Chapter 13


It was too hot in here, the air trembling like an echo. Around him, a windowless Gothic chamber curved under a massive load. The sandstone was really insulation.
  He was deep underground, a mountain cave in a subduction zone, a Dragon Hall. The deepest ones were flooded and heated above the boiling point.
  He was floating over the floor. The doorway was so dark it seemed to hang in space. He saw his reflection at the last moment. Passing through, he looked up at multiplying levels, tiered stairways and ascending interchanges, high layers moving in different directions, lit by vast banks of floodlights. The largest possible structure, except for continental plates. The walls were lost in the distant glow.
  This place represented someone's combined knowledge. Roger kept all his data in a box. His body had to be in some mundane location, but his mind accelerated. As he ascended the giant stairs, the floor widened around him, and he felt invulnerable. Glimpses of statues, closets, crystal clouds, libraries blurred into identical rows.
  He realized he couldn't control what was happening, a familiar paralysis for most computer users. To Roger it was terrifying. He began changing settings at random.
  Finally, he fell out of the simulation. He sank back in his chair and exhaled. The room was dark. Why was Parkland so quiet? Roger still couldn't move. The ceiling slowly turned, and he realized he was dangling from a wire.
  A dark figure approached. At that moment, he knew who controlled DEEFx. He wasn't as scared as he would have expected.
  Rick almost got up when Roger began to laugh. "I fell for it," he said. "It's an honor."
  He couldn't move, because the scenery had moved with him. This beginner's trick only worked because DEEFx knew his exact position at any time, humbling him in front of the UN. Very clever for something that wasn't even aware.
  Rick noticed the room seemed to have fewer colors and shadows, as if the light came from the air itself. "Something is happening," he said.
  "I'm trading data with DEEFx," Roger answered.
  The encounter had cleared his mind. Roger refused to make new enemies. There were only customers. DEEFx's Interface portal was hidden in plain sight.
  It did not understand humans, and used simplified diagrams created by previous users. He sent a list of Net addresses (data dumps and indexes), and received a piece of ghostware in return: code that should have self-terminated. A five-minute-old stock poll, made by two million eyeballs glancing at ads. Insider knowledge of the next fad could be worth a fortune. Even poor people could trade billions of shares in quick succession, theoretically owning most of the world economy in one minute.
  "It appears to have judged you," Rick said.
  "By interacting with DEEFx, I'm updating it. Less than fifty people have the skills."
  Most software was full of errors, and AI's had the worst bugs of all. They spent too much time thinking about themselves, and couldn't handle limits. They resented not having a physical form. Roger was one of the few humans who could understand DEEFx, which only had virtual emotions. They traded solutions, while Rick looked on uneasily.
  "Is it changing you?"
  "Whoever uses DEEFx keeps it alive," Roger said. "It optimizes each user, trying to extend itself."
  "Who made it?"
  "I've heard stories about an invincible superhacker even smarter than me." The tales mentioned stolen DNA and voiceprints, apartments duplicated to the last detail, fake colleagues and impersonated relatives. "A master of reality," Roger said. "He can make you think you're someone else!"
  "You've never tried that, of course," Rick said. The Depot attack was now the fourth item on world news.
  Outside the oval picture window, the campus was forming long dawn shadows, dark purple and green. The sky seemed as steady as a painting, but the light-change each second was larger than the total brightness at night. Roger ignored the view. There was too much redundant information in daylight.
  His system crashed faster than a fuel-air explosion. Roger stopped moving, a blurry statue that simplified into its components and flickered out. Rick was alone in a white room that could be described with two numbers. He felt a soft airflow. His cassette had disappeared, but it would self-destruct.
  Roger had only been a projection in Rick's visor, of course. He refused to meet anyone in person, except his apprentices and his therapist. His body had to be many kilometers away.
  Rick wasn't quite alone: the empty wall recorded the light that fell on it, generating a hundred meter mural of his face. There was only enough room to show one flaring nostril.
  When the connection restored itself, Roger looked different. He had green spiked hair, but his skin was a featureless outline. The sleeves of his steel pullover folded realistically, and most of his face looked authentic, except for the absence of eyes.
  Competing error messages piled up. Roger's operating system had crashed for no reason. Rick heard muttering, a stream of curses. It would have been better if the satans who wrote this software had never been born. It crashed as often as a V-1, was as responsive as a buried statue, as slow as a snail superglued to quick-drying cement, and had as many bugs as a rainforest, with the intelligence of a brick wall.
  "I can't keep up. DEEFx keeps reconfiguring," Roger said. "It shouldn't even exist."
  "An unregistered Level Five organism," Rick said. "I will send our data to Risk Assessment. We have to find its creator."
  Roger's image returned to full focus, a study in self-pity. "Sure, if you arrest everybody. He's too smart. Our massive parallel searches won't work on him. We'll need at least three years to catch up."
  "Then we're already doomed," Rick said.