(No "action" in this one, FYI)
You didn't hear this from me. I mean it.
Okay. The project had been going about two years. We'd gotten all settled in on the base. Never could have done it, working outside the R&D lab like that, except for ARPANET. Of course, it was a lot slower then... Oh yeah. So, the contract was for guided missiles. The uniform boys tended to throw terms like "chooser" and "assisted network" around a lot. We didn't know what we were doing.
I was the hardware guy. Burning chips, diags, checking the rating of power supplies. I didn't know exactly what they were up to, and I didn't need to know. Those engineers, man, they were bright. Obviously, too bright for their own good. But they couldn't desolder an IC to save their lives, much less lift a full water bottle for the office cooler.
Lewis was a nerd's nerd. Still, is probably. He was the junior when the pitch was made, and when Everson left he became the head of software. He was young, but so were the rest of us. Just out of college, with a blank check to make a smarter bomb. Plausible deniability, the whole ticket.
We'd work insane hours. Pile up the overtime. DoD was really slow about processing clearances, so if somebody quit it was hard to fill their spot. That's why we were still there at one in the morning, Lewis and me, trying to get a demo together for some big-wheel walkthrough a couple of days later.
The janitor was finishing up, and I'd just cracked open a beer - ah, the 70's... a guy could have a beer and fire up a smoke anywhere, even in the prototype labs...
Well, Lewis buzzed me on the intercom. Could I get down to the booth right away. No, no problem, not really, at least he didn't think so...
That was not classic Lewis. I headed right down to the proj- there was this one room we called the projection booth, but I don't know what the original purpose was. It had big windows overlooking a room like a big garage, except the only exits were the combination-lock doors, and we called that big room "the stage." Anyway, I get to the booth - and the door won't open. I knew I had the right combination for that day, but nothing. I pounded on the door, and heard Lewis yelling something, but couldn't make it out. So I went into the stage and looked - and there's Lewis, looking relieved to see me.
I hit the intercom just inside the door, and asked him what was up. No answer. I should have been hearing him, with the mike open like that, and his lips were moving. I shook my head, and he went over, cautiously, to the window. He pointed to his head, and then to the floor of the booth -
And the lights went out.
I don't mean figuratively. I was standing there, and it was pitch black. But only for a second, until the emergency lights kicked on. Lewis started to pound on the glass -
And my arm jerked. Not like a muscle spasm or anything. It seemed like something pushed it. Beer sloshed out, and I dropped the can. Looking back at Lewis, I saw he was trying to pull the door open. I remember I had never seen him do anything that strenuous before...
Well, I guess there's no best way to say it.
My arm was pulled behind my back. I don't know by what. I do know that it hurt. You know that burning sensation when you pull a muscle? I cussed, and tried to turn around.
There was... nothing there.
Some more of that nothing got my other arm, and wrapped around my waist. I... went up in the air, I don't know, maybe a yard off the ground. I could hear Lewis pounding on the glass again. I flew in toward the center of the room, and sort of darted up, and... then I started going down real fast. I just had time to think, hey, body slam. And then I hit, and I must've blacked out.
My chest was sore, and my left arm was throbbing fairly good, but nothing seemed to be broken. The lights were back on. I found myself sitting in an office chair. There were electrical cords there too, but it wasn't until I tried to get up that I figured out I was tied to the chair.
Now, this was not a Lewis-type of joke. I don't think he had much of a sense of humor. He was sitting at a terminal, typing away. I started pulling at the knots and yelled at him, and he jumped a mile - apparently the intercom was working again. He started trying to reassure me, and I told him to get his ass in there and cut me loose.
He said he couldn't do that, because the booth door was locked and he couldn't get it to open. I asked him what was going on, still trying to get untied. I won't ever forget what he said next.
"DeLeon, you remember what I told you about, uh, Turing machines?"
I don't know enough about 'em to matter. Made it a point not to learn any more, either since... well, the bottom line was that he'd been beefing up one of his little AI friends, artificial intelligence, and he'd put a couple of 'em together somehow, just kinda random. And the resulting program was a hell of a lot smarter than the sum of its parts.
So tell that thing I want out of here, I said. And he looked even more pale than usual and told me he's sorry, he's been trying to get it to let him out, and me too. It had always done what he'd told it to, blah blah blah. I was getting angrier all the time, and asked him if his little pets understood what the loss of circulation would mean to my hands and feet, real soon. He opened his mouth, and closed it, and sat down at the terminal again. I yelled his name, and he told me to hold on just a second...
