This Alien Shore Page 16

  Aware that the very air was charged with social pheromones of dominance and conflict, he chose his words carefully. “Of course, Dr. Masada understands his responsibility to you and your ship. No doubt he was unaware of the effect his research was having on your system. I’m sure when I show this to him, he’ll make the necessary adjustments.”

  “Make sure of it,” the captain said gruffly, and he handed him the inventory.

  With great effort Hsing managed to make his exit without any further confrontation. But inside he was seething. No one would treat him like that in his own node. No one. Had the captain forgotten that without the Guild there would be no outworlds to support his little ferry? Had he forgotten just what Hsing’s title meant, the kind of power he wielded in his own right? What was a petty inship processor when compared with the kinds of priorities he juggled daily?

  But you didn’t fight with a man over things like that when the two of you were stuck on the same ship for months yet. It just wasn’t worth it. Let him have his petty little kingdom; the stars would belong to Hsing, once he returned to the ainniq.

  For now, all he had to do was deal with Masada.

  Masada.

  At times he wondered if what was going on inside the man’s head resembled any process he would recognize, or whether common speech and cultural habits were disguising a conceptual gap so vast that they might well be from different species. But in that sense, all Guerans were aliens to one another, weren’t they? The iru only seemed more alien than most to him because he was nantana, and all the signals of tone and movement which he relied upon for social intercourse were absent in such a man. Or distorted. Or exaggerated. You couldn’t even try to read such a man beyond the surface, you just took his words at face value and tried not to look any deeper.

  Ah, he thought dryly, the joys of Gueran society.

  He wended his way through the public parts of the ship, back to the small cabins which were tucked into its rear. It was a pretty empty place this time of the shift; most passengers preferred the roomier public chambers up front, with their viddie screens and gaming tables and the thousand and one diversions provided for their amusement. Here in the back, in these smaller spaces, it was harder to forget that you were locked inside a finite vessel for the better part of six E-months, and if you didn’t get along with your neighbors, or needed some new horizon to explore, or simply wanted to be by yourself for a time ... tough luck.

  He knocked on Masada’s door. Three times in all, before the man responded. That was typical. The door finally opened to some unspoken command, and he saw exactly what he had expected to see.

  The professor was sitting before the large vid screen he had brought with him, which was doubtless displaying some coded and incomprehensible interpretation of a computer program. The screen was angled so that Hsing couldn’t see just what was on it, but that was all right; he had learned weeks ago that the types of visual patterning Masada used in his work were utterly meaningless to him. Which was just as well. He doubted the iru would take kindly to explaining the details of his work, even if Hsing were capable of understanding them.

  “Come look at this,” the professor said.

  Hsing was startled. Masada wanted him to look at his work? That was a first. Usually the iru treated Hsing’s bouts of curiosity as mildly annoying interruptions, and though he gave such explanations as the moment required, he was always anxious to regain the solitude which was his accustomed environment. To be invited to look at the Master’s work ... that was an honor indeed, Hsing thought dryly. Almost enough to make him forget that, look as he might, he probably wouldn’t comprehend one line of it. Most of it looked like pure chaos to him.

  But then he came to where the screen was fully visible, and saw what was on the surface. Not chaos. Not chaos at all. For a moment all other concerns were forgotten, even the one that had brought him to Masada’s cabin in the first place.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Masada pushed his chair back slowly; his eyes never left the screen. “That,” he said quietly, “is our virus.”

  It flowed across the screen with fluid grace, a shape made familiar by every youngster’s teaching program. The sheer familiarity of it took his breath away, and for a moment he couldn’t even connect what he was looking at to what Masada said it was. A double helix? How was their virus connected to that? Was Masada trying to say that the damn thing had DNA, that it really was alive, in the sense of a biological infection? If so, then the world-famous holist had finally lost all touch with reality. Life was a metaphor for programming, not a description of its true state. Surely even Masada understood that.

