a mathematical telescope.'
'Interesting metaphor.'
'I think she meant that a computer can be used to see parts of the mathematical universe that would be otherwise undetectable.'
There was an abstract of the speech available, and Gideon opened it.
'Has the term 'virus' stopped being metaphorical?' Gideon read. 'With the increase in complexity of the
Internet, there has been an increase in the 'size' of the environment that can host uncontrolled entities. An average personal computer is packed with so much data that it is easy for foreign bits of code to hide undetected, and when it is connected to a network, the environment is vast. Security against computer viruses, because of their constant proliferation, has had to concentrate more and more on preventing the harmful effects of these viruses, and less on preventing the infection of the system. It is possible for a 'benign' virus, a virus that conducts no discernible attacks on its host, to propagate unimpeded. Evolution forces the eventual existence of such 'benign' viruses.'
Gideon looked at the abstract and thought about what the old guy had told them about Julia's work for the NSA. Information warfare he said, military-grade viruses . . .
'Maybe this is what she was really working on,' Gideon whispered. If it was, he wondered what it meant. Was she actually working on some terrorist weapon? Why?
On the other end of the secure phone line, Emmit D'Arcy said, 'What've you got?'
Colonel Mecham looked at the papers that'd just been delivered to his desk. 'We have a flag from the New York Public Library.'
'The library?'
'Mother filtered out a keyword search originating from one of the public terminals. About Zimmerman. There's a good chance it's Malcolm.' Mecham cleared his throat. 'I've ordered a team in to extract him.'
There was a pause on the other end of the line. Eventually D'Arcy said, 'Did I hear you right?'
'This was time sensitive. The search was in progress as Mother flagged it. I had to act immediately.'
'I see.' D'Arcy's voice became colder. 'When this is over, we'll have a talk about this, Colonel Mecham.'
I'm sure we will, Mecham thought. Probably in front of a Senate hearing. 'Yes, sir,' he hung up the phone and shook his head. He looked up at the man sitting across from him. 'There we go,' he said. 'That's my career.'
General Adrian Harris shook his head. 'It has to be done. This situation is too dangerous to have a loose cannon out there. He's served his purpose, drawing the IUF out of the woodwork.' The General stood up and said, 'Don't worry, son. You did your duty.'
Mecham watched as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs left his office. The door closed silently behind him.
He had been on the computer long enough for his eyes to begin to hurt. He leaned back and let his gaze drift.
'So,' Ruth asked, 'are you any closer?'
'I don't know.' He had spent hours scanning documents, some of them way beyond his level of understanding. He had even found a description of the program Julia left on her own PC. It was a 'game' called Life that seemed to have originated on a checkerboard. It was played on a grid, and each turn, every cell on the grid is turned on or off—lives or dies—based on the number of neighboring living cells. The rules of the game were simple, four lines long, but the complexities of the patterns involved could be astounding.
The game of life, in the decades since its invention, had spawned a whole mathematical discipline around the study of what was called cellular automata. There were people writing theses on the properties of various arrangement of cells—there were patterns that could 'move' across the grid, essentially unchanged in form, there were other patterns that could repeatedly build other patterns. All from a set of rules that could fit on a business card.
Why leave that behind? Gideon pictured the way the pattern had erupted across the screen of Julia's computer, and then dissolved off into nothing. Why?
He had found quite a few traces of Julia Zimmerman in articles across the Internet, all predating her work for the government. While there was no question about her mathematical genius, she more often gave talks about the Evolutionary Algorithm than the Theorems she was trying to solve with it. When he first heard about what the ET Lab was doing, he'd thought that the computers were simply a means to work on the problems she was trying to solve.
More and more, it seemed that those problems were an excuse to work with the computers, and the opportunities that they opened up for her.
Gideon looked up at one of the chandeliers above the main reading room, watching as the late morning sunlight caught it. 'You think she saw the computers as a window on that pure mathematical world she
believed in?'
'That's the way she described it to me, back when she was going to college.'
Gideon looked at the description of 'Life,' and thought of Julia's own computer. Why leave it there unless it was some sort of message? A message to the people she knew would be going over her hard drive with a fine- toothed comb.
''This is what I'm doing,'' Gideon said, still staring at the chandelier. ''This is what I'm interested in.''
'What?'
'That's what she was telling them. I have a feeling about this. I think she might have modified her thinking about computers, about the data inside them, at least.'
'What do you mean?'
'I don't think she sees them as a window on her mathematical world,' Gideon turned to face Ruth. Her face was half shadow and half rose from the ambient light reflecting off the woodwork. 'I think she might see them as that world.'
Ruth looked at him. 'Come on, that's crazy. Julie knew—even when she talked about God in the numbers— that we're only talking about mental constructs here. She knew that there could never be a 'real' physical representation of it. There's even a theorem that proves that we can't have a complete picture of the mathematical world.'
'What's that?'
'I don't quite understand it, but she told me about it the last time she talked to me about her work. It's called Godel's Incompleteness Theorem—I think it says that it's impossible to prove all true statements in a logical system, even if the system is consistent. Julia thought that it proved that we can only glimpse the perfection of the mathematical.'
Gideon nodded. 'What that means is that there's still room for faith in Julia's religion.'
Ruth stopped short. 'What do you mean?'
'What's faith, but the acceptance that some things are true despite lacking the proof for them? Despite the impossibility of proving them . . . When did Julia tell you about this?'
'Just before she went to MIT. What are you thinking?'
Gideon looked at the computer in front of him, then past it at the series of terminals ranged along the reading tables. It's gotten to the point where we see them, but we don't see them. The computer was ubiquitous, everywhere . . . and most of them were connected to each other. The space, the environment that existed inside those machines, was just on the edge of comprehension. It was very easy to think of it as another world, an alternate universe.
And if he was thinking along these lines with just a brush against Julia Zimmerman's ideas, what was the impact of the woman herself? Someone everyone acknowledged as a genius . . .
'She stopped talking to you about the time she started working at MIT, didn't she?'
Ruth nodded.
'You said she took a page from the Greeks . . .'
'Yes, the Pythagoreans. Where are you going with all this?'
Gideon pulled a paper out of his pocket. It was the copy of the campus paper he had taken from MIT. He showed it to Ruth, reading the caption, ''Assault on Mt. Riemann; Drs. Nolan and Zimmerman stand with their New Pythagorean Order—members of the ET Lab— show a printout of a possible proof,' have you heard that phrase before? 'New Pythagorean Order?''
Ruth shook her head.
