Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [18]
Memories. She was investigating memory. He’d discovered this interesting fact while checking damage reports after coming off-shift, and it had brought him moseying and nosing along this morning. Her conversation had confirmed it, and now it was time for him to investigate it.
Kohn had a problem with memories. He had vivid memories of his childhood and of his teens, but there was a period in between where it was all scratches and static. He knew what had happened then, but he found it almost impossible to think himself back to it, to remember.
He got up and laid the gun gently on the desk and connected it to the back of the terminal.
‘Seek,’ he told it.
In his own mind he called it The Swiss Army Gun. He’d customized it around a state-of-the-art Kalashnikov and a Fujitsu neural-net chip, upgraded its capabilities with all the pirated software he could lay hands on – he’d stripped processors and sensors out of security devices he’d outwitted, out of little nuisance maintenance robots he’d potted like pigeons, and he’d bolted the whole lot on. He suspected that its hardware capacity by now vastly exceeded its resident software. Besides the standard features that made it a smart weapon, it ran pattern-recognition learning systems, natural-language HCI, interfaces that patched images to his glades, and enough specialized information-servers to start a small business – gophers to explore databases and bring back selected information, filters to scan newsgroups – all integrated around and reporting back to a fetch that could throw a convincing virtual image of himself: his messenger, decoy and stunt double.
Someday he would get around to documenting it.
He set it to find out more about the project Janis Taine was working on. Terminal identifications, effortlessly and habitually memorized; official project definitions, pasted from the admin database; traces of Taine’s library searches; molecular structures decoded down from the gun’s chemical analyser – all of them pulled together by Dissembler, the most successful and widespread piece of freeware ever written, a self-correcting, evolving compiler/translator that lived in the eyeblink gap between input and output. Mips – processing cycles, computer power – had always been cheaper than bandwidth. The computers got cheaper by the week and the phone bills stayed high by the month. Dissembler exploited this differential, turning data streams – sparse and skimpy, stripped and squeezed like the words of poetry – into images and sound and text endlessly adjusted to the user’s profile. Anonymous, uncopyrighted, it had spread like a benign virus for a quarter of a century. By now not even the software engineers who’d built it into DoorWays™ – the current smash-hit, chart-topping, must-have interface – had a clue how it worked.
Moh did, but tried not to think about it. It was part of the memory damage.
He launched his hastily assembled probe.
Mindlessly sophisticated programs swarmed into the university’s networks, expanding like a lazily blown smoke-ring, searching out weaknesses, trapdoors, encryption keys left momentarily unguarded. Most of them would get trashed by Security, but there was a chance that one would come back with the goods. Not for some time, though.
Kohn got up and reached to separate the basic weapon from its smart-box, the extra magazine that made it like a dog with two tails, then remembered where he was going and stayed his hand. Whether the rifle was smart or dumb, he couldn’t take it with him. The Geneva Convention’s Annexe On the Laws of Irregular Warfare, Inter-communal Violence and Terrorism was painstakingly explicit about that.
The university’s branch of the Nat-Mid-West Bank backed on to a long-established patch of waste-ground,