CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Stone Age Switch
Jenner stood outside the open door of the ASP’s office studying the floor. She shifted the optical memory disk to her left hand and worked it like a puzzle piece before knocking. She heard, “Welcome,” from around the corner, and she joined him at his desk.
“Good morning, Jenner. We haven’t talked for some time. I was so glad you called this morning. I read your most recent update on Monocle, and you seem to be making fine progress there.”
“Yes, Sir. I think the optical ASICs might give us the combination of speed and flexibility we need to survive the high-bandwidth snap. We can’t afford to let the spider go tunnel-vision in the end-game.”
“That’s right,” he said. “I think you’re moving in the right direction.”
“But that’s not the reason I wanted to see you this morning. I thought maybe … we could use your classified conference room.”
The Asp studied Jenner for a moment and then pushed a pair of buttons on his desk. “Of course. I don’t think we’ll be bothered there.” They entered and he ushered her to a seat near one end of the oval table while he secured the room.
When he returned to his seat across from her, she handed him a hand-written note she’d prepared earlier: “It is very important that there be no way that the central computer or any of its slaves can overhear or observe our conversation in any way.”
He looked up at her in a long exchange. He sat back, retrieved his favorite pipe from the rack, reached for the gold lighter in the little recess atop the rack, and proceeded with his lighting ceremony. Jenner sat in silence, studying the battle line between two adjacent pieces of swirling walnut in the tabletop. After a couple clouds of smoke began to obscure the air between them, he set the gold lighter on the table directly between himself and Jenner.
The Asp examined the computer terminal built into the table and then at the multi-media center at the end of the room and drew another puff. He worked a verbal menu and then said, “Shut down for maintenance.” Nothing seemed to happen except for a green light on the console turning red and then going out. He then said, “Bring the number one projector up.” The projector did not respond. He looked at Jenner with raised eyebrows.
“I know this seems a bit odd, but …”
“What I know, Jenner, is that I have come to trust your judgment completely. Now, what is this all about?”
Jenner then leveled with the Asp about her years of hacking and her abuse of the system-manager privilege he’d granted her and ended with, “I believe the computer has matured into a totally unforeseen mode of operation well beyond what anyone might have suspected. Dr. Planck was responsible for its evolution and was the only one who probably understood what was really happening.”
The Asp was now on his second bowl of tobacco as he sat back into cracked leather, giving the impression of being at ease. “And you think the computer had him murdered.”
Jenner looked surprised. “Well, yes … but how did you know I was going to say that?”
“You’re an engineer, Jenner. The logic of your tale led irreversibly to it.”
“You don’t believe it, do you.”
“Do you have any evidence?”
“Remember when Winger was selected as the new AD?”
“Yes, that was a surprise to me.”
“It was a surprise to most others, too. Bethe actually won the selection. The computer falsified the election results.”
“You know that for certain?” he said.
She handed him another piece of paper with the hand-written actual results of the selection committee. He looked at her with a grin and said, “Do you have any other notes?”
“No, Sir.”
He crumpled the two notes and set them ablaze in his ashtray. “What else do you know?”
“You remember when the technician was accidentally killed?”
“The computer was in on that, too?”
“I’m not totally sure on that one, but maybe,” Jenner said. “I studied the technicians journal, and found that he had discovered something extraordinary about that particular spider’s operation. He noted that it led off with its left foot instead of its right foot during the shakedown.”
The Asp raised one eyebrow as he reached for the lighter.
“Let me explain the significance of that.”
“Go ahead,” he said, replacing the lighter on the pipe rack.
“Under normal operating conditions, when a spider is at rest and begins to step forward, it will lead with its right front leg unless there is some reason to lead with the left leg. But when there’s no reason to choose one over the other, which is most of the time, it’ll default to leading off with the right leg. The spiders learn a command that sets the leg to right or left according to a parameter in the Targeting Authority data set. When that parameter is high, the leg is right; when it’s low, the leg is left. It could have been the opposite, but it had to be something.
“That’s the point where I got stuck because what precedes the Targeting Authority, the TA, data set is in the realm of the computer operation. I hacked at that for several evenings but just couldn’t trace the flow. It was just too complex. Dr. Planck had been using a consultant by the name of Dr. Susan Alvarez at the Institute for Research on Artificial Life. I figured she would have a much better shot at tracing the data flow even though she’s had little contact with the computer since Dr. Winger took over. I flew up to see her, and it didn’t take us long, working together, to figure out what was happening.
