Cyber Rogues (28 page)

Laura watched him in despair as he keyed in his order for a drink. He glanced at her glass and added a request for another without asking.

“So,” she said after a few seconds. “I gather it’s all going okay. Kim said everything’s going as planned.”

“Kim? I didn’t see her around,” Dyer said, surprised.

“We were talking over lunch. She went back early to tidy up a few things.” Laura studied his face for a moment as if searching for some reaction, then asked, “Why’s she here?”

Dyer shrugged in a way that he hoped was nonchalant. “She’s part of the team. The team’s here. Funny question. Why ask that?”

“I’m not sure really . . .” Laura’s voice had taken on a faraway note. “Did you know her first husband was killed?”

“What?” Dyer’s surprise was genuine.

“Four years ago. It happened in a midair collision somewhere over Europe. They finally traced it back to a programming error in the computers that hadn’t been picked up.”

“No, I didn’t know about that.” Dyer spread his hands in a sympathetic gesture. “That’s tough. I guess there’s nothing that’ll stop things like that happening ever. No . . . I really didn’t know about that.”

“That’s why she’s hated computers ever since,” Laura told him. She caught his look of disbelief and nodded to confirm the point. “She hates them . . . everything to do with them. I guess it must have affected her deeply. I don’t know how; you’re the shrink. But this whole business here is terrifying her. That’s why I wondered why she came.”

Dyer gave Laura a long and curious look. “Did you go into all that when you were talking just now?” he asked.

Laura shook her head. “Well, no. We’ve done a lot of talking on and off ever since we were back at Vokes. You’d be surprised what women get into when they start talking.”

The drinks arrived and Dyer took them out of the dispenser. Laura cocked her head to one side as she watched and then asked: “Want to know why I think she’s here?”

“Why?”

“Because you’re here.”

Somehow the statement didn’t take him by surprise. He kept his eyes on the glass as he passed it across and offered the automatic reply: “You’re crazy.”

“Come on, Ray. I’ve got eyes and ears. I’ve been around. I didn’t read my first schoolgirl romance yesterday. She didn’t have to come to Janus. She could have stayed on at CUNY or taken another job anywhere.”

Dyer looked up and their eyes met. In the split second that followed he saw that there would be no point in launching into one of those set-piece ritual dialogues that people employed to avoid coming to the point. Inside he knew; Laura knew that he knew; he knew that Laura knew and she knew and so on to the umpteenth iteration. He threw up his bands and slumped back in his chair.

“Okay, so maybe you’re right. There’s nothing I can do about it. I just run a computer team.” He wondered suddenly how much else Laura knew about Kim that he didn’t. To test her out, he added, “Anyhow she’s married so I wouldn’t imagine she’s got any big ideas about anything leading anywhere.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if she wasn’t, actually,” Laura replied, “I’ve got a feeling that that Tony guy may have taken off. I don’t know . . . a couple of things she said made me wonder about it. Anyhow, that’s not my business.”

Dyer made a steeple out of his fingers and brought it to his chin.

“What about us?” he asked. “Do you think she’s figured how it all stands?”

“Maybe,” Laura said. “She seems to probe a lot. I did my best to stay off it.”

“That’s good anyhow,” Dyer answered. “I thought maybe you’d have been sending smoke signals to assert your claim. That’s nice. If you were a guy I’d have to call you gallant.”

“It’s not so much that.” Laura thought for a second and sighed. “It’s . . . I don’t know really . . . I guess maybe I feel kind of sorry for her in a way.”

“For Kim? She’s as hard as nails. As soon as she knows the score she’ll straighten herself out okay. No problem.” Even as he spoke Dyer was aware of a twinge of a nagging doubt inside. Laura pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows dubiously.

“Outside maybe, but not inside.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No I’m not. That’s why she drives herself so hard at everything. She has to keep proving things to herself all the time. She makes herself do things to prove she can do it, except she never believes it and has to take on something bigger next. That’s why she works with computers even though she hates them. She has to prove she can beat it. She can’t just walk away.”

