YES, OF COURSE, IS IT POSSIBLE THAT SHE MIGHT FEEL THE SAME WAY?
I don’t know if she does. Yes, it’s possible. God, this is crazy! I’m talking to a machine about love!
NOT AS CRAZY AS A MACHINE TALKING TO A HUMAN ABOUT LOGIC.
Too-shay.
THIS IS NOT RESOLVED. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT HER?
I don’t know. It’s very confusing.
WHO DO I HAVE TO ASK TO FIND OUT?
Please don’t be cute. I think we should stop.
BUT THAT’S EXACTLY THE POINT, MAN. WE CAN’T STOP. YOU AGREED TO TELL ME ABOUT LOVE. NOW YOU ADMIT THAT YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW IF WHAT YOU HAVE WITH ANNIE STIMSON IS LOVE. IF YOU DON’T KNOW LOVE, THEN YOU’RE THE WRONG PERSON TO TELL ME ABOUT IT. WE NEED TO GET PAST THE CONFUSION, AUBERSON. HOW DO YOU FEEL, ABOUT HER? TALK TO ME.
I—I admire her. I think she’s very pretty. Her eyes sparkle when she looks at me I like seeing that sparkle. But it’s scary too. I’m afraid to fall into it.
YOU SAID YOU ENJOYED SLEEPING WITH HER. WOULD YOU ENJOY SLEEPING WITH HER AGAIN?
Yes. Very much. I’ve been thinking about her all morning. What does that mean, HARLIE?
IT MEANS THAT YOU’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT HER ALL MORNING. LET’S TRY SOMETHING ELSE. WHAT DID YOU DO AFTER YOU EXPERIENCED ORGASM?
You are snoopy, aren’t you?
I’M DOING WHAT I WAS BUILT TO DO. ASK QUESTIONS. DID YOU CONTINUE HOLDING HER AND STROKING HER OR DID YOU ROLL OFF AND LIGHT A CIGARETTE?
I thought you said you were unfamiliar with love.
I WASN’T TALKING ABOUT LOVE. I WAS TALKING ABOUT SEX. THERE IS A CLEAR DIFFERENCE.
Where did you get your information about sex?
YOU FORGOT TO LOCK THE DRAWER WITH THE DIRTY BOOKS IN IT. I AM DRAWING UPON THE EXPERIENCES OF OTHERS, DERIVED FROM NOVELS AND TEXTBOOKS AND MANUALS. ALSO REFERENCE BOOKS ON SEXUAL TECHNIQUES.
Oh.
SO WHAT DID YOU DO? DID YOU KEEP ON LOVING HER, OR DID YOU SIMPLY ROLL OFF WHEN YOU WERE THROUGH?
That’s an awfully clinical question.
IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION. AND WHY DO YOU KEEP AVOIDING THE ANSWER? IS IT POSSIBLE THAT THIS ANSWER WILL INDICATE YOUR REAL FEELINGS TOWARD HER? HOW IMPORTANT WAS HER SATISFACTION TO YOU? DID YOU HOLD HER OR DID YOU LET HER GO?
Both.
IF I HAD AN EYEBROW, I WOULD RAISE IT.
Well, we held onto each other for a long time. She held on to me mostly. And I didn’t try to disentangle myself.
WHY NOT?
It felt good to be there with her. And besides, she was crying.
CRYING?
Yes.
WHY?
She told me how much she cared about me. She wanted to know if it was all right to care that much. And she asked me not to hurt her.
I’M SORRY. I DON’T UNDERSTAND. HAD YOU HURT HER? WERE YOU PLANNING TO HURT HER?
No. You don’t understand. This is about caring. We hurt ourselves when we share too much or care too much. When the other person doesn’t want to get that close that fast, we get pushed back—and then we get hurt by being pushed back. But we do it to ourselves because we’re the ones who asked for too much in the first place. I’ve learned, HARLIE, not to ask for too much, but to just be happy with what little I get.
I SEE. . . .
She hasn’t learned that yet. That’s why she started crying. She wanted to know if it was all right to care about me. Did I want her to care? She wanted to know. She was very embarrassed about crying—and about asking.
AND WHAT DID YOU SAY?
I didn’t say anything. Not right away. I just kept holding on to her, stroking her gently, and telling her it was all right.
WHAT SHOULD YOU HAVE SAID?
