Spyware

Spurlock hawked a big one and fired it down the pipe. He couldn’t tell if the kid caught it in the face or not, but he hoped so. “See now, you don’t want to be calling up this pipe, boy. You never know what might come down to get you. Snakes would love this pipe, if they hear you. So, you just keep quiet until I bring you more food. If you’re real good, I might even let you out. If you’re not, I’ll cover up this last hole and you’ll suffocate down there in the dark. Now, shut up.”

With that, he walked back toward the road. There was still plenty of business to be done today.

***

Nog had plenty of snacks in his white Lincoln Town Car and Ray was so hungry that he couldn’t help himself. He felt vaguely ill to eat from the same bags of corn chips and boxes of cellophane-wrapped cakes that Nog had been pawing. Listening to Nog wasn’t helping his stomach, either.

“Where to?” asked Nog.

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, you’ve got the gun, Vance.”

“Right,” said Vance, feeling dazed. So much had happened today. He ate another chip, trying to think. “Let’s get out of here before the cops come. Just drive, Nog.”

Nog did a wide sweeping U-turn to get out of the dead-end circle. The big white car heeled over like a boat. The thought of Moby Dick, the great white whale, came unbidden to Ray’s mind. Kids on bikes scattered before their wake. Nog stomped on the pedal and they rolled quickly and quietly away from Brenda’s.

“I guess I can tell you some stuff, since you seem so convinced that I created this beauty,” said Nog, driving the car out of the neighborhood. “The virus is really a sophisticated piece of software. I can’t say that I completely understand what it’s doing now myself.”

“What do you mean?” mumbled Ray around his chips. He snorted quietly to himself; here was another nerd, telling him how cool a nerdy program was. They didn’t have many people to brag to, so he had always been a prime target during his office hours. He wondered vaguely what was happening to his students. Had they found a substitute for him?He hoped it wasn’t Waterson. The guy had his heart in the right place, but he couldn’t teach. He felt an odd pang of guilt for abandoning his classes.

“The virus is a real piece of work,” continued Nog, warming to his topic. “I always get a chuckle out of the news flashes-I’ve started watching CNN since your last visit-I love how they call it: adaptable. They have no clue.”

“Uh-huh.”Ray barely listened. Much of his attention was devoted to feeding his face and watching for cops. He wished there was something to drink. The only thing in sight was Nog’s sun-warmed, half-empty can of diet soda. He wasn’t that thirsty.

“A lot of the ideas in it come from your teachings, Vance. Particularly in the study of neural networks.”

Ray frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“Neural nets, my man. That’s what this virus is built from.”

Ray looked at him in surprise. Neural nets were software imitations of the human mind. They were currently a hot area of research in the artificial intelligence field, but few practical applications had yet been found. They were often found to be too large and complex for most projects. “They said the virus was big, but not that big.”

Nog nodded proudly. “I worked hard to shrink the neural nodes. They are both general problem-solvers and yet specialized to their task. But, that’s not the best part.”

Ray waited. Nog finally had his full attention.

Nog basked in it. “The worm is a fully-function learning system. It copies itself with both logical and random mutations. And it shares data on successful mutations with others of its kind, sort of cross-breeding.”

Ray thought about that for a moment. “That is some piece of software.”

“It’s more than that, Vance. It’s alive.”

“It’s just a bunch of bits set a certain way, Nog,” replied Ray. “It’s not going to pass the Turing test.”The Turing test, first described by Alan Turing in the fifties, defined a test which no computer had yet passed. Turing argued that if one could hold a conversation with a computer in another room and couldn’t tell its responses from those of a human, one had to admit it showed some degree of intelligence.

“No, no,” said Nog, “You miss my point. I didn’t say it was intelligent, Vance, I said it was alive.”

Ray was silent for a moment. “So, this thing makes copies of itself with variations in the copies?”

“Yes, logical mutations that stem from what it has learned. They vary greatly, too. I have no idea anymore what the virus has become. It mutates very quickly. Out on the open net, with a thousand conditions, it has turned into a thousand different viruses doing a thousand different things.”

“How many different moves does it know how to make? I mean, is it created to destroy data, hardware, what? What’s its trick?”

“You aren’t getting it, Vance. The thing is rewriting itself, adapting. I have no idea what it might do. There is one main trick that remains to be seen. What other moves might it make? Who knows? Whatever works best.”