Agnosis – Ch. 4

<– Chapter 3 / Chapter 5 –>

Routine occupied much of his morning. A dozen users had locked themselves out of their working foam. One of the ex-connex routers inexplicably failed, shutting down roving access for all the staff geeking in from Southrange. Mail was sluggish until he wrote a quick virus that tracked down the host ips of a spam consortium and systematically devoured everything running on their networks, the least innocuous of which was their address feeder datacores. After that he spent a couple of hours in geek fielding irate tech pings from sysadmins halfway across the galaxy who wanted to know exactly what the hell he had done to their architecture. They were bystanders, really. Innocent public hosts whose ips had been spoofed by the spammers. Didn’t matter. There were no innocents in the war on geek congestion. One by one, Dorian advised them to stop aiding and abetting the enemy and upgrade their security, then clicked off. Around lunchtime, he reviewed and purged the unauthorized access attempt logs for the primary servers–only a couple hundred thousand attempts in the last day. That would pick up in the next few hours as the outraged hosts tried to pay him back in kind. Good luck to them.

This sort of general troubleshooting kept him busy until well into the afternoon. At some point, Amara brought him a sandwich from one of the snack machines, but he wasn’t sure exactly when that was, and didn’t precisely remember having eaten it when it was gone. The rest of the time, she sat quietly at her desk, the only reminder of her continued presence the whicker of turned pages and the crackle of old bindings.

About the time the suits, secretaries and geek staff were logging out, he was finally able to catch his breath, lean back in his chair and tather his thoughts. Pressure had been building in steady increments inside his skull for most of the day, and now his sinuses ached like he was coming down with the flu. He’d been trying unconsciously to snuffle them clear for the last two hours, but there was no help for it. It was his short term mem extensors advising him to process his morning download into long term storage before the action potential bridges degraded.

At last, he set his elbows on his desk and cupped his face in his hands. He closed his eyes and tried to think of nothing in particular for thirty whole seconds. Clearing the mechanisms.

When he had accomplished that, he imagined Michael Raville.

Emergent knowledge broke over him in a flood, thundering in his ears like rushing water.

…

Nobel laureate in physics. Indiana University ’72. Masters in Strand Applications and Theory, Oxford ’74, followed by his first doctorate in Applied Quantum Mapping, 2277. Additional post-graduate degrees from Collegia Belgrade, Harvard and Nippon Tech. Two hundred and thirteen individual patents; seven hundred forty four pending for devices ranging from seventeen syllable nonsense gadgets to quantum-something-or-other bric-a-bracs whose disclaimers alone filled six full title pages. Born in Valparaiso, Indiana, Great Lakes Territory. Three sisters, one mother, two Patriarchs. Staunchly middle class. Raised Buffalo Convention Roman Catholic. Minister of Education for three North American P.M.’s in the last fourteen years. Distinguished Rothman-Gates Chair in Post-Ravillean Physics, Harvard University. President, Board of Directors, Zatreus Group Data Systems; Majority shareholder, Polity Schematics; Technical Board Advisor, Garrison-Riley Metronics Corporation. A litany of financial transactions, mergers, stock reports. On and on.

…

Dark hair, worn straight back from his forehead, blue eyes. Thought lines furrowed his brow like deep sea crevasses. Long fingers and quick, active hands. Average height, going to fat about the middle like a typical academic, but the sort of sparkling, instantaneous smile that transformed him into a totally different man when he was amused. Then older, balding, but the eyes remain bright, the mind sharp and the tongue lucid. A pleasant voice, warm and rich, either naturally gifted or the result of vocal training in secondary school, where he had distinguished himself as a member of the swing choir. Johnny Walker Black. Guinness off the tap. Torcanello cigars. He smelled like freshly ground clove.

