Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [71]
‘What is normal use, anyway?’
‘Be assured the component will be healthy and busy, as will its offspring. Such devices are an integral part of our society.’
Peri looked as though she’d tasted something sour, but the Doctor said,’Is it worse than training a dog for police work?’
She admitted, It’s gotta be better than whatever Swan’s planning to use it for. All right, Doctor. Let’s send that kid back home where it belongs.’
‘If it’s sitting in Swan’s bathtub,’ I said, ‘why don’t we just go and nick it?’
‘Because I wouldn’t advise it,’ said the Doctor, and wouldn’t say more.
Four
Swan was well aware that something was happening in her head. Her guess was that the creature was releasing pheromones, those chemicals bugs use to attract mates.
It took to the terminal in her kitchen like a fish to water. It seemed to understand the keyboard moments after the rippling tentacles in its fur had moved across the letters. It began to type commands, imitating what it saw on the screen, generating one error message after another, faster and faster, until its commands began to make sense and, the machine began to respond.
Swan watched, leaning back against the kitchen sink, both hands gripping the cold metal rim. It was just an animal. How could it possibly understand letters and numbers? How could it possibly turn them into commands? What kind of secret superproject had she got her hands on?
The monster was programming. It had created a file and was pounding in lines of code as fast as the machine could take them, building up a huge set of instructions. Swan could only catch snatches of the code as it flashed past. The monster seemed to be debugging as it went, running little bits of the program over and over until it was satisfied with them, their adding them to its massive project. It was learning only slightly faster than it was producing output.
The system crashed a few times as the big hairy bug tested its lengthy program. Each time it restarted the machine, massaged it a little to fix whatever it had broken, and then started its tests again.
Swan was cold and her arms were stiff by the time her furry baby was done. It just stopped, with the same abruptness with which it had started, and sat back a little froth the machine. The rippling in its fur quieted for the first time she could remember.
She wasn’t sure how it would react when she picked it up out of the seat, but it seemed quite happy to be carried back to its bathtub. She poured in the milk crate of Legos. At once it started picking them up, the tentacles moving them along its surface until it was half-covered in coloured plastic shapes.
She sat down at the computer in the kitchen. The seat was still a little warm.
Swan tried to analyse the code, but she couldn’t seem to stay on task. She played with pens, she rearranged the mess of cords behind the table, she even washed up some coffee cups.
Twice she found herself halfway up the stairs.
If she was going to get any work done, it would have to be at the office.
Three times she had to stop herself from turning the car around and racing home. But after a few hours in the office, she was sure her head felt a little clearer, she had more perspective.
Somewhere deep in her head, she knew that no-one was going to take the creature away from her. It was hers now, and it knew it.
It took Swan about fifteen minutes to hack a program for her Unix box that would display the pictures from her home cameras. After that, every quarter of an hour, she checked baby. Improve the picture quality, add some sound, and you’d have a dandy software package to sell to nervous parents.
She picked through the creature’s code. The printout ran to hundreds of pages; she had stuffed them into a couple of binders. She had forgotten the last time she slept. Teaspoons full of instant coffee held under her tongue helped keep her focussed on the problem.
The simplest thing would be to just run it and see what it did. Swan wasn’t quite ready to take that step yet. Not on her computers. And not on the