"Is Julie over there?" Ruth asked. Her breath fogged the window.
Mike nodded. "Overseeing the final stage. It's all just oversight now, monitoring the pipeline to the machine. I'm a programmer, not much for me to do now but watch."
Gideon did feel a wave of awe. Not at the project, whatever that was, but at finally reaching this point. Here it was, the crux of everything, the why. . .
Julia, Gideon thought, can you give me a reason for Rafe’s death?
Gideon tried not to let his emotions into his voice, he still needed to know what was happening. "I would think," he said after a moment, "that the NSA would have more freedom for this kind of thing than MIT."
Mike laughed and waved them down another flight of stairs. "You'd think, wouldn't you? But when it comes down to it, they're free to do what they want when it comes to information warfare, targeting some enemy of the state, but once you get into pure research—especially stuff in the field—the reaction is something like people get when they hear that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was injecting plutonium
into people."
Ruth sounded surprised, "You mean that this isn't an official Government project?"
For once, Mike's expression faltered. Gideon could glimpse some of Mike's doubts about what was going on. Gideon wondered if he knew that people had died because of this thing, whatever it was.
Mike spoke slowly now, obviously choosing words with care, "This is D'Arcy's project. He believes in Aleph, and once we gather the final programs, we'll all be proved right."
That frightened Gideon because that meant, as far as anyone outside this farm was concerned, this was some international terrorist operation. That meant that it would be too easy for him and Ruth—not to mention Zimmerman and Mike and everyone else here—to just disappear. D'Arcy had a pre-made explanation for anyone who turned up dead.
Mike led them outside, through a door that bypassed the room full of abandoned furniture. There was no porch on this side of the house, and Gideon stepped out into the snow after Mike and Ruth. Here they faced the barn a few hundred feet away.
Gideon stood in the snow, breath fogging in the sharp, cold air. Gideon looked around and saw the guards moving out there by the treeline. Mike led them toward the barn, oblivious.
He followed Mike and Ruth, turning his attention to the barn. It appeared worse off than the house. The sides had been weathered to an uneven gray, and the roof was shot through with missing shingles, and bowed in the center. There was a shed adjoining the rear of the barn, which might have once housed tools, a tractor, or cattle, but it was now little more than a roof supported by apparently random two-by-fours planted into the ground.
Under the shed's roof stood a cluster of sleek metallic antennas and a small dish. Mike saw Gideon looking and said, "That's our uplink, can't get a high volume ground line in here without someone noticing."
Gideon shook his head, still trying to understand exactly what was happening here. Mike had dropped some broad hints about viruses and from the sound of it, what was going on was a domestic experiment in information warfare. That's the only thing that Gideon thought would require this kind of rogue operation.
Mike led them around to the front of the barn. As they closed on the entrance, a small door set next to the huge barn doors, Gideon began to hear a noise, like a car idling. It got louder as they approached the barn.
Then Gideon started to feel a slightly warm wind brush against his face. He stopped, suddenly still, and looked up at the wall of the barn.
The door they faced was new construction, a pre-made vinyl-coated door, set rather abruptly into the weathered gray wood. That wasn't the only modification. Gideon could see a series of new metal vents set high up, above the top of the barn door, set in a line across the front of the barn. That's where the warm breeze came from, Gideon was certain. The wind shifted and the warmth left him.
Why would they be venting warm air? The only thing that Gideon could think of was a refrigeration system of some sort. . .
There was only one thing that Gideon knew of that would require refrigeration in this climate, but he didn't think it could be possible.
Mike led them through the door, and Gideon saw, immediately, that it was possible.
Behind the barn doors, sitting on a platform that was adjusted to give a level surface on the dirt floor, was a Daedalus supercomputer. Gideon recognized it immediately, even when it was half-hidden by silvery vents that led up into the gloom of the barn's loft, venting the waste heat, keeping the superconductors from frying while the machine operated.
From under the platform came a twisted mass of cable snaking back into the bam. The end of the bam without the Daedalus looked as if someone had decided to transplant someone's office pool. There were more leveling platforms set up, the cables snaking across the dirt to disappear under them in a half-dozen places. They had set up partitions making a half-dozen cubicles. And hanging from the rafters above were long fluorescent light fixtures.
The idling sound came from two generators that sat on the dirt floor of the bam, between the computer and the office area, snaking their own cables to both.
"Welcome to Project Aleph," Mike said.
The people back in the office weren't guards. Gideon could tell because all the people were more interested in what was going on on their desks than they were in the door. Gideon could tell the guards by their Kalishnikovs, and by the fact that they started straight toward the door from their positions flanking the generators.
Ruth called out, toward the cubicles, "Julie!"
Everything stopped.
The guards looked off toward the office area. The people in the office area turned and looked off toward the intruders.
One woman separated herself from a terminal where she'd been looking over the shoulder of some guy about Mike's age. She took a few steps toward them. She was taller than Gideon had expected. Her hair was loose and hung down around her shoulders, and her depthless gray eyes stared at all of them with what seemed to be a cold curiosity.
"Thank you, Gribaldi," she said. "Both of you should come with me. I suppose you have some questions."
