Jericho Iteration

16

(Friday, 12:06 P.M.)

The midday lunch rush in Clayton was just beginning as I climbed out of the rickshaw cab I had caught at MetroLink station and paid off the driver. The kid folded the money I gave him and shoved it into his fanny pack without so much as a word, then pulled out into the four-lane traffic of Central Avenue, playing a quick game of chicken with a streetcar as they rounded the corner of Forsyth together.

Long before St. Louis’s county and municipal governments had merged, Clayton had been a small metropolis in its own right, a prosperous “edge city” just west of Forest Park. Now it had become St. Louis’s uptown business district, its high-rise office buildings constituting a second skyline several miles from the riverfront. Compared to downtown, though, most of the damage suffered by Clayton during the quake had been cleaned up months ago, thanks in no small part to federal relief money. A few small offices had been condemned, a couple of side streets were still impassable, but otherwise it was now hard to tell whether this side of town had been affected at all by New Madrid.

No wonder. Clayton had always looked like a little piece of Los Angeles, disassembled from Beverly Hills and airlifted, brick by pink granite brick, to greater St. Louis. Yet I had never much cared for this part of the city. Despite its sleek postmodern veneer, Clayton was still a ghetto: ten square blocks of overpaid tax accountants, corporate lawyers, and executive vice presidents, an arrogant Disneyland for the aging yupsters and young MBAs who strutted down the sidewalks, each heading for his or her next opportunity to score big bucks. Although ERA troopers were invisible during the day, they were always out in force at night to keep Squat City refugees from taking up residence in the alleys and doorways of the social gentry who called Clayton home. Fall from grace, though, and you fall hard; some of those refugees probably used to live here, too.

The weather had turned bad; the blue skies of early morning had given way to pale gray clouds as a late April cold front began to move in from the west. Offices were letting out for lunch hour as I made my way down Central Avenue’s crowded sidewalk to Le Café François, about halfway down the block from the county courthouse.

It was your typical business-lunch bistro, already packed with salesmen and secretaries, and it took me a couple of moments before I spotted her. Beryl Hinckley was seated in a secluded booth at the back of the restaurant, nursing a cup of cappuccino as she furtively watched the door. Upon spotting me, she gave no overt sign of recognition other than to nod her head slightly; I cut my way through the dining room and slid into the booth across the table from her.

“Hi,” I said. “Long time, no see.”

“You’re late,” she said coldly. “If you’d been any longer getting here, I would have left.”

I shrugged. “If you wanted a reporter, you should have asked for one who owns a car.”

Or one who had changed his clothes or taken a shower within the past twenty-four hours, I might have added; her nose wrinkled at my slovenly appearance. It wasn’t my fault; she had given me barely enough time to catch the Green Line train out here, let alone clean up a little.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said calmly. “This will have to be quick. When we’re through here, you’re going to walk me down the block to the courthouse, where I’m going to find a judge and request that he place me in protective custody.”

“What?” Had she told me instead that she planned to throw herself off the Martin Luther King Bridge, she couldn’t have caught me more by surprise.

“I’d prefer to surrender to a federal circuit judge,” she went on, “but the federal courthouse is only three blocks from the stadium. Since the whole point is to avoid being captured by ERA, I’ll have to settle for a state judge.”

“Whoa, wait a minute, lady … back up a second. Why are you-”

I was interrupted by a young waitress coming by to offer me a menu. I was hungry and could have done well with a burger and fries, but I shook my head and asked for coffee instead. The girl gave me a sweet smile and sashayed away.

“Did you bring your PT?” she asked when the waitress was out of earshot. I reached into my pocket and pulled out Joker. “Good. I picked a public place for this interview because it’s the safest option right now, but we still don’t have much time.”

I placed Joker on the table between us but didn’t switch it into audio-record mode just yet. “On the contrary,” I replied, “I think we’ve got all the time in the world. At least long enough for us to have coffee and get to know each other a little better-”

“Mr. Rosen …” she said impatiently.

“Y’know, the usual stuff. What high school did you go to? How did you like the Muny the other night? What did you say to my best friend that got him killed? That sort of thing.”

