .”

  Daniel gulped down the rest of his tea and then rolled over on his back on the bed. He simply said, “Yeah.”

  “Wait, you’re kidding, right?”

  Daniel replied in a whisper, “I wish.”

  Wesley sprang to his feet, “No way! You hacked the FBI? That’s impossible!” He was beaming in the hope that Daniel was telling the truth. “No way,” he kept repeating, “No way.”

  Daniel stood up and crawled into his computer chair, then said, “Look at this.”

  He toggled the padd's main desktop interface. The screen came to life in a glorious splendor of chaos.

  “Whoa, what’s all that?” Wesley asked.

  “That’s my life experiment . . . in a nutshell.”

  Wesley peered closely at the screen, trying to make sense of the random lines, boxes, and curves that did not simply flicker randomly but moved in coherent patterns. “Cool. So they’re like . . . I don’t know . . . what are they doing in there?”

  “Rewriting the operating system, rebuilding the allocation tables, revising the storage partitions, rebuilding the installed software.”

  “Are you serious? How?”

  Daniel sat back in his chair as Wesley crowded him away to get a closer look.

  “All in the name of efficiency.”

  Wesley looked at him, “I can’t get anything from the computer. It’s totally wasted!”

  “Now it is, but when they’re finished it will be just like new. Better than new in fact.”

  “Huh?” Wesley inquired. “I don’t get it. The computer is messed up, why don’t you just restore it?”

  Daniel stood so he could pace around the room while thinking. “You don’t get it? The Bots are running on both of my machines. I was using the padd to examine what had happened on the home server when they discovered the gateway port. After that, there was no getting the genie back into the bottle.”

  Suddenly the screen flickered and cleared up for a few seconds before disappearing into chaos once again.

  “Hey, did you see that?” Wesley yelled.

  “Shhhhh! It’s late, you idiot,” Daniel said. “The Bots are almost finished.”

  “So they’re rewriting everything on your computer? What for?”

  Daniel explained, “Beats me. All I know is that they screw with it for a while and then take the back seat, at which point I can use it again. Only . . . .”

  Wesley was stunned, “Only what?”

  “The padd runs better, somehow, after they’re done. I figure they’re rewriting everything that was written by humans and making it all more efficient . . . fewer jumps, tighter loops, quicker math, condensed data. Rebuilding the OS alone makes everything else run better, you know.”

  Wesley asked, “How can they rewrite everything when they’re just programs themselves?”

  “That was the first thing I asked myself. The answer is that they’re adaptive programs, running in memory. By rewriting the operating system calls, they’re actually rewriting parts of themselves . . . which call on those system resources.”

  Wesley was impressed, “Awesome.”

  “But that wasn’t the answer.”

  “Huh?” Wesley asked.

  “I captured a Bot and traced it. The Bots are self-contained and highly efficient. They don’t call on the OS any more. Either they borrowed the system routines they needed or simply figured out how to do things on their own—a more likely explanation given their nature.”

  Daniel dug through some notes and found the printout of the Bot, and handed it to Wesley.

  Wesley dug through the list of instructions. “So this is a Bot?”

  “A distant ancestor, a couple hundred billion generations back.”

  Wesley frowned, “What, billions? Mate, this is crazy stuff. What’s up with all this?”

  Daniel raised his voice, “In a word . . . evolution. What you see on the screen there are distant successors of my life forms from class a couple months ago. I wrote a genetic algorithm. In fact, it wasn’t a real program at all. I created a . . . sort of . . . micro generator, which took pieces of code and spliced them together in random combinations. Later, those combinations were mated, exchanging genetic—”

  “Whoa, look at that!”

  The screen was back, complete with desktop and icons.

  “Looks like they’re finished . . . for a while, at any rate.”

  Wesley asked, “So you created a genetic program and let it go on your computer?”

  Daniel nodded. “There are billions and billions of them . . . alive in there. . . right now.”

  Wesley smiled, “So now you’re like their . . . their . . . . “

  “Don’t say it! I’ve been there already and it wasn’t pleasant.”

  “Dan,” Wesley exclaimed, “you’ve gotta tell someone about this! Have you shown it to Mr. Robathan?”

  “He was too busy, didn’t have the time for me to explain.”

  Wesley frowned, then came up with another idea, “Hey, we could send a few to someone we don’t like . . . how about Wil?”

  “Actually,” Daniel said, “that brings up the issue of my little problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The FBI, remember? The Bots escaped because I was stupid and logged on to check my e-mail from the same machine I was using to test the Bots. They screwed over the FBI systems, and it’s probably traceable . . . right back here.” He pointed to his computer.

  “Can we pick them up with anti-virus?”

  “Are you kidding?” Daniel asked, incredulous. “These suckers are too smart for that! As soon as they see something moving through memory, they scatter.”

  Wesley said, “Really? That’s so awesome. How did you get them to do that?”

  “Dude, like I said, I didn’t write anything. They evolved that way.”

  Wesley laughed, “So you don’t really have any control over them, do you?”

  Daniel glared at him, “Not really. But I have a plan.”

  Chapter 12

  “Can I help?”

  Daniel and Wesley looked towards the door where Daniel
’s little sister, Jade, was sitting against the door frame chomping on cookies.

  “Get out of here, Jade!”

  “I want to help you catch the Bots! I want to help attack the FBI!”

  Wesley looked at Daniel in horror, “Great! That’s just great!”

  “Jade, we’re not attacking the FBI, we were just talking about the virus that infested the FBI, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, the Bots you made,” she explained. “They attacked the FBI, and now all the bad guys are gonna escape from jail.”

  Daniel whispered to Wesley, “Don’t worry about her, she’s just looking for some attention.”

  Jade finished licking her fingers of chocolate, and added with a touch, “I called Missy and told her that her uncle’s get’n outta jail cuz your Bots wrecked the FBI.”

  “You what?” Now Daniel was the one who looked horrified. Jade got up and ran down the hall, afraid that Daniel was going to swat her. “This isn’t America anyhow.”

  Wesley’s mind got stuck, as if often did, and he repeated, “Oh man” repeatedly.

  Daniel yelled at him with a little too much force than he had intended, “Knock it off, you bloody . . . .”

  Wesley looked at him with a blank expression.

  “I have a plan, remember?”

  Wesley just shrugged.

  Daniel’s mom knocked on the partially open door to his bedroom and said, “Dan, you have more visitors.”

  Wesley asked, “Who?”

  As if on cue, a trio stepped through the door into Daniel’s room. They were all dressed in dark clothing, either black, dark green, or dark blue in various combinations. It was their trademark . . . what one might call their gang colors. However, these blokes were not nocturnal explorers of urban alleyways and streets, but rather explorers of information systems. It was Wil, Billy, and Nate.

  “Dan, Wes,” Wil said calmly. Billy and Nate simply nodded, as usual, leaving Wil in charge of what they called “communications routines.”