Surprisingly, though, the multipurpose craft avoided looking ungainly. It reminded Mike of the retired Space Shuttle, run through an extruder, with flattened, sharp edges, and two sets of wings forward and back. Ducted jets provided the vertical takeoff and landing capability.
The prototype was white. All white. Inside and outside. The cockpit controls were all white and unmarked. “Are you sure this is safe?” Mike picked at a corner of a screen, and peeled away a protective plastic film. “Has this plane ever been used before?”
“The earlier prototypes flew exceptionally well. LMB subcontracted the shell design to Exxon-Apple who subcontracted it to Cyberdynamics. This is an excellent aircraft.”
“Uh-huh. Now I understand. You just want to play with the toy you built.”
Like the old American space shuttle, the middle of the aircraft had an open bay that could be configured as a bomb bay, cargo bay, or passenger space. It was about as large as a minivan, and the prototype had six white carbon fiber seats in it. A three step ladder ran from the bay into the cockpit, which had room for a single pilot.
“Please choose a seat.”
Mike turned, conflicted. He couldn’t fly a plane, so there was no real point to sitting in the pilot’s seat. And yet the idea of sitting in the passenger bay with no pilot aboard seemed absurd. He climbed reluctantly into the pilot’s seat and buckled himself in.
The engines roared, and the plane rose straight up. As soon as they had gained some altitude ELOPe vectored thrust, and the plane shot forward. The plane accelerated, and the airframe creaked as it adjusted to the flight stresses.
A few minutes later, the whole shell seemed to crack repeatedly and Mike grabbed his seatbelt, for lack of anything better to hold onto.
“Don’t worry,” ELOPe said, “I’m reconfiguring the airframe for supersonic speed.” The engine thrust increased again, and Mike watched the airspeed indicator rising past Mach 1. He settled in for the cross-country flight.
Later, after a long discussion of the pros and cons of various strategies for dealing with the virus, Mike felt the plane begin to slow. Glancing out the cockpit window, he could see the lights of Chicago and the darkness of Lake Michigan off the left side of the plane. “What’s happening?” Mike asked softly.
“We’re slowing to refuel,” ELOPe answered. “You should see the drone ahead of you.”
In the inky darkness, Mike was able to spot the absence of stars first, and then the glow of the airplane’s lights lit up the lumbering, unlit fuel drone. The prototype extended a mid-air fueling boom, ELOPe manipulating the plane to get it into position. Mike watched as the drone targeted the boom with its own fuel hose. The hose had tiny winglets to fly it into position. With a thump the two mated, and Mike felt the flow of fuel into his plane. A few minutes later the procedure was complete, the two planes disengaged, and the white prototype resumed creaking as it prepared again for supersonic flight.
Still later, Mike watched the tree-covered hillsides approach as the plane slowed again and decreased altitude. “Where are we landing?” Mike asked.
“There’s a parking lot up ahead,” ELOPe answered. “I have a satellite image of it. There’s a package drone crashed at one end of it, but there’s sufficient room to put down.”
ELOPe spun the engines down to their slowest speed, and vectored thrust for a vertical descent. The plane touched down, and only the creak of the frame let Mike know they had landed. Mike unbuckled as the engines spun down. In the moonlight he could just make out a castle.
“It’s Grey Towers,” ELOPe explained. “The home of the Gifford Pinchot family. Founder of the conservation movement, friend of Teddy Roosevelt. Blah, blah, blah.”
Mike made his way to the door.
James was bored. He had found some kind of card game on the old Windows computer and was clicking away at it. James's mouse was an obscure mechanical device that Vito wanted desperately to take apart and examine. The mouse had developed a squeak from the rubber ball inside the device.
“Can you just stop, please?” Leon finally called out.
James gave him a look, then stood up in a huff and stormed out. Leon sighed. James's assigned task had been to try to find other people on the Internet, but aside from the discovery of Mike Williams, there just wasn’t anyone out there.
James's main discovery was that as the hours passed, the artificial intelligence’s communications grew closer and closer to natural language. They had found the change log for several wikis in use by the AI community. The first messages appeared to be in binary code, later messages in XML, still later messages in XML with English terms, and lately the messages were in heavily augmented English.
“See there, where it says, ‘trade[3]’,” Vito had pointed out hours earlier. “I think it’s clarifying which definition of trade it’s using. If you look at the wiktionary, the third definition of trade is to exchange something. They’re correcting for one of the natural weaknesses of human language, which is the multiple definitions available for a given word.”
James didn’t want to converse with human-sounding computers, he wanted people. “How can there be only four people on the whole Internet?” he had complained earlier before resorting to playing solitaire.
Leon turned back to Vito who was eating a cookie. Vito offered him the tray, “Rich, buttery shortbread cookie?”
“Where did it come from?” Leon asked, not recognizing the food as anything they had gotten from the grocery store.
“The packages from the drone we came in on. We also found some clothes, in case you’re running low.” Grey Towers was apparently built before the invention of washing machines, and the boys had been wearing the same clothes for days.
“Sure, that would be swell. Listen, about the virus. The copy we have from the memory on your phone is just one part. It’s an algorithm database, and it’s just one component of a larger virus.”
“What do you think it’s for?” Vito asked.
“I think it’s like the long-term memory of a person,” Leon said. “The algorithms database is a few hundred gigabytes in size. There’s nothing in there about when to use which algorithm, or how to use it. So I think there must be a separate structure which is probably some kind of neural network that helps the AI pick which algorithm to use in which situation. Then you’d have still other nodes that actually execute the algorithms. I’m just guessing here. I need more copies of viruses.”
“We could wipe one of our phones, put it back on the network, let it get reinfected with a new virus, then get the new virus image. Would that work?”
“Yes, it might.” Leon stared off into the distance, visualizing the process.
“And if you can do that?”
“If the AIs all share a similar neural structure, we can build a counter-virus that is tailored to that structure. My guess is that we need to attack either this algorithm database or the neural network. We want something that infects quickly, but becomes destructive slowly.”
“Why wouldn’t we want to just wipe it out as quickly as possible?” Vito asked. “The first virus spread around the world overnight. It was blindingly fast.”
“Yes, but Phage has been forced by evolutionary pressure to be resistant to fast attacks. The only hope is a really slow attack — so slow that it evades the attention span of the AI.”