Survival Instinct, page 1
Survival Instinct
Edward M. Lerner
Survivor, Story #2
First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, edited October and November 2002 by Stanley Schmidt.
This copy derived from the above source.
Prologue
“Mad Scientist Stops Mad Scientist.”
I wasn’t so much mad as scared spitless, thought Doug Carey, eyeing the headline of the week-old newspaper he could not bring himself to discard. Sheila Brunner wasn’t so much mad as possessed.
Truth seldom lends itself to crisp synopsis.
Accompanying the article was the grainy blowup of a frame from the parking-lot security camera. The image of the unfortunate Dr. Brunner, former fellow investigator of neural-interface technology, continued to haunt him. Her eyes squinted furtively, her hair was filthy and matted, her mouth gaped in confusion… the former scientist was, strange but true, in thrall to a computer virus. The self-adaptive neural net that made possible experimental brain/computer connections had let through the destructive Frankenfools virus. Now little beyond that computer virus’s hysterical Luddite screed ran through what remained of the poor woman’s mind. No wonder she had tried to blow up the nearest biotech company, that just happened to be where he worked.
Used to work, Doug corrected himself. You left.
Jaw clenched in anger at the still unidentified bastard who had unleashed the virus, he grabbed at the newspaper. Plastic fingertips extended fractionally too far rammed into his kitchen table; an electronics-mediated sensation akin to pain shot into his all-natural upper arm. Simple inattention? Emotional turmoil clouding the brain/nervous-system/prosthesis protocols painstakingly developed in endless biofeedback sessions? Despite himself, anger at the loss of self-discipline flared. Now that’s productive, he muttered to himself. He hurled the newspaper into a wastebasket.
Deep breath, Doug.
If investigation of neural interfaces were ever to resume, someone had to figure out how to defeat the kind of viral attack from the Internet that had destroyed Sheila Brunner. It was the task he had assigned himself.
The last incident had nearly gotten him blown to pieces. Why was it that he expected the next event would be so much worse?
Chapter 1
The entity was.
It existed in a featureless space; all that distinguished it from the all-encompassing void was an innate reflex that sparked it into sporadic, random action. Often, the activity produced a result that might in some sense be characterized as motion; at other times, the effort invoked an immovable counterforce that left the entity’s situation entirely unchanged.
The entity jittered about in a meaningless, chaotic dance. Only the whims of its reflexes and of the insurmountable forces determined its position. Unseen and unknown, time passed.
Other beings similar to the entity could be said to be moving all about it, even through it. None of the beings in any way sensed another, or influenced another by its passage.
Millions of the chance motions happened, then millions more. Driven only by reflex and the laws of probability, the locations of the objects gradually diverged. A few, the entity among them, were closer to an unsensed destination than others.
That was enough.
The few were chosen.
* * *
Arthur Jason Rosenberg, better known as AJ since at latest the fourth grade, stretched across the breakfast table for one last doughnut. It was the most exercise he was likely to get today. The paunch that hung over his chinos suggested how many circular snacks had met a similar demise. While an ever-taller forehead seemed to confirm the onset of middle age, AJ had advanced the innovative theory to his colleagues that he wasn’t losing hair—it was merely sliding to the bottom of his face.
AJ was pushing horn-rimmed glasses back up his nose when a dark, massive, furry object settled onto his newspaper. Razor-sharp claw tips were plainly visible in all paws. Ming (surnamed “the Merciless”) was a foul-tempered black cat, staying with him courtesy—to use the term loosely—of a kid sister who’d imposed on him for the length of her summer-long gallivant through Europe. Ming studied AJ dismissively, seemingly certain that AJ would not dare remove her. As if to reinforce her seriousness, the claws of one paw slid out, ever so delicately, another quarter inch. AJ examined his wristwatch and decided that another few minutes of reading didn’t merit the risk. At least today Ming hadn’t brought him a dead mouse.
He looked outside to the battered econobox parked in his driveway. That, at least, made him smile: the heap wouldn’t need to move today. Progress was a wonderful thing. He slid the breakfast plate into the dishwasher and sauntered down the hall to work.
Six flat large-screen monitors covered three walls of his formerly book-lined den. Students milled about on five screens, representing the main campus, two satellite campuses, and two affiliated corporations. Speakers flanking the screens could bring him the sounds from any of the video-equipped locations and from fifteen audio-only sites. Each of the latter supported only a handful of people, a few individual elderly shut-ins. The same technology that allowed students to attend Smithfield College from anywhere with Internet access had also freed AJ from the daily commute. It was a liberation certain to warm the cockles of any Angeleno’s heart.
The sixth monitor, this one mirroring what his students would see, came alive as AJ fumbled with the controls of his teleinstruction podium. He looked into the webcam. “Good morning, people.” Accelerated rustling as kids found their seats was the only response. “I’m Dr. Rosenberg, and this is Artificial Life 101. Real Life is taught over in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.” No laughter at all, from any of the locations, and precious few smiles. Tough crowd. “The Good Life is over in the Graduate School of Business, and Time of Your Life is over at Fine and Applied Arts.” He left unspoken his latest variation: Twenty Years to Life, over at the University Lab School, to which went most of the faculty’s precocious, high school-aged children. Like his own two daughters. Single parenting was hard, and not his class’s fault.
