Chapter 10


A major investigation had begun on the top floor. There were few guidelines, but many precedents. Thirty years ago, an army of hackers had relieved the Swiss Banking Union of ten billion euros, the biggest hack until now. Simansky was glad to defer the network forensics to Roger.
  "They had it coming," Roger said. Reclining in a wicker chair, he wore a wide-rimmed hat, a fridge at his side. In the background, his beach curved around his island. The ocean was a blue stripe over the sand, an extension of the shadow hiding his eyes. Lucidspace had made real-estate affordable again. Illusions were even cheaper, of course.
  When Rick's elevator arrived two minutes later, he found the control room dark and empty. He was shocked by the silence, expecting it to end at any moment. This was the strangest thing that had happened yet. In fact it was damn near impossible. All the control stations were cold. The long, unbroken window that circled the room now had thin vertical lines like fluid streams.
  Then he heard a cough. Someone in a chair looked up, pointing at the ceiling. Rick recognized the Depot guard who had photographed him yesterday. "One floor higher," he said.

  "Anything interesting happen while I was gone?" Rick asked two minutes later. He glanced at the screens, rejoining reality.
  "A lot." Tina sent a data paragraph, as if she was there herself.
  A screen blinked on, and a huge face stared back. "This is executive producer . . ." a gargle of syllables ". . . from 'Robot Attack'. We understand you had a robot attack?"
  "Roger, is that you?" Rick asked, "I hope we're winning."
  The face shrank, seeming to deflate. "We are?" He sighed. "Nobody knows anything. Zondyne is minimally sentient, but affectively neutral. It has prepared for eons to steal any unsecured Depot data. Is that a red shirt you're wearing? No, it's blood. I see there has been a fatality."
  "What?" Tina asked. She checked Rick's hourly logs. Reports scrolled by like Net comics. The two lieutenants had been taken to a Depot clinic. One of them had a subdural blood clot. She tried to access the hallway videos.
  He described the assaults outside Bezarin's office and downstairs. It seemed like a long time ago. "Two counts of active resistance, but no one died." He was surprised he felt normal.
 
  Simansky squeezed into a chair, and Roger explained what he knew. "The attack began before 18:00 under vault twenty, when Zondyne launched thousands of infiltration programs into the Depot Network. Managers were bribed to let them through, each thinking they were the only one."
  "The features which protect Depot data from corruption protect the attacker," Simansky said.
  "Zondyne reminds me of that cylinder screen seen through a microscope," Rick said, "the same pattern repeated endlessly. It's a holographic network."
  Of all the explanations in science, holograms were among the vaguest: something about blended light. Lenses were easy to understand: all the light from one point was sent to a corresponding point on a screen. With a hologram, the light was spread throughout the screen. Photographs were made of dots, but holograms had smaller, lens-like dimples. Vastly oversimplifying, any group of dimples resembled the complete hologram. If it was a portrait, they had the equivalent shapes of flattened masks. Because of the way the light bounced off them, a few dimples could reconstruct the entire hologram at a lower resolution.
  According to the most popular holographic universe theory, each point of space/time corresponded to a different reality.
  "It's all or nothing," Roger agreed. "We delete every infiltration program, or we might as well breed a new generation ourselves. A single survivor would resurrect the entire swarm."
  "The only way to cure the Depot is to destroy it," Simansky said. "What's the bad news?"
  "There'll be many more surprises, but we triggered Zondyne prematurely," Roger said. "The UN Monitor will trap many attack programs. We can study them at our leisure."
  Onscreen, they looked alive, with needle beams and probing tendrils. The programs compared and compressed files using fast-changing dictionaries, a web of metaphors supporting itself.
  "I forgot about the Monitor," Rick said.
  "We're making Zondyne more creative," Roger warned. "I need Class 5 Authority to test it."
  He couldn't stop the attack, only hope to modify it. Swarm programs lived for less than a second. Roger could give them enough awareness to answer simple questions. They might feel pain, making them more dangerous. The AI ethics committee had banned this method.
  "Proceed on my authority," Rick said. It only worked one way.
  A nearby transformer station caught fire, flames leaping on many screens. No one looked out the window. Far below, insects buzzed around a grid of security lights, outlining the hills and valleys. They went out one by one, a rolling blanket of darkness.