  “What is it?” he asked again. This time the question meant other things, deeper things. And it sheltered an even larger question: Have we made a mistake after all? Have we hired an extremist so lost in his holistic fantasies that he can

  no longer connect to reality? The thought made Hsing feel sick inside. Had he put his guildmastership at risk for some fairy tale of a binary Pygmalion? God help this man if that were the case. God help the Prima if it were so, for asking him to come here. Saving the world was one thing. This ... this was just crazy.

  But Masada’s tone was not the tone of a madman, and it was clear from his voice that he neither knew nor cared what was going on inside Hsing’s head. “It’s a programming chart of the virus. This is just a section of it, of course—but I assure you, the whole thing looks like this. Perfectly organized, from the first bit of data to the last.” He looked at Hsing for a moment, and it seemed that he smiled slightly. “Life.”

  If Masada had been nantana, Hsing would have taken the word as mockery. But no iru could have gained such insight into his thought processes from one look alone to know what power that one word would have.

  He moved closer and put his hand out to the screen, as if he would touch it. It was hard to look at such a thing in 2D like this, and not be able to rotate it at will in his mind’s eye. It was turning slowly on the screen, giving him a gradual view of the whole, but that wasn’t the same thing as being able to control it. “What’s that thing?” he said, pointing to a slender yellow line running down the center of the helix. “That doesn’t belong there.”

  “If it really were alive, no.” Masada turned back to the screen, and he must have fed the controlling program some command through his headset, for the double helix and its odd accessory suddenly increased in size and definition until he could make out the fine yellow struts connecting the central tube to the helix. “That’s memory storage. Normally it would be integrated with all the other elements, not isolated like that. But the programmer put it there, separate from the rest, so that it wouldn’t disturb the symmetry of the overall design. Which tells us just how very deliberate his choice of image was.”

  “You seem very sure of his motives.”

  He tapped a finger on the screen, touching segments of the helix one by one: blue, red, green, white. “Four colors, Master Hsing. Each one representing a different kind of processing sequence. Four colors in varying combination—just like the nucleic acids in a DNA string. Add one more color and the metaphor is no longer perfect.” He shook his head in amazement. “He designed his whole program to mimic DNA. A pattern one would only discover by decompiling and then charting the entire thing. One can barely comprehend the effort that would take. The frustration that would be involved, as he discarded segments of code which would suit his purpose perfectly ... except when viewed thus.”

  “Why?” he asked. “I mean, what’s the point?”

  “Good question. It certainly isn’t a desire to show off, for the odds of anyone getting this far with it are astronomically small. I had to dismantle over a hundred traps to get the virus decompiled in the first place, and those were very effective traps, targeted at someone of my skill level or better. I’ve ruined over two dozen copies of the virus just getting this far. So whoever did this never expected any kind of recognition for his efforts, unless it was from a very selec
t and secretive circle of colleagues.”

  “Hackers?”

  Masada turned to him. Just that: no words, no clear expression, just a look that Hsing could not read, a sentence that was never voiced, and the clear impression—gleaned from nowhere—that the professor’s estimate of Hsing’s intelligence was not all that high right now.

  “They fit the bill for secrecy,” Hsing offered. “And ego.”

  “Not hackers.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Masada said nothing. After two months of sharing a ship with him, Hsing knew that he hated repetition of the obvious. What seemed obvious to him, anyway. The fact that sometimes redundancy might serve an emotional purpose—like reassuring someone that he did indeed have some basis for his judgments—was lost on him. Or perhaps he was aware of it, but simply didn’t care.

  “How?” Hsing demanded. “How can you know that?”

  A faint expression that might almost have been a smile flickered across Masada’s face. “This isn’t a hacker’s pattern, Master Hsing. It isn’t how they think, how they act, how they program. Hackers are impatient creatures, hungry to test their skill against the world. They would never design a virus like this, that could disrupt all outworld commerce, and then hold it back for years while they worked to make it just a little prettier, on a level that no one would ever see. They would want to see it do its stuff.”

