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.”