Cyber Rogues (31 page)

“What a shame.”

At that moment Frank Wescott came over and drew Dyer to one side. Frank had been spending the last hour studying the entries in the log left by the night shift and interrogating data files at one of the consoles. He showed Dyer the log and pointed to a number of entries circled prominently in red ink.

“Try taking a closer look at some of the ordinary primary nodes,” he suggested. “Specifically these. They’re running job-assignment lists that ought to be too big for an ordinary primary to handle. And I think I know how they’re managing to do it.”

Dyer said nothing and took the log from Frank’s outstretched hand. He studied it intently and then examined the pages of summary data that Frank had appended to the back. Damn! he thought to himself. He still hadn’t gotten around to going through the night log as he’d intended. The day hadn’t really been a hectic one for most of the time and there was no excuse. Like weeds, bad habits were always ready to take root the moment you turned your eyes the other way.

The log told him that the drones had been inordinately active all through the night around a number of the primary nodes, of which there were hundreds scattered all over Janus. Today some of the primaries were doing things that only the super-primaries should be doing. Frank’s figures showed that the primaries that were starting to show symptoms of thinking they were super-primaries were the same ones that the drones had been fussing over. The implications didn’t need any spelling out.

“The system’s realized that its SPs are vulnerable,” Wescott said, nodding in response to Dyer’s incredulous stare. “So it’s doing something about it that we didn’t allow for. It’s upgrading its primaries and turning them into extra SPs. There’s more drone activity going on at other primaries right now. It’s building itself a whole new super-primary net. If it finishes the job, it’ll have a duplicate cortex that the substations can’t touch!”

Together they strode back to the dais and gave the information to Krantz. Then they ordered a remote inventory check to be made of the hardware items contained in a primary node selected from Frank’s list—Primary 46, which was located in one of the electronics assembly plants in Detroit, The results didn’t make complete sense. Performance parameters were showing up relating to unidentifiable pieces of hardware that weren’t supposed to be there. Dyer called the local Operations Supervisor in that sector of Detroit, who dispatched an engineer to conduct a visual inspection of Primary 46. In the Command Room, the scientists clustered round the Crystal Ball and watched the image of the engineer as he probed the intricate honeycomb of molecular-circuit cartridges, micromemories and programmable interconnect matrix blocks. There was a lot more of everything than there had been when Janus was constructed. Primary 46 had begun to turn into an SP.

And then a new series of reports began coming in from the monitor stations. The remnant SP-power that was still functioning had, in the last thirty minutes, increased significantly over the amount that had been measured when the SPs were shut down.
Spartacus
was not merely managing to hold on; it was rallying itself and growing stronger.

“Before we cut the SPs, it must already have figured out where it was vulnerable,” Dyer said to Krantz as they discussed developments. “It increased the capacity of some of the primaries and programmed them with the instructions necessary to construct more SPs by upgrading more primaries. That’s what they’re doing right now. It’s bootstrapping itself back. If my guess is right, every bit of information that was held in the SPs has already been distributed around the rest of the primary net and it’s being activated as fast as the new hardware comes on-line. It means that a full recovery is possible, even if we never switch the SPs back on again at all.”

“You mean that we cut its brain out too late,” Krantz said. “It had already told its nervous system how to grow its solar plexus into a new one.”

“Exactly.”

Krantz considered the statement silently for a while.

“So the only way we can retain overall control now is by cutting off the solar plant,” he commented. “It’s the only way to depower the whole primary-level net. The substations only control the SPs. That worries me, Ray. I never expected we would reach full shutdown of the primary net anywhere as soon as this. To be honest, I never expected that we would reach full primary shutdown at all.”

“There’s another side to it as well.” Frank Wescott, who was standing with them, pointed across at the summary data displays on the wall opposite. Two inquiring faces turned toward him. “
Spartacus
is in the process of coming up to full capacity even without the SPs,” he said. “That extra capability it’s adding won’t just go away. If we do add the SPs back in again, we’ll end up with a system that’s a lot bigger than the one we started out with. I’m not sure there’s any way of even guessing how fast a thing like that might evolve further. It could be capable of anything.”

