She said nothing.
‘Look, I’m not suggesting that any of their, uh, black propaganda is true but they might be getting into sabotage…’
He trailed off, feeling he’d said too much.
‘That’s a point. Besides, it could be more, well, local forces, shall we say? Some anti-Christian faction.’
Mrs Lawson picked up a phone and walked about with it, talking in the clipped argot of the security professional. (God, he’d never suspected she was a cop!)
‘—sitrep update request, BC. Check ECM on LANS…yes…OK negative on target specificity…copy, got you, logging out.’
She clicked the phone off.
‘We’re not the only ones. Some of our commercial rivals and ideological opponents are getting system crashes as well, but none of the core state or corporate networks have any problems. Doesn’t fit any known attack profile, doesn’t fit anything apart from the issue I raised this morning.’
‘Well, I certainly didn’t expect anything like this…so soon.’
Mrs Lawson nodded briskly, as if not paying attention.
‘You couldn’t be expected to. You’re not a big loop, Jordan – you’re not my main source of ideas. I want you to watch out, yes, you have a knack. But to be honest I’ve had the same theories run through by the leading Warriors already. I was just checking that the projections held.’
She paused, her face suddenly bleak.
‘I know I can trust you to keep this to yourself – not because I know you’re clean, but because I know for a fact you’re not. Take that spiritual-virgin look off your face! Do you think – no, you’re far too smart to think – an outfit like BC survives in this tough world on censored texts? We have to know the psychology, know the philosophies, of that world. Take what we can and trust in God to keep us from corruption! The Elders and Deacons have read and seen things – and done things – that would make the hair on your devious, secretly sceptical head stand on end! The ANR! Don’t talk to me about the ANR – don’t pretend not to talk about them. They don’t worry me. What I fear, what I truly pray we are not faced with, is the coming of the Watchmaker.’
‘What is the Watchmaker?’
He already knew: he’d read the book. He still hoped she didn’t know he had.
‘You can read the book,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you clearance.’
Mrs Lawson fiddled with the coffee percolator, poured two cups and sat down. Jordan accepted a cup and remained standing. He wondered how secure the door would be against a good kick.
‘Dawkins, R. Nineteen eighty something. We’re not bothered by all the arguments about the evolution of life. We’ve got fallback interpretations if that theory’s ever absolutely proved. The thing which had many better minds worried was the idea that natural selection could happen, could irrefutably happen, in a computer system. Intelligence could evolve out of the bugs and viruses in software. Something not human, not angelic, possibly diabolic. The Blind Watchmaker. Life made the devil’s way – by evolution, not creation.’
She fell silent, looking at him as if she were watching something behind him. Jordan decided not to throw in a suspiciously knowledgeable comment on the semantic slippage which confused the process and the product, the creator and its creation. Just as the name of Frankenstein had become irremediably tagged to the monster, so the long-imagined, long-dreaded spontaneously evolved artificial intelligence was stamped with the name of the process that would give it birth. ‘When the Watchmaker comes…’ Another bit of the buzz he occasionally glimpsed in hastily scanned chatfiles the censorship hadn’t quite caught up with. Another urban legend.
He finished his coffee and said edgily, ‘Can we be sure?’
He felt he had just been initiated, if not baptised and confirmed, into some alternative theology, the real thinking of the real minds that ran the place – still orthodox, he could see that, though not the sort of thing they’d want to slot on a satellite for prime time – and all he could respond with was his own self-corroding scepticism.
‘Of course we can’t be sure,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘Oh, Jordan, don’t you know anything?’
The system came back up, just as inexplicably, twenty minutes later. Melody Lawson sat in her office and looked at the monitor screens, frowning to herself as she watched Jordan logging on. She’d as good as invited him to move on from the naive fundamentals that were enough for the pew-ballast to the more sophisticated understanding necessary to protect that very simplicity, and he’d not risen to it at all. Any bright young Christian with a questioning mind would have been in like a ferret, eager to explore a legitimization of his more daring thoughts. There was no doubt Jordan was bright, but he sure as hell wasn’t a Christian. It galled her the kid was so transparent, and that nobody else saw through him. It galled her even more that whatever had undermined his belief in God had also diminished his belief in himself. Open irreligion could not be permitted, and she had no problem with that, but closet atheism was far more poisonous. There was no telling when such suppressed, turned-in hostility could lash out in a desperate act. For Jordan to leave Beulah City would be better for the community, and better for him.
It would even be better for his soul. He was becoming almost literally two-faced – the way he’d looked when he’d turned away from the screen! There had been only one moment when his mask had dropped, and that was when he’d mentioned the Black Planner…
Dear God, she thought. Suddenly frantic, she hit her door switch, keyed open the lock on a drawer and scrabbled for her VR glasses. She put them on and punched herself into the security net. The sensation of diving, of swimming and twisting like a shark, was all the more exciting for being – even for her – a rarely exercised, dangerous privilege. A quick scan of Jordan’s company records revealed an odd hiatus in the placing of a remittance – ah ha! She studied the traces, fragments of entry code snagged on tortuous logic branches, undetectable without the correct keys. Forensic diagnostics stripped them, returning pointers. She lowered thresholds on associative criteria, letting suspicions harden into certainties; then unleashed the now almost paranoid detection protocols and hit fast-forward to follow them. They took her to a Black Plan locale vacated in recent seconds. After clocking confirmations they leapt from one conclusion to another, finally locking on to an undoubtedly criminal penetration virus. She rode its backwash as far as she dared, far enough to confirm that Black Plan purposes lay just a few implications down the line. Disengaging, she encountered some paramilitary construct; its routines and hers conducted a brief, hostile interchange at a level far too fast for her to follow. It turned away from her and tracked the penetration virus, on business of its own. Mrs Lawson followed a secure path home, then backed out, feeling slightly nauseous.
Oh Jordan, Jordan. You are a silly boy. You are going to catch it, and so am I for letting it happen.
Unless…
Unless…
She let her conscience have its say for a few moments, then set to work deleting and revising, editing reality. When she was satisfied she sat back and picked up a phone.
The system crashed again and again. The afternoon passed in a trance of work, to the sound of crying alarms. Melody Lawson fought a rising sense of panic, becoming increasingly convinced there was something new in the networks and that it might be, if not the Watchmaker itself, a rogue AI of unprecedented range. She didn’t know if anyone else of her credibility and experience would see it that way.
There was one man who would. Perhaps two.
Two would be best.
She waited until the day workers had left, called her family to say she was working late, then checked and rechecked the security of her office and its systems. As she did so she ran through the memory trick – one digit in this corner, another on that shelf – that recalled a number she’d never dared write down or even keep in her conscious memory. She used it to call the most secret and mistrusted and deniable of her contacts.