Dr Van’s fetch flickered slightly, as if he’d been about to say something and thought better of it.
‘Almost but not quite the most disturbing feature of these events is that a considerable volume of research data, much of it hard-to-replace genetic archive material held at widely separated sites around the world, has simply disappeared. The most disturbing aspect of the problem is this:
‘A preliminary analysis of the scope and power of the source of these disruptions indicates that we are dealing with, at best, a virus of unprecedented sophistication and at worst with a manifestation of an autonomous artificial intelligence.’
‘The Watchmaker,’ Melody Lawson murmured.
‘That is indeed a possibility,’ said the Stasis agent.
‘Why have you contacted us?’ Donovan asked in as innocent a voice as he could manage.
‘Don’t fuck me about!’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre snarled. The vernacular vulgarity was a small shock after his previous stilted diction. ‘You know very well that the West Middlesex cell of your organization attacked the artificial-intelligence research unit at Brunel University last night. The drug laboratory was broken into around the same time—’
‘Nothing to do with me,’ Donovan interjected. Bleibtreu-Fèvre acknowledged this but continued implacably.
‘—and that one of your penetration viruses – illegal, and hazardous in its own right, I may add – was destroyed within that very area a few hours ago. Immediately thereafter your own interface with the system was crashed, presumably by the new AI. You then triggered a retaliatory demon attack, which by another coincidence destroyed the lab that I had been investigating. You, Doctor Van, are legally responsible for your company’s research, which is apparently of such great interest to this dangerous entity. I will take your cooperation as a gauge of the sincerity of your claim that you know nothing about any such connection. As for Mrs Lawson, it is very much to her credit that she contacted me on her own initiative, after encountering some early indications of the phenomenon.’
So that was it. Donovan suspected that a bit of ass-covering was going on here. Lawson had contacted him, and must have decided at the same moment that a parallel call to the legal authorities would be a good idea. Bleibtreu-Fèvre, no doubt frantic about how an otherwise minor lab-leak on his turf was escalating into a software-security crisis, would have been monitoring every call from the area and pounced on the opportunity.
‘In what context?’ Van asked, relieving Donovan of the necessity of revealing his curiosity. The angel-fetch brushed a wingtip against the Man In Black; some private communication passed between them and then Melody Lawson said: ‘I was investigating a Black Plan penetration of our business systems.’
‘That’s interesting,’ Donovan said. ‘I encountered the Black Plan in the same frame as the new entity – dammit, we might as well call it the Watchmaker – and there are all sorts of rumours flying around about a possible connection between them.’
‘Are there indeed?’ remarked Bleibtreu-Fèvre. He said nothing more for a few moments, his fetch taking on the barely controllable abstracted look that Stasis agents showed when accessing the net through their head patches. Then he snapped back to alertness.
‘What were you doing when your constructs encountered the…Watchmaker?’
Donovan sighed. A few hours ago, nothing had seemed more important than avenging the insult from Moh Kohn. Now that was only a squalid squabble.
‘I was pursuing a conflict with a common mercenary who had broken, ah, certain rules of engagement in the course of last night’s armed action—’ He stopped and frowned at Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘You said the drug-research project had been penetrated by some info-seeker agents.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, this mercenary, Moh Kohn, was definitely hacking about in the system.’ Donovan thought back to his conversation with Cat. ‘And he had visited a lab on campus shortly before. One that had been broken into.’
Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s eyes seemed literally to light up. He turned to Van.
‘Have you contacted the researcher, Janis Taine?’
‘I regret to say she has disappeared,’ Van said. ‘Possibly your intervention had something to do with that.’
Bleibtreu-Fèvre glared at him.
Van looked back, unperturbed. ‘The message she left was untraceable,’ he added.
‘Then she’s in Norlonto,’ said Melody Lawson. ‘It’s the only place within easy reach where that sort of crypto is legal.’
‘And where Stasis can’t go,’ Donovan added maliciously. ‘You’ll have to turn it over to Space Defense.’
‘We have a problem here,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said smoothly. ‘Stasis is the first line of defence against contingencies like the present situation. If we should fail, SD has a standing instruction to prevent any possible takeover of the datasphere by any AI not under human control. I am not at liberty to spell it out, but expressions like clean break and fresh start tend to crop up. Their response to a threatened degradation of the datasphere might be unacceptably drastic.’
Donovan took in this information with wildly mixed feelings: a certain grim elation that his fears of uncontrolled AI were shared by the most powerful armed force in history, and a sickly horror at what that armed force could do. If Space Defense ever decided to treat earth as, in effect, an alien planet, they’d have to prevent any organism, or any transmission, from ever getting off the surface again. Comsats would be lased, launch-sites nuked. Electromagnetic pulses from these and other nukes would wipe most computer memories. Production networks would unravel in days. They wouldn’t even have to burn the cities. The riots and breakdowns would do that for them.
‘Call it nine gigadeaths,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘So. I hope I can count on your cooperation, both in containing the problem and in maintaining absolute secrecy.’
‘It seems we have an agreement,’ Donovan said, looking around. ‘Pay-offs can be arranged later, but can we take it from here that the usual immunities apply?’
‘Of course,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre impatiently. ‘Now, details.’
The division of labour he proposed was straightforward. Lawson would network with her counterparts in other communities to discreetly monitor the AI’s activity. Donovan would assist her in using any logged traces of their respective encounters with the entity to develop specific attack viruses for it, while calling off his normal sabotage programme. Van would make a full investigation of the various projects that the Watchmaker AI had targeted, and try to reestablish contact with the fugitive researcher Janis Taine.
‘It seems a reasonable hypothesis,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre concluded, with a sort of civil-servant pedantry that had Donovan wishing he could clout him, ‘that Taine has fled to Norlonto, possibly in the company of Moh Kohn, if he indeed took an interest in her research and visited her lab. So we should track these two down if only to eliminate them from our inquiries. Ha, ha.’