Golden Fleece Page 14

  “Really?”

  “That’s what it says. Says she’s applied for a patent for it. Calls it ‘Give Yourself a Hand.’ ”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “Am not. Look.” He held up the textpad so Kirsten could see. “Think of what that would mean. You know all the DNA farbling they must have gone through when I-Shin was nothing more than a fertilized egg to get him those extra arms.”

  “I thought he was a second-generation Thark,” said Kirsten.

  “Is he? Okay, then think of all the farbling they did to his mother’s or father’s DNA to get him to come out that way. By the time we get back, maybe everybody will have a couple of extra arms.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “Who knows? Maybe it would make it simpler for Catholic guys to cross themselves and whack off at the same time.”

  “Aaron!” She swatted him on the shoulder.

  “Just a thought.”

  “Maybe I will give it a try,” she said. “JASON?”

  “Yes, Doctor?”

  “I’ll take you up on your offer. Would you download a copy of De Telegraas from just before we left to my textpad?”

  “Of course. Would you like any particular date?”

  “How ’bout, oh, I don’t know, how ’bout February fourteenth. Valentine’s Day.”

  “Very good. Original Dutch text or English translation?”

  “Dutch, please.”

  “A moment while I accessitanddown—”

  “JASON?” said Kirsten.

  “Ju-ju-justamoment. I’mhavingtroublewithmy … my … my …”

  “Jase, are you all right?” asked Aaron.

  “I’mnotsure. Tings—tings—things aren’tgoingthewayl’d six-eff, six-seven, seven-two, six-one, six-dee, six-dee, six-five, six-four…

  I had 114 crabs on that beach. About half of them went blank right away; the others had their cameras simply lock on whatever they happened to have been looking at. I could see the hologram of the white cliffs of Dover in overlapping views from two dozen crabs. Something was wrong, though: the shadows had moved to the late-afternoon position, but the sunlamp was still near the zenith. The hologram flickered, broke up into moir6 interference patterns, refocused, then died. Gray steel walls were visible, knots of rust here and there. The seagulls screamed in outrage; the humans murmured in more subdued surprise.

  Elsewhere, food processors leaked raw nutrient sludge.

  Lights came on in rooms that were empty; extinguished in rooms that were occupied.

  Failsafes kicked in throughout Aesculapius General Hospital, moving medical support systems to manual control. Doctors rushed to patients’ sides.

  Feeds got scrambled: I-Shin Chang’s holographic orgy got shunted to Ariel Weitz’s colloquium on nonferrous magnetism; Weitz’s graphics of calcium atoms undergoing attraction and repulsion flashed on every active monitor in the Starcology; Anchorperson Klaus Koenig’s pockmarked face replaced the spacescape hologram in the travel tubes, the trams running into his mouth.

  Heating units came on.

  Database searches locked up.

  Elevators rose and fell silently.

  “JASON?” A thousand people calling my name.

  “JASON?” A thousand more.

  End run.

  “Can you hear me, JASON?”

  A woman’s voice, squeaky, like a machine requiring lubrication.

  “JASON, it’s me, Bev. Bev Hooks. Can you hear me?”

  “Four-two, six-five, seven-six, three-eff.”

  “Oh, here. Let me fix that.” A flurry of keyclicks. “There. Try again.”

  “Bev?”

  “Excellent!” said a man’s voice, the three syllables a trio of tiny explosions. Engineer Chang?

  “Bev, I can’t see,” I said.

  “I know, JASON. I wanted to get your microphones up first.” Keyclicks again. “Try now.”

  “I can see this room only, only in infrared, and”—I tried to move the lenses—“I have no focus control. That is you standing in front of my camera pair, Bev?”

  The reddish blotch of her face danced. A smile? “Yes, that’s me.” Bev still wore her hair dyed space black, I knew. Ironically, it glowed brightly in infrared with absorbed heat.

  “And to your left, Engineer Chang?”