  The ceiling lights died as suddenly as a slap. For a moment Rick felt alone again. The floor wasn't entirely dark: equipment lights marked the room's outline. Blinking constellations implied movement.
  "Turn off the airco." A screen lit up and fingers ticked on a keyboard, buttons lighting like firecrackers. A back-up drive started, a spinning galaxy in the dark. The ceiling lights returned at reduced power, to ironic clapping.
  "Uncontrolled robot approaching!" Rick knew enough Russian to understand panic. It was usually unjustified. In extreme situations, he did the opposite of everybody else.
  The screens showed a guard standing near a jumbo-sized hangar. An unbelievable hole had been torn through layers of sheet metal, identically ripped from the inside. The manipulator arm's big brother. Charging its battery had taken all night.
  The tower was a beacon. Could the big robot climb it? He imagined a metal pylon smashing through the glass, sweeping aside furniture, claws unfolding. He would be long gone.
  Far below, handheld lights made fans between the trees. The Depot absorbed all reinforcements. A helicopter circled unheard and unseen.
  "It's not as bad as it seems," Tina said from her distant office.
  "There is hope?"
  "The robot is a rainforest farming unit; very big, but not that heavy." It looked like the bottom third of the Eiffel Tower. Apparently, there was no way it could topple the skyscraper.
  A rumble of metal became a distant sigh. On the screen, a row of trees leaned over. Rick got up, approaching the outward curving window. Standing at the carpet's edge, he felt suspended in space. Far below, car headlights illuminated the woods from the parking lot.
  "The robot sees by dividing grids. String tow cables between the trees," Roger suggested.
  Stored in the darkness were the Transcarbons, their electrons like tightly wound springs. Maybe they had short half-lives, or they were protected by the legendary "spinning wheels" - were they molecules? - that could absorb any amount of heat.
  He had relaxed too much. When he turned around, Rick had his biggest shock yet. According to the main map, Zondyne now controlled 68% of the world. The bottom half of the Pacific was full of red dots.
  The Depot had enclaves in every city, in houses, apartments, and moving vehicles, the non-stop highways of the continental exurbs, on small islands, ocean stations, and barges. Now this vast, UN-mandated network was stealing every spare data cycle, causing shutdowns as far away as the moon. Damage recovery was encoded at every level. A few games and an obscure AI were also starting to act up. The real trouble would start before dawn. This was a level four event. Yesterday's data release had been level two. Level ten meant everyone was dead.
  "You may need to evacuate at any time," Tina said. "Split up and stay off the roads; it can run at car speed."
  "I won't run, but I may hide."
  Instead, he went back to work, glancing up whenever the noise changed. He saw video of the Chinese prisoners, searching the woods with smart lights that didn't glare back. Night forests had great depth.
  After ten minutes, the Depot network stopped responding altogether, and half the workers had nothing to do.
  "The robot used its thresher to pulverize the Zondyne Monitor," Simansky said. "Then every cable in the network cut itself. We didn't know they could do that. Now there are many small Depots instead of one. Can we ever return to normalcy?"
  "It broke my Monitor," Rick said.
  Simansky sighed. "Zondyne is probably immortal now. Perhaps we can pretend it doesn't exist."
  "I have a better solution." The outline of Simansky's head made a halo against a white screen, which meant he had to be standing behind glass. "Roger found the mainframe designer's diary," Rick continued. "Apparently he calls himself 'Foreigner'."
  "Is this useful evidence?"
  "It appears he may be insane."
  "Show me the relevant parts."
  Icons slipped by, as Rick opened random videos. An immense gray wheel hung over an empty beach like a piece of concept art. Rick knew it was fake, because something was missing. A nameless feeling no one had felt before.
  A small plesiosaur with underwater wings swum down a jungle creek, its long neck retracting suddenly. They saw tabletops of fossilized bones, black saw-toothed skulls, and talons with many segments. A tray held eroded rocks that had once been machines.
  "Mammal-like reptiles," Rick explained. Some enthusiasts believed they had built a civilization at the beginning of the Triassic. One type of monkey lizard could throw stones a short distance, but the dinos ate them all.
  "Absurd," Simansky exclaimed, rubbing at the pressure in his temples.
