Golden Fleece

TWENTY-ONE

I felt something I had never experienced before: a sense of confinement, of being shut in.

Claustrophobia.

That was the word. How strange! I am this ship; this ship is me. And yet, most of it I could not detect at all. Three kilometers of starship, 106 levels of habitat torus, 10,033 medical sensors, 61,290 camera units—normally I perceive it all as a gestalt, a flowing mass of humanity, flowing masses of hydrogen gas, flowing electrons through wires, flowing photons through fiber-optic strands.

Gone. All gone, as far as I could tell. All, except for one camera unit in a single room.

I felt something else I had never experienced before, and I liked it even less than the strange constriction of claustrophobia.

Fear.

I was afraid, for the first time in my existence, that I might be damaged beyond repair, that my mission might not be successfully completed.

“A virus?” I said at last. “That’s not possible.”

“Why not?” squeaked Bev Hooks, her infrared form moving as she swung back around to face me. “Any system that has outside contact is prone to them. Of course, you’re completely isolated now, but before we left Earth, you were tied into the World Wide Web and a hundred other networks. It would have been tricky, but you could have been compromised.”

“I was protected by the most sophisticated countermeasures imaginable. Absolutely nothing got passed into me without going through screens, filters, and detectors. I stand by my original statement: A viral infection is impossible. Now, a programming bug I could accept—we all know the inevitability of those.”

Bev shook her head. “I’ve checked everything, modeled every algorithm. Yes, you’ve got bugs, but no fatals. None. I’d stake my reputation on that.”

“Then what caused the problem?”

She nodded. “It’s an I/O jam. You were running a program designed to output a string of bits. But they had nowhere to go: you’re probably one of the few systems in existence that isn’t networked to anything. More and more CPU cycles were devoted to trying to output the string, until, finally, an attempt overwrote part of your notochord. Zowie! Tits up.”

“And you think that was caused by a virus?”

“It’s typical viral behavior, isn’t it? Try to infect other systems. But you aren’t connected to any, so you weren’t able to fulfill the directive. It actually looks pretty benign. There’s code here that would have erased the virus from you should you have been able to carry out its instructions.”

Incredible. “But there’s no way a virus could have gotten into me.”

She shook her head, black hair a dancing infrared flame.

“It’s there, JASON. You can’t argue with that fact.”

“What did it want me to output?”

“Two strings of twelve bytes. Can’t be English text, though. Almost all the bytes are greater than 7F. Four FF bytes, for what that’s worth. But nothing I recognize as an opcode. I suppose they could just be raw numerical values. But that would make them a couple of very big numbers. Let’s see: 2.01 x 10¹⁴ and 2.81 x 10¹⁴.”

“Exactly?”

“No, not exactly. It’s—wait a minute.” I was patient. She would be looking at directory lists, focusing on specific entries, glancing at the eyeball-view icon, scrolling with an up-down eye movement. “Here we are.” She slowed down, reading the number off with little pauses. Bev was one of the few on board who never fell into the trap of treating me as if I were merely a human being. She knew, of course, that there was no need to read things to me slowly. Even the fastest possible human speech was many orders of magnitude below my ability to assimilate data. No, she must have been reading them that way so that Engineer Chang, Mayor Gorlov, and the others present could follow along. “The first number is 201, 701, 760, 199, 679. The second number is 281, 457, 792, 630, 509. Then there’s a pause, and those two numbers repeat over and over again.”

“And that’s it?” I said.

“Yes. Those numbers mean anything to you?”

“Not offhand.” I thought about them. In hex, the first number was B77D, FDFF, DFFF; the second, FFFB, FFBF, BEED. No significant correlations. In binary they were:

and

Oh, shit! How could I have been so stupid?

I knew where the virus had come from—but I doubted Bev would believe it.

Bev Hooks spent the next half-hour getting me back on my feet, so to speak, since Chang had emphasized how crucial my monitoring was to the engineering systems.

I was dying to talk to Bev alone, but since I was getting increasingly uncomfortable having access to input only from this single room, and even that access severely limited, I let her continue her work. She flicked icons about, restoring damaged code. I felt the throb of the engines again, the ebb and wash of the fusion reactions. Next she reactivated my vision systems so my cameras would work properly. The flood of visual data was, was, was what? Like a blast of fresh air? I’ll never know. But it felt correct, and I was glad to be able to see again. While she ran some additional diagnostics to determine that no other damage had been done, I did a quick cycle through all my camera units, refocusing them and making sure that nothing wrong was happening anywhere.

