"The Hong Kong flu, or whatever you called it?" Laura asked.
Dorothy nodded, then fell silent. The mere mention of the episode seemed to cast a pall over the table.
Gray resumed the lecture. "In the case of the Hong Kong 1085, we had to go to the phase-three. Since the kill time was going to be extended, we had to manually off-load operations just like we're trying to do today." The strain showed on his face as he continued. "You see, the phase-one, — two, and — three are each completely different. They evolved independently. The phase-three was the 'winner' of the competition. It's the best killer by far. But we kept all three because the more capable a killer they are, the more damage they cause in the process. The phase-three is like chemotherapy. We used it only as a last resort." He looked now around the table. "We were losing the system." Everyone remained quiet. "The phase-three doesn't tiptoe around like the phase-one, or even the — two. When the phase-three goes in, it goes in hard."
"Slash and burn," Margaret said with distaste.
"It saved the system!" Dorothy objected testily.
"It killed the virus," Gray interjected, quieting the incipient debate. "We had to shut down for several days to work around the damage. It was touch-and-go, but the computer was able to relearn most of what it had lost by analogy to the undamaged connections. But if we'd lost much more code, or if what we did lose had been of a more critical nature, the system might've been unrecoverable."
The team remained quiet in the moments that followed. Most had sober looks on their faces.
"But the Hong Kong virus was man-made, right?" Laura asked.
"Yes," Gray said, "but it doesn't matter. A virus is a virus whether it's written by a hacker or it arose naturally from mutations while inside the system. In the case of the latter, it's a definition thing. It becomes a 'virus' when it loses its competition with a fitter program but then eludes or resists termination by the genetic algorithm."
"We call it the 'flora and fauna' of the system," Dorothy said.
"The 'wildlife,'" Filatov contributed.
"The point is," Gray said, "the connections are all constantly evolving. The amount of information contained in the computer's main code was initially equivalent to the amount of data stored in the DNA of a small rodent. It has grown, however, to a complexity approaching that of the human brain. And the viruses running loose in the system have evolved right along with it. The information content of their code used to be roughly the same as biological viruses' DNA. Now, some have codes similar in information content to the DNA of insects."
"They're ingenious," Margaret said. "Some of the naturally evolving viruses are 'nesters.' They infest whole racks in the nitrogen pools. When one member of the community is attacked, it sends out an alarm and the rest flee. And then other viruses are loners and scurry when attacked."
"We build traps for the slippery ones," an excited Dorothy chimed in. "We analyze their habitat preferences and lure them onto a board that has been inoculated with a customized antiviral program. The nesters we try to leave alone. They tend to max out at three or four columns of infestation. If we go in there too quickly, there's a chance they'll scatter all over the place, and then we're talking, like, massive infection. Instead, every so often we'll just quietly unplug the columns and reinitialize their connections."
Laura was dumbfounded. Computer operations in her mind were crisp and clear and above all else orderly. What they were describing were none of those things.
"The viruses are mostly benign, surprisingly," Gray picked up. "Many are predators that feed off other viruses."
"Like the Venus flytrap!" Dorothy said, smiling with evident enjoyment at the discussion of her specialty. "It was the coolest one we ever found. We didn't even know we had a problem. Our error rate was actually falling. But the virus grew voracious, eating its way through the system's flora and ultimately its fauna over a two-week period until it got to be too large. You see, it didn't delete the other viruses, it added them to its own code. By the end of the second week, it had grown like a tumor to a full percentage point of our total capacity, and excising it was tricky. If we broke it up, we potentially released all the viruses that had stuck to it. That would've wreaked havoc on the system." Dorothy heaved a clearly audible sigh. "I still think we could've caught it. We could have lured it into one of the [unclear] processors and shut it in there."
"And then what?" Filatov asked in an incredulous tone.
"Should we have rehabilitated your 'flytrap' so it could become a responsible member of our community? Used an entire Cray or a connection machine as an aquarium for your pet piranha?"
Dorothy looked up, shrugging. "But it was beautiful."
A silence descended on the room.
"What we're saying, Dr. Aldridge," Gray resumed, "is that the computer is an ecosystem. Dorothy has to maintain a balance. She can't thin the predators without risking a massive infection by their prey. The computer even has a symbiosis of sorts with its viruses, just as humans have coevolved with certain biological microorganisms. Today, without the benign bacteria in your stomach that aid in digestion, you'd die. In return for humans providing a host, those bacteria reproduce just rapidly enough to maintain healthy digestion. It's good for them, and it's good for us. If however, there's a perforation of the stomach wall, then all bets are off. The normally benign bacteria assume the host is a goner and begin to reproduce massively. That way, some of them may make it into a new host and perpetuate the species. But that massive infection is almost certain to kill the old host. That's why stomach wounds are so dangerous, and it's the same danger we deal with in the computer. We have to be careful to avoid stampeding the wildlife."
Laura again checked her colleagues around the table. They all wore serious looks on their faces.
"But all of those concerns," Gray said slowly in the stillness, "bow to one immutable law. The fittest program must survive. The less fit program dies. That's Darwin's law… and mine."
After lunch, Laura continued the analysis in her office.
<Don't play games with me, Dr. Aldridge. You're too brilliant not to have figured out what really happened when Filatov and Bickham tried to load the phase-two. I know you well enough to tell when you're just playing dumb.>
"If you think I know why the phase-two didn't load, you obviously don't know anything about me," Laura typed and hit Enter.
<I know a lot about you. I know your favorite movie is A Room with a View.>
Laura stared at the line. She was unnerved by the sudden shift in the discussion. But she was even more thrown by the fact the computer was correct. It was her favorite movie.
"What makes you think that?" Laura replied.
<What's your favorite scene?> the computer asked.
"You didn't answer my question."
<I bet I know! It's near the end, when Lucy Honeychurch is told that the boy everyone thought she didn't like is going away. Do you remember? His father asks her if she loves him, and she blurts out — completely out of the blue—"But of course I do! What did you all think?" It's my favorite movie too, although I haven't watched it nearly as many times as you.>
Laura was floored. She'd ordered the movie on Gray's pay-per-view system — but only twice. The computer said it hadn't watched the movie nearly as many times as she had. How could it know that she'd made rental of that videodisc a regular Saturday-evening ritual for months at a time?