‘This is really interesting,’ he explained as spidery diagrams spread across screens all over the control room. ‘You may remember that I found Moh Kohn’s own software constructs, some tentacle of the Black Plan, and the new entity – all in the same locale, and hard to distinguish at certain points. Well, I’ve been working on that, and you can see what I’ve found.’ He hot-keyed a sequence and the diagrams simplified to a mere few thousand branching lines. Bleibtreu-Fèvre watched them glassy-eyed. ‘Common features!’ Donovan went on. ‘Moh Kohn must have his father’s programming style burnt into his mind, although of course it’s expressed in creating much smaller programs, his data-raiders and so forth. As for the Watchmaker itself, it appears to be a…descendant of the Black Plan—’
‘You’re not saying Josh Kohn created the Watchmaker, are you?’
Donovan shook his head with a rueful laugh. ‘On top of Dissembler and the Black Plan? I think that would have been beyond even his capacities…especially twenty years ago. No, I think that, whatever its origin, it has learned to exploit the…openings Josh Kohn evidently built into Dissembler, and the abilities he built into the Plan.’
Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s face went from pale to grey, as if the bones were showing.
‘And you have developed specifics for all of them?’
‘Yes,’ Donovan said. He couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. ‘We can destroy the Watchmaker, and the Black Plan, and Kohn’s little efforts as well – if they matter.’
‘And Dissembler?’
‘Ah.’ It gave him pause. ‘I hadn’t considered that.’
‘Oh, well, ha, ha,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre flatly. ‘Might as well be hanged for a cop as a dealer, what?’
Donovan dismissed the matter with the thought that losing Dissembler would be a small price for saving the world, whether from the Watchmaker itself or from the efforts of Space Defense. He punched up a new set of displays, flinching slightly at the sight of the ongoing havoc – traffic systems down, hospitals on emergency backup, markets going frantic – that he’d taken the blame for. Then he flipped to a search program that spun out thousands of agent programs to trace the Watchmaker. Nothing active, not yet: just to see if they could find the thing…
At first, as the hits began to light up on the screens, he thought he’d made a mistake. They were finding evidence of the entity just about everywhere they went. Were they reacting to Dissembler itself? Had he made them too general?
He checked, lost in concentration.
‘What is it?’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s eyes met his as he looked up.
‘It’s replicated!’ Donovan said. ‘It’s everywhere.’
Bleibtreu-Fèvre studied the screens in disbelief. ‘All of that, all those lights?’
‘All those lights,’ Donovan repeated bitterly. ‘And more.’
The disruptions died down. Everything seemed to be going back to normal except for the spreading spots of light.
‘That must be what’s in the net traffic,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said.
‘Yeah,’ said Donovan. ‘Right, there’s no time to lose.’
He hit the launch code for the viral antigens, the savage routines bred over multiple microsecond generations in closed systems, primed to tear the rogue AI and its cognates into their component bytes. Little red sparks shot across the displays, tracking the antigens’ progress through the global networks.
And, one by one, the red sparks went out.
Bleibtreu-Fèvre grunted. ‘It seems to be fighting back.’
Donovan marvelled again at how something that was as clear to him as an open book could be so obscure to anyone else.
‘No,’ he snarled. ‘They aren’t engaging, they aren’t even making contact. Something else is trashing them first.’ He stalked distractedly around the room. He hadn’t felt this frustrated since he’d been a commercial programmer. ‘Bloody hell.’ He clutched his head and tried to think calmly. ‘It can’t be the Watchmaker entity – entities. They haven’t had any exposure to give them a chance to evolve immunity. It’s got to be something else, something that’s familiar with my systems, my coding, my profile…’
‘Melody Lawson,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. As soon as he said it Donovan knew it had to be true. She’d worked with him, she’d been in the movement, she’d had years of experience of defending against his attacks…and she’d had access to his dataspaces for days. While he’d been developing specifics for the Kohns’ systems, she’d been doing the same for his!
He couldn’t blame her, really, for taking the opportunity to forearm herself against the time when the emergency was over and it was back to business as usual. Like wartime allies, spying on each other.
‘So we’re all right,’ he told Bleibtrue-Fèvre when he’d explained the situation. ‘We just ask her to stop, to give us a clear run at it.’ He let out a shaky laugh. ‘What a relief – just for a moment there, I thought we were doomed.’
‘Absolutely not.’
Melody Lawson glared at the flickering image of Donovan, who was obviously attempting his usual disconcerting trick of jumping from one screen to another and frustrated that he was failing, held on her most secure channel like a demon in a pentagram. The little hologhost brandished a match-stick at her, then a hand came into shot and caught his shoulder. He turned away and stepped out of view, to be replaced after thirty seconds of tinnily overheard altercation by another figure.
‘Mrs Lawson,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre in a smooth voice that affected her like a fingernail dragged down a blackboard, ‘I really must ask you to reconsider. The situation has deteriorated quite alarmingly. I assure you that to the best of my knowledge Donovan is telling the truth.’
‘I don’t doubt your sincerity,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘I doubt your interpretation.’
Her doubts over Donovan’s interpretation of events had grown over the past few days as her normal security work had redoubled to deal with the escalating challenge posed by the threatened terrorist offensives. She’d already admitted using her access to Donovan’s resources to develop defences against his software arsenal – it had been, even before she’d got really worried, almost a reflex response. With his usual sabotage out of the way it had been relatively easy to build on her vast previous experience to construct antigen systems keyed to Donovan’s distinctive fingerprint, the almost ineradicable impress of the personality on the program which now-standard protocols (developed originally to identify the authorship of biblical texts) could detect, and (again ironically) use a genetic algorithm to select their best match in the test of combat, replicate from it, go on from there…
What she was reluctant to admit was that her own freedom of action was severely curtailed. The general increase in paranoia within the enclave made it difficult for her to know just who might be watching her. Her own dubious past as a member of Donovan’s organization had never been held against her, but it was always there to be used if heads had to roll.
She’d responded to the chaos of the afternoon by throwing all of her newly developed search-and-destroy programs into the networks. When they’d had no effect she hadn’t lost confidence in them: she’d taken it as clear evidence that Donovan had no hand in the epidemic of system crashes.
And now her programs had proved themselves! Against Donovan’s best!