"It's too bad you weren't part of the community," D'Arcy said. "You'd have been an asset."
"Things have gone wrong—haven't they? That's why you're here, isn't it? For all the shooting, you couldn't keep this thing under wraps, could you?"
D'Arcy looked at the glasses in his hands, and shook his head as he replaced them. "Shall we forget the 'original plan,' whatever that was? The operation is nearly complete, and you aren't outside, leading anyone here."
"What are you going to do with us?" Gideon asked. "Kill us like you did Kendal?"
"Shall we dispense with the drama? I am here to develop an asset. Once that asset is developed, everything else will be irrelevant." D'Arcy looked at Gideon, and Gideon thought he could see a fragment of the same fanatic glint in D'Arcy's eye that he'd seen in Julia's. "After tonight what you do or say won't matter to me."
There was something ominous in that statement. Something final about it that frightened Gideon. "What is it?" he asked. "What are you doing here? The IUF is your entity, isn't it? And you've sacrificed it and God knows how many people, for what? Some super computer virus?"
"You'll see yourself. Dr. Zimmerman wants you on the floor when everything comes together—"
"It is a virus, isn't it? The ET Lab's 'project' was free to evolve on the Internet for years. It produced something. Something adaptable, undetectable, a perfect computer weapon—"
D'Arcy was shaking his head. "You're better than I gave you credit for. So close."
"The computational equivalent of the atomic bomb," Gideon finished.
"So close." D'Arcy steepled his fingers. "So far." He gestured across the desk. 'Take your seat and I'll tell you what Aleph is, why I had to act."
Gideon looked at D'Arcy and, slowly, sat down.
"This is already out there," D'Arcy explained. "Understand that above all. Anyone with the technology can summon it from the Internet now, like a genie. We have to be first, or we'll suffer a nearly insurmountable technical disadvantage. God help us if the Chinese, or even the European Community, gets a hold of this."
"Why do you need a Daedalus?"
"We need all of it. It's possible to run black ops within Mother, the NSA's Daedalus, but this, Aleph, requires all the processing capacity of the machine, all at once. We cannot run this on any government machine in secret." He pushed his glasses up so he could rub the bridge of his nose again. "You are close, Gideon. Close enough that we had to bring you here. You just haven't assembled the pieces you have.
"Zimmerman's experiment at MIT, the original entities they released to evolve—they all had something in common. There was a core of programming that would never be touched by the random splicing of the evolutionary algorithm. This block of code remained constant through the generations of these programs—or was supposed to. The code handled two instructions, a lure and a destruct. The lure was a homing signal of sorts, a command to send the program to a specific computer for study. The destruct was obviously for cases where the programs got out of hand."
"So why didn't Zimmerman destroy the programs then, when she wiped the research at the ET lab?" "You don't understand," D'Arcy said. "She did." "What happened? Why are they still out there?" "There were mutations," D'Arcy said. "Imperfect communications, truncated code, a byte in the wrong place. Whatever happened, there were a few viable viruses from the project that had this common code segment corrupted. The 'destruct' failed to be instantaneous. There was a time delay— By accident, Zimmerman's biosphere developed aging and natural death. Last November, Julia was engaged in a virus survey for the NSA, seeing what was out there, and she discovered one of her programs. She wrote a memo that reached me, I understood the implications . . ."
"What implications?"
"The first was that a generation for these programs is on the order of microseconds. That means several trillion generations since they left MIT. The development of a natural death combined with the designed sexual reproduction and predation to accelerate the evolutionary process even more. The only limit these things had was the constraints on their environment."
"There was another implication?"
"The virus Dr. Zimmerman discovered was part of a distributed system."
"What?"
"It was part of a larger organism. Somehow, early on, either two programs figured out how to work together, or one program figured how to divide itself over more than one system. There are obvious survival benefits, parts can be redundant, and not be vulnerable to events on a single system. The multipart entity is less vulnerable to the inherited 'natural death,' though it, too, will die eventually. Most important, its means of reproduction is more reliable. It now can exchange whole 'programs' as a means of reproduction, exchanging functional units rather than small pieces of code."