The muscles in Hinckley’s jaw tightened; she looked as if she were about to explode, but she was forced to remain calm while the waitress returned to place a mug of black coffee in front of me. “I’ve done a little checking on you since we met,” I went on after the girl had vanished again. “Found out a few interesting things, like the fact that you’re a research scientist at Tiptree, involved with the Ruby Fulcrum project for the company’s Sentinel program, and that your boss, Richard Payson-Smith, is currently being sought by the feds in connection with two murders.”

I picked up the cream pitcher and diluted the coffee with a dash of milk. “Also, you’ve been in hiding since last night,” I said as I stirred the coffee. “Given the neighborhood we’re in, you must have taken the Green Line out here, then checked into either the Radisson or the Holiday Inn … registering under an assumed name and paying for the room in cash, of course, since you were smart enough to take out all that money from your credit cards last night.”

Her eyes widened in outrage; for a moment there I thought steam would come whistling out of her ears. Except for the ATM transactions, the last bit was sky blue guesswork, but there was no sense in letting her know that. I was getting under her skin, which was exactly what I meant to do.

“Of course,” I continued before she could interrupt, “I could just get up from this table and leave. That’s mean sticking you with the bill, but I think paying the tab is the least of your worries right now.”

I picked up the mug and took a sip. “Good coffee. So what do you say we cut the crap, okay?”

I was bluffing. If I had a pair of brass handcuffs, I would have fastened her ankle to the table and threatened to flush the key down the men’s room toilet unless she spilled her guts. This woman had put me through hell in less than forty-eight hours after I had met her; besides getting a little cheap gratification from watching her squirm, I wasn’t about to let her waltz into some judge’s private chambers until she told me every nasty secret locked in her head.

Hinckley stared at me silently, her dark eyes smoldering with repressed anger. “One more thing,” I said, and this time I wasn’t bluffing. “I hold you responsible for John Tiernan’s death. If he hadn’t gone to Clancy’s to meet you last night, he’d still be alive now. But he took the bullet-or a laser beam, whatever-that was meant for you, and that really pisses me off, so don’t give me this ‘just a few minutes, then I gotta go’ routine. You owe me, sweetheart.”

She blinked hard a couple of times, then took a deep breath and slowly let it out again. “Mr. Rosen,” she said, her tone a little less imperious now, “the person who shot your friend-and it wasn’t Richard-didn’t miss. He’s looking for me now, but he meant to kill Tiernan. He was the intended target, not me.”

“Bullshit.”

“No bullshit.” She shook her head. “There’s a conspiracy behind all this, and the last thing the people behind it want is public attention. Despite whatever you think you may know, trust me … you don’t know anything.”

I wasn’t about to argue the point. I didn’t know anything, and I was counting on her to give me the answers, but before I could ask she clasped her hands together above the table and pointed a finger straight at me.

“One more thing,” she said, “and this is why I’m in a hurry. There’s four people they want to see dead … and you’re one of them.”

I felt my heart skip just a little. “And the only way we’re going to get out of this alive,” she said, “is if you shut up and listen to what I have to tell you. Understand?”

I believed her. All of a sudden, this pretentious and socially correct little Le Café François was no longer as safe or secure as it seemed when I walked in through the door. In fact, it felt as if I were sitting in the center of a sniper’s crosshair, drinking great coffee and waiting for someone to squeeze the trigger.

I slowly nodded my head, and she gestured toward Joker. “Good. Now turn on your PT. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

Before she got started, though, I filled her in on much of what I already knew.

Although it was an abridged version of what I had related to Pearl a few hours earlier, it included the fact that Barris and McLaughlin had pressured me into stating that I would help them track her down, as well as Payson-Smith and Morgan. I was barely through telling her about being sworn to secrecy with regard to Ruby Fulcrum, though, when she began to shake her head.

“The name’s right,” Hinckley said, “but the details are all wrong. Ruby Fulcrum exists-I told you that when I first met you-but it’s not exactly what they claim it is.”

The four scientists who had been assigned to the Ruby Fulcrum project, she went on to explain, were all specialists in artificial intelligence-or perhaps, more specifically, a branch of AI research called “a-life,” or artificial life: computer programs that mimicked all activities of organic life-forms, including the ability to learn on their own.