And, not a minute later, there were some slithery sounds near me. I finally realized it was the electrical cords - so I kicked and flailed real good, but they were only loosening, and the knots were still gonna hold. But I could feel my hands again, and my feet. Lewis had been watching this, and asked me if that was better.
I made it really clear that if he didn't let me go within the next thirty seconds, I'd kill him in a graphically visceral and nasty way. And his face got all red. He reminded me that he was trapped too. Then he said Turr was still accepting input but wasn't obeying directives anymore, and that the phones were still out.
There was a panic button near the booth door, left over from the fifties probably, but I'd raided it a couple months before for the switch relay 'cause I'd been too damn lazy to walk down and get one out of the supply depot. There was a panic button in the stage, too, but I wasn't going to be able to reach it any time soon.
I asked him what a Turr was. Oh, that's the name of one of the AI's, the other one was Cap, they'd picked out the names themselves. I interrupted him and said more forcefully that I did not want to be tied up there by a few renegade lines of code, and hadn't he started 'em out on the three laws of robotics anyway. You know those? I mean, whatever Lewis had cooked up had hurt me, inflicted injury, and that body slam was so unnecessary I was of a mind to think it had been, oh, maybe enjoying itself, at my expense. Lewis started to answer -
And right then I realized... what had been right in front of me, the whole time: he was saying a program had grabbed me, knocked me out and tied me to a frickin' chair. Software. And I had assumed he was right.
There had to be some other explanation. I couldn't come up with one.
Lewis was just as surprised as I was, but he was already trying to form theories. He was babbling about bus cables - back then, they were these great big bundles, really heavy, with huge pins on the end. Proprietary, of course. DoD. I'd pulled out a tape drive and had never gotten around to disconnecting the other end of this monster cable from one of the processors.
He was trying to figure out a way for a program to send itself over a bus and come out of the loose end, and I was yelling at him about the difference between analog encoding and radiant power. But arguing wasn't going to get me off that chair, or him out of the booth.
He looked at the console and started typing again, still answering my questions when he remembered to. No, he hadn't expected any of this. None of his programs would substantially hurt anybody, they had access to dictionaries on the base system. No, he couldn't get a console message out to the sysop to raise help, but he'd keep trying.
Then, all of a sudden, he shut up and just stared at the screen, and his hands flew over the keyboard. He said there was heavy file transfer activity. Hospital subsystem, such as medical records, and the computer-based training courses. Anatomy. Physiology. Physical therapy. It was all baffling, at the time, before -
I'm getting ahead of myself. Lewis quit answering my questions. Just staring at the screen, and then at me. Then he asks me, hey DeLeon, did you perhaps pull a hamstring in an especially sensitive place, a couple of years ago?
Seems his little program had fetched my medical records. Trouble was, those records weren't stored on the base. We weren't allowed in the hospital there except for an emergency. The company we worked for carried its own insurance, and since we knew of no way it could've visited the ancient Trash-80 computer at my doctor's office, the AI must've forced its way into the company's mainframe in Burbank. Over ARPANET. Which meant it was tooling around by itself. There were a bunch of universities on the net at that time, and mainframe security was no obstacle for an AI. Easy pickings. Everything from policy and research, to students' personal files...
Lewis tried a few more things to shut it down, at least break the data links, but it was way ahead of him. How it could be running amok on the net maybe fifteen minutes after it had attacked me in the stage, neither of us could guess. He sat there trying to figure out what to do next, and I tried to pull free.
Neither of us got very far. By asking Lewis a lot of questions, I found out that the AI he called Cap appeared to be monitoring the environment - keeping the doors locked and the phones down, accessing the log of the watch guard's rounds... So it could tell we were expecting Crawford at 03:00, just like every other weeknight. Turr seemed to be gathering data and running analyses. One keeping us neutralized, and the other figuring out what to do with us.
Then Lewis corrected himself and said they weren't exhibiting as separate programs at all. I didn't understand any of this, but I did catch the switch from plural to singular.
When he started talking about personality states I brought him back down to cold, hard reality - such as, how do we keep this program or entity, or whatever it was, from doing anything for the next ninety-some minutes until help arrived? He was sure we had to determine what it was doing in order to rein it in. Of course, it had quit obeying him quite a while ago, was out learning who-knows-what from the net, and I was the one it had tied up...