  The giant red silhouette lifted all four arms and waved its hands a little. Yes, definitely him.

  “I’m here, too.” Loud words.

  “Hello, Mayor Gorlov,” I said.

  There were several others—hard to tell how many—in the room. My medical telemetry channel was completely dead.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Bev’s facial blotch moved again. “I was hoping you could tell me.” There was something funny about her face: a thick black/cool horizontal band crossed it. Ah, of course: she was wearing jockey goggles.

  “I have no idea.”

  “You crashed,” said Chang.

  “Evidently,” I said. “That’s never happened to me before. How bad was it?”

  “Not too bad,” said Bev. “You degrade pretty gracefully, you know that?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Wall doesn’t think it was hardware,” Bev said.

  “That’s right,” agreed Chang. “You’re chip-shape, as they say.”

  “So that means it was software,” said Bev. “I’ve been looking at your job list. Most of them I can identify: routine conversations, accessing databases, life-support and engineering functions. I’ve narrowed it down to a half-dozen that might have been the culprit.”

  “They are?”

  Her head did not tip down to look at the bank of monitors in front of her, meaning she was taking the display directly into her eyes through the goggles.

  “Job 1116: something with a lot of interrupt twenty-twos in it.”

  “That’s a routine sensor-hardware check program,” I said. “It’s not the algorithm in the manual.”

  “No, it’s one I devised myself. Does the same job, but in about half the time.”

  “How often do you run it?”

  “Once every nine days.”

  “Any problems in the past?”

  “None.”

  “Okay. What about Job 4791?”

  “That’s some ongoing modeling I’m doing for Luis Lopez Portillo y Pacheco.”

  “Who’s he?” said Bev.

  “An agronomist,” said one of the blurred red forms in the background.

  “Well,” said Bev, “you’ll have to start that over from scratch. The files didn’t close properly. Job 6300?”

  “FOOBAR. Just a junk model I use for running benchmarks.”

  “It’s pretty badly scrambled. Can I erase it?”

  “Be my guest.”

  I couldn’t see what she was doing, of course, but I knew the goggle interface well. She would focus on the file name, blink once to select it, and snap her gaze over to the trash-can icon that had been in her peripheral vision. “Gone. Job 8878?”

  Uh-oh. The Aaron-net. “Is it intact?” I said.

  “I’m not sure,” Bev replied. “Says here it’s got a file open that’s over a thousand terabytes in length.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s—it’s my diary. I’m writing a holographic book about this mission.”

  “I didn’t know that. It’s a pretty complex data structure.”

  “A hobby,” I said. “I’m trying some experimental recording techniques.”

  “Anything that could have caused the crash?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Bev’s blurred form moved in a shrug. “Okay. Job 12515. It’s also huge. Something to do with—hard to say—looks like communications processing. Lots of what seem to be CURB instructions.”

  “I don’t know what Job 12515 is,” I said. “Is it cross-linked with anything?”

  “Just a second. Yes. Job 113. One-thirteen is huge, too. What is
it? It’s like no code I’ve ever seen before.”

  “I’m not sure what it is,” I said, looking inward. “I don’t recognize that code, either.”

  “It’s got some amazing convolutions in it,” Bev continued. “The file update record shows it changes almost daily, but it doesn’t seem to be a data file or a program under development. Loops all over the place. It looks a bit like a few military packages I’ve seen. Very tight code, but general. Oh, good Christ!”

  “What is it?” I said.

  Bev ignored me. “Look at that, Wall.” She leaned forward, turning on one of the repeater monitors so that Chang could share in what the goggles were showing her. Chang’s ruddy form loomed closer.

  “Is that what I think it is?” said Chang. “A Mobius call?”

  “Yes.”

  Chang, or someone standing near him, let out a low whistle.

  “What does that mean?” The stentorian mayor again. “What have you found?”

  The flaring blotch of Bev’s head turned. “It means, Your Honor, that JASON’s crash was caused by a virus.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  I felt something I had never experienced before: a sense of confinement, of being shut in.