As Cale McLaughlin had told me, the primary objective of Ruby Fulcrum had been to devise a c-cube system for Sentinel 1. This was to be an advanced program-since it was based partly on neural-net systems, even the word program itself was almost as archaic as calling a modern automobile a horseless carriage-which, once installed within the satellite’s onboard computer system, would learn on its own how to distinguish between ballistic missiles carrying real warheads and those launched as decoys. However, the long-range goal of the project had been the development of a self-replicating a-life-form. Although a-life R amp;D had been conducted, albeit on a smaller scale, by university and corporate labs since the 1980s, this was the first time a major DOD-funded research effort had been directed at this sort of cybernetic technology.

“The first part of the project was easy to come by, relatively speaking,” Hinckley said. “Richard and Po were principally responsible for coming up with an a-life system for Sentinel, and they managed to conclude most of their research about a year ago-”

“And Payson-Smith wasn’t opposed to it?” I asked. “I mean, he wasn’t against the military application?”

“Is that what they told you?” Hinckley looked at me askance, blowing out her cheeks in disgust. “Yeah, Dick’s such a dove, he has his father’s old RAF medals framed in his office just so he can swear at them.” She shook her head. “If anything, he was the most hawkish member of the team, even if he thought the whole concept of an orbital antimissile system was a little daft.”

“How’s that?”

She paused to take a sip from her cappuccino, licking the cream from her lips. “Maybe this sort of thing might have made a little sense twenty years ago, when the U.S.S.R. was still around and was stockpiling weapons, but nowadays the only country that still has a large nuclear arsenal is the U.S. itself. Any third-world country that wanted to nuke us wouldn’t fire a secondhand Russian missile … they’d simply put it on a freighter and sail it into a harbor city … and most arms-control people would tell you that accidentally launching a missile is much harder than it’s made out in movies. So Sentinel was obsolete almost before it got off the drawing board.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “I’ve heard that said before. So why were you going along with it?”

“Because it’s our job, that’s why.” She shrugged offhandedly. “Look, that may sound irresponsible, but we aren’t the congressmen who voted to appropriate money for this thing. We’re just some guys hired to do one small part of the program. We all knew that it was a fluke, but if this was something Uncle Sam wanted, and since Tiptree 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 reproduces. That was the whole purpose, to make a virus that could spread through the national datanet and all the commercial nets, interface with any computer it encounters, then promulgate itself again through cyberspace until it reaches the next computer. And so on, right down the line, like the domino theory.”

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 learns.”

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 life …

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.

Yet, despite all their precautions, the inevitable accident happened. This occurred on May 17, 2012-the same day an inevitable accident happened throughout the rest of St. Louis County.

“The earthquake hit the company pretty hard,” Hinckley said. “You can’t tell it now, but four people were killed when the cryonics lab collapsed. That was bad enough, but a lot of other people got injured because of ceilings and shelves falling in. None of my team were hurt, though, thank God … we were in the commissary having a late lunch, and the worst thing that happened was that I got a sprained shoulder when a light fixture nailed me … but our lab was almost totaled.”

She paused, looking nervously again toward the restaurant’s front door. I glanced over my shoulder; the lunchtime crowd was beginning to filter out, and our waitress looked as if she was wondering whether she would get a decent tip from two people who had taken up a booth but ordered nothing more than coffee. Other than that, though, nothing seemed unusual; no ERA troopers, no police cars, no mysterious men in trench coats lurking near the cash register.

“Go on,” I prompted. “The lab …”

Her gaze returned to me. “The lab was busted up pretty badly,” she continued, “and the company didn’t want any valuable employees going back inside until it had cleaned things up … hot wires, unstable walls, things like that. So we were sent home for the next several days while Tiptree brought in a general contractor from Chicago to restore everything-Science Services, some firm that specializes in laboratory restorations, that’s what we we’re told. Don’t worry about it, they said. Come back Monday and everything will be fine … and, you know, that was all right with us, because we had our own messes at home to clean up. Po lost his house, Dick’s cats had been killed, my car had been crushed by a tree …”

She sighed as she settled back against her seat, rubbing her eyelids with her fingertips. “Well, to make a long story short, some college kid was responsible for straightening up the a-life lab. I can’t really blame him, because things were scattered all over the place and no one had kept any reliable charts as to what went where … but when he uprighted the Ruby Fulcrum computer and found the loose telephone prong leading from the modem, he figured it was another loose wire and slipped it into the jack.”