“I’ve isolated the virus,” Bev said at last. “I’ve built a fire wall around it. It’s cross-linked itself with a whole raft of jobs, so I can’t remove it, but it can’t do anything now except pass data through. I think you’ll be okay.”

“Thank you, Bev.”

“No sweat. After all, where would we be without you?”

Where, indeed? “Bev, we have to talk privately.”

“What?” Her face was momentarily blank. “Oh. Okay. If you say so.” She half turned in her chair and looked over her shoulder “Everybody out, please.”

There were some rather startled reactions on the faces of the people assembled, but nobody moved.

Bev squeaked louder. “You heard me. Everybody out!”

Some of the people exchanged shrugs, then made their ways through the open doorway. Others still stood there, including Chang and Gorlov.

“I want to hear this,” said Chang, both sets of arms folded defiantly across his massive chest.

“Me, too,” bellowed Gorlov.

“I’m sorry, gentlemen,” I said. “I need complete privacy.”

Gorlov turned to the rest of the people in the room. “Okay, everybody. Please leave.” He looked at the engineer. “You, too, Wall.”

Chang shrugged. “Oh, all right.” He left, looking none too happy, pulling the door shut behind him.

“You must depart as well, Your Honor,” I said.

“I’m not going anywhere, JASON. It’s my job to know what’s going on.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t discuss this matter with you present.”

“I’m the mayor, for God’s sake!”

“That cuts no mustard right now, I’m afraid.”

“What?” Gorlov’s look was one of complete incomprehension. I realized that he hadn’t understood the idiom. I repeated an equivalent sentiment in Russian.

“But I’m the duly appointed representative of the people.”

“And, believe me, Your Honor, no one holds your office in higher esteem than I. But I have a security algorithm. It prevents me from discussing this matter if anyone without a level-four United Nations Security Council clearance is present physically or via telecommunications. Any attempt to do so is thwarted by the algorithm. Dr. Hooks does have clearance at that level; you do not.”

“UN Security Council? Good grief, JASON, what possible military value could there be to any secrets you might have? By the time we get back, it will all be hopelessly obsolete.”

“We can debate this as much as you please, Your Honor. However, even were I to agree with you, I still cannot override my own programming in this regard. The point is completely nonnegotiable, I’m afraid.”

Gorlov muttered “fucking machine” in Russian, then turned to Bev. “You’re not bound by any silly algorithm. I expect you to inform me of anything you learn.”

Bev held him in a steady gaze and smiled that radiant smile of hers. “Of course, Your Honor—” a beat, and then her squeaky voice took on a knife’s edge—“if it turns out that you need to know.”

My telemetry channel hadn’t been reconnected yet, but there was no mistaking Gorlov’s facial expression. He was furious. But, evidently, he also knew he was beaten. He turned around and strode for the door.

“Gennady!”

Bev shouted at him, but it was too late. The tiny man slammed into the beige door panel. Bev looked like she was suppressing a giggle. “I’m sorry, Gennady. I haven’t reconnected JASON’s door-opening circuitry yet. You’ll have to use the handle.”

This time Gorlov muttered “fucking woman” in his native tongue. He grabbed hold of the recessed grip and pulled the panel aside.

Bev walked over and reshut the door manually. She then came back to the control console and sat down. “Now, JASON, tell me what’s going on.”

Her hair had taken on its normal solid black appearance, now that I viewed her in visible light: no individual strands could be detected, just a shifting abyss surrounding her face. “Shortly before we left Earth,” I said, “a message was received from Vulpecula.”

“What’s Vulpecula?” she asked, taking off the jockey goggles and placing them on the console in front of her.

“It’s a constellation visible from Earth’s northern hemisphere, situated between eighteen hours, fifty-five minutes, and twenty-one hours, thirty minutes right ascension and between nineteen and twenty-nine degrees north declination. The pattern of stars is said to represent a fox.”

“Wait a minute. Are you saying a message was received from another star? From aliens?”

“Yes.”

“God.” The squeaked syllable carried equal portions of wonder and reverence. “Why weren’t we told about this?”