3.05 Fri. Mar. 26
THERE was a dark corner of the barn, by the ersatz offices. It was walled off completely, for privacy. Julia took them inside, leaving Mike out on the floor of the "lab" with the other computer people. She shut the door on the activity outside, and the room became disturbingly silent. Gideon felt as if they were completely alone with Julia Zimmerman.
He couldn't help staring at the woman. There was only the barest hint that there was anything extraordinary about her—and it might only have been there because Gideon expected it, and was looking for it. Her posture broadcast confidence, perhaps—as Dr. Nolan would have said—arrogance. Her eyes were deep and powerful, and seemed to look through him, or into him.
Julia turned on a fluorescent that flickered a half-dozen times before it came on fully.
She strode through the small cramped room, around the desk, and said, "I'm glad you're all right, Ruth."
"Julie—" Ruth began.
"No thanks to the bastards you work for," Gideon blurted. He was saying it before he even realized the anger that he was holding back.
Ruth reached for his arm, "Gideon, wait a m—"
Gideon shook off her arm and took a limping step forward. "You do work for them, don't you? Or is it the other way around?"
"You don't know what's going on here, Detective Malcolm," Julia said. Her voice was much colder than the one she had used to address Ruth.
"I don't?" Gideon said. He took another step and leaned forward, his hands on the edge of the desk. He gripped the edge until the healing muscles in his arm vibrated. "You and Emmit D'Arcy came to some sort of agreement to continue your 'work' outside of the NSA's control. Both of you staged your defection to a phantom terrorist group, and even went so far as to contract the theft of a Daedalus supercomputer. Have I got the gist?"
"Plea
se," Ruth said. "Let her explain what's happening." If anything, it was Ruth who seemed to be hurt by Gideon's tirade. Julia simply watched him, unmoved.
"If I have that much right—" Gideon glared at the woman. React, damn you. "Those thieves killed a highway patrolman, you realize that, don't you? In fact, they botched the whole job—bad enough that the CIA managed to set a trap with the Daedalus. But D'Arcy tipped you off, didn't he?"
"I'm sorry that you and your brother—" Julia began.
"You are? Are you sorry about Mr. Jones and Mr. Williams? They might have been criminal scum, but the fact that you involved them meant they had to die. Your pet terrorist, Volynskji, put a bullet into Morris Kendal because he was just a little too close to figuring out D'Arcy was behind this. Are you sorry about him? Then there're a half-dozen dead Israelis in New Jersey-----"
Julia nodded and said quietly, "Much of this has been unfortunate."
"Good Lord, do you understand that these bastards almost killed your sister—"
"They panicked," Julia said. "After the travesty with the Israelis, I made them understand that they had to bring the two of you here, in one piece."
"Do you know how many people have died because of this?"
Julia sat down, behind the desk. "I am not in control of these people, Detective Malcolm."
"Bullshit!"
"Gideon, please." Ruth sounded shocked. She pulled at his arm trying to get him back into a seat.
"You have these people wrapped around your finger. You dictated that we be brought into audience with you, and here we damn well are—snatched from out of the NSA's own hands."
"You have no idea what that required," Julia said.
"They can't have their little project without you, can they? You seem to have a powerful negotiating position."
Julia shook her head. "D'Arcy won't allow a threat to himself or the IUF—"
"So the blood is on his hands, not yours?"
"You don't know what Aleph means, do you?" Julia looked at Ruth and the coolness leaked out of her face. "I couldn't not take the opportunity D'Arcy offered me."
"Whatever the cost?"
"I brought you here to explain." She was still talking to Ruth.
"Explain why my brother died." The words hung in the air as silence claimed them again. Julia still looked at Ruth as if she was searching for something, support, justification, rationalization. Gideon turned around and looked at Ruth himself. Ruth's eyes were shiny, and she was wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand.
Gideon felt spent, as if venting his anger had withdrawn all solid support from inside him. He pushed away from Julia's desk and half-collapsed into a chair next to Ruth.
"Julie," Ruth said. "What's going on here? Why's this happening?"
Julia Zimmerman glanced at Gideon and paused, as if waiting for a continuation of his tirade. "You didn't need to involve yourself so deeply. Eventually you would have known. Everyone would have known, soon enough."
"What is Aleph?" Gideon asked.
Julia smiled slightly. "You already know." She looked up, toward the louvered window, and at first Gideon thought she might be looking at the Daedalus. But her eyes were unfocused and blank, as if she was looking beyond the Daedalus, at something only she could see. "'Why,' is a good question. 'Why' is exactly what we're searching for here."
"Why what?" Gideon asked.
"Why is this world, on its face, filled with such illogic, such randomness, such pain. The human mind is such a faulty mechanism, capable of intolerance, brutality, stupidity, evil. . . And yet, and yet. . ." She closed her eyes. "I cannot believe that we, a race of beings of brutal stupidity, a race of Pol Pots, Charlie Mansons, and," she paused a moment, "Emmit D'Arcys—a race of evil high and low—could have 'invented' the beauty of the mathematical world."