Something flashed across the terminal that made Lewis swear, and start banging keys wildly. He told me, with great care, that the AI was running a "triple correlation" - reaction, damage, stamina. I had no idea what the hell that meant, but I heard the word "damage" and knew something had gone very wrong with whatever safeguards Lewis had thought to put into his renegade program. I told him it was high time to smash the booth window, there, and get me loose so I could take a screwdriver or something to the door, hinky the lock.
He looked at me blankly, as if I'd asked him to roll me a joint, but he looked around and picked up a chair.
His first hits were tentative. I told him it was tempered glass, to follow through right at the corner, but it was like trying to explain how to cast a fishing pole to somebody who's never held one in his hand before. But I figured eventually the glass would crack -
Instead, something else happened.
The lights went out again, and the emergency floods blazed up. And Lewis, he'd been rearing back for another swing - but behind him, I saw a power cord arc up, graceful as a snake. I yelled, but he just looked at me, sorta stunned at what I was saying... and then the loop pulled taut against his chest, and he went down.
I started trying to get loose, all over again. There was the sounds of a struggle, and then just wheezing. Lewis informed me he was all right, essentially, but his limbs were tied together in front of him with an extension cord.
Neither of us said anything for a couple minutes.
I was trying to catch my breath when the terminal started beeping. There were shuffling sounds from the booth, as Lewis scooted himself around to look at the screen, but he was too low to see what was displayed there.
That was just about the time I felt something jab me in the gut. I yelled, and told Lewis...
And next something, well, mushy seemed to press against my face. My hair was tugged really hard, and when I cussed again it seemed like a warm dowel or rod pressed down on my tongue. And of course Lewis' first reaction, when I could tell him, was a poorly concealed joy that it was learning experientially. Whatever that was, I wasn't too keen on it getting curious about my asshole.
But I didn't have time to think about that. Right then, the stage door opened.
My chair began wheeling toward the door. I started yelling. Lewis had no idea what to make of this. I kept on hollering, and flopping around, as the stage door closed and I went rolling down the hall.
A program pushing my chair was impossible. I expected the worst. It was plain by now that, program or not, Lewis' creation was... taking me somewhere. I had a feeling from the start it was expecting the guard to pass through, and was stashing me someplace I wouldn't be found. When the chair passed a hallway intersection without a pause and then took a right turn and a quick left, smooth as anything, it wasn't hard to believe it knew the building layout well enough to have a destination in mind. I yelled my head off, of course, knowing full well there was no one around except Lewis and me...
Finally, a door was opening. While I was still being pushed toward it. This thing wasn't localized - I mean, it could be active at more than one place at a time - but you already know that. The destination it had picked... I was almost impressed by the logic, at the same time my stomach was so twisted up I thought I was surely gonna upchuck. See, the military, in their vast wisdom, they'd made a half-level that only extended for maybe ten, twenty yards or so. There were tunnels that led to fallout shelters - well, anyway, it was built to be an emergency radio room or something. Lights, outlets and jacks... and easily eight feet of stress-poured concrete all around.
Nobody ever went in there. There was no reason to - and besides, it opened right up to the network of tunnels, all under the base, with blast doors every so often and redundant hallways. You couldn't hardly build anything that would muffle sound better. And if a search party was getting close, there were at least three paths out. Easy as pie to double back to a place that had already been searched.
But that's stuff I learned much later. All I knew, when the big vault-door closed, was that I was screwed. Whatever had taken me down there was out to get some answers.
There was about a half-hour of poking and prodding, twisting my neck a little, bending my thumb the wrong way. Broad curves holding body parts still, when necessary. It seemed like a dozen different implements were used, at one time or another, and I couldn't see a fuckin' thing.
Draw whatever conclusions you want to from that - I mean, about the manipulation of molecules or whatever. I saw no reason why the... objects would need to be invisible, because I was stuck there whether I saw anything poking me or not. Just seemed like so much wasted effort. So the less incredible thing to believe, at the time, was that the probes and bands and, uh, fingers were not just, well, unseen... they were immaterial, is that a word?
Maybe it doesn't make any difference. What I'm saying is I didn't just anticipate, to take an example, hmmm, I bet a rubbery pair of pliers is going to squeeze the bridge of my nose. It was random places on me, and random... textures.
It tore my shirt off, and pulled off my shoes and socks. My jeans seemed to stump it - for a while...
I was really not happy to see this action, but the only thing that kept me from completely freaking out is that as the experimenting went on, it was doing fewer and fewer things that really hurt. You know, like hitting my chin at the same time my tongue was in the way. Now, I'd never want to say anything positive - not on the record, you can be sure of that, buddy - but I got the impression that it was... inflicting less pain, on me, as time went by. Hell, it had a golden opportunity there to do anything it wanted! I didn't like the idea, but it was hard getting around the fact that if it wanted ao dish out agony, I could've been getting it to the max.
