Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [134]
‘This is really interesting,’ he explained as spidery diagrams spread across screens all over the control room. ‘You may remember that I found Moh Kohn’s own software constructs, some tentacle of the Black Plan, and the new entity – all in the same locale, and hard to distinguish at certain points. Well, I’ve been working on that, and you can see what I’ve found.’ He hot-keyed a sequence and the diagrams simplified to a mere few thousand branching lines. Bleibtreu-Fèvre watched them glassy-eyed. ‘Common features!’ Donovan went on. ‘Moh Kohn must have his father’s programming style burnt into his mind, although of course it’s expressed in creating much smaller programs, his data-raiders and so forth. As for the Watchmaker itself, it appears to be a…descendant of the Black Plan—’
‘You’re not saying Josh Kohn created the Watchmaker, are you?’
Donovan shook his head with a rueful laugh. ‘On top of Dissembler and the Black Plan? I think that would have been beyond even his capacities…especially twenty years ago. No, I think that, whatever its origin, it has learned to exploit the…openings Josh Kohn evidently built into Dissembler, and the abilities he built into the Plan.’
Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s face went from pale to grey, as if the bones were showing.
‘And you have developed specifics for all of them?’
‘Yes,’ Donovan said. He couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. ‘We can destroy the Watchmaker, and the Black Plan, and Kohn’s little efforts as well – if they matter.’
‘And Dissembler?’
‘Ah.’ It gave him pause. ‘I hadn’t considered that.’
‘Oh, well, ha, ha,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre flatly. ‘Might as well be hanged for a cop as a dealer, what?’
Donovan dismissed the matter with the thought that losing Dissembler would be a small price for saving the world, whether from the Watchmaker itself or from the efforts of Space Defense. He punched up a new set of displays, flinching slightly at the sight of the ongoing havoc – traffic systems down, hospitals on emergency backup, markets going frantic – that he’d taken the blame for. Then he flipped to a search program that spun out thousands of agent programs to trace the Watchmaker. Nothing active, not yet: just to see if they could find the thing…
At first, as the hits began to light up on the screens, he thought he’d made a mistake. They were finding evidence of the entity just about everywhere they went. Were they reacting to Dissembler itself? Had he made them too general?
He checked, lost in concentration.
‘What is it?’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s eyes met his as he looked up.
‘It’s replicated!’ Donovan said. ‘It’s everywhere.’
Bleibtreu-Fèvre studied the screens in disbelief. ‘All of that, all those lights?’
‘All those lights,’ Donovan repeated bitterly. ‘And more.’
The disruptions died down. Everything seemed to be going back to normal except for the spreading spots of light.
‘That must be what’s in the net traffic,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said.
‘Yeah,’ said Donovan. ‘Right, there’s no time to lose.’
He hit the launch code for the viral antigens, the savage routines bred over multiple microsecond generations in closed systems, primed to tear the rogue AI and its cognates into their component bytes. Little red sparks shot across the displays, tracking the antigens’ progress through the global networks.
And, one by one, the red sparks went out.
Bleibtreu-Fèvre grunted. ‘It seems to be fighting back.’
Donovan marvelled again at how something that was as clear to him as an open book could be so obscure to anyone else.
‘No,’ he snarled. ‘They aren’t engaging, they aren’t even making contact. Something