“Obviously there can be no question of reactivating the SPs until we’ve got the situation fully under control again,” Krantz said.

“It’s not quite that simple, Mel,” Dyer said after a few seconds. “The System is growing itself all the time. It could end up bigger than it was originally, whether we switch the SPs back in or not. The whole primary net could turn itself into a complex of hundreds of SPs. The only way to stop that would be to knock out the whole net at source by cutting off the solar plant.”

“That’s what I was getting at,” Wescott told them.

The unvoiced fear that had been lurking at the back of Dyer’s mind came true less than thirty minutes later.

A gasp of disbelief caused him to turn around sharply toward where Frank was standing staring at one of the indicator screens. Frank’s voice was hoarse as he pointed at the data being displayed.

“SP Three status! It’s changed this second. SP Three has just reactivated!”

Dyer promptly called up the duty operator in Substation Three.

“What’s the status there?” he demanded curtly.

The operator waved his hands helplessly in front of his face. “The circuit breakers are still all out. We haven’t changed anything down here. We must have been bypassed.”

Ten minutes later SP Six reactivated itself.

“It’s bypassing all of them,” Krantz said. “We’re about to lose control completely. We have to shut the whole system down before things get out of hand. We have to do it now!”

“Why not let it ride,” Dyer said. “We’re supposed to be simulating a worldwide system. With a worldwide system you mightn’t have a single-source cutout to fall back on.”

“Then let’s make damn sure we’ve still got one here,” Krantz said shakily.

Dyer thought about it and agreed. Alerts went out to the backup stations to prepare for a total shutdown of
Spartacus.
Krantz made a general announcement to all sectors of Janus. He stated that there was no cause for alarm and that the action was being taken as a precaution, purely to test the solar-plant shutdown procedures.

Minutes later the supervisor in the control room of the solar plant in Detroit was on one of Dyer’s screens, waiting for the word to cut
Spartacus
’s
supply of lifeblood. The final reports from around the Command Floor confirmed that the backup stations around Janus were ready and standing by to take over.

“Okay,” Dyer said. “Carry on. Drop out the main power bus.”

“Main power bus down,” the supervisor replied. “It looks okay. All readings confirm zero load on the solar-plant grid.”

Dyer sat back and wiped his brow with the side of his hand. He turned and made a thumbs-up sign to Krantz.

“That’s it,” he said. “
Spartacus
is dead. The solar plant’s delivering zero.”

“Thank God for that,” Krantz replied in a relieved voice. “Maybe I was overreacting earlier, but I confess I was really worried for a while. I want to be absolutely certain nothing can interfere with that cutout before we even talk about switching anything on again. I’d like to call a meeting this evening to go through all the safety interlocks connected with the solar plant and double-check every one of them. Things today have moved too fast for comfort—my comfort anyway.”

“I think maybe you’re talking too soon,” Frank Wescott said, stepping forward from where he had been standing a few paces behind. He pointed up at the master data displays. At that same moment Dyer became aware of the disbelieving murmurs that were breaking out all around the Command Floor.

“
Spartacus
is still running!” Wescott said. “It might not be taking any power from the solar plant, but it looks like it doesn’t care about the solar plant anymore. The solar plant hasn’t made a damn bit of difference! The bloody thing is still as alive as it ever was. It’s getting power from somewhere else!”

Through the confused images that came pouring into his reeling brain, Dyer saw Kim sinking down onto a chair in front of one of the displays. Her fists were clenched white and her face was stretched into a mask of suddenly unconcealed hatred as she took in the story unfolding in front of her. For her, he realized, this had already become a personal war.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Dyer didn’t say much as he sat with Danny Cordelle, Fred Hayes and some of Cordelle’s Technical Auxiliary Group in the capsule that was carrying them through the Spindle from the Hub to Detroit. It was almost midnight.

With the benefit of hindsight, what had happened seemed so damned obvious and yet nowhere in the planning had they considered it a possibility. He felt angry and inwardly bitter, as if it reflected some failure by him personally. Dammit, he was in charge of the planning team; it was a personal failure.

