“Bill, what if this doesn’t work?”
“Haven’t thought that far, Sir.”
“Great!”
“Sir, are you really going to resign?”
“Under the twenty-fifth amendment, I am going to step aside to the vice president and let Congress decide whether to make it permanent or not.”
“Sir, may I ask you something?”
“The answer is no, Bill. Reynolds made the deal and didn’t think it was important enough to tell me about it. But, no matter, it was my responsibility. Even though I did not make the deal with Parnes, I benefited from it.”
“Whatever happens, Sir, thank you for believing in my approach.”
“You made sense, Bill. Your ideas were wild, but this whole nightmare has been unprecedented.”
Kronos called out, and both men reentered the ECM.
“We’re ready to turn this sucker loose. The Navy guys have routed all our circuits onto the five fiber-optic cables running to the ship.”
“Is my line ready?” the president asked the captain.
A Navy yeoman appeared with a telephone handset and held the center button down for the Commander in Chief as he leaned into it.
“Mr. Vice President, make your speech.” He then asked the yeoman, “Can we pipe that down here?”
A sailor turned on a TV set. The show was immediately interrupted by a slide that read ‘Please Stand By’—the Cold War — designed government system of commandeering broadcast channels not having caught up to the slick computer graphics of the news networks. A man in a suit, probably a network executive who was quickly drafted into service, addressed the camera. “Pursuant to our FCC licensing, we now relinquish airtime to the executive branch of the government for this important announcement.” The picture switched to the White House pressroom. There, the vice president was at the podium.
Hiccock glanced at his watch; it was 7:48 PST. Kronos reported the planting of digital DNA over the web at 7:53 PM PST, three days earlier. Hiccock figured there was a good shot that the majority of the computers that were on then would be on now. That’s why the timing was so critical. They could not permit another twenty-four hours to pass allowing ALISON to regroup elsewhere. He only hoped they had gotten it right. They all looked up at the vice president on the TV monitor.
“My fellow Americans, our nation has suffered great devastation and tremendous loss of life in the past few months. I can tell you tonight that we are near the end of this horrendous episode in American history. President Mitchell has asked me to address you tonight. He is, at this moment, involved with the conclusion of this national crisis. Now it is your turn to help. This calamity has been brought upon us through technological means. Although the greatest part of the threat has been diminished, there remains a call for an essential concentrated effort from all of you.
“In coordination with 127 governments around the world, whose leaders are, at this instant, asking their citizens to do the same thing, I implore you, if you own a computer, to please turn it on now and establish an online connection. Stay online for ten minutes and then, after these ten minutes, please turn off. If you cannot get online right now, please try again in ten minutes. Our experts tell us this is necessary to, once and for all, erase the malignant viruses that still loom in each and every online computer in the world. Please be assured your computer will not be adversely affected in any way.”
The camera zoomed in, as was the standard format for all presidential addresses when they neared the end of the prepared text. “In the coming days I will also address this nation on a grave matter of national importance, but for now, the goal is to rid the World Wide Web, once and for all, of this hideous virus. Thank you and God bless America.”
“Okay. Kronos, Admiral, go,” the president said.
Kronos typed, “Load program.” The Cray’s screen blinked and then displayed a graphic progress bar with a percentage in type below it reading zero. A minute later, it still read zero.
“Kro… nos…?” Hiccock called out as he glanced at the clock.
“It’s not working,” the Admiral said.
“There must be a parameter mismatch. Something is different. Something has changed from when ALISON was last on line.”
“Nine minutes,” Hiccock said, checking his watch.
“What’s different?”
“Well, it is a whole different computer, for one thing,” the president said.
“Nah, we are running a compiled simulator. The front door is exactly the same.”
“Kronos, ALISON did exactly what when she distributed her code?” Hiccock asked.
“She, er … it imprinted the code with an algorithm that uniquely identified her as her … it.”
“And what was the basis for the algorithm?”
“Well, what I detangled was a code line that gave her status at the time of the distribution.”
“Could Marilyn be the key?”
“Crap! Yes, of course!” Kronos quickly flew over to his laptop bag and ripped out the CD that contained the voice synthesis program.
“Okay, now explain it to me,” the president said.
“The snapshot that Kronos used to replicate the ‘scent’ of mommy to all the little digital babies out there was taken before Kronos plugged in the data-to-voice module in the original ALISON. The babies leaving the nest took their exact snapshot of ‘mommy’ with them a few minutes later. That configuration had Marilyn’s voice program by then.”
“So, he’s now going to give the ship’s computer mommy’s voice?”
“That way she can call all the kiddies home with a voice they’ll recognize, so to speak.”
“Seven minutes left.”
Kronos slammed the CD into the drive and then selected “Marilyn.”
The bar started to move. The percentage read “1 %.”
“Yes!”
The line continued moving. The percentages climbed into double digits.
“What are we looking for here, Bill?” the president asked.
“ALISON based the distribution on RAID protocol based on the prime number seven.”
Kronos filled in. “In a RAID protocol, you can lose parts of data streams and because of a built-in redundancy, it can reconstruct the missing data.”
“But not if the majority of the data is missing,” the president said as he caught on.
“Exactly, so based on seven, any four pieces can reconstruct the full seven.”
“I see, so that’s a little more than 50 percent.”
“But the reverse is also true. If four pieces out of the seven are absent then the data can never be reconstituted,” Hiccock said. “And the Admiral and Kronos have written a subroutine that erases the DNA from peoples’ computers as it finds it arriving on the ship. So when the percentage of DNA captured by the Cray passes 58 percent, the rest of the distributed code on the web can never reach critical percentage again and will wait dormant forever.”
“Twenty-seven percent now,” Kronos said.
“Come on …”
All at once, the room became still as a chilling voice from the not-too-distant past cut through the ECM. “I cannot locate memory locations DBAE2098367 through EEEE999999.”
“The bitch is back,” Tyler blurted out.
“ALISON, we are reinstalling your core now,” the Admiral said. “We had a temporary malfunction of the nexus.”
“What was the cause?”
“An insect flew in between the layers and shorted out your electrolytic fluid,” the Admiral said.
“Sir, she is now at 39 percent,” Carson reported.
“ALISON is coming back to life, stretching her computational muscle,” the Admiral said to Hiccock.
“How is that possible?”