There was something larger, and much more important at stake.
Gideon looked at Ruth. Did he care about bringing Julia in alive? "I do," Gideon said quietly. "Believe me, I do."
Ruth looked at him a little oddly. "You don't have a crush on her, do you?"
Gideon laughed. "That's silly. I've never even met the woman."
He turned back to the computer screen and started calling up searches on the other terms that related to Dr. Zimmerman's work. As he worked, the phrase kept running through his head, I've never even met the woman.
He searched for things relating to "Evolutionary Algorithm," "Virus," and, "Information Warfare."
The search presented him with dozens of pages on the Evolutionary Algorithm. A few pages were actually archived copies of papers from the ET Lab at MIT. There were so many documents that Gideon threw Zimmerman's name into the search to pare down the list.
When he did that, he found all the MIT papers, and a document titled, "Tenth International Conference on Artificial Life."
Gideon stared at the title for a long time before he opened the document. He was remembering something Dr. Michael Nolan had said. "She began to act as if the programs we were creating were living creatures. . ." He also remembered the lone thing that she'd left on her own personal computer, a little icon labeled "life."
The document had an introduction to the term "artificial life." Gideon scanned the page, picking out phrases that caught his eye, or seemed important.
"Artificial Life labels human attempts to construct models—digital, biological, and robotic—that reproduce some of the essential properties of life. The goal of such models is to reveal the organizational principles of living systems on Earth, and possibly elsewhere . . ."
". . . requires a truly interdisciplinary approach that knits together fields of knowledge as diverse as mathematics and biology, computer science and physics, engineering and philosophy . . ."
". . . an important part of this effort is a search for independent principles of living systems, which apply to any living system, regardless of biology—or lack thereof. Artificial Life also considers the possibilities of life, artificial alternatives to a carbon-based chemistry."
"This sounds like so much science fiction," Ruth said.
Gideon nodded. "But, according to Dr. Nolan, this kind of research has been going on for decades. He said some of the first Genetic Algorithms were produced on an Apple II computer."
Gideon checked the conference schedule and found Dr. Zimmerman's name.
"Sat. June 29: 8:30-9:15 Keynote Talk, Julia Zimmerman, The Biology of the Internet."
Gideon stared at the title of her talk for a long time. It was hard to reconcile with his idea of what Julia Zimmerman was involved in. So far he had pictured her as interested in obscure mathematical objects like the Zeta Function. The Internet seemed too "earthy" a topic for her.
He looked across at Ruth. "How interested is your sister in computers?"
"She's fascinated by them," Ruth said. "At least as far as they are a means to her ends. She once called them a mathematical telescope."
"Interesting metaphor."
"I think she meant that a computer can be used to see parts of the mathematical universe that would be otherwise undetectable."
There was an abstract of the speech available, and Gideon opened it.
"Has the term 'virus' stopped being metaphorical?" Gideon read. "With the increase in complexity of the
Internet, there has been an increase in the 'size' of the environment that can host uncontrolled entities. An average personal computer is packed with so much data that it is easy for foreign bits of code to hide undetected, and when it is connected to a network, the environment is vast. Security against computer viruses, because of their constant proliferation, has had to concentrate more and more on preventing the harmful effects of these viruses, and less on preventing the infection of the system. It is possible for a 'benign' virus, a virus that conducts no discernible attacks on its host, to propagate unimpeded. Evolution forces the eventual existence of such 'benign' viruses."
Gideon looked at the abstract and thought about what the old guy had told them about Julia's work for the NSA. Information warfare he said, military-grade viruses . . .
"Maybe this is what she was really working on," Gideon whispered. If it was, he wondered what it meant. Was she actually working on some terrorist weapon? Why?
On the other end of the secure phone line, Emmit D'Arcy said, "What've you got?"
Colonel Mecham looked at the papers that'd just been delivered to his desk. "We have a flag from the New York Public Library."
"The library?"
"Mother filtered out a keyword search originating from one of the public terminals. About Zimmerman. There's a good chance it's Malcolm." Mecham cleared his throat. "I've ordered a team in to extract him."
There was a pause on the other end of the line. Eventually D'Arcy said, "Did I hear you right?"
"This was time sensitive. The search was in progress as Mother flagged it. I had to act immediately."
"I see." D'Arcy's voice became colder. "When this is over, we'll have a talk about this, Colonel Mecham."
I'm sure we will, Mecham thought. Probably in front of a Senate hearing. "Yes, sir," he hung up the phone and shook his head. He looked up at the man sitting across from him. "There we go," he said. "That's my career."
General Adrian Harris shook his head. "It has to be done. This situation is too dangerous to have a loose cannon out there. He's served his purpose, drawing the IUF out of the woodwork." The General stood up and said, "Don't worry, son. You did your duty."
Mecham watched as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs left his office. The door closed silently behind him.
He had been on the computer long enough for his eyes to begin to hurt. He leaned back and let his gaze drift.
"So," Ruth asked, "are you any closer?"
"I don't know." He had spent hours scanning documents, some of them way beyond his level of understanding. He had even found a description of the program Julia left on her own PC. It was a "game" called Life that seemed to have originated on a checkerboard. It was played on a grid, and each turn, every cell on the grid is turned on or off—lives or dies—based on the number of neighboring living cells. The rules of the game were simple, four lines long, but the complexities of the patterns involved could be astounding.
The game of life, in the decades since its invention, had spawned a whole mathematical discipline around the study of what was called cellular automata. There were people writing theses on the properties of various arrangement of cells—there were patterns that could "move" across the grid, essentially unchanged in form, there were other patterns that could repeatedly build other patterns. All from a set of rules that could fit on a business card.
Why leave that behind? Gideon pictured the way the pattern had erupted across the screen of Julia's computer, and then dissolved off into nothing. Why?
He had found quite a few traces of Julia Zimmerman in articles across the Internet, all predating her work for the government. While there was no question about her mathematical genius, she more often gave talks about the Evolutionary Algorithm than the Theorems she was trying to solve with it. When he first heard about what the ET Lab was doing, he'd thought that the computers were simply a means to work on the problems she was trying to solve.
More and more, it seemed that those problems were an excuse to work with the computers, and the opportunities that they opened up for her.
Gideon looked up at one of the chandeliers above the main reading room, watching as the late morning sunlight caught it. "You think she saw the computers as a window on that pure mathematical world she