  “You think it took that long to finish?”

  “E-months at least. Years, if the designer had other business to attend to.” He turned back to the screen, and Hsing saw one section of virus give way to another, then to a third. “The programming charts of hacker viruses are complex, artistic in their own right, but they tend to be more chaotic in form, slapped together in bits and pieces as the muse of inspiration strikes. This is the product of a much more ordered mind. In fact I would say, this is the product of a mind that prides itself on order.” He stared at the sequence of flashing images for a moment in silence, then added, “I’d be willing to bet our designer is the product of conventional education, well-schooled rather than self-taught. He’s a perfectionist at heart, and that probably shows up in his day-today life as well as his programming. He doesn’t require praise from others, but takes pleasure in the process of his work. And whatever he planned to do with this ... I’d bet it was neither an impulsive move, nor a response to any outside event. He began work on it long ago and kept working on it until every byte was perfect. Then he set it loose. He’s probably still watching it, which means that we may have a way to find him; I’m searching through his code now for any kind of homing sequence, or a pattern that might reasonably evolve into one. The fact that we’re dealing with infinite variations makes it hard to find, of course; it may not even exist at this point. But I assure you, the man who created this masterpiece will want to see what it becomes.”

  “He could just collect spores from the outernet,” Hsing reminded him. “Eventually he’d get what he wanted, and there’d be no risk that way.”

  “For another programmer that might be enough,” Masada agreed. “Not for this man. His work is too ordered, too controlled ; that kind of personality wouldn’t put itself at the mercy of chance. He’d want to watch every variation as it evolved, and in the proper sequence, so that if corrections were necessary, he could make them in a timely manner. And he’s made arrangements to do so. Of that I’m certain.”

  Hsing stared at Masada for a moment—the professor was focused on the virus once more, and seemed unaware of his scrutiny—and at last said, softly, “You seem to have great insight into how this man thinks.”

  Did Masada hear the unvoiced challenge in his words? Iru weren’t known for their insight into other peoples’ motives. In fact, they were notorious for their lack of such insight. It had been one of the things the Guild had argued about, when Masada’s name was first brought up as that of a possible consultant. An iru might prove helpful in analyzing cold, dead code, but could he possibly give them insight into who and what had created it? In the end they had decided to hire him anyway, but they hardly expected him to turn in a personality profile on the virus’ designer.

  “It’s all in the code,” Masada said quietly. And it was to him. Cold code, clean and impersonal: of course, it contained the essence of the personality of the man who designed it. Of course, anyone who knew what he was doing could find those clues, and interpret them. It was all simple math to him, motivations dissected with the cool precision of a laser scalpel. It’s all in the code. Yes, but who else would ever see it there?

  It struck Hsing suddenly that Masada didn’t even understand the nature of his own genius. To him the patterns of thought and motive that he sensed in the virus were self-explanatory, and those who could not see them were simply not looking hard enough. Yet he would readily admit to his own inability to analyze more human contact, even on the most basic level. That was part and parcel of being iru.

  What a strange combination of skills and flaws. What an utterly alien profile. Praise the founders of Guera for having taught them all to nurture such specialized talent, rather than seeking to “cure” it. It was little wonder that most innovations in technology now came from the Gueran colonies, and that Earth, who set such a strict standard of psychological “normalcy,” now produced little that was truly exciting. Thank God their own ancestors had left that doomed planet before they, too, had lost the genes of wild genius. Thank God they had seen the creative holocaust coming, and escaped it.

  “True evolution is random,” Masada told him. “This isn’t. Someone had to decide when and how the virus would mutate, and if I can isolate the code that controls that, I should be able to gain more insight into how the designer thought. Which in turn should give me more control over his creation. As well as answers to some very important questions.”

  “Such as?”

