"Maelstrom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

Cascade

Achilles Desjardins sat in his cubicle and watched baby apocalypses scroll across his brain.

The Ross Shelf was threatening to slip again. Nothing new there. Atlas South had been propping it up for over a decade now, pumping evermore gas into the city-sized bladders that kept the ice from its cathartic belly-flop. Old news, leftover consequences from the previous century. Desjardins wasn’t wired for long-term catastrophes; he specialized in brush fires.

A half-dozen wind farms in northern Florida had just gone offline, victimized by the selfsame whirlwinds they'd been trying to reap; brownouts chained north along the Atlantic seaboard like falling dominoes. There was going to be hell to pay for that one—or Qu#233;bec, which was even worse (Hydro-Q had just cranked their rates up again). Desjardins's fingers tensed in anticipation. But no: the Router handed that one off to the folks in Buffalo.

A sudden shitstorm in Houston. For some reason the emergency floodgates had opened along a string of sewage lagoons, dumping their coliform bounty into the storm sewers leading to the Gulf. That was only supposed to happen when hurricanes wandered by—an atmosphere mixing it up at forty meters-per-second lets you slip a fair bit of crap under the rug—but Texas was calm today. Desjardins laid odds with himself that the spill was tied to the windfarm failures somehow. There was no obvious connection, of course. There never was. Cause and consequence proliferated across the world like a network of fractal cracks, infinitely complex and almost impossible to predict. Explanations in hindsight were a different matter.

But the Router wasn't giving him Houston either.

What it gave him was a wave of sudden slam-down hospital quarantines, epicentered on the burn unit at Cincinnati General. That was almost unheard of: hospitals were vacation paradises for drug-resistant superbugs, and burn units were the penthouse suites. A plague in a hospital? That was no crisis. That was the status quo.

Anything that raised alarms above a baseline that nasty could be very scary indeed.

Desjardins was no pathologist. He didn't need to be. There were only two subjects in the whole universe worth knowing: thermodynamics and information theory. Blood cells in a capillary, rioters on main street, travelers vectoring some new arbovirus from the Amazon Preserve—life, and its side-effects—all the same thing, really. The only difference was the scale and the label. Once you figured that out, you wouldn't have to choose between epidemiology and air traffic control. You could do either, at a moment's notice. You could do pretty much anything.

Well, except for the obvious…

Not that he minded. Being chemically enslaved to your own conscience wasn't nearly as bad as it sounded. It saved you from always worrying about consequences.

The rules stayed the same, but the devil was in the details. It wouldn't hurt to have a bit of bio expertise riding shotgun. He buzzed Jovellanos.

"Alice. They've handed me some kind of pathogen out of Cincinnati. Want to ride along?"

"Sure. Long as you don't mind having one of us reckless free-will types endangering your priorities."

He let it pass. "Something nasty showed up on one of their germ sweeps; their onboard shut them down and sent a shitload of alarms off to potential vectors. Those are pretty much shut down too, as far as I can tell. The secondaries are falling even as we speak. I'll track the alarms, you find out what you can about the bug."

"Right."

He tapped commands. The cubby display dimmed down to a nice, undistracting wash of low-contrast gray; bright primary spilled in over his optical inlays. Maelstrom. He was going into Maelstrom. All the NMDA, the carefully-dosed psychotropics, the eighteen percent of his occipital cortex rewired for optimum pattern-recognition—all next to useless in there. What good does a measly 200 % reflex acceleration do against creatures living fast enough to speciate every ten seconds?

Not much, maybe. But he liked the challenge.

He called up a real-time schematic of the local metabase: a 128-node radius centered on Cincinnati General's onboard server. The display rendered logical distances, not real ones: one extra server in the chain could put a system next door farther away than one in Budapest.

A series of tiny flares ignited around the display, color-coded by age. Cinci Gen sulked in the middle, so red it was almost infra, an ancient epicenter over ten minutes old. Farther out, more recent inflammations of orange and yellow: pharms, other hospitals, crematoria that had taken deliveries from Cinci within some critical timeframe. Farther still, bright white stars speckled the surface of an expanding sphere: the secondary and tertiary vectors, businesses and labs and corporations and people who'd had recent contact with businesses and labs and corporations and people who'd—

CinciGen's onboard had sent contagion warnings to all its friends in Maelstrom. Each friend had bred the warning and passed it on, a fission of sirens. None of these agents were human. Humans had had no role in the process at all so far. That was the whole point. Humans wouldn't have been fast enough to cut off a thousand facilities by lunchtime.

Humans had stopped complaining about such extreme measures right after the 38 enceph pandemic.

Jovellanos conferenced in. "False alarm."

"What?"

