Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [30]
The small cartoon syringe flickered red and steady on the screen. If someone had looked over Stephanie’s shoulder they would have seen what was apparently a virus protection package searching her hard disk.
What was really happening was the unleashing of the Ferret. The Ferret wasn’t created by the AI research team at Texas Instruments. It had been bought on the grey market from the Pacific Basin, so they could take it apart and study the methods used in its searching technique. Now the screen flashed and the syringe was replaced by the Ferret front end. Originally the package had come with a terribly boring military ID screen, just some serial numbers and a diagnostic menu. The boys at Texas Instruments had replaced that with the graphics that now flashed in front of Stephanie, washing her face with coloured screenlight in the dark office.
The Ferret looked like a genuine ferret, a weasel‐thin carnivore snaking around and twisting its neck, happy to be unleashed from whatever software hibernation limbo held it between excursions. Bright eyes and yellow teeth. It moved as if it was ready for the hunt, the screen animation hardly blurring. At the top left of the screen a network status panel appeared, showing the codenames of the hard disks for every terminal in the Butler Institute. The hard disks appeared as solid black rectangles, showing that they were locked and secure. Nobody could get into them through the network. Two fat boxes appeared next. These were the gateways into the Butler Institute mainframes. They were also black. Locked solid.
The Ferret thrashed on the screen.
There was a popping sound like someone opening a six‐pack of soft‐drink cans all at once, close to your face. Stephanie flinched. She kept the sound on her machine turned off in normal use, but Ferret could override any system defaults.
With the volley of popping noises the rectangles symbolizing the hard disks all snapped from black to white. The mainframe boxes took a moment longer. Then both unlocked with the sound of champagne bottles opening.
The whole system was wide open.
Ferret moved as if it had caught the scent of blood, tail whipping. It turned and looked at her and winked then lunged towards the top left corner of the screen. En route it split into a dozen tiny dashing cartoon ferrets. Each one darted into a box representing a hard disk or a mainframe, disappearing into it as if vanishing down a rabbit hole.
The Ferret was penetration and search software. You told it what you wanted to look for and unleashed it on a network. That’s where it was now, a sly predator‐process sniffing at every node in the Butler Institute, cracking open every file on every disk and nosing through it. Anything of interest that it found it would copy. It was a smart program and had a knack for choosing only the relevant material. The criteria it used were sophisticated and remarkably astute. That was where the artificial intelligence came in. The Ferret had been written using some very sophisticated techniques. The boys in her old research lab had still been scratching their heads over it when she left, a highly illegal copy of the Ferret in her briefcase. Once she knew she’d be working at the Butler Institute she’d suspected it might come in useful.
In an alcove beside the washrooms there was a small refrigerator, its top covered with dirty coffee cups, a microwave and coffee machine. Stephanie took a break from her screen and ducked in there for some coffee. It took her five minutes expertly to fix herself a cappuccino, even grating some chocolate from a bar in the refrigerator, sifting it on to the stiff white foam.
When she sat back down at her workstation there was a folder containing seven documents