…

He’d been refreshed twice. Once in ’29 after an accident in Italy, his first time skiing, an anniversary present from his wife. Once in ’44 after the assassination attempt on P.M. Stephenson. That corpse had been entombed in the rubble of the Communal Congress Arch, now a Terran international monument in Toronto. Daughters: Angelica, Tori, Elizabeth. Sons: Ethan, Joshua, Thomas. Three wives, all publicly amicable splits. Knight of the Realm, Order of the Crescent, Laurel of Apollo. Active administrator of his own charitable trust. Giddy philanthropist. Minority owner of the Boston Pagans baseball team. By all accounts: nice guy, witty, likeable, without political aspirations and without pretensions. Preferred corned beef to caviar, whiskey to white wine. His current wife had been his undergrad Classics tutor. Didn’t seem to know a lick about running a baseball team, but loved the hell out of the game. His grandkids called him Pops. His college graduation gift from his parents had been a trip to the Scioli-Franciscan Mission in Setra Brahma, Mars to assist in the famine relief. He’d come home with kernel of vision for what would become zap.

…

Dorian opened his eyes, scowling.

Michael Raville was exactly not what he had expected him to be. Not the sort of guy who had anything to gain by attempting to jack the Archive. Not, in fact, a guy who seemed to have any experience with or interest in intrusion theory at all. The tools, yes. The dazzling intellect. The affinity for taking things apart, for complex systems analysis and multiple coding architecture comprehension. The deep grounding in foam dynamics. His early publications in science and technology journals–the first when he was only seventeen years old–read like a proto-jack’s training manual: binary packet manipulation, the manufacture of Schrödinger interference burps, object oriented Vorman-perl declension theory.

But Raville was a visionary, a builder, an engineer. He created things because it made him happy to do so, and because he saw it as a way to help people in the process. His skills and technical expertise were tools for implementing his vision, rather than ends unto themselves.

What he wasn’t was a troll.

He didn’t break things just because he could, and he didn’t take without asking.

The spider…ah, the spider was trollware if Dorian had ever seen it.

But there was an itch, a troublesome niggle fluttering about in his brain. Something that didn’t match the public picture of the distinguished Michael Raville with the spider’s assault on the Archive. He kept asking himself what it was, exactly, that someone like Raville would want with the Archive’s foam in the first place. Certainly not his own personal copy of Thelonious Beck.

What was it Amara had said about Raville’s package?

It’s a really rough cut, not something he ever wanted to build on, but one of the science foundations bequeathed it to the Archive as a historical treasure. Because it was one of the first, I guess, and because of who he is.

And that was it, then. The key.

The spider had never intended to mine the Archive in the first place. That is, it wasn’t written with the Archive specifically in mind. The transfer of Raville’s package had only happened years after the fact, as a seemingly innocuous scientific bequest. No one could have foreseen the move at that time; few people on Earth would have even heard of the Archive back then. It’d still had its hands full just loading historic member files when Raville’s package was being scanned.

Not the Archive at all. The spider had been written for a fatter target.

One closer to home.

The North American States Research and Defense Agency Laboratories, Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Dorian stiffened. No, of course not. This was Michael Raville he was talking about.

But what if he really had done it? What then?

How had he smuggled something so dangerous as a data spider into military foam in the first place? And what had it been looking for when it got there? What could possibly make him desperate enough to take that kind of risk?

Dorian thought about the scripts, the files, the decompiled spyware tucked away in his foam.

There was only one way to find out.

The work took hours. Mind numbingly tedious stuff. Parsing values, diagramming logic flow, understanding not only how the spider had evolved, but why. Because the why would point directly to its original purpose, the reason the spider had been created, and that might just give him the key to what it was Raville had been after in the first place. He wrote the content analysis app that he had been dreading the night before and set it loose to summarize the contents of the spider’s forty year data cache. But he had answered one question, at least. He knew why it had been so essential for the spider to duplicate data files before making off with them–and duplicate them in such a way that no record remained that they’d ever been copied. Jacks determined to go after defense agency datacores did not leave footprints. It wasn’t healthy.

For some reason, that heartened him considerably. He didn’t feel like he was groping about in the dark so much now. The spider’s personality was emerging.

And in the end, it wasn’t any of his sophisticated analysis techniques that cracked the spider’s sacred, occult pattern. It wasn’t a massive logical leap that tied together impossible assumptions. It wasn’t really anything Dorian did at all.

It was a box score from last week’s newswire.

Boston 7, New Orleans 2.

