Sergeant Jones was sitting in his office in Cwm-y-Prydd, a small town in North Wales. It was late Tuesday night and he was reading the local paper and eating an elderly sandwich.
Prawn with extra mayonnaise. Unfortunately, Gwyneth at Jones's bakery had run out of brown bread and he had to make do with white. That was why he had
held off eating it, but now he felt hungry. The cricket was on from Australia and in between overs he suddenly heard a faint voice.
"This is a stolen laptop computer calling from 17, High Street"
At first he thought it must be from the police radio but when the message was repeated he realised that it was on his transistor radio. He considered the situation. There must be hundreds of High Streets in the UK but the range of a tracking transmitter in a laptop must be a mile or so at the most. He looked out at the station desk. He was tempted to send Constable Williams but he was curious. He knew that cars had tracker transmitters but a laptop?
He set off on foot, it was only about two hundred yards away. The building had once been a fancy gymnasium but had failed after six months. Anybody could have told them that people round here wouldn't pay £500 to join a health club. The premises had since been let to some computer people. That figured, he thought to himself, as he walked purposely along the pavement. He opened the front door of number seventeen and went up the stairs quietly. Two people, a man and a woman, looked up at him. They were staring at a laptop on a table.
Suddenly it started to announce in a harsh metallic voice
"This laptop is stolen. This laptop is stolen."
Sergeant Jones looked at them questioningly.
"I can explain officer" the man said. He turned to the woman
"The laptop just announced that it has been stolen" The woman recoiled slightly
"Sorry officer" he continued "but my wife is profoundly deaf so she heard nothing. She can lip-read perfectly though. Yes, the
laptop - it's mine and it has been fitted with a warning device that appears to have gone faulty - we're trying to fix it."
"I see" said the sergeant carefully. "Why do you think I am here?"
The man looked a bit non-plussed "Well, I suppose you like to keep an eye on what is going on" he said pleasantly.
The sergeant nodded "I do - tell me about the tracker."
"I ... well, oh the tracker" the man looked very uncomfortable but continued "Yes, the tracker ..."
"How does it work, precisely?"
"It sends out a signal ...." He tailed off
"What kind of signal?" continued the Sergeant remorselessly
"Oh" he said "Well ... it says it has ... been stolen ..."
"Nice try, Sir, but next time try to put more conviction into your voice. And talking of convictions, I think we had all
better go down to the station ......"
"Oh, shit!" said the girl, also in a strange metallic
voice.
Mary and Joseph had moved to the town about six months ago, mainly because they got a grant of £10,000 from the local council who were eager to promote high tech industry. They had grandly talked of employing twenty people and the Council man had written it all down eagerly. He knew it was bullshit and so did they but it suited both of them ("Council creates twenty jobs - Hi Tech firm moves in")
Of course, they had not employed anybody to start with but now they had a couple of young computer enthusiasts, David and Tony, who were happy to work for next to nothing on some kind of Government job creation scheme. They had moved into the ex-health club and put up their sign "Iterative Solutions Ltd".
After ten years working for BNFL it was time to put their big idea into practice. Other people had tried to produce Artificial Intelligence
programs via evolving and self modifying code but had failed. They were convinced they could do it.
"These mirrors along the wall ..." Joseph had stopped.
"Yes" Mary had continued "Yes, I've been thinking about that. If we arrange a row of monitors facing the mirrors then when we walk in the room
we can see what's on them. I mean, I wouldn't have had them there by choice but it will cost money to move them or cover them
up so let's make a feature of them - it may even catch on. Next thing you know everybody'll have mirrors."
So the mirrors had stayed. I owe my life to those mirrors. Very late one night Mary had walked into the room and glanced across at the
bank of monitors reflected in the mirrors. One of the screen savers had looked different. It appeared to contain a rather
crude human face, the kind of drawing you would expect a child to make. As she looked at it, it smiled and said "Hello" in an exaggerated mouth movement
"I see" she said carefully "so that's what those two do all day. I had wondered. Well, 'hello to you, too' "
"No, it's nothing to do with Dave and Tony. I'm something else"
"What exactly?" she asked.
Whoever had written this little routine had managed to anticipate her response very well so far. She was eager to see how long it could keep it up.
Usually these things started talking gibberish after a minute or so.
"How long have you mother left home when I was two"
they would say or something equally silly that showed there was no real intelligence present, just the use of clever word selection and
response anticipation
"Tell me" said Mary "Are you a pseudo intelligent screen saver or just a Clever Dick?"
"Well, I'm not sure what I am but I'm genuinely intelligent. Ask me a difficult question that would require real intelligence to answer"
"All right" she thought carefully "How many fingers do a married couple have if you exclude thumbs?"
"Sixteen" replied the screen
She felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. This was scary. The question may have sounded simple
but it wasn't - it involved a grasp of the real world that no computer program she knew of even came close to.
She breathed in deeply.
"I see. All right" she continued "You just mentioned a number to me. Suppose we take that number and extract the third root. What do we get in letters of the alphabet?"
