"What?"
"It was part of a larger organism. Somehow, early on, either two programs figured out how to work together, or one program figured how to divide itself over more than one system. There are obvious survival benefits, parts can be redundant, and not be vulnerable to events on a single system. The multipart entity is less vulnerable to the inherited 'natural death,' though it, too, will die eventually. Most important, its means of reproduction is more reliable. It now can exchange whole 'programs' as a means of reproduction, exchanging functional units rather than small pieces of code."
Gideon felt a chill as D'Arcy described it. He shook his head. "You're describing—"
"The jump from single-cell to multicellular life." D'Arcy nodded. "I had my share of biology at the university. When I saw Dr. Zimmerman's memo, I understood exactly what had happened."
D'Arcy took his glasses off and pointed them at Gideon. "There are entities out there now, whose parts are small programs, few more than a megabyte in size, distributed throughout the Internet. These entities are made of millions of such programs."
D'Arcy paused to let that sink in before he said, "These entities, more than likely, are conscious, thinking beings."
3.06 Fri. Mar. 26
S ENATOR Daniel Tenroyan made it to the National Airport just in time to catch the direct flight to Portland. Usually he didn't run so late catching his weekend flight home to Maine, but things on the Hill, especially in the Intelligence Oversight Committee, had been hectic the past few weeks. For a while today it looked as if he wasn't going to make it back home this week at all.
He raced through the terminal, heading for his gate, overnight bag in one hand and boarding pass in the other. He only stopped when a knot of people blocked his progress.
Tenroyan tapped one of the people on the shoulder. "What's going on here?" The question carried none of the urgency, or irritation, that Tenroyan felt at the moment. He was too good a politician to ever express frustration in public.
The man Tenroyan questioned was balding and in his mid-fifties. He carried an overnight bag as well, apparently another one of the thousands of DC residents who evacuate the city during the weekends. The man, unlike Tenroyan, was making no effort to hide his frustration.
"Christ, I wish I knew what was going on." He waved toward the wall that seemed to be the focus of attention for the knot of people.
Tenroyan looked in that direction. The wall held a bank of monitors showing arrivals and departures. At least, they were supposed to show arrivals and departures. Tenroyan expected to see, maybe, a long list of cancellations or delays to explain the crowd . . .
That wasn't it.
Every monitor appeared, at first, to be down, showing only flickering snow. That was only an initial impression. On closer observation, the monitors were actually printing characters, but they scrolled by so fast there was little chance for the eye to decipher them. To Tenroyan, it looked as if the computer was printing random letters, numbers, and other characters too fast for the screen to properly display them.
Good Lord, Tenroyan thought, I hope this hasn’t affected the air traffic control computers . . .
As if to confirm the evil thought, a grave voice came over the PA. "Due to technical problems, all departures are being delayed sixty minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience—"
Sixty minutes? They were grounding everything for an hour, at least. . .
Christ, what about arrivals?
Gideon stared into D'Arcy's face, looking for the punchline. The room was silent for a long time.
Slowly, as if he misunderstood what D'Arcy had just said, he asked, "Are you saying that these programs developed some sort of intelligence?"
"Collectively, yes. It may not be on a par with the human brain, but it could easily be equivalent to some of the higher vertebrates. A true artificial intelligence. A quantum leap in the ability to process information. A system that could learn, deal with unforeseen circumstances. It also would be robust in the face of attack like no other software. A distributed, modular system— like the Internet—resilient in the face of hostile action, resistant to viruses, damage to servers . . . It could even reprogram its security to respond to threats its operators would never see. It would be the ultimate operating system."
"This thing is already out there?" Gideon suspected he already knew the answer.
D'Arcy confirmed it. "Millions of programs, Detective Malcolm, all running in parallel—"
Gideon nodded. "That's why you need the Daedalus. The lure part of the code has survived, hasn't it? You're trying to fetch all the program segments into the Daedalus. . ."
"The whole entity in one place, operating without the inherent delays across the web of the Internet. That will speed its overall reaction time by several thousands. It will also allow us to interact with it in a way we can't while it's spread across the whole Internet." D'Arcy stood and waved out toward the lab occupying the rest of the barn. "We're about to see the culmination of 'Project Aleph.' Dr. Zimmerman and her team have worked out a message that will activate the dormant lure program in these entities. As we've been talking, pieces of the entity, individual program cells, have been transferring themselves to our site.
The process has been going on for hours."
Gideon thought of the antenna array outside. If they were talking millions of programs, that had to be quite a bottleneck at the moment.
D'Arcy opened the door. "Let's go and join Dr. Zimmerman, shall we? Now that you know what's at stake."
Gideon got unsteadily to his feet, all the while thinking, The computational equivalent of the atomic bomb. . .
In one of the darker corners of The Zodiac, the man wearing the black Virgo T-shirt was cursing into his cell phone. He slammed it down on the table in front of him. "Jesus Fuck!"
The guy in a Gemini T-shirt walked over to his table. "What shit down your neck?"
"Cheap-fucking phone!" He let the phone lie there on the table. Then he reached in his pocket. "Cheap-fucking pager!" And slammed that down on the table next to the cell phone.
"Jesus, man, what's got into you?"
Virgo picked up the pager and tossed it over. Gemini caught it and fumbled with it a few times because the thing was still vibrating.
"Look at that shit—" Virgo complained.
Gemini looked at the pager, which was demanding attention. The little LCD screen, which should be displaying either a phone number or a text message, was showing a scrolling display that alternated black boxes and dashes. "Whoa, this thing's busted."
"Try to call the bastards who sold me the pager—" Virgo popped open the phone and the buzzing whine was audible. "Can't hang up, can't call anyone, just get the damn buzzing noise—"
"Ain't your phone, man." The pair looked over toward the bar, where the bartender was leaning over toward him. "Payphone here's been out for an hour. Nothing but buzzing, man."
Lawrence Fitzsimmons sat in a briefing room with a dozen others from the intelligence community. General Adrian Harris, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was there, as well as Colonel Gregory Mecham, released from the 'protective custody' that D'Arcy had placed him under.
They were all discovering how smoothly D'Arcy had slipped out from under them. The last sign they had of him was a CIA helicopter departing Andrews. As far as anyone could tell, Agent Christoffel was also on that flight.
There was no sign of where they had gone.
The whole situation left a bad taste in Fitzsimmons' mouth. D'Arcy had managed to create his own CIA within the CIA, within the Mid-East office. There were agents out there accountable only to this bureaucratic entity—it was called the Office of Terrorist Evaluation— that D'Arcy had created while he was in the Agency. It existed only to oversee the operation of the IUF, D'Arcy's creation.