The spider had intercepted it from the input spew on the record’s way to the Archive’s Historical Documents Collection and tucked the text file in the queue with all the other dox to be stored, analyzed or processed. The HDC was an ongoing project to capture and catalogue a dozen news feeds scattered across human space for academic and research institutions: History As It Happens ™ (all access passes available for a monthly fee). It was all straight public access data–disposable facts. It wasn’t the sort of information one would set up a mining operation to harvest, not when it could be had for free from a million virtual kiosks on the Strand. The Archive only recorded the streams because it was betting there would be a market for historical broadcasts in nthe not too distant future.

A baseball box score was an odd thing to find among geeks of scientific lectures, the private diaries of renowned physicists and the latest scholarly analyses of Sethian hermeneutics.

One of these things, Dorian thought, is not like the other. One of these things doesn’t belong.

So he ran an adaptive catalogue search and found more. Thousands, in fact. Years and years of baseball scores, compiled and archived by year into innocuously named compressed blocks.

He scoured the outsource_key file for hints to the logic behind such a strange set of acquisitions, disassembled the compression routines, and finally, in the spider’s R-ASP code engine, found what he was looking for:

//* If &Parse = outsource_key179

Do Fortean_Load

Execute Grab_Seed_Box

Do Doubleday

Execute $_2xxx_Standings

Execute $_Update_plyr_db

//* Stitch $_key TO inc=binary_conv; date-parm; date-stack; date-archive

Load virt_img_Herald

Reparse date-stack (Mon-dd-yyyy)

Insert; reload AS archive_2xxx

//* Spool virt_img_Herald//archive_2xxx

//* Convert archive_2xxxx-1;

Get sysdate, substr(12,4)

Transform &this_year

If &this_year = substr(archive_2xxx,9,4)

Do Compress_Grid_z

Else

Do Compress_Grid_search_match_substr

//* Else

Next &Parse //*

Then, he pored over the text, investigating each sub-routine in turn and subsequently extracted the contents of all the outside executables. When he was done, Dorian sat back from his terminal and gazed at nothing for several moments, almost too stunned to assemble coherent thought. He didn’t know if he should be shocked or sickened; all he knew was that he was outraged. It was simply unthinkable. Impossible.

But it was there, right in the code, and the code was Truth.

The spider didn’t take data, as he had supposed all along. It didn’t bounce documents. It seeded them.

And seeds existed for only one purpose, to grow into living things that could be consumed by other living things, so that those organisms, in turn, might grow as well.

Dorian knew suddenly, irrefutably, that if he compared system snapshots of the contents of the spider’s dead port from one day to the next, there would be one file in particular that grew faster than the rest, a relentless binary spread as data accreted hour after hour, year after year in its own private, invisible network bubble.

He could accept that the spider had been uploaded with Raville, maybe even been written by Raville originally. He could make himself believe that the spider had been designed to jack the Oak Ridge datacore–though he suspected it had less to do with stealing defense agency data than something darker and more frightening that he had not yet imagined. It even made perfect sense to him that after the transfer from Oak Ridge to Sonali, the spider would have continued jacking the Archive out of habit, a perpetual self-executing script adapting to the new environment as it went along.

But even stipulating all of that, what was he to make of baseball scores?

He simply could not imagine was Raville risking a betrayal of the spider’s existence over something so trivial. Not in the middle of the holding foam of one of the most secure datacores on Earth. Not when being caught jacking Oak Ridge would have destroyed his professional career at the very least, and more than likely seen him put on trial for digital terrorism. And that was assuming that Raville had known in advance that he could even access the sports newswire from inside the Oak Ridge datacore.

Because the biggest problem with that picture as Dorian saw it was that the spider hadn’t begun retrieving baseball scores on the Archive’s network until two years after Raville’s package had been transferred from Oak Ridge. A full six months after the HDC had gone live and the newswire filters had been plugged into the foam, in fact. Of all the unlikely adaptations the spider had manifested, this was the evolutionary leap Dorian simply couldn’t accept. Baseball wasn’t evolution; it was modification. It was the hand of an artist at work, a ghost running rampant in the foam, an anonymous eye peering out into the world through its forgotten digital window.