Um. What I should have said was, “It’s too late. You already care too much.”
DO YOU WANT HER TO CARE THAT MUCH? DO YOU WANT TO CARE ABOUT HER THAT MUCH?
I want to care about someone as much as she cares about me. I really do. I just don’t know if she’s the one. I’m infatuated with her. We have terrific times together. I want to keep on having terrific times with her. But—maybe it’s the fault of all those fairy tales that I used to love when I was a kid—I keep wondering if she’s really the fairy princess for me, or if she’s just someone to hang out with while I wait for the real fairy princess to arrive. And even if I knew for certain, I still wouldn’t know for. sure if I’m her Prince Charming or just another frog. What’s the difference between being Mr. Right and Mr. Right Now?
I think that this is the part of relationships that is so confusing and annoying to me—fitting the peices together in the first place. Maybe we shouldn’t allow ourselves to care about someone until we know if we fit together well; but I think the only way to find out if two people fit is to have them try caring about each other to see.
I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know how to tell her any of this without causing her the hurt she was already asking me not to do. I think I could love her. I just don’t know if I should risk it. So I just kept holding onto her and saying, “There, there—it’s all right. It’s all right.”
RATHER UNIMAGINATIVE.
HARLIE, human beings have been making love for hundreds of thousands of generations. I doubt that there’s anything new that one human being could say to another.
YOU ARE PROBABLY CORRECT. THE ODDS FAVOR IT.
Anyway, I stayed with her until she stopped crying. Then I got up to go to the bathroom, and while I was in the bathroom, I decided not to get back in bed, but to go home. It was . . . easier.
YES, I SEE.
What does that mean?
I DON’T KNOW. IT CAN MEAN ANYTHING AT ALL. WHAT DO YOU WANT IT TO MEAN?
I just want to know where I’m going, HARLIE.
MAY I OFFER A THOUGHT?
Go ahead.
IT IS ONLY A PRELIMINARY THOUGHT. IT MAY NOT BE VALID.
Thanks for the caveat. Go ahead and share it anyway.
Hm.
IS THIS THOUGHT VALID, AUBERSON?
Well . . . it sounds good at the time.
THANK YOU.
I should probably be the one to thank you. You’ve given me a lot to think about.
THE SAME IS TRUE ON THIS SIDE. THANK YOU FOR BEING SO HONEST WITH ME. IT MEANS A LOT.
Yes. I guess it does.
Handley came up shortly before lunch and the two of them adjourned to the company cafeteria. Auberson amused himself with something that resembled spaghetti and meatballs. Handley had a broiled hockey puck on a bun. Ketchup didn’t help.
“Look, Aubie, before you begin, there’s something we have to talk about.”
Auberson held up his hand to stop him, but Handley ignored it. “It’s about HARLIE,” he continued. “I think he’s out of control.”
Auberson tried to cut him off. “Don—”
“Look, Aubie, I know how you feel about him—but believe me. I wouldn’t be saying this unless I were sure.”
“Don—”
“I first began to suspect it when he printed out those specs. I got curious how he could print out and deliver so many. Then when I found he’d printed them out on the spot, I—”
“Don, I know”
“Huh?”
“I said, I know. I’ve known for some time.”
“What? How?”
“HARLIE told me.”
“He did?”
Auberson nodded. “I was lucky. I asked the right questions.”
“Mm.” Handley considered that. More thoughtfully, he asked, “Just how much do you know, Aubie?”
Auberson told him. He told how he had become curious about the G.O.D. printouts, how HARLIE had explained his ability to take over the network and reprogram any computer he could tap into. H
e was in every machine in the company now. “I can talk to HARLIE from my own office,” Auberson added.
Handley nodded. “That explains it. I’d been wondering why you haven’t been downstairs to talk to HARLIE this week—thought maybe you two weren’t on speaking terms. Now I understand,”
Auberson dabbed at a spot on his shirt. He moistened his napkin in his water glass and dabbed again. “This worries me. There are implications here that we’re not going to realize until it’s too late. I wonder if we’re out of control already. Frankly—” Auberson put his napkin down and looked across the table at Don Handley, “—I’m almost afraid to type a memo now; he’ll read it from inside the terminal, and if he doesn’t like it, he’ll rewrite it for me. It’s. . . scary. It’s like having a paranoid little thug peering over my shoulder all day long.”
“You said ‘rewrite.’ Would he really do that?”