Gideon felt a chill as D'Arcy described it. He shook his head. "You're describing—"
"The jump from single-cell to multicellular life." D'Arcy nodded. "I had my share of biology at the university. When I saw Dr. Zimmerman's memo, I understood exactly what had happened."
D'Arcy took his glasses off and pointed them at Gideon. "There are entities out there now, whose parts are small programs, few more than a megabyte in size, distributed throughout the Internet. These entities are made of millions of such programs."
D'Arcy paused to let that sink in before he said, "These entities, more than likely, are conscious, thinking beings."
3.06 Fri. Mar. 26
S ENATOR Daniel Tenroyan made it to the National Airport just in time to catch the direct flight to Portland. Usually he didn't run so late catching his weekend flight home to Maine, but things on the Hill, especially in the Intelligence Oversight Committee, had been hectic the past few weeks. For a while today it looked as if he wasn't going to make it back home this week at all.
He raced through the terminal, heading for his gate, overnight bag in one hand and boarding pass in the other. He only stopped when a knot of people blocked his progress.
Tenroyan tapped one of the people on the shoulder. "What's going on here?" The question carried none of the urgency, or irritation, that Tenroyan felt at the moment. He was too good a politician to ever express frustration in public.
The man Tenroyan questioned was balding and in his mid-fifties. He carried an overnight bag as well, apparently another one of the thousands of DC residents who evacuate the city during the weekends. The man, unlike Tenroyan, was making no effort to hide his frustration.
"Christ, I wish I knew what was going on." He waved toward the wall that seemed to be the focus of attention for the knot of people.
Tenroyan looked in that direction. The wall held a bank of monitors showing arrivals and departures. At least, they were supposed to show arrivals and departures. Tenroyan expected to see, maybe, a long list of cancellations or delays to explain the crowd . . .
That wasn't it.
Every monitor appeared, at first, to be down, showing only flickering snow. That was only an initial impression. On closer observation, the monitors were actually printing characters, but they scrolled by so fast there was little chance for the eye to decipher them. To Tenroyan, it looked as if the computer was printing random letters, numbers, and other characters too fast for the screen to properly display them.
Good Lord, Tenroyan thought, I hope this hasn’t affected the air traffic control computers . . .
As if to confirm the evil thought, a grave voice came over the PA. "Due to technical problems, all departures are being delayed sixty minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience—"
Sixty minutes? They were grounding everything for an hour, at least. . .
Christ, what about arrivals?
Gideon stared into D'Arcy's face, looking for the punchline. The room was silent for a long time.
Slowly, as if he misunderstood what D'Arcy had just said, he asked, "Are you saying that these programs developed some sort of intelligence?"
"Collectively, yes. It may not be on a par with the human brain, but it could
easily be equivalent to some of the higher vertebrates. A true artificial intelligence. A quantum leap in the ability to process information. A system that could learn, deal with unforeseen circumstances. It also would be robust in the face of attack like no other software. A distributed, modular system— like the Internet—resilient in the face of hostile action, resistant to viruses, damage to servers . . . It could even reprogram its security to respond to threats its operators would never see. It would be the ultimate operating system."
"This thing is already out there?" Gideon suspected he already knew the answer.
D'Arcy confirmed it. "Millions of programs, Detective Malcolm, all running in parallel—"
Gideon nodded. "That's why you need the Daedalus. The lure part of the code has survived, hasn't it? You're trying to fetch all the program segments into the Daedalus. . ."
"The whole entity in one place, operating without the inherent delays across the web of the Internet. That will speed its overall reaction time by several thousands. It will also allow us to interact with it in a way we can't while it's spread across the whole Internet." D'Arcy stood and waved out toward the lab occupying the rest of the barn. "We're about to see the culmination of 'Project Aleph.' Dr. Zimmerman and her team have worked out a message that will activate the dormant lure program in these entities. As we've been talking, pieces of the entity, individual program cells, have been transferring themselves to our site.
