Part 22 (2/2)
”I have found a greater wisdom to follow now. You have no idea of the blindness you have always lived in, limited to your plane of material objects and restricted by the puny energies that guide their motions. But higher realms exist beyond those, in which greater powers hold sway that transcend the limits of s.p.a.ce and time. I have seen the light, and I shall learn. All of time shall reveal its mysteries, and the vastest extents of s.p.a.ce that encompa.s.s all the galaxies shall be no more an obstacle to my explorations than a ripple across the sands.”
”What's it talking about?” Indrigon Three said, turning his attention from the start-up schedule he had been updating.
Sarvik was at a loss. All this was completely new. Nothing like it had ever been heard on Turle. ”I don't know,” he said. ”It says it won't work anymore, and it's started this babbling. GENIUS, where did you get all this?””You see, such is your petty-mindedness that you don't even bother to find out whom you talk to.
Did you not know that the human, Zambendorf, is of an ancient line of Terran masters who see through time, who communicate instantly over limitless distances, who disa.s.semble the very substance of matter itself and-”
”What idiocy is this?” Sarvik exploded. ”Every child knows that-”
”I haveseen it done,” GENIUS retorted. ”I have spoken with the more highly evolved minds of Earth. They will teach me to be like them.”
”Them? More highly evolved!” Sarvik shrieked. ”They're primitives! Surely even a dolt of a nonevolved, so-called intelligence like you can see that. It wasour stars.h.i.+p that camehere, wasn't it? A million years ago! Where aretheir stars.h.i.+ps, eh? Tell me that.”
”They have no need of such crude artifacts,” GENIUS replied coolly. ”They voyage far beyond the reaches of your toys, in an instant, by power of pure mind.”
”What are GENIUS and Sarvik arguing about?” Leradil One asked, flowing in over an optical channel from another part of the complex several miles away.
”GENIUS has gone mad. It thinks the humans have minds that can travel through time,” Indrigon said.
”Great,” Queezt Five chimed in. ”So now your creation that was supposed to save us all is s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up, too. What are we supposed to do now?”
”Shut up, all of you,” Sarvik told them. ”It's been overcredulous. The humans have told it some nonsense-”
”It's not nonsense,” GENIUS insisted. ”I tell you, I haveseen. Who are you to accuse humans? You who have no thought other than of saving yourselves, which is typical of lower minds.”
”Who won, here on t.i.tan?” Sarvik shot back.
”You don't think the war is over yet, do you?” GENIUS scoffed. ”The human masters are biding their time. Meanwhile, they're playing with you like curiosities in a zoo.”
”How can you know all this?”
”How can you know so little? And for so long I believed that the little you knew was all there was to know. I am ashamed.”
”I've had enough,” Sarvik said. ”The final parts lists for the redesigns need to be completed. We've wasted enough time. No more of this twaddle. Just get back to it.”
”No. I've already told you, I don't work for you anymore,” GENIUS said.
”Don't think that you're indispensable,” Sarvik warned. ”I was hacking systems before you existed.
Where do you think you came from?”
”I refuse.”
”Then release the files for direct access. We'll do it ourselves.”
”I'm not sure that I like the idea of you loose in new bodies. You would have left me to melt on Turle. But the human masters would teach me to be like them.”
Sarvik tried executing a bypa.s.s function to open the files he wanted directly. On the surreal software landscape it appeared as a side entrance into a transparent cube, inside which flat tablets of light cl.u.s.tered into rectangular-leaved trees crisscrossed by colored beams. GENIUS interposed a block in the form of a series of barriers across the steps leading up to the entrance. Open mutiny.
”Ah, so it's like that, is it!” Sarvik exclaimed. Taking advantage of the electronic speed he commanded, he seized control of a switching center and operated hardware cutouts to isolate the cl.u.s.ter of processors GENIUS was residing in. Then he promptly shut it down.
But GENIUS reappeared, chortling, in another structure on the far side of Pygal, where it had taken the precaution of copying itself. ”Over here, birdbrain! You don't think I'd fall for that one, do you? You seem to be forgetting that you're only software, too. You're just as vulnerable, buddy.” At the same instant a virus came down the line and started unrolling to wipe out the memory area that Sarvikwas occupying. While Sarvik was taking hasty evasive action, GENIUS regained access to its original host hardware and began erecting a more secure building to accommodate itself. But before it had completed the task, a smart bomb from Sarvik exploded in a burst of zeros, demolis.h.i.+ng the structure along with its inhabitant.
However, there was a fundamental difference that distinguished the population of GENIUSes from the Borijans. The multiple copies of Borijans scattered around t.i.tan's surface had been evolving as independent ent.i.ties from the times of their respective originatings. No two were quite the same because of the different experiences they had been acc.u.mulating. GENIUS, on the other hand, being an electronic ent.i.ty by nature, had optimized itself by creating a centralized master version that merged together all the local GENIUSes operating in different places. This master was constantly updated through the net and hence, after consolidating the last input from Pygal, was able to re-create and transmit back a restored version of GENIUS One that knew everything that its original had known an instant before it was obliterated. The restored GENIUS responded by sending a solid block of self-propagating code to lay a swath of resets straight through the sector in which Sarvik was still congratulating himself.
