was writing out paychecks on behalf of the taxpayers, who were we to argue?”
“You remember Alfred Nobel?” I muttered. “They guy who invented dynamite? I think he would have disagreed with-”
“Yeah, right.” She held up her hand. “That’s political, and anyway it’s beside the point … at least, right now it is. Let me catch up to the rest of the story, then I’ll get back to Sentinel.”
While Payson-Smith and Kim Po were concentrating on the c-cube for Sentinel, Jeff Morgan and Hinckley herself were developing a different and far more sophisticated a-life-form. This was the basic research end of the project, intended to produce a nonmilitary spin-off of the original Ruby Fulcrum program; once the Sentinel c-cube was wrapped up and delivered to DOD, Payson-Smith and Kim joined the other two cyberneticists in spending most of their time and effort on the spin-off project.
It had been Morgan’s brainstorm to develop a “benign virus” to enable different computer networks to be interfaced without going through a lot of the handshaking protocols mandated by conventional communications software. He was inspired, in part, by the infamous “Internet worm,” which a young hacker had let loose in the government’s computer network during the late eighties. However, Jeff’s dream had been to produce a much more complex-and far more benign-version of the same basic idea. This advanced a-life would be a hybrid between a neural-net and a conventional digital program, allowing it to interface with all types of computers, sort of like a cybernetic philosopher’s stone. In fact, the a-life-form that they invented was initially called Alchemist, until the team slipped into referring to it by a part of its old code-name: Ruby.
“Like all a-life organisms,” Hinckley went on, “Ruby is guided by a set of rules that mandate its behavior, and these rules compose an iteration-”
“Iteration?”
“Like a cycle,” she said, “but the difference between most program iterations and Ruby’s is that the others have definite beginnings and endings. Ruby’s iteration is open-ended, though. It keeps repeating itself indefinitely. Simply put, it works like this.”
She held up a finger. “First, once it’s introduced into a computer, it seeks out all programs in that system and everything that’s interfaced by those programs. It doesn’t even need to be entered into the hard drive … transmitting an affected program through modem into a net or even slipping a contaminated disk into the floppy port will do the same trick.”
She held up another finger. “Second, it runs through all possible permutations of standard algorithms until it reaches the ones that match and unlock the target program’s source code. Once that’s accomplished, it deciphers the source code and gains admission. Same idea as hotwiring a car’s ignition plate by finding out what the owner’s fingerprint looks like and forging it.”
A third finger rose from her palm. “Third, it absorbs the target program into its own database, but it does this without locking out access by another user or impeding the functions of that program … and then it moves on to seek the next program in the system, and so on.”
She paused while the waitress reappeared to reheat my cup of coffee and ask Beryl if she wanted another cappuccino. She shook her head, and the waitress drifted back into the lunchtime crowd. “That’s what happened when my buddy Jah booted up a copy of the disk you gave John,” I said. “It took over every program in his system but didn’t lock him out.”
Beryl nodded eagerly, like a mother proud of her child’s accomplishments. “Exactly. That’s why I gave Tiernan the mini-disk in the first place … to prove what Ruby can do. The only difference was that your friend-uh, Jah, right? — stumbled upon it by accident.”
“Hell of a demonstration,” I murmured. “And you say this thing can slip through networks and copy itself in other computers?”
“Yes,” she said, “but that’s not exactly the right term for what it does. It doesn’t copy, it
I poured some more milk into my coffee. “I don’t understand, though … something like this would require an awful lot of memory to store all that data. And besides, wouldn’t it be defeated by antivirus programs?”
Hinckley shook her head. “No, no, it’s not quite like a virus. It’s more sophisticated than that. It’s like …”
She sighed and glanced up at the ceiling, searching for an easy explanation. “Ruby is an advanced cellular automaton. Each computer it encounters, no matter how large or small, is absorbed into the larger organism, with each of its programs capable of being controlled by Ruby itself. Then Ruby splits itself apart and automatically seeks out the next computer that it can interface. Meanwhile, the last computer affected becomes a node, or a cell, of the larger system …”
“And it keeps growing …”
Hinckley nodded. “Right. A little more with each program it interfaces, with each computer functioning as a small part of the larger organism, just as your body is composed of billions of cells that are interconnected to a larger organism, each serving its own function. Unplugging a computer it has accessed won’t destroy it, any more than killing one cell would destroy the bio-organism it serves.”
She raised a forefinger. “By the same token, antiviral programs are useless against it, because Ruby seeks out, finds, and defeats the basic source codes of those programs, just as a cancer cell defeats the antibodies that surround it.”
“Oh my god …” I murmured.
“If you think that’s scary,” Hinckley said, “try this on for size: each time Ruby completes an iteration, it not only grows a little more in storage capacity … it also evolves a little more. It
She folded her arms together on the table and stared straight at me. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” she asked, her voice kept beneath the noise level of the room, yet not so low that I could miss its urgency. “In theory at least, after a certain number of iterations a critical mass … or a phase transition, if you want to use a-life jargon … may potentially be achieved, in which Ruby crosses over from being a relatively dumb a-life-form to something much different.”
At first, I didn’t get what she was saying … and then it hit me. “Intelligence?” I whispered.
She slowly nodded. “Artificial intelligence … in an artificial life-form that is practically immortal.”
I whistled under my breath. Beryl Hinckley was right in her initial assessment; Ruby was no simple spreadsheet program or computer game, but something that imitated life …
No. Far more than that, even: Ruby didn’t just imitate life; it was a form of life itself. Perhaps not born of woman and man but of fingers tapping instructions into keyboards, yet nonetheless
And, even as I realized this, the full enormity of what we were discussing came home with the impact of a sock in the jaw-and with it, a sneaking suspicion.
“This program,” I said haltingly, “or cellular automaton, whatever you call it … anyway, when Jah realized that it was some sort of virus, the first thing he did was to disconnect his phone cord.”
Hinckley gazed at me without saying anything. I hesitated. “Anyway, it’s a good thing he did that, right?”
“No,” she said softly, gently shaking her head. “It wouldn’t have mattered even if he hadn’t, and that’s what I told John last night. Ruby’s already out there … in fact, it was released eleven months ago.”
During its infancy, Ruby’s cradle had been an IBM desktop computer inside the a-life lab at the Tiptree Corporation. The team had not been careless in raising their creation; they had disconnected the cable leading from the computer’s internal modem to the nearest phone jack, and a locked grill had been placed over the computer’s CD-OP drive, one that could be removed only by a key carried solely by the four members of the Ruby Fulcrum team.
They knew exactly what they had created: their baby was a Frankensteinian monster that had to be kept locked in its dungeon until it could be trained to behave in a social manner. In turn, as the parents of this potentially destructive creation, they attempted to be responsible in its upbringing. They had fed it only select bits of data, made careful notes as it slowly grew and taken pride in every step it mastered, but nonetheless they made sure that Ruby didn’t cross the street until it was properly toilet-trained.