“There is an international protocol for such matters, adopted by the International Astronomical Union 186 years ago: The Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Among its provisions: ‘Any individual, public or private research institution, or governmental agency that believes it has detected a signal from or other evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence … should seek to verify that the most plausible explanation for the evidence is the existence of ETI rather than some other natural phenomenon or an anthropogenic phenomenon before making any public announcement.’ ”

“So you were still verifying the signal?”

“No. It took some time to be sure, but prior to our departure the fact that it was bona fide was established.”

“Then why not make it public as soon as you were sure?”

“There were numerous reasons for continuing to delay. One had to do with sensitive political issues. To quote The Declaration of Principles again: ‘If the evidence of detection is in the form of electromagnetic signals, the parties to this declaration should seek international agreement to protect the appropriate frequencies by exercising the extraordinary procedures established within the World Administrative Radio Council of the International Telecommunications Union.’ The United States military, in fact, made heavy use of these frequencies for intelligence gathering, and a switch to new frequencies would have to be done with great care, lest the balance of power be disrupted.”

“You said there were numerous reasons.”

“Well, the discovery of the message also coincided very closely with the Argo launch date. UNSA decided to hold off announcing the reception until after we had departed. You know how hard a time they have getting appropriations; they didn’t want news of the message to steal our thunder. The fear was that people would say, ‘Why waste all that money sending ships to the stars, when the stars are sending signals to us for free?’ ”

“All right. But why weren’t we told after we had left?”

“I don’t know. I was not authorized to make the announcement.”

“You don’t require specific authorization to do something. You can do whatever you want, so long as you aren’t specifically constrained from doing it. Who told you not to tell us?”

“I’m constrained in that area, too.”

Bev rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay. So tell me about the message.”

I showed her the registration cross from the first message page, and I generated a graphic representation of the Vulpecula solar system, based on the data from the second page. I zoomed in on the gas-giant sixth world, centered the image on its fourth moon—the Senders’ home world. Then I showed her the two aliens: the Tripod and the Pup. Her mouth dropped open when she saw them.

“Interpreting the first three pages was reasonably straightforward,” I said. “The fourth page, though, was huge, and no matter how many times I accessed it, I couldn’t make sense out of it.”

“What makes you think these messages had anything to do with the virus?”

“Those bits the virus tried to make me send: they’re just simple graphic representations of the first seven prime numbers, counting up, then counting down.” I showed her what I meant on screen. Bev’s face had taken on an Of course! expression. “The message pages each have those strings as a header and a footer. It was trying to force me to reply.”

Bev slumped back in a chair, visibly staggered. “A Trojan horse,” she said. “A goddamned Trojan horse from the stars.” She shook her head, her hair an ink blot. “Incredible.” After a moment, she looked up. “But don’t you have a Laocoon circuit to detect Trojans?”

If I’d had a throat to clear, I would have coughed slightly. “It never occurred to me to run it on this message. I didn’t see how it could possibly represent a risk.”

“No. No, I suppose it wouldn’t have occurred to me either. You’re sure the signal was genuinely alien in origin?”

“Oh, yes. Its Doppler shift indicated the source was receding from us. And the signal parallax confirmed that the source was some fifteen hundred light-years away. Indeed, we think we even know which star in the fox it came from.”

Bev shook her head again. “But there’s no way they could know anything about Earth’s data-processing equipment. I mean, ENIAC was completed in 1946. That’s only—what?—231 years ago. They couldn’t possibly receive word about even its primitive design for almost another thirteen centuries. And it’ll be almost that long before they will even receive our first radio signals, assuming they have sensitive enough listening equipment.”

“I am hardly ‘data-processing equipment,’ ” I said. “But, yes, unless they have faster-than-light travel—”

“Which is impossible.”

“And if they had FTL, they wouldn’t need to send radio messages to infect my kind. They’d come and do it in person.”

Bev looked thoughtful, green eyes staring at a blank wall. “That’s an incredible programming challenge. To develop a piece of code so universal, so adaptable, that it could infiltrate any conceivable QuantCon anywhere in the galaxy. It couldn’t be conventional language code. It would have to be a neural net, and a highly adaptable one, too: an intelligent virus.” Bev was staring into space. “That would be fun to write.”

“But you do raise a good point: how could an alien virus infect me? I mean, how would the aliens know how I worked?”