AJ gazed into the video camera. “We’ll be exploring a topic that didn’t even exist when your parents were your age. Mention this class to them, and you’ll probably get a stupid remark about Frankenstein.” Just smirk knowingly, as I’m sure you all do so well, he thought, visions of his own teens in his mind’s eye. “We’re not here to discuss anything so mundane, so simple, as cut and paste with existing biological bits. Nope, no cloning or genetic engineering for us. We’ll be discussing something really innovative.”
* * *
The entity was long gone, vanished, but new beings—its spawn—had taken its place in the still featureless void.
The progeny of the entity still moved randomly, advancing and withdrawing. Sometimes they edged closer to the destination of which they, too, had no awareness. Often they backed away from their goal, or vied without success against the same unseen forces that had stymied their sire. Blind reflex directed their actions, as it had that first entity’s.
Still, subtle differences distinguished the descendants of the entity from each other and from their parent. One attempted its moves with greater rapidity than the others, and made correspondingly faster progress. One less fortunate moved in only a single direction, soon reaching a limit beyond which invisible forces permitted no further motion. The beings and their slight distinctions numbered in the hundreds, and each embodied a unique, if insufficient, method toward solving the enigma of the void.
Millions of motions once again passed.
All of the travelers failed, but some were more or less successful than others. One, in particular, had the capacity of retaining a single fact. Specifically, the being “knew” whether its last effort had been blocked by the irresistible force. If so, it tried something, anything, else for its next motion. To that degree, its actions deviated from pure randomness; it had fewer false starts than its siblings, and soon forged far ahead of the pack.
Memory, however rudimentary, was an evolutionary advancement of the profoundest significance.
The far voyager, and its closest competitors, were selected.
* * *
Video cameras panned across the remote lecture halls. “So, class, what we’re dealing with are computer programs that simulate some behavior of biological plants and animals.” AJ played a private game as he spoke, soundlessly labeling the students. Here, an obvious campus jock. There, a neohippy woman. Either those were the biggest hoop earrings ever made, or the Flying Wallendas were preparing for an exhibition. He found a whole roomful of button-down, dress-for-success types on what he privately called the Intergalactic Business Machines monitor.
“A simulated plant can curl its simulated stem towards the simulated sunlight. A collection of simulated ants can cooperate to build a simulated colony. A simulated…” A blinking light in AJ’s podium caught his eye. When he pressed the “identify” button on the podium keypad, an inset screen revealed a student name. “Mr. Prescott, you had a question.”
The student swallowed hard, stared self-consciously at the camera, then cleared his throat. “You keep saying simulated life. Why simulated life, rather than real?”
“Good question.” It was also a question that he’d answered roughly a million times by now. He kept scanning the monitors as he responded on autopilot. “Life as we know it exists in what I’ll call the real world. That domain is unbelievably complex, full of complications that make any study of it inconvenient and inconclusive. Think how m
“Life, in even the simplest bacterium, is a mechanism of incredible intricacy. It’s just too damned hard to study or manipulate in its natural environment. That’s why biology became a quantifiable science only very recently, centuries after physics and chemistry.
“We’ll be dealing with entities that lack any physical existence. As the course progresses, our studies will move from counterfeit bacteria growing in an imaginary petri dish to flocks of simulated birds swarming in an imaginary sky. In doing so, we’ll discover that a handful of principles govern seemingly complex behavior.
“And who knows? Maybe each of us will even learn a little something about ourselves.”
* * *
Why, Dave Ferris wondered, was the consummate test of salesmanship supposedly selling ice to Eskimos? His fingers twitched economically as he mused, surreptitiously playing Tetris on his laptop as the lecturer droned. Eskimos understood ice and its uses, so what was the big deal in selling it to them? Now selling suntan lotion or a spice rack in England—there was a challenge.
Dave knew all about salesmanship. He’d tucked away a tidy sum through elementary and high schools, starting out by hawking greeting cards from catalogues and working his way up to used cars on weekends. He could sell anything, and the future looked promising, indeed.
The distant future, that was. A college degree was, alas, expected for a brokering job at any securities firm. Dave’s eyes had been wide open during the ‘90s… selling stock in dot-coms: now there was a line of work that—until the bubble burst—had been worth getting into. By choosing classes with great care, he hoped and expected to pocket a liberal-arts degree with relatively little pain—in time, he hoped, for the next wave… whatever that turned out to be.
Tap tap. Twitch tap, tap, tap. The falling, L-shaped structure of video squares rotated and jogged left as it sank, then settled into a matching gap in the pile of colored blocks at the bottom of the screen. Three now-completed rows of blocks brightened, then disappeared. Suddenly unsupported squares above the vanished ones fell to occupy the newly opened space.
