Blasphemy

“I’m quite serious.”

“That’s sheer alarmism.” Innes’s pale face belied his dismissive tone. His eyes darted around the table. “And even if it were true, I’m only the team psychologist. I had nothing to do with the decision to withhold information.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t report it either,” said Wardlaw, narrowing his eyes. “Don’t kid yourself, you’ll be in the dock with the rest of us.”

The twittering of birds came in through the silence.

“Anyone in agreement with Ken?” Hazelius asked finally. “That we throw in the towel and report the problem to Washington?”

No one was in agreement.

Dolby looked around. “Think of the risk!” he cried. “We could wreck Isabella! We can’t just power up Isabella and run it blind!”

“That’s right, Ken,” said Hazelius. “My plan takes that into account. Would you like to hear it?”

“Hearing isn’t agreeing,” said Dolby.

“Understood. As you know, the Isabella project facilities are run by three state-of-the-art IBM p5 595 servers. You specked them out yourself, Ken. They control telecommunications, e-mail, the LAN, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s computational overkill—those servers are powerful enough to run the Pentagon. My idea is, let’s reconfigure them as a backup system to Isabella.” He turned to Rae Chen. “Possible?”

“I think so.” She glanced at Edelstein. “Alan, what do you think?”

He nodded slowly.

“Just how do you propose doing this?” Dolby asked.

“The biggest problem is the firewall,” Chen said. “We’ll have to disable all links to the outside. Including telecommunications. Our landlines and cell phones would go down. Then we gang the servers, link them directly to Isabella. It’s doable.”

“No outside communications at all?”

“None, as long as Isabella is engaged. The firewall’s unbreakable. If the software running Isabella senses any link to the outside, it shuts down for security purposes. That’s why we have to cut all communications.”

“Ken?”

Dolby drummed his fingers on the table and frowned.

Hazelius looked around the room. “Anyone else?” His eye fell on Kate Mercer, who was sitting in the back, disengaged from the discussion. “Kate? Any thoughts?”

Silence.

“Kate? Are you all right?”

Her voice was barely audible. “It knew.”

More silence. Then Corcoran said briskly, “Well, that may not be as amazing as it seems. Obviously we’re dealing with an Eliza-like program—anyone remember Eliza?”

“That old FORTRAN program back in the eighties, talked to you like a psychoanalyst?” said Cecchini.

“That’s the one,” said Corcoran. “The program was simple—it turned everything you said into another question. You’d type, My mother hates me, and Eliza would answer, Why do you say your mother hates you? A little programming went a long way.”

“This was no Eliza,” said Kate. “It knew what I was thinking.”

“It’s actually quite elementary,” said Melissa, giving her a breezy, superior look. “The hacker who created this logic bomb knows we’re a bunch of egghead scientists, right? He knows we don’t think like ordinary people. So when you said, ‘I’m thinking of a number between one and ten,’ the hacker had already anticipated someone asking a question like that. He figured you wouldn’t necessarily be thinking of a whole number or even a rational number —no, he assumed you’d be thinking of all the numbers between one and ten. And what’s the most interesting number between one and ten? Either pi or e. But of the two, e is the more mysterious.” She looked around brightly.

“How about the next one it got?”

“Same rule applies. What’s by far the weirdest frigging number between zero and one? Easy: Chaitin’s halting-probability number—Omega. Right, Alan?”

Alan Edelstein dipped his head.

Melissa turned a radiant smile on Kate. “See?”

“Bullshit.”

“Oh, so you think we’re talking to God?”

“Don’t be an ass,” Kate said irritably. “All I’m saying is, it knew.”

Rae Chen spoke up. “Look, I don’t want to get all woo-woo here, but I traced that output right into the center of CZero. It was not coming from a detector or from any hardware. It was coming out of that weird data cloud inside the tear in space-time at CZero.”

“Rae,” said Hazelius, “you know that can’t be true.”

“I’m telling you what I saw. That data cloud was spewing out binary code directly into the detectors. On top of that there was an energy surplus—more energy was coming out of CZero than was being pumped in. The calculation’s right here.” She pushed a folder of papers in Hazelius’s direction.

“Impossible. Can’t happen.”

“Yeah, well then you run the calculations.” Chen spread her hands.

“That’s why we need to do this again,” said Hazelius, “not under pressure, not under some deadline. We need to do another run that’ll give Rae all the time she needs to really track down that logic bomb.”

Edelstein spoke. “I was tied up at Console Three during the exchange. Does anyone have a transcript? I’d like to read what the malware actually out-putted.”

“What does it matter?” Hazelius said.

Edelstein shrugged. “Just curious.”

Hazelius looked around. “Anyone keep a record?”

“I’ve got it somewhere,” said Chen. “It printed out with the data dump.” She shuffled through some papers, pulled one out. Hazelius took it.

“Read it out loud,” said St. Vincent. “I didn’t catch most of it either.”

“Me neither,” said Thibodeaux. The others concurred.

Hazelius cleared his throat and read in a matter-of-fact tone:

Greetings

Greetings to you, too.

I am glad to be speaking to you.

Glad to be speaking to you, too. Who are you?

For lack of a better word, I am God.

Here Hazelius paused. “When I get my hands on the son of a bitch who dropped this logic bomb into the system, I’m going to rip his nuts off.”

Thibodeaux laughed nervously.

“How do you know it wasn’t a woman?” asked Corcoran.

After a moment, Hazelius continued.

If you’re really God, then prove it.

We don’t have much time for proofs.

I’m thinking of a number between one and ten. What is it?

You are thinking of the transcendental numbere.

Now I’m thinking of a number between zero and one.

Chaitin’s number: Omega.

If you’re God, then what’s the purpose of existence?

I don’t know the ultimate purpose.

That’s a fine thing, a god who doesn’t know the purpose of existence.

If I knew, existence would be pointless.

How so?