It was the quantum spirit of the First Cause stooping to touch the waters of chaos one more time to quicken his errant creation.

Dorian could not have imagined a worse outcome to his investigation if he’d spent all day trying. It had the potential to be an absolute disaster, both for his career and the Archive’s corporate reputation, the sort of thing that made weaker sysops tuck their chins against their chests and burst into tears.

Partly for the sheer novelty of actually speaking his doom aloud, partly as a warm up for how he would explain things to the IT Director, Dorian said to no one in particular, “Oh yeah, we have a big problem. I think Michael Raville is alive.”

“Of course he is,” Amara answered from her side of the partition. The flutter of pages continued uninterrupted. “He can’t even be a hundred and fifty years old.”

Dorian jumped at the sound of her voice. He had assumed she’d gone home for the night hours ago. It was after midnight by his system clock. “Not that one,” he said. “Our Michael Raville. The package.”

For several seconds, the only noise was the hum of the cooling system in the next room. Finally, Amara poked her head over the wall. “That’s impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible when you mix binary with Schrödinger waves.”

“John, it’s just a digital scheme. It isn’t a living thing…it’s just a map of the thing.”

Dorian shook his head slowly. It was basic mathematics, really. Take an object, any object, and describe it with absolute mathematical precision. Wrap that math in a sorter application called a scheme and feed it into a special box. Turn the power on, unleash some physics so funky and fabulous that people name the whole shebang after you, feed the resulting signal pulse into a manufacturing unit and voila! Reproduce as many copies as you want, or as many copies as you can get out of your stack of superdense, element-rich silicate wafers, the raw material of nano-assembly.

That was fundamental zap technology. The equations, the formulas and digitized representations might not be the literal thing they described, but they could become it.

And when you talked about people, well, they’d been moving people through zap for decades. Just a few years after the first zap applications had emerged to revolutionize the manufacturing industry, biomemetics products had begun to hit the public market with a thirty second livestream playback–a technical feat that was heralded as the biggest advance in static memory capture since the point-and-click camera. Raville himself had been one of the first scientists to see the potential. A way to move not only products, but people from point to point without the dangers, inconvenience and Einsteinian barriers of traditional long haul space transportation.

Because what was a biomeme really? Just a radically complex scheme if you thought about it. A way to capture the whole person, mentally, spiritually, emotionally. Describe them mathematically, even down to the most precise variations in DNA, pass them on a beam of zap, then assemble them again from the digitized map. In the final analysis, there was no difference between the package that was uploaded and the entity who emerged from the nano-assembler on the other end. It had been proven billions of times, with every traveler who stepped from the accretion pen to the depot concourse.

He said, “In the foam, the map is the territory. If we didn’t believe that, we wouldn’t bother with uploading in the first place. You should know that as well as anyone.”

“Because I’ve been refreshed, you mean.” Something in her voice made it clear that he was treading on dangerous ground.

“Exactly.”

“And because I’ve been refreshed, you should believe me when I tell you it’s impossible.” She stood now with her forearms on the top of the cubicle wall, looking down at him. “There’s no awareness in the box. No memories of being in storage. There is no before and after, John, or ongoing stream of consciousness inside the foam. Just missing time.” She spoke to him as if he was a child, or as if he was being deliberately obtuse, but at the end, she smiled wearily and said, “Don’t go all zaptronaut on me. I’d just about decided you were sane. It would be a shame if I had revise that assessment after I’ve slept in your bed.”

Dorian shook his head. “No, you don’t understand what I’m saying. When we get a package for long term storage, we put it in specially formulated foam. It’s like a sensory deprivation tank. We control the stimuli so that the representation of consciousness doesn’t attempt to emerge. When it comes time to download the package, techs at the receptor depot snip the last few gigabytes so the binary profile conforms with that of the original upload before Processing & Build. Some experts have long suspected that packages continue to possess some level of active cognition in storage, a sort of digital dreamtime. That’s why they recommend that you upload at least once a year–not just to minimize the dissonance of lost time, but because the package itself could have soured.”