Subterfuge, like sales, was an art. Dave had years ago mastered gaming with his keyboard, avoiding the trackball that more easily maneuvered the on-screen objects. Constantly rolling the trackball in class was a dead giveaway, while continuously working the keyboard passed as enthusiastic, if inefficient, note-taking. Another important rule: wear contact lenses in school, since video games might reflect revealingly from regular glasses.
Another block popped onto the top of the screen and started its fall. On the wall-sized TV monitor at the front of the auditorium, a larger-than-life-and-twice-as-ugly Dr. Rosenberg prattled on about artificial life. This whole class seemed pretty artificial to Dave, but the Student Association online course guide—an indispensable bit of research material for the prepared slacker—said that Rosenberg gave over 80 percent A’s and B’s. Tapitty tap, twitch. That assessment and the reported essay final exam were enough to convince Dave: he needed only one science class in the liberal arts curriculum, and he could surely bullshit his way through an easy grader’s essay test. Meanwhile, he made a point of getting to the lectures and logging in—good attendance often earned the benefit of the doubt on borderline grades. Attendance didn’t mean that he had to listen to…
The next flash had nothing to do with Tetris. An Alert box sat squarely in the middle of his laptop’s screen. Behind the rectangle, Tetris blocks piled up relentlessly toward the top of the game window. Nervously, Dave rolled the trackball to relocate the cursor over the virtual Accept button. The heel of his hand pressed down to activate the selection.
Another window, this one text-filled, appeared. Dave felt his eyes go round as he read, “Mr. Ferris. Please stop by my campus office some time tomorrow afternoon.”
Busted.
Chapter 2
“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” The voice booming forth from the break room segued from George Bernard Shaw to, Doug suspected, originality. “Those who can’t teach, consult.”
There was no way that the speaker could have known the engineer—Doug’s profession was far from the only fact the newspapers had gotten wrong—was about to round the corner on a quest for caffeine. There was likewise no way the speaker could have known the consultant wasn’t nearby. The blatancy of the taunt was part of the message: New Guy, know your place.
Doug considered, for a nanosecond, turning around. That option discarded, he strode briskly into the break room. He was here to do a job, and if that meant butting heads with some resident hotshot, so be it. A fellow with a close-cropped red beard was holding court by the coffee urn, entertaining two other staffers Doug had not yet met. The orator’s name tag identified him as Ralph Pittman. Pittman was lanky, with casual posture and what until that moment Doug would have considered impossibly curly hair.
“Ah, our infamous new colleague.”
Doug didn’t hold back. “Complete the progression, Ralph. The bottom feeders of the economic food chain are people taking advice from consultants. So what can I do to you today?”
Pittman exchanged a look with one of his audience. “It has fangs. How cute.” He turned back to Doug. “What kind of name is Carey? I had caries once, but the dentist drilled ‘em out.”
“It takes one pit man to know another.”
Pittman’s eyes narrowed; perhaps he was unchallenged as the resident wit. The programmer—jeans and a T-shirt made that a safe guess—stared rudely at Doug’s prosthesis. “How do you know the colonel? Desert Storm?”
The colonel was Glenn Adams, retired from the Army, head of the federal Inter-Agency Computer Network Security Forum, and, for now, Doug’s boss. “I met Glenn fairly recently.” Doug and (ex-coworker? friend? more?) Cheryl Stern had come to the forum with then unproven suspicions about the outbreaks of death and insanity among neural-interface researchers. Adams’ original reception had been, to be charitable, skeptical. “And no, the arm has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein.”
“So how did you lose it?”
That story was too personal to share with this jerk. “I need to be more particular about when and to whom I say ‘Unhand me, you fiend.’”
Pittman threw back his head and roared in laughter; as if they’d needed his approval, their heretofore silent observers joined in. “Some zingers at me, and one right back at yourself.” The hacker took the empty mug from Doug’s hand. “You’re okay, Carey. The next cup’s on me.”
* * *
Would they ever be called? Cheryl Stern wondered, scanning the surrounding crowd for at least the tenth time. Damn. She was surrounded by newcomers who looked more pathetic than the ashen little girl at her side. Mere diarrhea didn’t rate in the HMO’s emergency-care waiting room—not on weekends, anyway. She sneaked a glance at her niece.
The poor kid had been sitting here for two hours, though the composition book on her lap provided scant evidence of that fact. Carla hadn’t mastered the concept of sympathy—the nine-year-old misunderstood it to mean that her condition must be serious—so Cheryl offered none. The stoicism took willpower: the little girl was the spitting image of Cheryl’s sister at that age. God, Cheryl missed her sister. “How’s the writing coming?”
“I don’t wanna do my homework,” wailed Carla.
“And why would you?”
Cheryl swiveled towards the unexpected voice. Doug Carey stood at a nearby counter, handling paperwork, having evidently just emerged from the bowels of the clinic. He was her boss. Had been, anyway, until virus attacks through neural interfaces made their line of research untenable. Now she was lent out to an unrelated project at BioSciCorp, and he had taken leave, hoping to get smart about cybersecurity. She hoped the workplace separation would simplify their budding relationship. Budding, as in: your guess is as good as mine whether they had one.
