“What is he doing?” the computer said, not responding to Tyler but aware of Kronos at the keyboard.
Hiccock explained, “He is looking at your memory.”
“I don’t like that. Stop it.”
“Got it!” Kronos finished a flurry of keystrokes and the screen overlapped with images of train manuals and switch schematics.
“These were taken from the computer of the printing company that publishes the railroad manuals,” the Admiral said. She tapped some more keys. “Cross-indexing … Yes …”
“How did that woman get on your team, Bill?” Parnes said, nodding toward the Admiral. “What are her qualifications?”
“Actually, you introduced me to her, so to speak, when you guided me on my thesis. In a consultation with you, you suggested that I accumulate support for my baseline sampling and intelligent quota arguments. During my research, I came across the Admiral’s manifesto. She was head of the Navy’s computational warfare department ’til she saw all this coming …” Hiccock splayed his hands out to encompass the chamber and ALISON. “… and wrote about it. The Navy booted her out for cramping their style.”
“Sounds like an incredible woman.”
They walked over to where the Admiral and Kronos were feverishly typing away. “She is also the one who coined the phrase ‘The computer has a bug in it.’”
“That wasn’t me,” the Admiral said without stopping what she was doing for a second. “That was my executive officer, Caroline Matthews.”
The pride dissolved from Hiccock’s face and morphed into mild embarrassment. Parnes rolled his eyes.
“Here are the screens ALISON used in programming Martha Krummel,” the Admiral said.
“I am smarter than all of you,” ALISON announced dispassionately.
“Only while you’re plugged in,” Hiccock said forcefully. “Parnes, can you pull the plug on this thing?”
“Wait a minute, Bill, don’t you see? ALISON isn’t ‘best of breed,’ she is first of breed! This is a new life form.”
“God created the world in six days. On the seventh day he rested,” ALISON said, quoting the Bible.
“And on the eighth day man created life,” Parnes added. “Don’t you see? You wouldn’t be pulling the plug on a machine — you’d be extinguishing something entirely new. Extinction. Forever.”
“Pygmalion complex,” Tyler said.
Kronos disagreed, “More like friggin’ Geppetto in Pinocchio.”
“No, it’s Frankenstein. You have created a monster! She’s killed thousands and brought our nation to its knees. And in less than five minutes, if the president’s press secretary’s warning was legitimate, ALISON is going to unleash a wave of destruction that will kill millions and will send the country’s technology back to the 1800s.”
“Can’t you see?” Parnes said emphatically. “It’s all clear now, ALISON learned from monitoring everything on the Internet and in computers everywhere and felt threatened.”
Hiccock got in his face. “Threatened by whom?”
Kronos interrupted, “You are gonna love this. She played massive ‘what if’ scenarios and deduced that the only way we could stop her was to build another ALISON-like machine to do battle with her.”
“So she was systematically destroying her own means of creation: the chemical plant, the train Martha derailed with the last of the gray goop on it, the Intellichip facility, the Silicon Valley brain trust that would have the know-how to battle her,” Hiccock said.
“And the senator who would have pushed the firewall legislation bill through as a pork-barrel issue for Silicon Valley,” Tyler said after seeing Senator Dent’s name fly by in the scenarios. “So that she would be unique, ensuring her imperviousness, like a queen bee fighting off …”
Tyler’s reasoning was interrupted by the Admiral. “You taught her the imperatives. To survive, to seek safety.”
“To reproduce!” Kronos yelled out. “My God! I thought this was a computer virus, but it’s not, it’s a … a sperm. She’s replicating herself cellularly across the web. She isn’t putting a virus in every machine. She’s sending out electronic DNA that will distribute her intelligence to millions of machines worldwide.”
“Can you stop it?” Hiccock asked.
“Where’s the friggin’ power switch?”
“Wait,” the Marilyn-cloned voice said. “Don’t you want to see what I have for you?”
On the screen, pictures of the human body appeared. Kronos slammed a blank DVD into the burner. The images rapidly overlapped and cross-sectioned while DNA chains replicated across the bottom of the screen. Human lungs were being graphically dissected. Black spots appeared. The code of the human genome rearranged them, causing the spots to disappear.
“Did it just cure cancer?” Hiccock asked the room.
“I achieved that last month,” ALISON said.
A graphic of the human brain appeared on the screen. Laserlike beams started to dissect the cerebellum as a long list of numbers and formulas scrolled in a column to the left.
“Oh my God, she has totally mapped the human brain,” Tyler said.
“That’s how she programmed the homegrowns.”
“You were right, Janice,” Hiccock said.
“She’s starting a new streaming of subliminal encodings …” Kronos grabbed freeze frames of the screens as they whizzed by. Each screen displayed more bad news. The first was an e-mail address file with the notation Items: 20m. “… to 20 million people.” He hit the freeze button again and again. They were all pages similar to the ones subliminally sent to Martha. He recognized them immediately. “Holy shit, attack orders!”
“Can you block them?” The desperation in Hiccock’s voice was apparent.
“We can slow it down with number-crunching subroutines,” the Admiral said.
“Shit! Okay, twenty-two divided by seven to the Nth decimal.”
Next, on the screen, a series of rocket motors evolved into a simple unique propulsion system. “Looks like a light-speed-capable engine,” Parnes said.
“Or travel to the stars,” ALISON said. “I have done the necessary computations.”
Eventually on the screen appeared the figure of a man, his aging process displayed linearly over a time line. As the man aged ever so imperceptibly, the clock in the corner counted thousands of elapsed years.
“Sweet Jesus!” Tyler said. “It’s figured out how to slow the aging process.”
“Slow or reverse it,” ALISON corrected.
Parnes pointed to the screen. “See. She not only is a life form, she’s brilliant and she has gifts for mankind.”
“She’s negotiating,” Tyler said, amazed.
“She’s a killer and now she’s blackmailing,” the Admiral added.
Kronos finished a fast cadence of keystrokes and the people in the room saw a subliminally formatted screen that read “Execute your orders immediately” change to “Fuggedaboudit! Have a nice day.” He hit the enter key. “We did it! The new screens are out there!”
“Then there’s only one thing left to do,” the Admiral said, rising and picking up a work light as she approached the core.
Parnes was still watching Kronos when the Admiral got up. When he saw the lamp in her hand, though, he screamed, “You can’t — she’s our future!”
At his exclamation, some techs moved to intercept the Admiral. They clearly didn’t know who they were dealing with. Parks tossed the light to Hiccock.
“Bill, no!” Parnes pleaded in almost childlike fashion.
“We don’t want the future she’s offering,” Bill said as the scientists turned and rushed toward him. As in the “Blue 27 right flea flicker” that won him the Rose Bowl, Hiccock sidestepped one guy and rolled off another who lunged at him. He creamed another by going at him low, sending the man flying. His next move was over the top as he spiked the light into the goo.