"Michael's 'rabbits.'" Gideon said.
"The term for the first creatures we released into the Internet. They had two main directives, to burrow and hide, and to find other rabbits and reproduce."
"The evolutionary algorithm," Gideon said.
"True evolution, where survival is the only criterion for reproduction. We added predators, foxes and sharks that would consume any rabbit they found, and each other—"
"Christ," Ruth said.
"You engineered a whole ecosystem and infected the Internet with it. . ." Gideon shook his head. "Do you have any idea how potentially destructive that was, is?" He looked into Julia's eyes. "Of course you do, you jumped right on board the NSA's information warfare projects. It was a seamless transition, wasn't it. You picked up right where you left off—"
Julia shook her head. "No, Detective Malcolm. I didn't. Losing the ET Lab was a disaster. Wiping the research was all I could do to save even the idea of the project— that and our secrecy."
"I wonder how many laws you broke with this project."
Julia looked at him sternly.
"This is like some genetic engineer dumping a new plague into the Chesapeake just to see what'll happen." "The evolutionary pressure is against any of these creatures causing overt disruption. Detection means that the program does not survive, doesn't reproduce."
"That doesn't stop the occasional 'disruption,' does it?"
Julia was silent.
"How many times has your project caused something like the Wall Street crash? Or does it matter?"
"These are living creatures, they will have some effect on their environment. . ."
"And if the 'project' is already out there— If your viral life-forms are happily breeding on the Internet already— What is all this, then?" Gideon waved back toward the lab. "Why are you suddenly here, with a damn supercomputer? What is D'Arcy after? What's worth all the deaths that've already happened because of this thing?"
The door opened behind them, and a voice said, "She's giving the United States the greatest technological advantage since the invention of the atomic bomb."
Gideon turned around and faced the speaker, a short bespectacled gentleman who looked somewhat like Peter Lorre. Emmit D'Arcy gave Gideon a half-grin and looked up at Julia. "I think, Doctor, you would be better off monitoring the progress of the lure." He looked at Ruth. "And perhaps you should take your sister."
Julia looked at D'Arcy with an expression of vague distaste, gave a curt nod, and took Ruth out of the small office. Gideon was left alone with the man most responsible for his brother's death.
D'Arcy walked around and sat behind Julia's desk. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "She was adamant that we bring you here."
"Bastard," Gideon said.
"I've been called worse."
"How many people have you killed to keep this private enterprise of yours a secret?"
D'Arcy shook his head. "Your problem, Detective Malcolm, is that you have no perspective."
Gideon stood up. "How can you have the gall—"
"You rushed in," D'Arcy said. "Starting with the unfortunate incident with your brother, you've gone charging ahead with little thought to what might be involved or what the consequences are. For a time you were a useful distraction."
"You Machiavellian— What was the original plan? Have them finish this project and then storm the place? Everyone conveniently dies in the assault, and no one to say this wasn't a terrorist operation."
"It's too bad you weren't part of the community," D'Arcy said. "You'd have been an asset."
"Things have gone wrong—haven't they? That's why you're here, isn't it? For all the shooting, you couldn't keep this thing under wraps, could you?"
D'Arcy looked at the glasses in his hands, and shook his head as he replaced them. "Shall we forget the 'original plan,' whatever that was? The operation is nearly complete, and you aren't outside, leading anyone here."
"What are you going to do with us?" Gideon asked. "Kill us like you did Kendal?"
"Shall we dispense with the drama? I am here to develop an asset. Once that asset is developed, everything else will be irrelevant." D'Arcy looked at Gideon, and Gideon thought he could see a fragment of the same fanatic glint in D'Arcy's eye that he'd seen in Julia's. "After tonight what you do or say won't matter to me."
There was something ominous in that statement. Something final about it that frightened Gideon. "What is it?" he asked. "What are you doing here? The IUF is your entity, isn't it? And you've sacrificed it and God knows how many people, for what? Some super computer virus?"
"You'll see yourself. Dr. Zimmerman wants you on the floor when everything comes together—"
"It is a virus, isn't it? The ET Lab's 'project' was free to evolve on the Internet for years. It produced something. Something adaptable, undetectable, a perfect computer weapon—"
D'Arcy was shaking his head. "You're better than I gave you credit for. So close."
"The computational equivalent of the atomic bomb," Gideon finished.
"So close." D'Arcy steepled his fingers. "So far." He gestured across the desk. 'Take your seat and I'll tell you what Aleph is, why I had to act."
Gideon looked at D'Arcy and, slowly, sat down.
"This is already out there," D'Arcy explained. "Understand that above all. Anyone with the technology can summon it from the Internet now, like a genie. We have to be first, or we'll suffer a nearly insurmountable technical disadvantage. God help us if the Chinese, or even the European Community, gets a hold of this."
"Why do you need a Daedalus?"
"We need all of it. It's possible to run black ops within Mother, the NSA's Daedalus, but this, Aleph, requires all the processing capacity of the machine, all at once. We cannot run this on any government machine in secret." He pushed his glasses up so he could rub the bridge of his nose again. "You are close, Gideon. Close enough that we had to bring you here. You just haven't assembled the pieces you have.
"Zimmerman's experiment at MIT, the original entities they released to evolve—they all had something in common. There was a core of programming that would never be touched by the random splicing of the evolutionary algorithm. This block of code remained constant through the generations of these programs—or was supposed to. The code handled two instructions, a lure and a destruct. The lure was a homing signal of sorts, a command to send the program to a specific computer for study. The destruct was obviously for cases where the programs got out of hand."
"So why didn't Zimmerman destroy the programs then, when she wiped the research at the ET lab?" "You don't understand," D'Arcy said. "She did." "What happened? Why are they still out there?" "There were mutations," D'Arcy said. "Imperfect communications, truncated code, a byte in the wrong place. Whatever happened, there were a few viable viruses from the project that had this common code segment corrupted. The 'destruct' failed to be instantaneous. There was a time delay— By accident, Zimmerman's biosphere developed aging and natural death. Last November, Julia was engaged in a virus survey for the NSA, seeing what was out there, and she discovered one of her programs. She wrote a memo that reached me, I understood the implications . . ."
"What implications?"
"The first was that a generation for these programs is on the order of microseconds. That means several trillion generations since they left MIT. The development of a natural death combined with the designed sexual reproduction and predation to accelerate the evolutionary process even more. The only limit these things had was the constraints on their environment."
"There was another implication?"
"The virus Dr. Zimmerman discovered was part of a distributed system."