“Hell, if there’s been a mistake don’t feel too bad about it,” Krantz had said. “We are supposed to be simulating what could have happened on Earth. How much more of a realistic simulation can you get?” But Dyer still felt bad about it.

Spartacus
had built a bridging connection across to the grid powered by the fusion plant. Once this fact had been deduced, Dyer remembered that during one of the planning meetings many months before, somebody had raised just this possibility. But neither
Spartacus
nor any of the systems controlled by
Spartacus
were powered from the fusion-plant grid; it fed only the backup systems and their control facilities.
Spartacus
couldn’t know about the backup supply grid. How could it bridge across to something it couldn’t know about? It couldn’t, the planners had decided. But somehow it had.

There were ten separate outlet circuits from the fusion plant, running out through Janus to feed the backup stations and the functions that they controlled. Every backup station had three of the ten feeder circuits routed through to it, which meant that each station could be switched out of one circuit and into another via switches located in the stations. This arrangement enabled, for example, all the backup stations to be distributed among nine of the feeder circuits while the tenth was isolated and shut down for repairs or maintenance.

In theory, therefore, it should still have been possible to close down
Spartacus.
What they needed to do was establish which feeder circuit
Spartacus
had hooked itself to, switch the backup stations into the others, and then close down the one that had been thus isolated. In practice doing so was far less simple. Nobody knew which circuit
Spartacus
was on. Come to that, nobody knew even where the bridge was physically. All they had deduced was that it had to exist somewhere because every other possibility had been eliminated.

Until more information was forthcoming, there was no way of depowering
Spartacus
short of shutting down the fusion plant itself, which would have entailed bringing every machine on Janus to a stop. That, of course, would have meant evacuating everybody. Although there had been more than a few surprises, not to say shocks, that day, agreement was soon reached that there were several alternatives to be explored before anything as drastic as evacuation needed to be considered. After all, nothing actually bad had happened in spite of everything. All
Spartacus
had done was succeed beyond all expectations in staying alive, which was nothing more than what they had programmed it to do.
Spartacus
hadn’t hurt anybody. In fact it was still doing a faultless job of operating and managing the systems that kept everybody alive and comfortable. The whole situation was as good an example as anybody could ask for of the dilemma that might have been faced one day on Earth by a society that had come to depend totally on its machines to preserve the way of life that it had chosen to live. No, evacuation was not called for; there was much more still to be learned from the Janus experiment.

In the meantime all ten SPs were running again,
Spartacus
was continuing in its self-appointed mission of upgrading primary nodes wholesale, and the elaborately worked-out plan of campaign had gone down the tubes. All the safeguards and precautions offered about as much protection as a solid-lead life jacket. The substations were designed to cut the SPs off from the solar-plant grid;
Spartacus
didn’t need the SPs, wasn’t running from the solar plant, and had bypassed the substations anyway. The fusion plant, once considered a guarantee that
Spartacus
could always be shut down even if it did bypass the substations, had now ironically turned out to be the very thing that was enabling
Spartacus
to avoid being shut down at all. The next line of defense, according to the plan, was Emergency Orange, which had also become a joke; the ISA ships could take out the whole solar plant now and it wouldn’t make an iota of difference.

Krantz had gone into conference with Linsay and his staff officers to review strategy in light of the new developments. Dyer had taken charge of a concerted effort to locate the bridge that
Spartacus
had constructed into the fusion grid. If they could break the bridge and isolate
Spartacus
from the fusion grid again, they might still be able to salvage the situation. After four hours of frantic exchanges between the scientists in the Command Room and engineers in practically every nook and cranny of Janus, they finally found what they were looking for. The bridge was in the very heart of Detroit, linking the main supply bus from the fusion plant into the solar-plant bus on the “downstream” side of the main solar bus cutout. Hence, when the main solar bus cutout had been operated in the attempt to de-power
Spartacus,
the bus that was supposed to have been isolated by the cutout had simply continued to draw power across the bridge from the fusion bus.