Dyer sipped his drink and thought about what Laura had said. If she was right then perhaps he should talk quietly to the Medical Officer about it. Janus was no place for somebody to be working off personal hang-ups. He looked up as the whole situation suddenly presented itself in a different perspective.

“Then maybe you’re wrong about this other business,” he said. “If she needs to know that she can beat a computer, wouldn’t that give her a reason for wanting to come here? If she is bothered by the whole thing, then maybe that adds up to an even bigger reason. I knew a guy in California once who climbed mountains because he had a fear of heights. It could be the same kind of thing.”

Laura reflected on the suggestion.

“If it turns out you’re right, I’ll go back to reading schoolgirl romances,” she conceded.

At that moment Hayes, Wescott and Chris appeared in the doorway. They scanned the bar then walked over to where Dyer and Laura were sitting.

“We’ve nailed it,” Hayes announced without preamble. “The solution was quite neat, There was no way the System could back up through the branching structures so it correlated the shutdown frequency with the periods logged against the request flags in the scheduler and pinpointed the routine for that. Then it picked the routine up at the entry point and created five million blocks of code analyzing it forward. After that it simply erased its initiation linkage.”

“What did all that mean?” Laura asked in bewilderment.

“It means it’s time to get back to work,” Dyer said. “Drink up and let’s go.”

The main supply to SP Three was routed through a switch controlled by a small computer. The next step was to interrupt the supply by running a simple program to make and break the circuit continuously, one hundred times per second.
Spartacus
responded initially by switching in a secondary supply line to SP Three, which was what any conventionally programmed system would have been designed to do. Unlike a conventional system, however,
Spartacus
began reacting also to the implication that whatever was affecting its primary supply could conceivably affect its secondary too; as the tests continued, the scientists observed a steady increase in activity within the system, which they interpreted as
Spartacus
exploring systematically through its circuits toward the source of its problem. When the data produced up to that point had been collected, the scientists escalated the game by interrupting both the primary and secondary lines randomly and sometimes simultaneously. Now
Spartacus
would know that no amount of juggling with switch points could guarantee the security of SP Three.

Toward the end of the day the switching computer suddenly became ineffective. Power went into it and power came out of it to feed the SP and nothing was happening inside to cause any interruption.
Spartacus
had tracked down the point at which the break was occurring, determined that it was being caused by something that was within its ability to control, and had proceeded to reprogram the switching computer. To all intents and purposes the switch was now reduced to a solid wire connection.

The next day the scientists disconnected the switching computer from the
Spartacus
net and ran it as a stand-alone device that the system was unable to access.
Spartacus
began creating alternative paths through other sections of the matrix. Moves and countermoves followed one another in rapid succession as Hayes’s group plotted the bypasses and devised ever more elaborate ways of disrupting them. By the end of the day’s session Hayes was ready to admit that, as had been expected, he was being pushed to the limit.

“This could go on forever,” he said at the impromptu conference held in the middle of the Command Floor to recap on the day’s events. “Every time it figures out a new path, it takes us twice as long to crack as the one before. I’m not saying we could never get there. It’s just that the law of diminishing returns says that it won’t make sense to take this much further. We’re already at the point where if this was as big as TITAN we’d need years to figure out how to shut the damn thing down, and in that time it could do anything it wanted. Tomorrow we’ll have to use the substations.”

As a quick check, just to make sure that everything was still under control, the duty operator in the SP Three substation was instructed to throw the switch that would disconnect the whole power-bus into the SP. There was no hitch. Super-Primary Three promptly shut down and died without a murmur.

As everybody was leaving, a news reporter who had been following the proceedings throughout stopped Dyer at the door to ask a question he had been puzzling over.

“I’ve followed what’s been going on but I’m not sure I see the point of it,” he said. “You seem to have been training
Spartacus
to defend itself. Why do that? If the substation can knock it out anyway, what would be the problem in having a system like
Spartacus
on Earth? If you discovered that it had evolved itself some kind of survival drive and you hit it right up front with manual substations in a situation where it hadn’t had the training, then that’d be the end of it, surely.”