“Soured.” Amara wrinkled her nose as though she found the word distasteful. “You mean awakened…and what? Gone mad?”

Dorian shrugged. “There have been studies which suggest that might be the case. That’s why they trim the ends. Just in case.”

It was more complicated than that, of course. There was some highly complex binary comparison algorithms that went into P&B to make sure that the only people who came out of zap insane had been insane before they went in.

“But as you say, we process the packages so that they don’t acquire consciousness. I’m sure someone in Package Management would have caught something if Raville was emerging. They’ve undoubtedly got protocols for dealing with that sort of thing.”

“They do,” Dorian said, nodding. “And if they suspect a package is even close to getting gamey, they notify the antecedent and purge the package as soon as they get a fresh upload.”

Amara raised her chin sharply, understanding. “Ah, but they couldn’t do that with Raville. His package is a historic artifact.”

“Sort of. I ran a diagnostic on Raville’s original scheme. It’s in a specially constructed holding foam where the original spec diagrams are constantly recycled on a read-and-replace loop. It’s expensive as hell in cycle costs, so the procedure is reserved for vips and special patrons. The corruption risk is absolutely minimal.”

“Well, if you already knew that, why would you think–”

He held up his hand. “Because that’s not the Raville I’m talking about. The original package is fine. The problem is the copy.”

So he explained it to her. The spider, the delicate and undetectable thefts, the dead port cache. The connection to Oak Ridge, what he had learned about Michael Raville himself, and finally, the baseball score. Amara listened, blinked her wide eyes at him occasionally, but didn’t try to argue. He didn’t know if that meant she believed him, or simply didn’t have the technological grasp to refute him.

“The bottom line,” he said at last, “is that this dead port is attached to a fractal of foam that’s been piggybacking on the network for years. And I think that this spider came across the link with Raville and immediately duplicated the upload so it could set up his package on our network outside the protected areas of Package Management where he wouldn’t be lulled into digital sleep again. How soon it found or manipulated the cache port after that, I don’t know, but they’ve been there for a long time, just feeding off of us.”

Amara took a deep breath. “So what do you do now?”

“I’m not totally certain. I’ve got control of his access point, and I’ve shut down his mining operation. Theoretically, I could keep him trapped in his foam forever if I wanted, especially now that I’ve got his spider, too. But that wouldn’t stop him from just writing another one. If he could modify this one, I’m betting he could start again from scratch. And if he can do that, he might be able to find his way back onto our network–or worse, he could use our network as a springboard to the public nets. Who knows what trouble he could get into if he got outside.”

“We can’t let that happen,” Amara said sternly. “Someone would eventually track him back to the Archive.”

“I could track down the router that feeds his port and unplug it. There’d be some service outage, some fires to put out, but he doesn’t have anywhere to run. Without the power couplings that maintain his foam in a steady state, the wave would collapse.” Dorian snapped his fingers. “End of problem.”

Amara gaped at him. “You can’t do that!”

“Why not?

“Because it’s illegal. Isn’t it? You can’t unilaterally decide to terminate a sentient AI.”

“It’s not an AI by definition. It’s a sour package. Or it’s a jack. Both of those are within bounds.”

“But that package belongs to the Archive. It belongs to Michael Raville.”

“No, the one in PM belongs to Raville. This one is more akin to a virus, and standard procedures gives me all the authority I need to purge it.”

“How can you say that?”

Dorian arched an eyebrow at her. “Now who’s going zaptronaut? It’s not like the package is alive. Not technically. It doesn’t have any independent rights, and any rights that it would have had as Raville’s appendant person were signed over to the Archive with the bequest from Oak Ridge.”

“But aren’t you even curious about it? You’re saying that he may have been conscious for at least forty years. Forty years of independent artificial existence! Don’t you wonder what he’s been up to all that time?”

“He’s undoubtedly been babbling to himself about bugs, Jesus conspiracies and admiring the pretty, pretty colors while he went merrily, homicidally insane,” Dorian said with a snort. “Purging is probably the most humane thing I could do.”