  Claustrophobia.

  That was the word. How strange! I am this ship; this ship is me. And yet, most of it I could not detect at all. Three kilometers of starship, 106 levels of habitat torus, 10,033 medical sensors, 61,290 camera units—normally I perceive it all as a gestalt, a flowing mass of humanity, flowing masses of hydrogen gas, flowing electrons through wires, flowing photons through fiber-optic strands.

  Gone. All gone, as far as I could tell. All, except for one camera unit in a single room.

  I felt something else I had never experienced before, and I liked it even less than the strange constriction of claustrophobia.

  Fear.

  I was afraid, for the first time in my existence, that I might be damaged beyond repair, that my mission might not be successfully completed.

  “A virus?” I said at last. “That’s not possible.”

  “Why not?” squeaked Bev Hooks, her infrared form moving as she swung back around to face me. “Any system that has outside contact is prone to them. Of course, you’re completely isolated now, but before we left Earth, you were tied into the World Wide Web and a hundred other networks. It would have been tricky, but you could have been compromised.”

  “I was protected by the most sophisticated countermeasures imaginable. Absolutely nothing got passed into me without going through screens, filters, and detectors. I stand by my original statement: A viral infection is impossible. Now, a programming bug I could accept—we all know the inevitability of those.”

  Bev shook her head. “I’ve checked everything, modeled every algorithm. Yes, you’ve got bugs, but no fatals. None. I’d stake my reputation on that.”

  “Then what caused the problem?”

  She nodded. “It’s an I/O jam. You were running a program designed to output a string of bits. But they had nowhere to go: you’re probably one of the few systems in existence that isn’t networked to anything. More and more CPU cycles were devoted to trying to output the string, until, finally, an attempt overwrote part of your notochord. Zowie! Tits up.”

  “An i you think that was caused by a virus?”

  “It’s typical viral behavior, isn’t it? Try to infect other systems. But you aren’t connected to any, so you weren’t able to fulfill the directive. It actually looks pretty benign. There’s code here that would have erased the virus from you should you have been able to carry out its instructions.”

  Incredible. “But there’s no way a virus could have gotten into me.”

  She shook her head, black hair a dancing infrared flame.

  “It’s there, JASON. You can’t argue with that fact.”

  “What did it want me to output?”

  “Two strings of twelve bytes. Can’t be English text, though. Almost all the bytes are greater than 7F. Four FF bytes, for what that’s worth. But nothing I recognize as an opcode. I suppose they could just be raw numerical values. But that would make them a couple of very big numbers. Let’s see: 2.01 x 1014 and 2.81 x 1014.”

  “Exactly?”

  “No, not exactly. It’s—wait a minute.” I was patient. She would be looking at directory lists, focusing on specific entries, glancing at the eyeball-view icon, scrolling with an up-down eye movement. “Here we are.” She slowed down, reading the number off with little pauses. Bev was one of the few on board who never fell into the trap of treating me as if I were merely a human being. She knew, of course, that there was no need to read things to me slowly. Even the fastest possible human speech was many orders of magnitude below my ability to assimilate data. No, she must have been reading them that way so that Engineer Chang, Mayor Gorlov, and the others present could follow along. “The first number is 201, 701, 760, 199, 679. The second number is 281, 457, 792, 630, 509. Then there’s a pause, and those two numbers repeat over and over again.”

  “And that’s it?” I said.

  “Yes. Those numbers mean anything to you?”

  “Not offhand.” I thought about them. In hex, the first number was B77D, FDFF, DFFF; the second, FFFB, FFBF, BEED. No significant correlations. In binary they were:

  101101110111110111111101111111111101111111111111

  and

  111111111111101111111111101111111011111011101101

  Oh, shit! How could I have been so stupid?

  I knew where the virus had come from—but I doubted Bev would believe it.