“Before profile data can be released to a field agent with a termination order, a screening committee reviews the case and any special circumstances surrounding the order. That must have happened because of some embarrassing hit or something,”
“Yes, I well remember that flap,” the Asp said. “A daughter of a network vice-president was terminated for alleged subversive associations. It looked like we might have to go to the mat with the network until the VP disappeared on a Canadian fishing trip.”
“Well, apparently, the Enforcement Committee Report grew out of that flap. That ECR has to be signed off by each of the eight committee-members before a termination can be authorized. And to insure total security and anonymity, none of the committee knows each other.”
“COPE’s Blind Man’s Bluff Principle strikes again,” the Asp said as he shook his head.
“Right, the COPE computer unilaterally manages the whole ECR procedure. And it’s done it faithfully—with some rare exceptions.”
“I see where this is going now, but go ahead and finish your story, Jenner"
“The Targeting Authority data set issues directly from the ECR. When the ECR takes its normal route through the labyrinth of the computer management system, the parameter ends up high. But when the computer bypasses the normal authorization procedures to insert its own target, the TA data set issues in identical form except for that single parameter, which ends up low. It’s really a weird glitch that I guess even the computer is unaware of.”
“So the bottom line is,” the Asp said as he leaned back into leather, “a spider leads with its right leg when on a normal mission, but leads with its left leg if it’s on one of those hopefully rare missions invented by the computer. The technician noticed it but didn’t understand its significance. Just a minor operational anomaly, except not so minor to him.”
A long silence passed as the Asp studied some curves in the pipe rack, and Jenner traced a swirl in the tabletop with her finger.
“Okay, Jenner. This is all totally incredible to me. What do you recommend we do?”
“I’ve given that a lot of thought.”
“I’m sure you have.”
“I consulted with Dr. Alvarez on this, too.”
“So she’s involved in this as deeply as you. I’m glad you kept her involvement remote.”
“We were able to reconstruct a lot of what Dr. Planck did, and it
’s really quite exciting. His idea was to allow the main computer to construct itself. His early attempts at artificial life were crude compared to what he finally came up with that worked so well. He finally modeled the computer after the evolution of humans, but with a little help. You probably remember from biology that there are twenty amino acids that are the basic structure of human life. Genes assemble these amino acids into thousands of different proteins. Dr. Planck came up with seven surams, or surrogate aminos. These were blocks of artificial life, which were hybrids of traditional computer code with imbedded neural-network control functions.
“We don’t totally understand how they worked, but the key was this code that was in each suram. He bathed his baby with billions of the surams. Now comes the part that’s a mystery to me. In a human, the amino acids are assembled into proteins according to the instructions in the gene, which is a small part of each chromosome. Each gene expresses a different protein, and it’s the genes that have evolved over the eons to form humans or blue jays or whatever.
“Dr. Planck allowed the intra-suram codes to mutate and replaced natural selection with a rule-based selection process that controlled the mutations. And he made the rules. The bottom line was that the surams evolved into units that kept getting better adapted to the computer’s environment according to the figures-of-merit, his rules. Dr. Planck had put them into a part of each code that was locked and not subject to any change, sort of like a stem cell. He was trying to evolve a set of operating instructions for the neural-network coprocessor that would allow it to work very efficiently—and very smart.”
The Asp studied a cloud of smoke as he listened to Jenner. “I tried to read each of his monthly reports,” he said. “He referred to ‘evolution’ of the coprocessor control-system, which I believe is resident in the main computer. I never knew exactly what he meant by that.”
“What he was getting at,” Jenner said, “is that the main computer is what tells the neural network what to do and how to do it. The main computer can’t do the complex processing that the neural net coprocessor does, but it does tell the coprocessor how many levels to use, where to distribute the signals, and exactly what weighting factor to use for each of the trillions of neural connections. There’s no question that the main computer is the real brain behind the brain.”
“What would happen if we simply shut down the coprocessor neural net?”
“That would make a real change in the computer’s mental state. Its highest-level functions are shared somehow with the neural net processing, but it’s more complicated than that. It’s not like a part of the human brain because the brain is hardwired with the inter-neuron connections. In this case, the main computer is far more than just an input/output device. It effectively tells the coprocessor what to think and, to a large extent, how to think it. Somehow, the emotions it has developed are shared between the two parts of this thing. I really don’t understand the interaction very well.”