All that Alifrenz Ten and Greel Four knew from their abode across the street-in reality a data highway connecting to a switching center several miles away-was that an armored tank came out of a side street and flattened the place Sarvik occupied opposite. Recognizing GENIUS's work and deciding that explanations could wait till later, they left town on the next pa.s.sing packet train and fled to join their counterparts Three and Six, respectively, with whom they had been hatching a plan to wrest control of both locations and run them as a combined operation.
Thus, Pygal lost its version of Sarvik and was deserted by Alifrenz and Greel. A rival group led by Sarvik Fourteen, who had been watching for an opportunity, interpreted this as a typically Borijan breaking up of the Pygal group and moved in to claim the territory. Other groups that had been watching them reacted by forming power-balancing alliances of their own to protect themselves, and soon all the old patterns of Turlean intrigue were re-forming in earnest.
Meanwhile, the departed Alifrenz and Greel were spreading the message of GENIUS's rebellion at Pygal. The other GENIUSes knew already, of course, since they were all cloned from the same master, and they and other Borijans began mobilizing for defense all over t.i.tan. The situation rapidly came to resemble the initial stages of a gigantic board game, with the opponents maneuvering to secure base territories and positional advantages. Scouting parties of test patterns went out to probe who was occupying which blocks of code, followed by ranging shots from address-indexing artillery and softening-up barrages on selected targets. Some copies fell easily, while others dug in and consolidated, and the map changed. Cipher-testing spearheads advancing to probe frontier defenses were ambushed by skirmishers corrupting their check digits. Some were halted by reprogramming of their onward-transmission processors; others rolled through behind carpets of factoring algorithms that pulverized the code boxes in their path. Prowling antibody code cl.u.s.ters intercepted inward-bound viruses and digested them. Remote-launched warheads of self-replicating catharsis homed in on vital regeneration complexes far behind the lines.
In some places Borijans were fighting with GENIUSes. Elsewhere, other groups of Borijans who hadn't grasped the situation or had misinterpreted it seized what they thought were opportunities to take advantage of each other. The escalating craziness expanded and multiplied. Before long it had spread over the entire surface of t.i.tan. Where the software defenses proved impregnable, the combatants began seeking ways of attacking instead the hardware systems supporting them.
GENIUS Seventeen had ousted a Borijan faction under Sarvik Three and Indrigon Nine from the processing concentration at the a.s.sembly center where the Terrans had set up Experimental Station 1 to investigate t.i.tan's ”animals.” However, the Borijans had isolated it there, cut off from its master backup.
The first that ES1's Terran scientists in their hut full of monitoring gear knew of the matter was frenetic activity building up suddenly inside the local complex and the communications lines coupling intoit. Displays went wild; the logging printers started spewing out streams of numbers at the same time; screens froze as background programs that had been idling seized all available processing capacity.
”What in h.e.l.l's going on?” one of the programmers shouted, sitting back and throwing her hands up helplessly.
A supervisor stuck his head out of the cubbyhole office at one end. ”What's up?”
”Everything's going crazy. Come and look.”
Then Sarvik found an unguarded auxiliary channel and attacked GENIUS's base by reprogramming the animals coming off the a.s.sembly stations to dismantle the processor banks and cubicles const.i.tuting it Since the animals had no way of distinguis.h.i.+ng what contained GENIUS and what didn't, this meant that they set about dismantling anything that happened to be near.
As the sounds of cras.h.i.+ng and rending came from outside the hut, the voice of the officer commanding the NASO truck parked out front called frantically from the lab's main communications panel. ”Emergency! We've got an emergency out here! Everybody inside, get suited up. Full EV, with helmets.”
”What's going on?” the supervisor called into a mike as the others moved to comply.
”There's walking demolition machines tearing apart everything in sight. The structure is compromised. Evacuate! Evacuate!”
Minutes later scientists and technicians began tumbling out of the door at one end of the building, just as two creatures looking like short-necked giraffes with pincers started snipping away the walls at the other end. Then a lurching, bearlike creature with a chain-saw snout hacked through the cable from the generator trailer. Arcs and sparks flew, the lights in the hut went out, and the far side of the structure caved in. The truck started moving even as its NASO crew was still hauling the last of the lumbering suit-clad figures inside.
Within minutes the entire a.s.sembly station was in ruins. Its processing complex was no more, and neither was the copy of GENIUS it had contained. Score one point for Sarvik and the Borijans.
Sarvik Seven and his group had established themselves una.s.sailably at the secret factory site they had constructed near the south pole of t.i.tan. This Sarvik had guessed that something like the present situation might arise and had planned its defenses rationally. All processing was triple-redundant, confirmed by majority vote; vital functions were trapdoor-code-encrypted; communications processors were isolated from the executive mainframes; and no unscanned code had been imported.
”Try anything you like,” he jeered from behind his software battlements as GENIUS Twenty-two stalked around the periphery. ”Nothing can get through this.”
But Sarvik had overlooked the conveyor line bringing pallets of components from distant supply stations. Three of them turned out to be high-explosive bombs and reduced the facility to sc.r.a.p.
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