An image superimposed itself lower-right on his visual field:

XXX FREE HARDCORE XXX

BoNDAGE SI22

THOUS NDS OF HOT S MS

BDSM NECRO WATERSporTS

PEDOsNUFF

XXX mu34.03 11 TO ENTER XXX

"That's what sent up the alarm," Jovellanos told him. "Screen grab from the hospital's pathfinder."

"Details."

"The pathfinder takes swabs from the ventilation filters and cultures them for nasties. This particular culture plate went from zip to thirty-percent coverage in two seconds. Which is impossible, of course, even for hospital paths."

But the system hadn't known that. Some bannerbug had dumped its load into visual memory and the pathfinder had just been doing its job, looking for dark blotches on light backgrounds. Who could blame it for being illiterate?

"This is it? You're sure?" Desjardins asked.

"I checked the ancillaries: no detectable toxins, proteins, nothing. The system was just playing it safe—figured anything that bred that fast had to be a threat, and there you go."

"And Cinci doesn't know?"

"Oh, sure. They figured it out almost immediately. They'd already sent the abortions when I called 'em."

Desjardins eyed the schematic. Pinpoints continued to blossom at the periphery.

"Alarms are still going off, far as I can see," he said. "Double-check, will you?" They could always short-circuit the quarantine through a media broadcast— they could even phone around if they had to—but that would take hours; dozens, hundreds of facilities would be paralyzed in the meantime. Cinci had already sent out counteragents to call off the alarms. So why wasn't the core of Desjardins's schematic going green by now with successful aborts?

"They sent them out," Jovellanos confirmed after a moment. "The alarms just aren't responding. You don't suppose…"

"Wait a second." A star had just gone out on the schematic. Another one. Three more. Twenty. A hundred.

All of them white. All on the periphery.

"We're losing alarms." He magged on the nodes where the lights had winked out. "But way out on the edge. Nothing near the core." The abortions couldn't have jumped so far so fast. Desjardins spun down the filters; now he could see more than autonomous alarms and the little programs sent to call them off. He could see file packets and executables. He could see wildlife. He could see—

"We got sharks," he said. "Feeding frenzy at PSN-1433. And spreading."

Arpanet.

Internet.

The Net. Not such an arrogant label, back when one was all they had.

The term cyberspace lasted a bit longer— but space implies great empty vistas, a luminous galaxy of icons and avatars, a hallucinogenic dreamworld in 48-bit color. No sense of the meatgrinder in cyberspace. No hint of pestilence or predation, creatures with split-second lifespans tearing endlessly at each others' throats. Cyberspace was a wistful fantasy-word, like hobbit or biodiversity, by the time Achilles Desjardins came onto the scene.

Onion and metabase were more current. New layers were forever being laid atop the old, each free—for a while—from the congestion and static that saturated its predecessors. Orders of magnitude accrued with each generation: more speed, more storage, more power. Information raced down conduits of fiberop, of rotazane, of quantum stuff so sheer its very existence was in doubt. Every decade saw a new backbone grafted onto the beast; then every few years. Every few months. The endless ascent of power and economy proceeded apace, not as steep a climb as during the fabled days of Moore, but steep enough.

And coming up from behind, racing after the expanding frontier, ran the progeny of laws much older than Moore's.

It's the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon's just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they're coded the right way.

It's all just Pattern.

And so viruses begat filters; filters begat polymorphic counteragents; polymorphic counteragents begat an arms race. Not to mention the worms and the 'bots and the single-minded autonomous datahounds—so essential for legitimate commerce, so vital to the well-being of every institution, but so needy, so demanding of access to protected memory. And way over there in left field, the Artificial Life geeks were busy with their Core Wars and their Tierra models and their genetic algorithms. It was only a matter of time before everyone got tired of endlessly reprogramming their minions against each other. Why not just build in some genes, a random number generator or two for variation, and let natural selection do the work?

The problem with natural selection, of course, is that it changes things.

The problem with natural selection in networks is that things change fast.

By the time Achilles Desjardins became a 'lawbreaker, Onion was a name in decline. One look inside would tell you why. If you could watch the fornication and predation and speciation without going grand mal from the rate-of-change, you knew there was only one word that really fit: Maelstrom.

Of course, people still went there all the time. What else could they do? Civilization's central nervous system had been living inside a Gordian knot for over a century. No one was going to pull the plug over a case of pinworms.

Now some of CinciGen's alarms were staggering through Maelstrom with their guts hanging out. Naturally the local wildlife had picked up the scent. Desjardins whistled through his teeth.

"You getting this, Alice?"

"Uh-huh."

Sometime in the dim and distant past—maybe five, ten minutes ago— something had taken a swipe at one of the alarms. It had tried to steal code, or hitch a ride, or just grab the memory the alarm was using. Whatever. It had probably screwed up an attempt to fake a shutdown code, leaving its target blind to all signals, legit or otherwise. Probably damaged it in other ways, too.