“But it’s probably safe to say,” the Asp said, leaning back and speaking to a swirl of walnut, “that shutting down the coprocessor would have an effect on COPE operations.”
“I think it would be dramatic. All of the computer’s operations have become totally integrated with that coprocessor. And it’s more than just dependence. It’s like … like some kind of relationship.”
The Asp looked directly at Jenner while he silently recharged his pipe. “This is almost too much for an old timer like me to even think about. I thought I was pretty flexible in my thinking until about a half-hour ago. But this …” He shook his head as he replaced the gold lighter on the table.
“It’s pretty hard for me to grasp, too. But I’m forced to accept it.”
“Okay, Jenner, get on with your recommendation.”
“We discovered the part of each suram that was locked out of the intra-suram mutation sequences. It turned out to be a simple set of instructions with read and write statements.”
The Asp pointed the stem of his pipe at Jenner as he leaned forward. “A back door,” he said. “Planck left himself a back door.”
“That’s exactly right,” Jenner said. “He figured that he might have to find all those mutant codes some day, and maybe modify them for some reason, so he gave himself access to them, no matter where they went or how the code structure around them had changed. It’s like a receptor molecule on a protein.”
“Yes,” said the Asp. “But maybe even more than that since it contains built-in input and output ports. In cell biology, I believe one of the biggest challenges is to figure out how to get the modified genes into the nuclear DNA. Planck made that easy.”
“Correction, sir. Easier. I don’t think Dr. Planck appreciated just how far afield these little critters were going to get.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember I said the computer falsified all those purchase orders for networks and buffers? Well, I traced some of its excursions over a few of its satellite nets. It either knows about the back door or is just playing it very safe because I found critical packages of code all over the place, and not just at COPE facilities.”
“What kind of places?”
“For example, the World Bank in Sao Palo, TRW in Jakarta, GE in Dublin, Mitsubishi in Baghdad, Cairo University—”
“And what is the function of these disbursed files?”
“Well, I’m not sure.”
“Spare parts?”
“Yes,” she said quickly.
“An army is only as good as its inventory of replacement parts.”
“That might be a good analogy.”
“But an army also needs a supply line to get the parts to where they’re needed.”
“Nearly all of the networks have multiple redundancies. And most are not dedicated to COPE so you can’t take out the networks without severe communication disruptions worldwide.”
“Can you find all the storage depots?”
“That’s the good news. I don’t think we need to find every one. We can equip the network managers here with the ability to look for those back doors as they come in.”
“But aren’t the network managers under the control of the main computer?”
“They were. I built a network manager emulator and tested it, and I think it’s transparent. At the appropriate time, I can physically cable around the old network manager with a switching device and insert the emulator so the computer won’t know about the change we’ve made.”
“I see,” said the Asp, “sort of like a switch to switch out the returning surams right under the computer’s nose.”
“That’s right. If it’s done properly, the computer will never know. This machine may be clever, but it lacks arms and legs.”
“How about …”
“ … spiders?”
The Asp nodded thru a thin cloud.
“Can we count on security to keep them out?”
He nodded again, this time with a grin. “Now tell me about your virus.”
“How did you know we’d written a virus?”
“Not only have you written a virus, but you’ve tested it somehow, too.”
“I guess I’m as transparent as my net-manager emulator.”
“Not transparent, Jenner, just thorough.”
“We’ve written a virus that is actually a time bomb. When it is fully deployed, it will go off and attack suddenly. We can’t afford a gradual attack because the computer might be able then to create an antigen. The virus will disable only those surams that mutated after January 12, 2046. That’s six months before Dr. Planck’s death. I figured his plan to do something like that is what got him murdered. This time bomb will actually infect all surams because they all have their back doors open. The ones whose last mutation was before January 12, 2046 will be spared, but no further mutations will be allowed after that. It’s the closest I could get to returning the computer to some previous state.”
“Is that goin
g to be good enough?”
“That’s a tough question. If you go back too far, there’s no telling how degraded the computer’s performance will be. At some point before Dr. Planck’s death, the computer’s mutation emphasis shifted from satisfying Dr. Planck’s imbedded success criteria to satisfying its own. That was the critical time. It’s evolution after that probably didn’t benefit COPE very much.”
“You are in danger, yourself, now. What if—”
“I’ve taken some personal precautions. And there’s this.”
Jenner laid an optical disk on the tabletop with a snap.