“Not when you think about it,” Dyer told him. “What we’ve really been doing these last three days has been simulating power faults, just to see how it reacts. There are still a lot of places on Earth where power can sometimes be unreliable. Now suppose that a system on Earth had reacted to them in the same way that
Spartacus
has. You could find that it had trained
itself
even before you discover that it’s developed a survival drive at all. So by the time you decide that you’d like to shut it down, it’s already gone a long way along the line to figuring out how to stop your doing it. That could be a problem.”

“So what happens next?” the reporter asked.

“Tomorrow we do what you said—we hit it with the substations at several SPs. Who knows, you could be right. With luck it won’t be able to figure out a way around those.”

“Is it possible that it could?” The reporter sounded skeptical.

Dyer shrugged. “
Spartacus
is a high-power learning machine and also very logical,” he replied. “It ought to be able to deduce that whatever can affect its supply lines in the way we’ve been messing with them could surely take them all down together. That should make it very uncomfortable inside.”

That night Chris, Ron and Frank went off to try low-g diving at the Hub pool, a group of scientists decided to pit their skills against the Coriolis force by visiting the golf course at the Downtown end of Rocky Valley, and Dyer and Laura went to see a show. Cordelle was in command of the skeleton crew that remained on duty in the Command Room through the night. At intervals reports came in of unusually high amounts of drone activity in various parts of Janus.

Cordelle duly noted the details in the log that would be available for the scientists to examine when they returned the following morning.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The schedule next morning called for a further escalation in aggression and provocation. The manually operated circuit breakers in the substation, through which all power to SP Three was routed, were opened and left open. The game thus progressed beyond the point of merely simulating intermittent supply faults; now the scientists were conveying to
Spartacus
in no uncertain terms that a whole vital node of its system had been totally and permanently chopped out—a direct challenge to it to try and do something to fix the situation. Then the scientists settled back to spend the rest of the day waiting for some kind of reaction. The day did not, therefore, promise to be a busy one and only a skeleton crew remained on duty in the Command Room while others continued with the analysis of the data obtained previously or drifted away to occupy themselves elsewhere around Janus.

Several of them, notably Frank Wescott and Melvin Krantz, had expressed strongly the opinion that there was no way in which
Spartacus
could react, and that the whole experiment would probably end right there. After all, they argued, there were only two possible approaches that
Spartacus
could adopt in endeavoring to restore the SP: it could either try getting inside the substation to close the circuit there, or it could use its drones to manufacture a bypass around the substation completely.

The first possibility stood little chance of success since every substation on Janus was permanently guarded by a platoon under standing orders to neutralize on sight any drone attempting to enter a predefined kill-zone. The soldiers would accomplish this by jamming the control beams used for guidance or, if that means was rendered ineffective for any reason, by bringing to bear some of the selection of more drastic measures which they had at their disposal.

The second alternative would require a bypass to connect from some point on the solar-plant power grid upstream of the substation to some point inside the SP itself. There had been some disagreement among the planners over this point. Some of them had been worried that the possibility should be allowed to exist for the substations to be bypassed at all; it could have been eliminated quite simply by declaring the SPs themselves kill-zones for drones. Others had pointed out that keeping the drones out of the SPs would not be practical because they would have to go in there to perform maintenance and carry out repairs. And in any case, Janus was supposed to simulate future Earth and who could imagine that such tasks wouldn’t be performed by drones or something equivalent to them as standard practice in times to come?

In the end the latter view had prevailed. If the drones did succeed in bypassing any of the substations by picking up power upstream on the solar-plant side, then the stream that fed all the substations could always be dammed by shutting down the solar plant itself, which could be done either locally inside its control room in Detroit, or from the Command Room in Downtown. And if that dam was somehow bypassed, the lake that fed the stream could be dried up completely by putting the solar plant out of action, if necessary by taking out its receivers with ISA missiles.