So this poor victimized alarm—wounded, alone, cut off from any hope of recall—had blundered off through Maelstrom, still looking for its destination. Apparently that part of the program still worked: it had bred itself, wounds and all, at the next node. Primary contacts, to secondary, to tertiary—each node a juncture for geometric replication.

By now there were thousands of the little beggars in the neighborhood. Not alarms any more: bait. Every time they passed through a node they rang dinner bells for all and sundry, corrupted! defenseless! File fodder! They'd be waking up every dormant parasite and predator in copy range, luring them in, concentrating the killers…

Not that the alarms themselves mattered. They'd been a mistake from the outset, called into existence by a glorified typo. But there were millions of other files in those nodes, healthy, useful files, and although they all had the usual built-in defenses—nothing got sent through Maelstrom these days without some kind of armor—how many of them could withstand a billion different attacks from a billion hungry predators, lured together by the scent of fresh blood?

"Alice, I think I'm going to have to shut down some of those nodes."

"Already on it," she told him. "I've sent the alerts. Assuming those get through without getting torn to shreds, they should be arcing inside seventy seconds."

On the schematic a conic section swarmed with sharks, worming their way back toward the core.

Even best-case, there was bound to be damage—hell, some bugs specialized in infecting files during the archive process—but hopefully most of the vital stuff would be encysted by the time he hit the kill switch. Which didn't mean, of course, that thousands of users wouldn't still be heaping curses on him when their sessions went dark.

"Oh, shit," Jovellanos whispered invisibly. "Killjoy, pull back."

Desjardins zoomed back to a low-resolution overview. He could see almost a sixth of Maelstrom now, a riot of incandescent logic rotated down into three dimensions.

There was a cyclone on the horizon. It whirled across the display at over sixty-eight nodes per second. The Cincinnati bubble was directly in its path.

A storm convected from ice and air. A storm constructed of pure information. Beyond the superficial details, is there any significant difference between the two?

There's at least one. In Maelstrom, a weather system can sweep the globe in fourteen minutes flat.

They start out pretty much the same way inside as out: high-pressure zones, low-pressure zones, conflict. Several million people log on to a node that's too busy to support them all; or a swarm of file packets, sniffing step-by-step to myriad destinations, happen to converge on too few servers at once. A piece of the universe stops dead; the nodes around it screech to a crawl.

The word goes out: fellow packet, Node 5213 is an absolute zoo. Route through 5611 instead, it's so much faster. Meanwhile an angry horde of gridlocked users logs off in disgust. 5213 clears like Lake Vostok.

5611, on the other hand, is suddenly jam-packed. Gridlock epicenter leaps 488 nodes to the left, and the storm is up and moving.

This particular blizzard was about to shut down the links between Achilles Desjardins and the Cincinnati bubble. It was going to do so, according to tactical, in less than ten seconds.

His throat went tight. "Alice."

"Fifty seconds," she reported. "Eighty percent arced in fifty—"

Kill the nodes. Feed the swarm. Either. Or.

"Forty-eight…forty-seven…"

Isolate. Contaminate. Either. Or.

An obvious call. He didn't even need Guilt Trip to tell him.

"I can't wait," he said.

Desjardins laid his hands on a control pad. He tapped commands with his fingers, drew boundaries with eye movement. Machines assessed his desires, raised obligatory protests—you're kidding, right? You're sure about this? — and relayed his commands to the machinery under them.

A fragment of Maelstrom went black, a tiny blot of darkness hemorrhaging into the collective consciousness. Desjardins caught a glimpse of implosion before the storm snowed out his display.

He closed his eyes. Not that it made any difference, of course; his inlays projected the same images onto line-of-sight whether or not his eyelids were in the way.

A few more years. A few more years and they'll have smart gels at every node and the sharks and anemones and trojans will all just be a bad memory. A few years. They keep promising.

It hadn't happened yet. It wasn't even happening as fast as it had been. Desjardins didn't know why. He only knew, with statistical certainty, that he had killed people today. The victims were still walking around, of course—no planes had fallen from the sky, no hearts had stopped just because Achilles Desjardins had squashed a few terabytes of data. Nothing that vital relied upon Maelstrom any more.

But even old-fashioned economics had its impacts. Data had been lost, vital transactions voided. Industrial secrets had been corrupted or destroyed. There would be consequences: bankruptcies, lost contracts, people staggering home in sudden destitution. Domestic violence and suicide rates would spike a month or two down the road in a hundred different communities, geographically unconnected but all within forty or fifty nodes of the CinciGen Pathfinder. Desjardins knew all about cascade effects; he tripped over them every day of the job. It'd be enough to drive anyone over the edge after a while.

Fortunately there were chemicals for that too.