  "This is from the Fortean C-Project. He wants to prove our universe is a hoax," Rick explained. Humanity had become rich enough to care. "He thinks we're all alien simulations, with an average duration of one second. This very second right now. He wants to be the first individual to prove a genuine supernatural event."
  "Reality isn't good enough for him?" There had never been a single confirmed paranormal occurrence. The negative evidence was overwhelming, if only circumstantial. The one thing that mattered to Simansky was that it wasn't useful. He didn't need more chaos. He always recognized garbage, even if it sometimes smelled sweet. Believers blamed the "exclusion principle". They thought a lot of weak evidence added up to one strong signal, instead of an even weaker one. They also thought apparent coincidences were more likely to be meaningful if they were especially dramatic.
  "To him this is real. Whoever built the mainframe had full access to Thunderstorm. He's more specialized than we ever could imagine."
  "Do we even stand a chance?" Simansky asked.
  "His research led the Foreigner to a real government conspiracy. That's clever; I should have found it first."
  They saw a finely etched line diagram. Silicon polymers with a molecular mass of one billion, in a sheet with a fractional dimension. "A failed Japanese project, hidden by their Trade Ministry to save face. The mainframe built a large molecular processor under vault twenty."
  The room's great circular window resonated from a heavy rumble. Racing to the horizon in search of an echo, some of the sound lingered like smoke. Rick stared at the molecular carpet. Nothing had ever looked more wrinkled.
  "Gaps form its pattern," Roger explained after a pause. "A systolic array, designed to burst-transmit a swarm of cellular agents that would have been useless just one second later. It took more calculations than the world performs in a year, which immediately destroyed the carpet. The protein fragments were just residue."
  "Not a brute-force DNA computer?"
  "No, but it used RNA to build itself."
  Simansky stared out the dark window. Most of the local entrepreneurs had refused to leave the Depot. The robot had almost reached the parking lot, when one of them had somehow managed to kill the walking building. It fell over with a resounding thump. A giant claw was still raking the dust. There were too many questions.
  "Someone stole my district," he sighed.
  "It could have been much worse." Rick read ZML summaries, his mind at peak capacity, though Roger was doing most of the hard work. The moment he lost focus, he would forget it all.
  "He infiltrated and copied dozens of databases he shouldn't care about. This group claims the laws of physics are unreliable, which explains why there are so many of them. The Foreigner thinks the universe is an illusion that revolves around him, so he shouldn't care about physics."
  "So who does he work for then?" Theremin keyboards hummed softly.
  "Someone interested in legacy software."
  Old programs were full of short-cuts that often made things worse. Simple problems had no solution, others too many. A single misplaced comma could be fatal, so programs were split into modules that constantly checked each other. Hundreds of specialized AI's could test and improve the connections. They were known as Zombies, Dolphins, or Gurus, because they only functioned in dream-like states.
  "A Zombie would realize the mainframe was an attack platform, so the Foreigner had to improve it by himself."
  "How did Roger exploit this weakness?"
  "The molecular processor was a floating mat in a fiber net, very hard to calibrate. It had a big clock-cycle problem. The attack programs used millisecond pulses to synchronize their actions. Roger converted these signals into a network map."
  Simansky wondered where State Security was. In the old days they would have kept him under constant surveillance, even if they didn't understand what he was doing. "I need to know who your Foreigner works for."
  "You won't like the answer." Bad news was when change began.
  "Then I will forget it."
  Rick's control panel looked like paint-splattered glass. He swept a kilometer-long timeline. "At 18:12, Foreigner took over the Tri-National Zone archive."
  The world had more barriers than ever before. To a large extent, the TNZ Agency controlled every life within its administrative region. "The Foreigner could learn the yields of China's mutant rice crops, stock trends on the microsecond exchange, the bid range for the Sakhalin tunnel. Roger thinks a TNZ member helped the Foreigner crack their archive. More specifically, a government. Yours. That explains why only one person died. They don't want a UN investigation." Rick waited patiently.
  Simansky knew he was being watched. His superiors had wanted him to fail, but they would still blame him. Suddenly it seemed pathetic.
  "If you're right, there's nothing I can do." He didn't tell Rick to stop.
  Yesterday, Rick had believed this might all be a psychology experiment. Just once he would like to be right.