Up Against It - M. J. Locke [84]
Jane felt sick. “If it gets out of Phocaea on bandwidth as broad as Upside-Down’s, it’ll be all over the solar system in no time. Billions of computer systems could be damaged.”
“Yes. And there’s more. Look.” Tania bounded over to one of the “points,” the binary module system, and her hands flew back and forth in a complex pattern: the rest of the construct vanished and the binary subsystem grew in size and complexity.
“This unit,” Tania told Jane with a gesture at the structure hanging before them, which caused the bigger of the two tightly bound modules to light up, “is at the very core of life support, and it was the first unit to go active. Look at the behavior of these two.” She lit up its sister module. “These flows”—she pointed at the green strands and streams, which brightened as she gestured, and the other strands faded—“are internal processes with the other nine modules. But we have no idea what that extra module hanging out there is doing”—she pointed at the distant extraneous module, the one also attached to the star’s center—“or why there’s so much activity between that one and these two. These three modules are behaving very differently from what you’d find in most star-structure sapients.
“And somehow, these unusual relationships and activities are critical to the sapient’s identity-formation. All its awareness, growth, and replication activities accelerated once that one became active and hooked up to these two.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we have a very unusual sapient on our hands. It could have all kinds of unique properties. Now, look at all this other activity.” Hundreds of suddenly brilliant streams and packets darted to and from the three modules, in all directions. “We don’t even know what all these additional calls are—we can’t trace them; the sapient has masked the process. And it’s a huge transfer of information. This represents a good five percent or more of the entire cluster network activity—at least six kilo-turings’ worth of processing, maybe as much as ten.”
Jane whistled. “That’s got to be affecting our other systems.”
“It is. The city’s automated processes are all experiencing slowdowns of fifteen to twenty-five percent.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“I have Thondu investigating.”
Jane frowned. “Is he the best choice?”
“I wish I had a dozen of him! He’s caught tricks our sapient has pulled that I’ve missed. And I’m no slouch.”
Jane thought for a moment. “Are you sure all this activity isn’t a second attempt to replicate itself?”
“Oh, absolutely! Even if it weren’t a huge waste of resources to try to replicate itself twice at one time—remember, it’s just now learning how to do it—making two separate attempts from different centers would overtax it. Not a logical act. And artificial sapients are nothing if not logical. Also, there’s just not enough room on our systems for it to create a duplicate. It takes up a huge amount of space and processing time. That’s why we couldn’t just take a snapshot of the entire system and then do a purge and reboot. None of our recording and viewing methods can deal with that much information flowing in all those directions at once.”
“Hmmm.”
“And I also know that sapients are prone to going off on odd tangents that are of no importance to humans. They take contemplating their navels to a whole new level.
“Besides,” Tania said, “we have a fleet of people around the entire cluster watching for unexplained behavior across the network. Trust me—we’d know if it was making yet another replica.”
A call came in from Upside-Down. An older woman