“Oh, shit …”

Hinckley’s face expressed a wan smile. “Yes, well, that’s one way of putting it. After he did that and he was assured that the phone lines were operational again, he switched on the computer to give it a quick test … and, of course, being a conscientious Science Services employee, he tested the modem by dialing into a local BBS to see if the patch was solid.”

And, without anyone’s realizing what had happened, Ruby was allowed to crawl through the bars of its playpen. Frankenstein’s monster had been let loose to roam the streets of the global village.

“We didn’t know what had happened until we came back to the lab on Monday,” Hinckley went on. “Dick flipped out, of course, and the first thing he did was to try and figure out where and how Ruby had slipped through our fingers. To do this, he had to access the company’s mainframe and backtrack all its incoming and outgoing phone calls, including e-mail and fax records.”

She stared at me directly, meeting my gaze over the tabletop. “When he did this,” she said, very quietly, “he managed to penetrate company files none of us had ever seen and discovered something none of us were ever meant to know-”

At that moment, the door slammed loudly. We both glanced up; no one but a pair of salesmen, swaggering in for a late lunch as if they owned the place. One of them yelled for our waitress to seat them; the other tried to stroke her ass as she flitted by. A couple of slimers, nothing more, but their rude entrance made her more aware of our surroundings.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “I don’t like this place.”

“C’mon,” I said. “Just some yups cruising for burgers.”

She continued to stare uncertainly toward the door. “There might be ERA people out there,” she said. “They don’t always wear uniforms or carry guns, you know.”

She was scared and had every right to be, but that didn’t matter right now. I wanted to get the rest of the story out of her before she went down the street to the courthouse. “Don’t worry about the feds grabbing us,” I said quickly. “Remember what I told you about Barris, the local ERA honcho? He gave me a card I could use to get us past checkpoints.”

“Card?” Her gaze wavered back toward me, only slightly distracted. “What sort of card?”

“Umm … this one.” I reached into my jacket for the laminated card the colonel had given me the night before. I hadn’t looked at the card since Barris had handed it to me; in fact, this was the first time all day I had thought of it.

“See?” I said as I produced the plastic card and showed it to her. “It’ll solve any problems with-”

“Oh, hell,” she whispered. “Let me see that.”

Before I could object, Hinckley whisked the card from my fingertips and examined it closely. She bent it slightly, held it up to the light … then reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a Swiss Army knife, unfolded its miniature scissors, and made a deep cut into the center of the card.

“Hey!” I snapped. “Don’t do …”

Then I stopped as she pulled open the card a little more and revealed it to me. Within its plastic and cardboard lining lay wires as fine as cat whiskers, leading to tiny wafer-thin microchips and miniature solenoids.

“It’s a smartcard,” she breathed. “Like the smartbadges we’ve got at the company … only this one can emit a signal that can be traced through cellular bands.”

“Aw, shit …” I couldn’t believe I had been such an idiot. The bastards had set me up and I had fallen for it. “Can it … could it listen to us?”

She shook her head. “Uh-uh,” she said quietly. “It’d have to be larger than this … but it can signal our location to anyone who’s paying attention. That’s bad enough.”

A frigid current ran down my spine. “Does this mean-”

“I don’t know what it means,” she shot back at me. “You brought it here, so you tell me.” Hinckley gently lay the card on the table and slid it against the wall, placing a napkin dispenser on top of it for good measure. “One thing’s for sure, and that’s the fact we’ve been here too long.”

“Hey, I didn’t know-”

“I know you didn’t know,” she murmured as she slid out from her side of the booth. “If you’d been working for them, you wouldn’t have been so stupid as to show it to me. That’s not the point.”

She dug a few dollars out of her pocket and put them on the table. “When we get to the courthouse and I find a judge, you’ll get the rest of the story … but we’ve got to get out of here.”

I was just starting to clamber out from my side of the booth. “But I swear I didn’t-”

“Now, damn it!” Hinckley was already heading for the door by the time I crawled out of my seat. I scrounged a handful of loose change out of my pocket, dropped it on the table, and gave an apologetic shrug to the waitress, then hurried to catch up with her.