Zimmerman's Algorithm

3.05 Fri. Mar. 26

THERE was a dark corner of the barn, by the ersatz offices. It was walled off completely, for privacy. Julia took them inside, leaving Mike out on the floor of the "lab" with the other computer people. She shut the door on the activity outside, and the room became disturbingly silent. Gideon felt as if they were completely alone with Julia Zimmerman.

He couldn't help staring at the woman. There was only the barest hint that there was anything extraordinary about her—and it might only have been there because Gideon expected it, and was looking for it. Her posture broadcast confidence, perhaps—as Dr. Nolan would have said—arrogance. Her eyes were deep and powerful, and seemed to look through him, or into him.

Julia turned on a fluorescent that flickered a half-dozen times before it came on fully.

She strode through the small cramped room, around the desk, and said, "I'm glad you're all right, Ruth."

"Julie—" Ruth began.

"No thanks to the bastards you work for," Gideon blurted. He was saying it before he even realized the anger that he was holding back.

Ruth reached for his arm, "Gideon, wait a m—"

Gideon shook off her arm and took a limping step forward. "You do work for them, don't you? Or is it the other way around?"

"You don't know what's going on here, Detective Malcolm," Julia said. Her voice was much colder than the one she had used to address Ruth.

"I don't?" Gideon said. He took another step and leaned forward, his hands on the edge of the desk. He gripped the edge until the healing muscles in his arm vibrated. "You and Emmit D'Arcy came to some sort of agreement to continue your 'work' outside of the NSA's control. Both of you staged your defection to a phantom terrorist group, and even went so far as to contract the theft of a Daedalus supercomputer. Have I got the gist?"

"Please," Ruth said. "Let her explain what's happening." If anything, it was Ruth who seemed to be hurt by Gideon's tirade. Julia simply watched him, unmoved.

"If I have that much right—" Gideon glared at the woman. React, damn you. "Those thieves killed a highway patrolman, you realize that, don't you? In fact, they botched the whole job—bad enough that the CIA managed to set a trap with the Daedalus. But D'Arcy tipped you off, didn't he?"

"I'm sorry that you and your brother—" Julia began.

"You are? Are you sorry about Mr. Jones and Mr. Williams? They might have been criminal scum, but the fact that you involved them meant they had to die. Your pet terrorist, Volynskji, put a bullet into Morris Kendal because he was just a little too close to figuring out D'Arcy was behind this. Are you sorry about him? Then there're a half-dozen dead Israelis in New Jersey-----"

Julia nodded and said quietly, "Much of this has been unfortunate."

"Good Lord, do you understand that these bastards almost killed your sister—"

"They panicked," Julia said. "After the travesty with the Israelis, I made them understand that they had to bring the two of you here, in one piece."

"Do you know how many people have died because of this?"

Julia sat down, behind the desk. "I am not in control of these people, Detective Malcolm."

"Bullshit!"

"Gideon, please." Ruth sounded shocked. She pulled at his arm trying to get him back into a seat.

"You have these people wrapped around your finger. You dictated that we be brought into audience with you, and here we damn well are—snatched from out of the NSA's own hands."

"You have no idea what that required," Julia said.

"They can't have their little project without you, can they? You seem to have a powerful negotiating position."

Julia shook her head. "D'Arcy won't allow a threat to himself or the IUF—"

"So the blood is on his hands, not yours?"

"You don't know what Aleph means, do you?" Julia looked at Ruth and the coolness leaked out of her face. "I couldn't not take the opportunity D'Arcy offered me."

"Whatever the cost?"

"I brought you here to explain." She was still talking to Ruth.

"Explain why my brother died." The words hung in the air as silence claimed them again. Julia still looked at Ruth as if she was searching for something, support, justification, rationalization. Gideon turned around and looked at Ruth himself. Ruth's eyes were shiny, and she was wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand.

Gideon felt spent, as if venting his anger had withdrawn all solid support from inside him. He pushed away from Julia's desk and half-collapsed into a chair next to Ruth.

"Julie," Ruth said. "What's going on here? Why's this happening?"

Julia Zimmerman glanced at Gideon and paused, as if waiting for a continuation of his tirade. "You didn't need to involve yourself so deeply. Eventually you would have known. Everyone would have known, soon enough."

"What is Aleph?" Gideon asked.

Julia smiled slightly. "You already know." She looked up, toward the louvered window, and at first Gideon thought she might be looking at the Daedalus. But her eyes were unfocused and blank, as if she was looking beyond the Daedalus, at something only she could see. "'Why,' is a good question. 'Why' is exactly what we're searching for here."

"Why what?" Gideon asked.

"Why is this world, on its face, filled with such illogic, such randomness, such pain. The human mind is such a faulty mechanism, capable of intolerance, brutality, stupidity, evil. . . And yet, and yet. . ." She closed her eyes. "I cannot believe that we, a race of beings of brutal stupidity, a race of Pol Pots, Charlie Mansons, and," she paused a moment, "Emmit D'Arcys—a race of evil high and low—could have 'invented' the beauty of the mathematical world."

To Gideon, it appeared as if she had fallen into that world. The hardness was gone from her expression, replaced with something distant and serene. "How can we say that Newton invented the calculus when it was his study of the physical world that led him to discover it? How can we say that some ancient invented '1 + 1 =2'? Those in my discipline keep going further and further afield, trying to 'invent' new, esoteric forms of mathematics, and they always find to their chagrin that eventually their math describes some aspect of the world, be it the quantum spaces inside an atom, or the growth of a species, or the deformation of a polymer under stress."

"You see it as a form of higher reality—" Gideon said. But Julia opened her eyes and shook her head slowly, as if trying to be kind in contradicting a child's view of the world.

"It is reality," she said. "The closest that we can come to seeing how things really are."

Gideon opened his mouth, but he couldn't say anything.

"It's obvious," Julia said. "Once you start to see. The way that every form of the discipline, from number theory to topology, will find its manifestation in the world we experience. The way the world we see informs the discipline, from chaos theory to the evolutionary algorithm—" Julia tapped on the desk. "If you believe in physics, you believe that this desk is simply a physical form of energy left over from the creation of the universe.

"So can't you see that this universe is an objectified form of a mathematical object?"

"Is that what the New Pythagoreans are about?" Gideon asked.

"They are Mr. Gribaldi's invention. They understand, but only in a rhetorical fashion. Their beliefs are ones of aesthetics . . . There are very few who even claim that the evolutionary algorithm is the same as evolution, or that a computer program that shows all the functions of biology is, by definition, biological."

"That's what you were doing at MIT, wasn't it? Applying the evolutionary algorithm to computer viruses."

"An oversimplification. We were working on a new biology. At MIT, working within a closed environment of our private computer network, we generated programs that were more complex than any mere virus . . ."

Ruth spoke up. "All sorts of people work on Artificial Life. There're conventions for it. Why was this a secret? Why destroy all the research you left at MIT."

Gideon felt as if he finally understood. He could feel some of the anger return. "A private, isolated environment wasn't big enough, was it?"

"No," Julia said, "it wasn't."

"You let these things out into the world," Gideon said. "Damn the consequences. So what if Wall Street collapses—"

"These were not destructive viruses." Julia frowned.

Ruth sounded appalled. "You were letting these things go?"

"To generate what we wanted required the widest, most diverse, and challenging environment that was available."

"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."

"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."