Moody looked on as the sergeant’s fingers worked the spinner and ratpad. Figures flooded the two monitors to his immediate left, digital dopplegangers of the rapidly sequencing succession of fractal images that filled the main screen. He stood staring until the schematic blur made him turn away, slightly dizzy.
He had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. The mollysphere would obediently try to reduce the fractal pattern to a finite level, which was impossible. Ooljee would eventually get bored and shut it off. Which was fine with Moody. How an old Indian had managed to install a hidden fractal pattern in a hundred-year-old sandpainting was sufficient mystery for one night.
“Y’all had enough?” he finally asked his colleague half an hour later, “or you gonna wait until you run out of storage?”
“If things get too hot, it will shut itself off.” Ooljee was staring at the blur of images on the monitor. “Something here is not right.”
“Y’all are right about that, and it’s got nothing to do with what the molly says,” the detective muttered.
“It should be running sequential patterns. It is not. It’s bouncing all over the place.” Ooljee worked his spinner. “This does not look right. It is not just searching to expand resolution: it’s lining up specific Julia Sets from the Mandlebrot.” He glanced back and up at his colleague. “I did not tell it to do that.”
“How do y’all know for sure it’s not just processing your request in its own way?”
Ooljee gestured at one of the smaller screens off to the side. “Because the corollary figures are not emerging sequentially. Numbers are lining up, but in what looks like random order.”
“Nothing’s random in a Mandlebrot. ” Moody stared hard at the monitor. “Damn if it don’t look like it’s building something. Pulling a whole new pattern out of the existing series.” He was having a hard time believing what his eyes and mind were telling him. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that the yellow schematic from the Kettrick painting was acting like a template.”
Ooljee stared unblinkingly at the monitor. “The deeper the resolution goes into the basal pattern, the more extensive the simulation becomes. One is like a distorted mirror image of the other.” He sat back. “Well, this is all very fascinating, but not what I had hoped to find. And if we keep letting it expand and eat up mollystorage like this, pretty soon we will start triggering alarms in the departmental database.” He tapped a sequence of keys on his Scorpion.
Nothing happened. Numbers continued to speed across the two subsidiary screens. The blur of images on the central monitor continued their rush toward infinity.
“Must have entered the wrong sequence.” Ooljee repeated the spinner entry, slowly this time, only to be rewarded with an identical lack of results. He leaned forward in the chair.
“This is very interesting.” He spoke calmly, quietly. “I don’t seem to be able to interrupt the sequence.”
“Shut down the input.”
“What do you think I just tried to do?”
“All right then, shut down your sphere reader.”
“I tried that too.” He indicated a readout. “It shut off just the way it is supposed to.”
The detective studied the console. There was nothing exotic about it, nothing radical in the design or setup. It was much the same as the molly he was used to working with every day in Tampa. But if Ooljee had ceased inputting and had also shut down the read-enter laser which read the concentric molecular layers of the mollysphere the way a good paring knife peels an onion, then why was the resolution-search sequence still running?
“Procedural error,” he finally suggested.
Ooljee made a face. “Shutting down is not a very complicated procedure. It’s not one any fool is likely to mess up.”
“Okay, granted. Then the problem’s got to be mechanical.”
“That is what I was thinking.” He sighed, straightening in the chair. “I will have to bring maintenance into this. There will be harsh words.”
As he reached for the phone, two screens on the far side of the room sprang to life. Each was attached to a spinner. But no one was seated before them.
“I did not turn those on.” Ooljee was staring stupidly at the precessing images.
Moody was no longer tired, no longer bored. “I think we’d better find a way to shut this thing down. Fast.” As he finished, another pair of screens high up on a wall became active. Ooljee grimly worked his spinner, the ratpad, and nearby input keys, until he was literally stabbing at them.
“No good. No damn good. Y adil."
“I can see that.” Moody was trying to make some sense, any kind of sense, out of the millions of images and figures that were avalanching across the multiple screens.
“It’s still resolving and still expanding.” Ooljee was just sitting now, his gaze flicking in dumbfounded amazement from one monitor to the next. “And whatever it is doing is affecting the hardware. We are getting active response as well as analysis. What is that damn sandpainting a template for?” He gestured at the no longer quite so innocent-appearing fax of the Kettrick painting where it lay on the console next to his Scorpion. “If this is some kind of virus, we may be causing a lot of damage.”
“C’mon, man,” said Moody. “From what the Laughters told us, that design is at least a couple of hundred years old. They didn’t have computers then, or viruses to affect them, much less mollysphere storage.”
Ooljee was rising. “I am going to have to ask the building engineer to cut the power. For all I know, we are already on course to crash every opdisk and molly in the department.” He eyed the detective resignedly. “You had no part in this. I will bear the consequences. It is now unavoidable that there will be consequences. And all I thought to do was to play a few picture games with the painting.”
The lights went out, flickering once before silently expiring. Not the screens. Every monitor glowed with diagrams or numbers as the mutating program continued to build upon itself, utilizing more and more of the station’s mollystorage. A wall phone began to jangle insistently. Without taking his eyes from the first monitor he’d activated, Ooljee lifted the receiver. The voice on the other end was loud and frantic enough for Moody to make out some of the words.
“Who’s down there? Everything’s going nuts upstairs! Who are you people? What’s your authorization? I demand to know your—!”
The sergeant calmly replaced the receiver on its hook, effectively silencing the unidentified interrogator. “Someone is very upset. I think we should try to think of an explanation.”
“How’re y’all gonna do that when you don’t even know what’s happening?” Moody spoke without looking at his colleague. He could not help but ignore him in favor of the dazzling displays that now filled every comer of the room.
Every screen, every telltale, every readout and monitor, was alive and glowing, bombarding them with information they could make no sense of, and chromatic schematics as bright and ever-changing as an exhibition of kinetic art. All that was missing was deafening popular music, Moody thought, preferably by a group like Molten Scalpel or the Raucoids, and they could sell admission.
In place of music there was a persistent, electronic hum that rose and fell in a pattern that, while not recognizable, was self-evidently anything but random. An eerie, fuzzy whisper that tittered in the background, emanating from an unidentified source like rats running the conduits.
Ooljee disconnected his spinner. It had no effect whatsoever on the now self-sustaining program. Both men began backwalking toward the door. Moody’s imagination was beginning to run away with him. While whatever was happening here might not be easily or readily explained, he reminded himself, it wasn’t an excerpt from a horrorvid either. Ooljee’s fiddling with a Mandlebrot Set derived from the Kettrick sandpainting had inexplicably generated some kind of reproduction program within the police mollysphere. That was physics, not phantasy.