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Gideon felt spent, as if venting his anger had withdrawn all solid support from inside him.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.'