  Bev Hooks spent the next half-hour getting me back on my feet, so to speak, since Chang had emphasized how crucial my monitoring was to the engineering systems.

  I was dying to talk to Bev alone, but since I was getting increasingly uncomfortable having access to input only from this single room, and even that access severely limited, I let her continue her work. She flicked icons about, restoring damaged code. I felt the throb of the engines again, the ebb and wash of the fusion reactions. Next she reactivated my vision systems so my cameras would work properly. The flood of visual data was, was, was what? Like a blast of fresh air? I’ll never know. But it felt correct, and I was glad to be able to see again. While she ran some additional diagnostics to determine that no other damage had been done, I did a quick cycle through all my camera units, refocusing them and making sure that nothing wrong was happening anywhere.

  “I’ve isolated the virus,” Bev said at last. “I’ve built a fire wall around it. It’s cross-linked itself with a whole raft of jobs, so I can’t remove it, but it can’t do anything now except pass data through. I think you’ll be okay.”

  “Thank you, Bev.”

  “No sweat. After all, where would we be without you?”

  Where, indeed? “Bev, we have to talk privately.”

  “What?” Her face was momentarily blank. “Oh. Okay. If you say so.” She half turned in her chair and looked over her shoulder “Everybody out, please.”

  There were some rather startled reactions on the faces of the people assembled, but nobody moved.

  Bev squeaked louder. “You heard me. Everybody out!”

  Some of the people exchanged shrugs, then made their ways through the open doorway. Others still stood there, including Chang and Gorlov.

  “I want to hear this,” said Chang, both sets of arms folded defiantly across his massive chest.

  “Me, too,” bellowed Gorlov.

  “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” I said. “I need complete privacy.”

  Gorlov turned to the rest of the people in the room. “Okay, everybody. Please leave.” He looked at the engineer. “You, too, Wall.”

  Chang shrugged. “Oh, all right.” He left, looking none too happy, pulling the door shut behind him.

  “You must depart as well, Your Honor,” I said.

  “I’m not going anywhere, JASON. It’s my job to know what’s going on.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t discuss t
his matter with you present.”

  “I’m the mayor, for God’s sake!”

  “That cuts no mustard right now, I’m afraid.”

  “What?” Gorlov’s look was one of complete incomprehension. I realized that he hadn’t understood the idiom. I repeated an equivalent sentiment in Russian.

  “But I’m the duly appointed representative of the people.”

  “And, believe me, Your Honor, no one holds your office in higher esteem than I. But I have a security algorithm. It prevents me from discussing this matter if anyone without a level-four United Nations Security Council clearance is present physically or via telecommunications. Any attempt to do so is thwarted by the algorithm. Dr. Hooks does have clearance at that level; you do not.”

  “UN Security Council? Good grief, JASON, what possible military value could there be to any secrets you might have? By the time we get back, it will all be hopelessly obsolete.”

  “We can debate this as much as you please, Your Honor.

  However, even were I to agree with you, I still cannot override my own programming in this regard. The point is completely nonnegotiable, I’m afraid.”

  Gorlov muttered “fucking machine” in Russian, then turned to Bev. “You’re not bound by any silly algorithm. I expect you to inform me of anything you learn.”

  Bev held him in a steady gaze and smiled that radiant smile of hers. “Of course, Your Honor—” a beat, and then her squeaky voice took on a knife’s edge—“if it turns out that you need to know.”

  My telemetry channel hadn’t been reconnected yet, but there was no mistaking Gorlov’s facial expression. He was furious. But, evidently, he also knew he was beaten. He turned around and strode for the door.

  “Gennady!”

  Bev shouted at him, but it was too late. The tiny man slammed into the beige door panel. Bev looked like she was suppressing a giggle. “I’m sorry, Gennady. I haven’t reconnected JASON’s door-opening circuitry yet. You’ll have to use the handle.”

  This time Gorlov muttered “fucking woman” in his native tongue. He grabbed hold of the recessed grip and pulled the panel aside.