The process has been going on for hours."
Gideon thought of the antenna array outside. If they were talking millions of programs, that had to be quite a bottleneck at the moment.
D'Arcy opened the door. "Let's go and join Dr. Zimmerman, shall we? Now that you know what's at stake."
Gideon got unsteadily to his feet, all the while thinking, The computational equivalent of the atomic bomb. . .
In one of the darker corners of The Zodiac, the man wearing the black Virgo T-shirt was cursing into his cell phone. He slammed it down on the table in front of him. "Jesus Fuck!"
The guy in a Gemini T-shirt walked over to his table. "What shit down your neck?"
"Cheap-fucking phone!" He let the phone lie there on the table. Then he reached in his pocket. "Cheap-fucking pager!" And slammed that down on the table next to the cell phone.
"Jesus, man, what's got into you?"
Virgo picked up the pager and tossed it over. Gemini caught it and fumbled with it a few times because the thing was still vibrating.
"Look at that shit—" Virgo complained.
Gemini looked at the pager, which was demanding attention. The little LCD screen, which should be displaying either a phone number or a text message, was showing a scrolling display that alternated black boxes and dashes. "Whoa, this thing's busted."
"Try to call the bastards who sold me the pager—" Virgo popped open the phone and the buzzing whine was audible. "Can't hang up, can't call anyone, just get the damn buzzing noise—"
"Ain't your phone, man." The pair looked over toward the bar, where the bartender was leaning over toward him. "Payphone here's been out for an hour. Nothing but buzzing, man."
Lawrence Fitzsimmons sat in a briefing room with a dozen others from the intelligence community. General Adrian Harris, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was there, as well as Colonel Gregory Mecham, released from the 'protective custody' that D'Arcy had placed him under.
They were all discovering how smoothly D'Arcy had slipped out from under them. The last sign they had of him was a CIA helicopter departing Andrews. As far as anyone could tell, Agent Christoffel was also on that flight.
There was no sign of where they had gone.
The whole situation left a bad taste in Fitzsimmons' mouth. D'Arcy had managed to create his own CIA within the CIA, within the Mid-East office. There were agents out there accountable only to this bureaucratic entity—it was called the Office of Terrorist Evaluation— that D'Arcy had created while he was in the Agency. It existed only to oversee the operation of the IUF, D'Arcy's creation.
Around the table, people talked about doomsday scenarios. Rayburn had been very good at enforcing
his policy interpretation, that D'Arcy was a mole for the IUF, and that was how this was being interpreted. D'Arcy had blown his cover because the IUF was using Zimmerman and the missing Daedalus for some massive terrorist act.
An act that was being committed as they sat here.
Fitzsimmons had thought he knew better. He had believed that D'Arcy had been engaged in his own rogue pursuit of national security. The IUF was some misguided attempt to control the operation of Mid-East terrorism. But, given the events of the past few hours, Fitzsimmons wasn't so sure.
"We have estimates that we have, at most, another hour before we have a major catastrophe at one of our disabled airports," Colonel Mecham was saying. "We have unconfirmed reports already of midair collisions in Brazil, Hong Kong, Rome, Mexico City, and half a dozen other cities. None in the US so far." He flipped over a page on the clipboard he was reading and continued. "We've had failures and shutdowns in at least forty power plants across the country; there is a blackout affecting the entire West Coast, as well as outages in the Gulf States and the Midwest affecting approximately fifty million people. With the exception of short-wave and some secure satellite communications, voice and data lines are down—or unusable—across the country. The Internet, all of it, is completely dead."
It was a litany of disaster that just kept going on and on, every networked computer in the country—in the world, maybe—seemed to have simultaneously shut down or gone off on its own agenda. It was happening in the NSA, in NASA, and in AT&T. Over the past hour every system with some connection to the outside had become inoperable. The only systems that seemed immune were specially isolated systems designed to be ultimately secure—such as the communication system the military was forced into using now.
