'How many people have you killed to keep this private enterprise of yours a secret?'
D'Arcy shook his head. 'Your problem, Detective Malcolm, is that you have no perspective.'
Gideon stood up. 'How can you have the gall—'
'You rushed in,' D'Arcy said. 'Starting with the unfortunate incident with your brother, you've gone charging ahead with little thought to what might be involved or what the consequences are. For a time you were a useful distraction.'
'You Machiavellian— What was the original plan? Have them finish this project and then storm the place? Everyone conveniently dies in the assault, and no one to say this wasn't a terrorist operation.'
'It's too bad you weren't part of the community,' D'Arcy said. 'You'd have been an asset.'
'Things have gone wrong—haven't they? That's why you're here, isn't it? For all the shooting, you couldn't keep this thing under wraps, could you?'
D'Arcy looked at the glasses in his hands, and shook his head as he replaced them. 'Shall we forget the 'original plan,' whatever that was? The operation is nearly complete, and you aren't outside, leading anyone here.'
'What are you going to do with us?' Gideon asked. 'Kill us like you did Kendal?'
'Shall we dispense with the drama? I am here to develop an asset. Once that asset is developed, everything else will be irrelevant.' D'Arcy looked at Gideon, and Gideon thought he could see a fragment of the same fanatic glint in D'Arcy's eye that he'd seen in Julia's. 'After tonight what you do or say won't matter to me.'
There was something ominous in that statement. Something final about it that frightened Gideon. 'What is it?' he asked. 'What are you doing here? The IUF is your entity, isn't it? And you've sacrificed it and God knows how many people, for what? Some super computer virus?'
'You'll see yourself. Dr. Zimmerman wants you on the floor when everything comes together—'
'It is a virus, isn't it? The ET Lab's 'project' was free to evolve on the Internet for years. It produced something. Something adaptable, undetectable, a perfect computer weapon—'
D'Arcy was shaking his head. 'You're better than I gave you credit for. So close.'
'The computational equivalent of the atomic bomb,' Gideon finished.
'So close.' D'Arcy steepled his fingers. 'So far.' He gestured across the desk. 'Take your seat and I'll tell you what Aleph is, why I had to act.'
Gideon looked at D'Arcy and, slowly, sat down.
'This is already out there,' D'Arcy explained. 'Understand that above all. Anyone with the technology can summon it from the Internet now, like a genie. We have to be first, or we'll suffer a nearly insurmountable technical disadvantage. God help us if the Chinese, or even the European Community, gets a hold of this.'
'Why do you need a Daedalus?'
'We need all of it. It's possible to run black ops within Mother, the NSA's Daedalus, but this, Aleph, requires all the processing capacity of the machine, all at once. We cannot run this on any government machine in secret.' He pushed his glasses up so he could rub the bridge of his nose again. 'You are close, Gideon. Close enough that we had to bring you here. You just haven't assembled the pieces you have.
'Zimmerman's experiment at MIT, the original entities they released to evolve—they all had something in common. There was a core of programming that would never be touched by the random splicing of the evolutionary algorithm. This block of code remained constant through the generations of these programs—or was supposed to. The code handled two instructions, a lure and a destruct. The lure was a homing signal of sorts, a command to send the program to a specific computer for study. The destruct was obviously for cases where the programs got out of hand.'
'So why didn't Zimmerman destroy the programs then, when she wiped the research at the ET lab?' 'You don't understand,' D'Arcy said. 'She did.' 'What happened? Why are they still out there?' 'There were mutations,' D'Arcy said. 'Imperfect communications, truncated code, a byte in the wrong place. Whatever happened, there were a few viable viruses from the project that had this common code segment corrupted. The 'destruct' failed to be instantaneous. There was a time delay— By accident, Zimmerman's biosphere developed aging and natural death. Last November, Julia was engaged in a virus survey for the NSA, seeing what was out there, and she discovered one of her programs. She wrote a memo that reached me, I understood the implications . . .'
'What implications?'
'The first was that a generation for these programs is on the order of microseconds. That means several trillion generations since they left MIT. The development of a natural death combined with the designed sexual reproduction and predation to accelerate the evolutionary process even more. The only limit these things had was the constraints on their environment.'
'There was another implication?'
'The virus Dr. Zimmerman discovered was part of a distributed system.'
'What?'
'It was part of a larger organism. Somehow, early on, either two programs figured out how to work together, or one program figured how to divide itself over more than one system. There are obvious survival benefits, parts can be redundant, and not be vulnerable to events on a single system. The multipart entity is less vulnerable to the inherited 'natural death,' though it, too, will die eventually. Most important, its means of reproduction is more reliable. It now can exchange whole 'programs' as a means of reproduction, exchanging functional units rather than small pieces of code.'
Gideon felt a chill as D'Arcy described it. He shook his head. 'You're describing—'
'The jump from single-cell to multicellular life.' D'Arcy nodded. 'I had my share of biology at the university. When I saw Dr. Zimmerman's memo, I understood exactly what had happened.'
D'Arcy took his glasses off and pointed them at Gideon. 'There are entities out there now, whose parts are small programs, few more than a megabyte in size, distributed throughout the Internet. These entities are made of millions of such programs.'
D'Arcy paused to let that sink in before he said, 'These entities, more than likely, are conscious, thinking beings.'
3.06 Fri. Mar. 26
S ENATOR Daniel Tenroyan made it to the National Airport just in time to catch the direct flight to Portland. Usually he didn't run so late catching his weekend flight home to Maine, but things on the Hill, especially in the Intelligence Oversight Committee, had been hectic the past few weeks. For a while today it looked as if he wasn't going to make it back home this week at all.
He raced through the terminal, heading for his gate, overnight bag in one hand and boarding pass in the other. He only stopped when a knot of people blocked his progress.
Tenroyan tapped one of the people on the shoulder. 'What's going on here?' The question carried none of the urgency, or irritation, that Tenroyan felt at the moment. He was too good a politician to ever express frustration in public.
The man Tenroyan questioned was balding and in his mid-fifties. He carried an overnight bag as well, apparently another one of the thousands of DC residents who evacuate the city during the weekends. The man, unlike Tenroyan, was making no effort to hide his frustration.
'Christ, I wish I knew what was going on.' He waved toward the wall that seemed to be the focus of attention for the knot of people.
Tenroyan looked in that direction. The wall held a bank of monitors showing arrivals and departures. At least, they were supposed to show arrivals and departures. Tenroyan expected to see, maybe, a long list of cancellations or delays to explain the crowd . . .
That wasn't it.
Every monitor appeared, at first, to be down, showing only flickering snow. That was only an initial impression. On closer observation, the monitors were actually printing characters, but they scrolled by so fast there was little chance for the eye to decipher them. To Tenroyan, it looked as if the computer was printing random