  For a moment Masada didn’t answer. For a moment, it seemed, he was deciding whether or not he should answer. “It uses a segment of outpilot’s code to gain entry,” he said at last. “Right now it’s using code it stole during its former invasions; that’s how the thing works. I want to know what was there originally, the first time it tried to gain access to an outpilot’s brain. That will tell us a lot, Master Hsing ... including whether or not the designer had access to Guild files.”

  A cold shiver ran down his spine. “You think one of our own was involved in this?”

  “I think nothing at this time,” he said quietly. “But I must consider all possibilities ... including the least pleasant ones. If I can regress the virus, I may be able to tell more.”

  “I thought you already did that.”

  “I decompiled it. Broke it down. Regression is a different process, an extrapolation of source code probability.” He suddenly seemed to guess that he was moving into territory where mere untrained mortals could not follow, and started again. “I’m going to try to determine what earlier versions of this thing might have looked like. Depending upon what happens to the invasion sequence then, that may tell us something.”

  “Evolution in reverse?”

  “Precisely.”

  “But if the thing really is that complex ...” He fumbled for the proper words. “That’s rather like trying to guess what a child’s great-grandparent looks like, given only one glimpse of the child. Isn’t it? Wouldn’t there theoretically be thousands of possible ancestors for each version of the program?”

  “Millions, at this point. And more as each new generation is spawned.” His eyes fixed on the screen before him, he seemed wholly undisturbed by that prospect. “I’m hoping to find some underlying patterns which will enable us to prune the family tree. Reduce it to a workable number. That done, the most likely suspects for source code will be allowed to reproduce and evolve on their own, to see if the pattern of their growth is true to the original. Most of the false leads will reveal themselves within a few dozen generations. The remainder may enable us to draw some observations about the origin of our virus.”
>
  Hsing stared at him in amazement. “Do you have any idea how much raw data you’re talking about processing?”

  “Of course I do, Guildmaster Hsing.” He shrugged. “I have four months here, after all. The Guild won’t transmit current copies of the virus to us while we’re in transit for fear of data interception, thus I have only what you brought me originally to work with.” He looked up at Hsing. “Can you think of a more productive way for me to spend my time?”

  “No. Of course not.” He watched as the professor turned his attention to the creature on his screen once more. The image grew larger, sharpened, and coiled upward a few turns, responding to unspoken commands. Within a few moments it was clear that Masada’s attention was elsewhere; Hsing wondered if the professor even remembered that he was in the room.

  “Your processing requirements are crowding out the ship’s own programs.” He said it bluntly, plainly, though all his nantana instincts urged him to do otherwise. But you didn’t beat around the bush with an iru. They didn’t like it, and besides, it wouldn’t get you anywhere.

  A second passed, then Masada turned to him again. “Is anything disabled?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Then there is no cause for concern.” He turned back to his work.

  Hsing took a step forward, edging into the man’s personal space just enough to break his concentration. “Dr. Masada, the captain asked me to talk to you about this.”

  The dark eyes turned on him. Annoyance flickered in their depths. “Speak, then.”

  “You’re monopolizing his processors. Ship’s systems are slowing down.”

  “Guildmaster Hsing.” The man’s tone was slow now, infinitely patient, as though he were talking to a child. Or an idiot. If the man were nantana, Hsing would have taken great offense at his tone; as it was, he gritted his teeth and didn’t protest. “I’ve explained my work to you. You understand its importance. Now, I’ve promised the captain and his crew that my calculations won’t interfere with the functioning of this ship. And they haven’t, have they? I’m sorry if one program or another is running a nanosecond slower, but unfortunately this ship is ill equipped for my kind of research. I have to use whatever space I can find, wherever I can squeeze it out of something.” His eyes flickered back to the screen, but Hsing’s closeness made it impossible for him to tune the Guildmaster out. “The equipment we brought with us is sufficient for me to manipulate the virus itself, but I need much more than that. The things I’m processing on the ship’s system are no security risk.”