Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [77]
For protection. Just in case.’
He handed the Doctor a slip of paper on which he had constructed an elaborate occult symbol. The Doctor unfolded the paper, raised an eyebrow, examined the complex diagram drawn with ruler and compass and ringed with angelic names and alchemical marks, carefully folded it up again, and inserted it into his coat pocket.
‘Thank you, Bob,’ he said. ‘That was very thoughtful of you.’
‘Uh, Doctor?’ said Bob. He was pointing at the screen of the Apple. Letters and numbers were flowing across its screen in a flood of symbols. ‘I have never seen anything like this.
What’d you do to it?’
‘It’s not me,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s something on Swan’s Eclipse. I was trying to make her system crash to root, and suddenly something reached out and grabbed the modem.’
‘Well, disconnect it!’
The Doctor caught Bob’s hand before he could yank the modem’s plug. ‘Just a moment. Look at it. What’s it doing?’
Bob said, ‘It looks like it’s running the same instructions over and over again. You know, it looks like a diagnostic test... a program checking out the Apple’s system, poking into all the nooks and crannies. I do not like this.’
The scribble on the screen meant nothing to Peri.
Everything she had seen up to that point had been in kind of stunted English, the high-level command languages which let human beings talk to the machine: a translator takes words like PRINT or RUN and turns them into the microcode that the computer can understand. Now the Apple was receiving instructions in its own tongue, and gleefully running them through its little circuits just as fast as it could.
They watched as the program refined itself. ‘It’s using a sort of evolution,’ said the Doctor. ‘Inputting its best guesses, then running Them through ‘natural’ selection to refine them.
Each generation of the program is a little better than the last.’
‘There’s no way the Apple has enough oomph to do that,’
said Bob. ‘The actual program that’s doing this must be running on Swan’s mini.’
‘Using the Apple as its testing ground.’
‘Well, what’s it trying to accomplish?’ said Peri
‘A good question,’ said the Doctor. He reached over and plucked the cord out of the modem. Instantly, the characters on the screen of the Apple froze.
Bob picked up a diskette and fed it into the slot. ‘Let’s do a core dump,’ he said. ‘Find out what Swan was trying to do to my machine.’
The big fear about the people who break into computers is that they could bring civilisation tumbling down. They’re forces of chaos, pulling the rug out from under the order we’ve created with our machines. Trust me, the hackers aren’t going to trigger World War III. They just don’t think that big, even when their philosophy tells them to screw the system before it screws them. No, what they cause are little miseries. Dumb pranks, mostly against one another. A few thousand dollars bilked from Ma Bell or the credit card companies isn’t enough to blow the walls down. Oh, in theory they might be able to kill a few people by blowing away 911 or messing up a hospital’s records, but even that’s not enough to end life as we know it.
I couldn’t believe that Swan was as dangerous as the Doctor was making out. I could see her growing fat and ugly on petty thefts, petty revenge. But she’d always be a parasite, living around the edges instead of pulling strings from the centre. Let her keep the little monster; if the Ruskies really wanted it back, or the CIA really wanted to get their paws on it, Swan would just turn up missing one day, simple as that.
That’s what I was thinking on my way to the mall.
I met Swan at a coffee and pastries shop. She had a junk look about her, a pale twitch. The thing that was scraping at her mind would soon be flaking away the health of her body.
‘Tell me where the Doctor is,’ she said.
‘Hold on!’ I said. ‘What makes you think I know where he is?’
‘I practically walked into you when you were with his pals.’
‘But I was only interviewing them,’ I bulishitted.
‘Mr Peters,’ she said, ‘if you’re not with me, you’re against me. Is