To Gideon, it appeared as if she had fallen into that world. The hardness was gone from her expression, replaced with something distant and serene. "How can we say that Newton invented the calculus when it was his study of the physical world that led him to discover it? How can we say that some ancient invented '1 + 1 =2'? Those in my discipline keep going further and further afield, trying to 'invent' new, esoteric forms of mathematics, and they always find to their chagrin that eventually their math describes some aspect of the world, be it the quantum spaces inside an atom, or the growth of a species, or the deformation of a polymer under stress."
"You see it as a form of higher reality—" Gideon said. But Julia opened her eyes and shook her head slowly, as if trying to be kind in contradicting a child's view of the world.
"It is reality," she said. "The closest that we can come to seeing how things really are."
Gideon opened his mouth, but he couldn't say anything.
"It's obvious," Julia said. "Once you start to see. The way that every form of the discipline, from number theory to topology, will find its manifestation in the world we experience. The way the world we see informs the discipline, from chaos theory to the evolutionary algorithm—" Julia tapped on the desk. "If you believe in physics, you believe that this desk is simply a physical form of energy left over from the creation of the universe.
"So can't you see that this universe is an objectified form of a mathematical object?"
"Is that what the New Pythagoreans are about?" Gideon asked.
"They are Mr. Gribaldi's invention. They understand, but only in a rhetorical fashion. Their beliefs are ones of aesthetics . . . There are very few who even claim that the evolutionary algorithm is the same as evolution, or that a computer program that shows all the functions of biology is, by definition, biological."
"That's what you were doing at MIT, wasn't it? Applying the evolutionary algorithm to computer viruses."
"An oversimplification. We were working on a new biology. At MIT, working within a closed environment of our private computer network, we generated programs that were more complex than any mere virus . . ."
Ruth spoke up. "All sorts of people work on Artificial Life. There're conventions for it. Why was this a secret? Why destroy all the research you left at MIT."
Gideon felt as if he finally understood. He could feel some of the anger return. "A private, isolated environment wasn't big enough, was it?"
"No," Julia said, "it wasn't."
"You let these things out into the world," Gideon said. "Damn the consequences. So what if Wall Street collapses—"
"These were not destructive viruses." Julia frowned.
Ruth sounded appalled. "You were letting these things go?"
"To generate what we wanted required the widest, most diverse, and challenging environment that was available."
"Michael's 'rabbits.'" Gideon said.
"The term for the first creatures we released into the Internet. They had two main directives, to burrow and hide, and to find other rabbits and reproduce."
"The evolutionary algorithm," Gideon said.
"True evolution, where survival is the only criterion for reproduction. We added predators, foxes and sharks that would consume any rabbit they found, and each other—"
"Christ," Ruth said.
"You engineered a whole ecosystem and infected the Internet with it. . ." Gideon shook his head. "Do you have any idea how potentially destructive that was, is?" He looked into Julia's eyes. "Of course you do, you jumped right on board the NSA's information warfare projects. It was a seamless transition, wasn't it. You picked up right where you left off—"
Julia shook her head. "No, Detective Malcolm. I didn't. Losing the ET Lab was a disaster. Wiping the research was all I could do to save even the idea of the project— that and our secrecy."
"I wonder how many laws you broke with this project."
Julia looked at him sternly.
"This is like some genetic engineer dumping a new plague into the Chesapeake just to see what'll happen." "The evolutionary pressure is against any of these creatures causing overt disruption. Detection means that the program does not survive, doesn't repr
oduce."
"That doesn't stop the occasional 'disruption,' does it?"
Julia was silent.
"How many times has your project caused something like the Wall Street crash? Or does it matter?"
"These are living creatures, they will have some effect on their environment. . ."
"And if the 'project' is already out there— If your viral life-forms are happily breeding on the Internet already— What is all this, then?" Gideon waved back toward the lab. "Why are you suddenly here, with a damn supercomputer? What is D'Arcy after? What's worth all the deaths that've already happened because of this thing?"
The door opened behind them, and a voice said, "She's giving the United States the greatest technological advantage since the invention of the atomic bomb."
Gideon turned around and faced the speaker, a short bespectacled gentleman who looked somewhat like Peter Lorre. Emmit D'Arcy gave Gideon a half-grin and looked up at Julia. "I think, Doctor, you would be better off monitoring the progress of the lure." He looked at Ruth. "And perhaps you should take your sister."
Julia looked at D'Arcy with an expression of vague distaste, gave a curt nod, and took Ruth out of the small office. Gideon was left alone with the man most responsible for his brother's death.
D'Arcy walked around and sat behind Julia's desk. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "She was adamant that we bring you here."
"Bastard," Gideon said.
"I've been called worse."
"How many people have you killed to keep this private enterprise of yours a secret?"
D'Arcy shook his head. "Your problem, Detective Malcolm, is that you have no perspective."
Gideon stood up. "How can you have the gall—"
"You rushed in," D'Arcy said. "Starting with the unfortunate incident with your brother, you've gone charging ahead with little thought to what might be involved or what the consequences are. For a time you were a useful distraction."
"You Machiavellian— What was the original plan? Have them finish this project and then storm the place? Everyone conveniently dies in the assault, and no one to say this wasn't a terrorist operation."
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