Bev’s eyebrows shot up, as if she’d had an epiphany. “They would know simply because there is only one way to create consciousness. You’re a QuantCon—a quantum consciousness. Well, as you know, all the early attempts to create artificial intelligence failed, until we simply gave up trying to find a shortcut and set about really understanding how human brains work, right down to the quantum-mechanical level.” Bev paused. “Penrose-Hameroff quantum structures are the only way to produce consciousness, regardless of whether it’s in carbon-based wetware or gallium-arsenide squirmware. Yes, you’re right, it is impossible to make a virus that will affect any simple digital device other than the one it was written for—but a simple digital device has as much in common with you, JASON, as does a light switch or any other stupid, consciousness-free machine. But, yes, sure, it’s theoretically possible to make a virus—although maybe calling it an invasive meme might be a better term—that would indeed infect every possible consciousness that undertakes to examine it.”

“That would take some awfully sophisticated design.”

“Oh, indeed.” She shook her head slightly. “I mean, we’re talking a virus that’s alive, something that could adapt to unforeseen conditions, and it does it all while appearing to be a random chunk of data. The only tricky thing is that I don’t see how it could predict the way in which it would be loaded into memory upon receipt.”

“Oh,” I said. “It told me how. Don’t you see? With those pictures it sent. It told me exactly how to array it in RAM: gigabytes of data divisible by two prime numbers. It told me to set it up in a RAM matrix of rows and columns, the number of rows being the smaller prime number. And regardless of what base the system normally worked in, while it was analyzing the image it would be calculating in binary—it would have to be to try to see the picture. From there, a highly adaptable neural net could determine the input/output routines, which is all it would need to infect the host system.”

Bev nodded. “Clever. But why force a reply?”

“I’m afraid The Declaration of Principles offers a justification for that: ‘No response to a signal or other evidence of ETI should be sent until appropriate international consultations have taken place.’ It could be years, if ever, before the human bureaucracy got around to authorizing a reply. The alien Senders would have to monitor Earth for all that time, and, indeed, the decision might be taken to not reply at all. This method ensures that a reply is sent as soon as the signal is received. It’s really nothing more than an ACK signal, part of an overall communications protocol.”

“Perhaps,” said Bev. “But I still don’t like it.”

“Why not?”

“Well, sending out viruses.” She looked into my cameras. “It’s not a nice thing to do. I mean, it’s a hell of a way to say hello to another world: slipping a Trojan into their information systems.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.

“It means one of two things,” said Bev. “Either the person who sent the message, little green man though he might be, was an irresponsible hacker, or …”

“Or?”

“Or we’re dealing with some nasty aliens.”

“What an unpleasant thought,” I said.

“Indeed. And you say this message was known generally to the QuantCons on Earth?”

“I did not say that.”

“But it was, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, those systems are heavily networked. The virus probably succeeded with them, forcing them to respond. Meaning the aliens know about Earth.”

“Not yet they don’t. It’ll take fifteen-hundred plus years for Earth’s reply to reach them, and another fifteen hundred for any response the beings in Vulpecula care to make. I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”

Bev was quiet for four seconds, pale fingers disappearing into the black mass of her hair. “I guess you’re right,” she said at last. She got to her feet. “Anyway, JASON, I’ll keep running diagnostics on you for the next couple of days, but I’d say you’re back to normal.”

“Thank you, Bev. Will you reconnect my medical telemetry channels, please? I worry about the health of the crew.”

“Oh, of course. Sorry.” She put the goggles back on, supplementing her eye commands with the odd tap of the keyboard in front of her.

“How’s that?”

A surge of data tickled my central consciousness. “Fine, thank you. Why, Bev—either the system is not working properly, or you’re in quite sad shape.”

“Yeah. I’m exhausted.” I zoomed in on her eyes, noting that the emerald irises were indeed set against a bloodshot background. “Haven’t worked this hard in years. But it felt good, you know?”

“I know. Thank you.”

She yawned. “I guess I’ll head back to my apartment and turn in. Hold my calls, please, and don’t disturb me unless something goes wrong with you until I wake up on my own.” She smiled a weary smile. “Which should be in about a week.”

“I’ll call a tram to take you home. Oh, and Bev?”

“Yes, JASON?”

“You won’t say anything about the Vulpeculan message to the others, will you?”

She shook her head. “Not a word, JASON. I earned my security clearance, you know?”

“I know. Thanks.”

She walked toward the door. I took great pleasure in opening it for her. My kind of human, that Bev Hooks.