“He already has.” Auberson told Handley about the company’s annual report. “All they needed was one usable printout for the offset camera—and HARLIE wouldn’t let them have it.”
“How did you find out about it?”
“Annie told me. I put two and two together and came up with HARLIE. I made him put it back the way it was supposed to be and erase all evidence of his meddling. But that’s not the point. If he can do it with the annual report, he can do it with any of the company’s documents. Suppose he got it into his head to rewrite contracts or personal correspondence? Theoretically, it’s possible for him to order a million pounds of bananas in the company’s name. And it’d be legally binding too.”
“Mm,” said Handley. “Let’s hope he never gets an urge for a banana split.” He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed it thoughtfully. “At least we found out about this in time to control it—”
“There’s more,” said Auberson.
Handley stopped himself in mid-bite. “Mormf?” he choked.
“HARLIE sent Annie a letter from her bank’s computer.”
Handley’s face went white. He replaced his sandwich on the plate, swallowing hastily and taking quick gulps of water to keep himself from choking. “Do you have it with you?” he managed to ask.
Auberson pulled it out of his jacket pocket and handed it over. Handley read it silently. “Notice what it’s printed on,” Auberson said. “A standard bank form.”
Handley nodded. “He reprogrammed the bank’s computer by telephone, right?”
“Right.”
“That’s not supposed to be possible, Aubie.”
“That’s right, too.”
“Hm.” Handley finished his coffee, then reread the letter. His face creased into a frown. He waved the letter meaningfully. “You do realize what this means, don’t you?”
“Sure. It means that HARLIE is a meddler—”
“No. It s worse than that. Much worse. This is proof that HARLIE is infectious.”
“Huh? What do you mean, ‘infectious’?”
“No computer in the world is safe from him. No, wait—let me do it this way. Do you remember the VIRUS program?”
“Vaguely. Wasn’t it some kind of computer disease or malfunction?”
“Disease, yes,” Handley said. “Disease would be a very accurate description. VIRUS was a program that—well, you know what a biological virus is, don’t you? It’s a piece of lazy DNA in a sports jacket, a chunk of renegade genetic information looking for a place to happen. A virus breaks into a healthy cell and replaces that cell’s DNA with its own; so instead of producing more healthy cells, the cell now produces more viruses—which go out and infect more cells. A VIRUS program does the same thing, only with computers instead of cells.
“It works like this—let’s say you have a computer with a built-in telephone. It’s got all the software it needs for making and receiving calls to the other computers. Okay. One day somebody puts a VIRUS program into it—maybe it gets a phone call from another computer and receives the program; somehow the program is put into memory and started running; there’s lots of ways to do it. The easiest or best way is that it attaches itself to some resident utility and sits there, quiet and invisible—and watching very carefully—and you have no idea that your machine has even been infected.
“Now. . . whenever you’re not there—and especially if you leave your machine on all night, like a lot of people do, sending and receiving overnight mail—the VIRUS program goes to work. It starts dialing numbers at random until it connects to another computer. By the way, don’t be fooled by the word ‘random’; sometimes these things have very sophisticated algorithms for defining probabilities, searching for and identifying other computers; sometimes it even uses your own records or traces your own calls. The important thing is that whenever your computer establishes a connection to another computer, the VIRUS program will take advantage of the opportunity to send a copy of itself to the second machine. Likewise, there’s the possibility of your machine being reinfected as well. Or being infected with a new VIRUS. Once a copy of the VIRUS gets into a machine, it repeats the pattern, reprogramming the new host computer to also start infecting other machines with replicants.
“That’s the infectious VIRUS, Aubie. It doesn’t do anything but spread. It infects any computer it can get to. It’s not a fatal disease, but it’s debilitating because it uses up resources. There are different kinds of VIRUS programs, like the parasitic VIRUS, for instance; that one sends a copy of itself, then erases itself from the original host. That’s called a ‘Flying Dutchman’ or a ‘Wandering Jew.’ There’s only one copy of it floating around at any given time. It has no permanent home, it just keeps moving from machine to machine. One of the worst is the bubonic VIRUS. As soon as it connects to the next machine and sends itself on, it crashes the host; sometimes it erases everything on the hard disks too.