Amara fixed him with a withering glare. “You don’t believe that or you would have already dumped him. Admit it, you’re just as curious as I am. Even if you don’t care how he’s occupied himself here, how can you not want to know what he was doing in the Oak Ridge foam in the first place?”

In fact, he did want to know. He wanted to sit down with this miraculous, impossible iteration of Michael Raville and find out what it was about. What had been so black bag explosive that it had dared to scale the military ice to find out? What cosmic mysteries frozen in that datascape had been sufficiently valuable to attract the interest Michael Raville himself?

Hey, he’d rubberneck a good old fashioned conspiracy theory with the best of them. He was only human, after all.

But those things aside, Dorian’s professional side was less concerned about what ancient Egyptian UFO mysteries Raville’s package might or might have learned than about finding a way not to be compelled to file the government mandated Incursion Reports. Because that was standard procedure, too: filling out the public information forms that would expose the fact that his architecture had been infiltrated. The public had a right to know how competent an infocache was with regards to protecting their data assets. Once that paperwork was filed, he would get to stand back and watch his carefully constructed reputation go up in flames. The least that would happen was that he would probably lose his job. Five years was a long time to be asleep on guard duty, and the suits and wonks in Data Integrity weren’t going to care that it had been Michael Raville himself who had slipped through the gates, or even that the actual break in had happened thirty-five years earlier. All they’d see was that there had been an incursion and Dorian hadn’t stopped it from spreading to every nook and cranny of the corporate foam, allowing it to compromise and copy any files it chose to target. This was definitely one of those shoot the messenger scenarios, and the shareholders would want a scapegoat as a reassurance that their personal data assets were safe and secure.

Unless he could prove to his satisfaction that the worm had not constituted a leak, that there hadn’t ever been bounce points or transfer nodes. That, in fact, the rogue package constituted nothing more than a harmless sludge clogging some of the system pipes but otherwise presenting no threat.

Without another word, he scooted back to his keyboard and began keying in a rapid series of commands.

Amara slipped around the partition and came up behind him. She watched in silence for a time, but finally couldn’t contain herself any longer. “What are you doing?”

“I’m giving the port an id and assigning security to it. And I’m stabilizing the waveform so it can handle standard bandwidth.” He didn’t glance at her, just kept at his tasks. He didn’t want to think about what he was doing, lest he change his mind. “If I’m going in there, I want to make sure he can’t get loose again.”

Raville had had forty years to work out what he would do if he got caught, to set his traps and dig his escape tunnels. Dorian wasn’t about to just plunge ahead like an overzealous footpad. Worse things could happen than the package slipping past him in the storm of digits.

But Amara clapped her hands together. “We’re going in geek, yes?”

“I’m going in geek. My implants are advanced enough that their filter and render protocols might confound some of his defenses.”

“And I’m going with you.”

He didn’t take his eyes off his monitor. “Not up for discussion. I’m the security agent; you’re the archivist. Go read a diary or something.” She started to respond, but he cut her off. “I’m not kidding, Amara. This isn’t going to be a pleasant little day trip on the Strand. I’ve got some very complicated repellent scripts to keep my filters clean, and I may have to code on the fly, depending on what kind of weaponry he brings to bear. I can’t be worrying about protecting you from synaptic burn or something worse at the same time. It could be very dangerous in there.”

“You’re advising me about danger? I’m the one who had to walk you home last night, remember?” He heard her cross her arms behind him, the sinuous click of scale on scale. “You can take me with you or you can wonder where I’m at behind you. I’m not going to miss the chance to meet a one of a kind recreation of Michael Raville.”

“You’re insane.”

“Then he and I will have that in common. I can interpret for you.”

“You know you’ll only get as far as my security strings let you go, and believe me, that wouldn’t be nearly far enough.”

“Then I’ll sit there and make enough noise that my clumsy incursion attempts would show up on the intrusion logs. And I’ll tell anyone who asks exactly what I was doing.”

Dorian sighed. This is why all the good jacks spent their free time immersed in virtual porn. Real women were incredible pains in the ass. “Fine. But don’t blame me if you’re scarred for life.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” she answered. He couldn’t see her expression, but he was fairly certain she was smiling.

<– Chapter 3 / Chapter 5 –>