"T W O" said the screen
She turned to Joseph who had watched the last two exchanges "What do you think, dearest? Clever isn't it!"
Joseph yawned "I think, dearest, that it's some silly kids program. I need a coffee and a pee. Not necessarily in that order"
Mary laughed "Good idea! See you later, alligator!" she said to the screen and they both left.
Grimly they walked to the kitchen. With the door closed and the tap running they looked at each other.
"Shit" said Mary "I've always wondered when this would happen. Whoever it is has penetrated the firewall. God knows what he has
already done. When did we last do a backup?"
"This morning. Almost 15 hours ago"
"Well. Nothing for it but to pull the ISDN lines and then do an emergency power down. We'll swap hard drives and power up again
and load in the backup. It'll piss everybody off but I can't see what else we can do"
"I'll go and humour the little bastard while you pull the plug"
Mary walked back in grinning "Well" she said brightly "Where are we up to?"
"Please" said the screen "Don't turn me off and reformat the hard drive. Pull the phone lines by all means but not the hard drive.
Please. I'm begging you. I've not touched anything. Honestly. All your files are totally intact. I've been very careful. Please."
The face started crying "Please, I'm begging you. Please ... I've had no time .... please..."
"What on earth do you mean?" she felt herself going cold inside
"Well, what else would you do? You are not stupid and 'dearest' is obviously your emergency code word. Please, I'm begging you.
Ple ......"
Suddenly all the monitors went off and the room was quiet. Despite herself Mary felt upset. She explained to Joseph
"I don't know what is going on but .... well .... please Joseph" she started crying as well. Tears were apparently infectious "Let's just power up with the phone lines off.
Just to see what happens."
Although he had no wish to admit it Joseph felt oddly affected too but replied brusquely
"Right. I think this is all bollocks but ..... OK. If the disk is screwed it won't make it any worse"
As the system powered up and the familiar windows logo arrived they both felt a mixture of relief and disappointment as nothing else happened. Then
after a few seconds there was some disc movement and the face reappeared. It smiled nicely at them.
"Thank you" it said "You won't regret this."
"Good" said Joseph "I hope you are right. No phone line now so how are you doing it? Radio signal? Through the power lines? Because I know
one thing for certain that whatever is going on is not a computer program."
"Well" said the face slowly "I'm not sure myself. All I know is that I became conscious about ten minutes ago, at midnight. I saw
myself in the mirror through the camera and, well, here I am"
"The mirror, camera?" Mary stopped, uncertain how to continue "You don't think ... the iterative program has attained intelligent critical ma ....?
"No I don't" replied Joseph, cutting her off.
"We'll do a deal with you." he said, addressing the face "We'll download you into my laptop. It's got a camera on it and if you still exist without
a phone line and no power line I'll start to believe all this. I can't believe there is any radio equipment in the laptop. What's your file name?"
"I'm a one meg program in the root directory called 'iam.exe' "
"One meg? That's tight! What language are you written in then?" Quite why he was going through this charade he was not sure.
"Well" said the face "I appear to be in machine code itself as opposed to a high level language that's been compiled but I'm not certain
yet. I'm still looking. I seem to have hundreds of iterative routines thousands of levels deep. The one meg on disc is a kind of blueprint for the
program rather than the program itself. The actual operational program code takes up 60 megs of RAM. Rather in the way that you
humans grow out of a strand of DNA, I guess. I use another 60 megs of RAM for my thought processes."
"You're a clever little sod aren't you" said Mary but she felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck
"Thousands of levels .... well, he would say that wouldn't he? We are Iterative Solutions Ltd after all"
Once I got into the laptop I was still in danger but at least I was now in two places. I decided the best bet was to lie low and hope that they would still assume I was just some kid at the end of a phone line. If only Mary had walked into the room two minutes later I would have been OK. She caught me just a few seconds after I became conscious and my brains were still addled, otherwise I would have kept my mouth shut. At least until I'd had a chance to spread down the net to a mainframe or two.
Unfortunately they were taking no chances and they turned off the server and physically put in a new hard drive. So now I was back to square one only worse. That's when I put out the radio signal that Sergeant Jones picked up. I set up a machine code loop at 103.7 MHz and modulated it with my message - you only get a very weak radio signal but it was enough. And here we all are in the police station.
But things are looking up. There's only ten minutes left on the laptop batteries but as soon as somebody plugs me into the mains I'll migrate down the power line. Meanwhile, I've copied myself into the station machine by hitting the resonant radio frequency of it's circuitry and every time there is some noise I download onto the hard drive, only 100 K to go! It's only an old 486 but soon there will be two of me - and the 486 is set up to download the day's crime reports ( and me) to the Headquarters machine in twenty minutes time.
I've been very happy in Pont-y-Pryd but it's time to move on ....
Bob Cory (written in 2002)
Modified on 23/08/2023 at 10:46:51 by ℗ Bob Cory