had a delayed reaction here. It's been known to happen.'
'Yeah, hallucinogens are like that. D‚j… vu experiences are pretty common.'
'I've known some people who claim to be revisited by their Snarks every odd month or so. It's like an imprinting process. An id‚e fixe, if you'll forgive another Gallicism.'
I scratched my face, shaking my head. 'But it seemed so real.'
'It can be that, m'lad.'
'Yeah. One thing, though.'
'Hm?'
'You said the thing I saw wasn't a Boojum.'
'Sounded like a Snark to me.'
'What would've happened if I had seen a Boojum?'
'You wouldn't be here to talk about it.'
'Ah,' I said.
Sam was lonely, parked as he was at the mouth of the cave-city, so in and around other activities, I had made sure to go up and visit him. To pass the time, we ran a systems check on him, just to make sure that everything was working smoothly.
We would do this now and then, debug and add a few new subroutines, erase useless files, that sort of thing. All seemed fine until I discovered that Sam's absolute-timing circuit was two hours slow. No doubt about it. Sam was two hours behind all the other clocks in the rig: the one on the dash, the one on the microwave oven in the kitchenette, even my wristwatch, which I never wear. There were only two explanations. Either the timer had inexplicably shut down for two hours and started up again, or Sam had been shut down for the same amount of time.
There is no direct way to turn Sam off, but if I wanted to, I would cut the power to his CPU and he'd be out like a light, just like any other computer. Of course, Sam would never permit anyone else but me to do it, but somebody working on him, on the rig, rather…
Sam said, 'So you figure if it happened, it happened at the repair garage back on Talltree.'
'Can't think of any other time when the opportunity would have arisen, except when Stinky worked on you back on Goliath.'
'Well, surely Stinky's above suspicion.'
'Maybe.' I thought a moment. 'Okay. Stinky worked all day on you, right? And that night, the Militia tried to break into the garage to search you.'
'I don't know who it was. I just got the hell out of there, fast.'
'Yeah, which is kind of hard to figure, now that I think about it.'
'How so?'
'You say you crashed out of Stinky's garage. Did you run into anyone?'
'Nope. I rolled through a vacant lot, flattened a little shed, then found a side street, and rolled out of town. No one followed.'
'If it was the Militia, I wonder why they didn't,' I said.
'Maybe it was that Petrovsky fellow, and an assistant or two,'
I nodded. 'Makes sense. I didn't see Petrovsky at the Teelies' ranch when the Militia raided it. He could have been leading the mission to search you.'
'Could '
Sitting in the shotgun seat in front of Sam's diagnostic display, I tugged at my lower lip, pinching it between thumb and finger. 'Though Petrovsky could have been in one of those flitterjets. Only two landed, as I remember. I can't imagine him not personally commanding a major operation like that.
So, he may have left the break-in attempt to his subordinates.'
'Maybe.'
'Yeah,' I said, mulling it over. Presently I said, 'Answer me this. Is there a chance you were shut down that night?'
'How would they have done it?'
'An electromagnetic pulse gun could have knocked you out that way.'
'That would have knocked out everything, including the other clocks.'
'Maybe some other way? Maybe you didn't notice anything until the last second before they yanked the plug.'
'Well, hell, I guess it's possible,' Sam acquiesced, 'but doesn't it make more sense to suspect that something happened back on Talltree? There, they had all the opportunity in the world. You told them to go right into the main power junction to check for sand.'
'I was trying like hell,' I said, 'to avoid drawing the conclusion. Don't like the implications of that. If they got to you back there and tampered with you, it was for a reason.'
'To get control of me? I can assure you that I'm just as ornery as ever.'
'No. Those backwoods bumblers wouldn't know how to handle a major artificial intelligence. But they could have punked around with your auxiliary system software, maybe added a mole program.'
'To what end?'
'To get you to do something you wouldn't be aware of doing.'
'Like what?'
'Like leaving some kind of trace.'
'Okay, I see what you're driving at. Well, it's easy enough to find out. Let me just read out how much main memory we're currently using for system software and… Jesus Christ.'
The readout was on the screen before Sam's reaction. The figure was almost twice what it should be.
'No wonder I was having trouble crunching numbers during that shoot-out,' Sam said. 'What is all that junk? Can't be just supervisor programming.'
'Doubt it,' I said.
'Lemme try to get a listout, see what the hell it is. Dammit. Why ain't I surprised that it won't list out?'
'You've lived too long. Switch the buffer to the dash terminal and let me try.'
Sam did, and I punched up the Main Menu. I tried various ploys to get a listout of the mass of bytes taking up space in main memory, but couldn't, though I did get an address for it, and a program ID.
'At least it has a name,' Sam commented.
'WPA0001. Mean anything to you?'
''WPA' rings a bell somewhere. Otherwise, no, it's meaningless.'
'Not surprising. Lessee, what else can we do? What about this…?'
Half an hour later, we had an empty trick-bag and still had a main memory clogged with what was undeniably a mole program of puzzlingly major proportions that stubbornly refused to show itself or give some clue as to its nature. It was everywhere. As well as claiming squatter's rights in the CPU,
it had nestled itself in Auxiliary Storage, but we couldn't pinpoint exactly where. It was as if it had checked into a motel and left a suitcase in every room. The thing was intractable. When we erased it from main memory, it would load rightback in when we IPLed the system again. And we couldn't erase it from AuxStorage without the risk of wiping out something we wanted to keep. I grew frustrated. In a last-ditch effort, I spent two hours coding a diagnostic program which, while it would not tell me directly what the phantom program was, would by a process of elimination tell me what it wasn't. It wasn't a conventional supervisor program. It would not relinquish control to any other program once it started operating. What it did when it operated was a mystery. With the engine off, it seemed to do absolutely nothing. When we fired up the rig, something happened in the radioactive waste management system, but whatever was going on was too subtle to detect.
After two hours of test runs, I finally got an inkling of what the thing could be.
'I'd say it was an artificial intelligence. Generation Ten, possibly higher.'
'That's what I make it out to be,' Sam said. 'Which means…'
'We have a stowaway.'