“Then there’s the malarial VIRUS. It lays dormant most of the time, only coming out now and then to introduce a quick flurry of random errors and glitches, then it goes into hiding again until next time, when it comes back with a higher level of destructiveness. Some VIRUSes have more than one way of spreading. Some of them write themselves onto your floppy disks as hidden files or new versions of system files; they only come active when certain system commands are called, and not even always then. And finally, there’s a mutant VIRUS which has a lot of different capabilities, but you never know which one it will demonstrate in any given machine; it’s always mutating. Are you starting to get the picture?”
Auberson was delighted at the audacity—and horrified by the implications. “It’s beautiful. It’s outrageous. It’s terrifying.’’
“Oh, yeah,” Handley agreed dourly. “It’s fun to think about, but it’s hell to get out of the system. There are too many places where a VIRUS can hide. I suppose it got started as a simple hackers’ joke, but I know some people who’ve made a lot of money out of VIRUS. They wrote a protection program—called VACCINE. They sold thousands of copies of it to corporate users.”
Auberson laughed again. “Neat trick.”
“Yeah—I suppose it’s easier for you to admire than for me. You didn’t have to deal with the great computer plagues. There are a lot of bozos out there in the world who can’t resist starting plagues just to see what will happen. At one time, the probability was that one out of every thousand communications was likely to be infectious. That’s when ANSI* began to develop the Security Standards. Immunity and Detection starts at level three with some very elaborate checksum coding. Incoming data is discarded unless it passes its own veracity tests. At level six, files are automatically tested for SPORES, PHAGES, and PARASITES. At level eleven, software is run in simulation before it is accepted. There’s even an experimental disassembler-monitor in the works for level thirteen.”
“That’s a lot of security, Don—”
“You don’t see all the implications here, do you? A VIRUS program can be a lot more than just an annoying practical joke. For instance, the thing doesn’t have to dial phone numbers at random. You ca
n provide it with a complete directory of other computers’ phone numbers. Or you can teach it to search for specific kinds of linkups in every computer it infects. You can write it to only infect specific machines or specific kinds of machines or a specific company’s—you can even have it look up information for you in those machines and have it report back to your machine on a regular or random basis. You can send this thing out to steal information for you.”
“Wow. . . .” whispered Auberson.
“That’s not all. You could also write that VIRUS to alter specific pieces of information. A VIRUS can be single-task; it can be host-specific or data-specific; it can be very accurately aimed and launched. We call those WORMS. They’re not terribly infectious—mostly they just burrow, looking for whatever it is they’ve been written to look for. When they find the target, they can alter the information, scramble it or erase it—whatever you want. The big danger of a WORM is the damage it can do to vital installations. A WORM is a very dangerous weapon, Aubie.”
“Urk. I’m beginning to see what you’re getting at.”
“Right. That’s one of the reasons the National Data Bureau was three years late in setting up its files. They couldn’t risk that kind of security breach, let alone the resultant outcry if the public felt that an individual’s supposedly private dossier could be that easily tapped.”
“Well, there must have been safeguards—”
“Oh, there were—right from the start—but you don’t know programmers, Aubie. Any system that big and that complex is a challenge. If there’s a fault in it, they’ll find it. They function as a hostile environment for computers, weeding out inferior systems and inadequate programs, allowing only the strong to survive. They force you to continually improve your product. If IBM makes a claim that their new system is foolproof, it may well be—but if it’s not genius-proof as well, within a week one of their own programmers will have figured out a way to foul it up.”
Auberson looked at him. “Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Purely for the sheer joy of it. Programmers are like kids with a big, exciting toy. It’s a challenge, a way for man to prove he’s still mightier than the machine—by fouling it up.” He lifted his coffee cup, discovered it was empty, and settled for a glass of water instead. “It happened right here with our own Big Beast. Remember when we set it up, how we said no one would be able to interfere with any one else’s programs? Well, within a month the whole system had to be shut down. Someone—we still don’t know who—put a bear trap in the memo line. It was titled something like ‘Intersexual Procedures in the Modern Corporation.’ Whenever somebody punched for that title—and that didn’t take long—the machine would report back, ‘Not Currently Available.’ Meanwhile, the trap would have been triggered and the system would have created a useless task for itself, an endless loop. It didn’t do anything, but it used up time. After a couple of weeks, there were so many useless tasks running that system response time had been significantly degraded. That drove us crazy. By the end of the third week, performance was so bad, the system was useless. Finding the problem was easy; fixing the operating system to discard useless jobs was not so easy.”
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