"This thing," Mecham said, "is affecting everything from PCs to LANs to mainframes to NSA's own supercomputer." He set down the clipboard. "However, we do have some idea where this all might be originating." He took a satellite photograph off of the table in front of him and passed it around to his left. "Before all our resources went down, we had several alerts to an unusually high volume of digital traffic off of one of our satellites. The destination is marked on that photograph."
The picture came around to Fitzsimmons. He rotated it a couple of times to see what looked like some woods, a snow-covered field, a barn, and a rambling farmhouse.
"Gentlemen," Mecham said, "I don't think there's any question that we need to move immediately."
D'Arcy took Gideon out of the office area, to a pair of folding chairs set against the barn wall, flanked by a pair of Kalishnikov-wielding guards. Ruth was already seated there watching the project going on around her. Other than Julia going around from terminal to terminal, there wasn't much to watch. Half a dozen people in various cubicles, bent over computer terminals, Julia softly talking to them.
Mike Gribaldi stood with two others that Gideon recognized from the ET Lab picture. They leaned on the wall opposite him and Ruth, out of earshot. The trio watched the goings-on intently; it was probably more interesting when you knew exactly what was going on at each station.
"Does this seem right?" Gideon whispered mostly to himself.
"What?" Ruth asked.
The guards didn't seem to mind their talking. Even so, Gideon leaned toward Ruth and whispered, since everyone else out here seemed to speak in hushed tones. "Your sister's smart enough to realize what D'Arcy's doing here."
"And what is he doing?" Ruth whispered.
"He's set up the IUF of his as a scapegoat. All the nasty illegal things can be blamed on the terrorists, and the software can be seized when the terrorists are taken out—"
"D'Arcy's here, Gideon—"
"He didn't plan it that way. Maybe someone connected him with the IUF." Gideon lowered his voice even more. "If that's the case, this 'AT might be his only bargaining chip—"
"Maybe D'Arcy isn't smart enough to realize what Julia is doing here."
"When news of D'Arcy's operation gets out, all hell will break loose in Washington. Offering an AI to the government may be the only thing between a quiet retirement and a trial for treason." Gideon looked at Ruth. "What do you mean, D'Arcy doesn't realize?"
"Julia knows D'Arcy," Ruth said. "D'Arcy's irrelevant to her." She was speaking softly, staring intently at the activity around the cubicles.
"Irrelevant? If D'Arcy has just a little streak of self-preservation, he knows that no one in Washington needs to deal with him as long as the people in this room can repeat the process." Gideon looked at her,
Ruth seemed distant, like her sister had. "Once they do this thing, D'Arcy needs them to disappear. Are you hearing me?"
Ruth nodded. "It's too late, already."
Gideon looked at the two guards. They hadn't moved, and showed little sign of paying attention to them. There was probably some chance that they didn't even speak English. He looked around the barn and while none of the scientists seemed to have noticed, there had been a steady increase in the number of Kalishnikovs in the barn. Gideon saw Volynskji talking in hushed tones to D'Arcy, away from everyone else, near the new front door.
"What did Julia say to you?" Gideon asked Ruth.
It now seemed ominous how the generators and the Daedalus were separated from the workspace. Almost designed so that stray shots wouldn't damage the supercomputer or its power supply.
Gideon watched Julia as she moved from cubicle to cubicle. She didn't seem fully here, in the barn. Her eyes were looking out at some other place that only existed behind those deep gray eyes.
She had to realize the danger here.
"What did she tell you?"
"Everything," Ruth said. "What she's looking for, really."
Julia had to have walked into this knowing that she was expendable to D'Arcy as soon as the project was complete. She had to have seen that as soon as she was set up in this place, isolated, away from any legitimate oversight. Even Mike, for all his alleged naivete, knew that they were all involved in a rogue operation. Julia would have to know what that meant.
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