Of course, I think now I may have been a bit premature...
In any case, it seemed to go away after a while. I don't know exactly how to explain the difference. It didn't make any sound, or reek or anything. But it was obvious when I was alone in the cell, and it was plain as day when it had returned. Through the back door, so to speak - it came in from one of the other tunnels and was shutting the door before I'd gotten the chance to yell much.
And it had been shopping.
At first I thought it might be a rescue party, already. That hope died in a heartbeat.
What I saw, wheeling over from the back doorway, was a stretcher. Loaded down with shit.
A little wheeled cart with a whole frickin' infirmary in it. Among other stuff, I recognized a blood pressure cuff, and jugs of distilled water... and what turned out to be straps. Restraints.
Somewhere about this time Crawford showed up, got suspicious and busted his way into the booth. When Lewis could get up, he saw the terminal. What was on the screen. He had a bad feeling - and he had a hunch, as to where I'd been taken. His hunch was right, but they looked at the door log. There were records that showed the outside door being opened at 01:53, so they did the logical thing and checked the door logs for other buildings. Sure enough, the ordnance locker's side door had been opened by a master card-key at 01:59. So they started the search across the base, and fanned out from there.
When something's always been reliable, you tend not to question it. They launched an all-out effort to find me, thinking it was something like a terrorist/hostage situation. Discounting Lewis's story. Who wouldn't? The door logs told it all.
But you get the picture, don't you? The AI, it thought up some fake entries for the logs. Got all the activity a good half-mile from where it was planning to get down to business.
That bad feeling Lewis had - well, shit, that turned out to be right. He didn't miss the trees for the forest, that time. He saw the last couple clues left on the terminal, whether by accident or as a taunt. Maybe an announcement to the world - I'm here now, you better watch yourselves. Go figure.
He told me later the reaction/damage/stamina correlation was still fresh on his mind when he saw a change in something he called a "self-referent." I guess something the program was spitting up on the screen gave itself away.
It went from combining the names Turr and Cap - as TC, saving memory as all good programs did back them - to reversing 'em, and then it started un-abbreviating, playing with the shift key...
Anyway, the last lines on the screen were preceded by:
Capturr
The program had been raiding help files. On a UNIX system, the command to get some online help was man . And somewhere, in examining the options open to it, the AI came across another verb - or maybe somebody's twisted neurology thesis. Who knows? It could've been just some bored sophomore at MIT writing a kinky BASIC subroutine to tease her boyfriend...
Anyway, what Lewis saw there on the screen was a valid command:
man tickl
That tells the computer to display the reference manual entry for that command with the odd name, which counts seconds or clock ticks or something. Not very incriminating, in and of itself. But apparently a 'Q' was soon entered to end that command, and the next line read:
exec mantickl
Now you got to remember, this is 1974. UNIX was even more rigid then about typing shit just right. Combining those parameters and adding an 'e' would have caused the whole command to be rejected, no question - unless it was recognized as the name of a program.
What confirmed that for Lewis was the system's last response:
!-Running
So Lewis probably knew, before I did, what Capturr wanted to do.
Wanted - shit! What it did do.
And has done to me so many times.
The more it learns, the worse the experience is. Let me tell you. I ended up in a nut ward that first time, not because it was such a mind-blowing experience - though it was pretty rough - or because it lasted all those months, but really nobody was ever gonna believe me, or Lewis.
After that, I quit telling the truth. No point. Yeah, it got a hold of me seven times after that, and I can't even tell you how many times its little brothers grabbed m-
That's what I said. No way of guessing how many copies of itself it made. Could still be making. Who knows how many. And who's gonna tell, and come off like a total psycho? Again?
I started drivin' truck to keep on the move, stay the hell away from here. Didn't help. Had my little run-ins with 'em anyway. Phoenix, Amarillo, Dallas, all over the south. They're everywhere. Nobody'll talk about it...
And they're frickin' experts now. That first weird night was like a picnic. To think there was ever a time when I didn't know what was in store for me - damn.
I mean, when that stretcher rolled in, and Capturr wrestled me onto it, strapped me down, chocked the wheels... there was a time, there, a classic second or two when I stared, and couldn't figure out for the life of me why it had gone to the trouble of bringing me a feather duster.
22dec1998