Rick Cook - The Wizardry Quested

Moira furrowed her scaly brow. She had been more intimately associated with the programmers than Bal-Simba or any of the other wizards and she knew Jerry’s knack for spotting problems even if he couldn’t quite grasp the whole.

"You’ve never had a virus here before?" Taj asked.

Jerry shook his head. "Now that it’s happened I can see how it could, but no."

"Hmm," Bal-Simba said, staring at the glowing letters. "Do you think it is related?"

"Directly? No. But I suspect it’s a manifestation of the same kind of underlying phenomenon. Sort of the fundamental particle of your problem."

"And it works by sticking stuff together," Jerry said in an effort to forestall the inevitable. "Let me guess, you call this a glue-on, right?"

Taj brightened. "Hey, that’s a good name for it"

"Me and my big mouth," Jerry muttered. "Anyway, it still doesn’t explain who our enemy is."

"What about," Taj said slowly, "the possibility that the glue-on arose naturally? It’s not very complicated. Only about a dozen basic instructions."

"I suppose that’s possible," Jerry said equally slowly. "Like I say, we’ve never seen that. But we really haven’t been here long."

"Where do you suppose all these complicated magical phenomena come from?"

"Around here that’s like asking why the sky is blue. They just are."

"The sky’s blue for a reason," Taj pointed out.

"It’s something we never really wondered about."

Taj smiled, looking more satanic than ever. "Those are the ones that get you in the worst trouble."

While Jerry chewed on that Taj went back to wandering about the room restlessly, looking at things without quite seeing them. He came to rest in front of Danny’s magical fish tank and suddenly froze like a bird dog coming on point. The rainbow denizens of the tank were oblivious to him, but everyone else in the room was suddenly watching him intently.

"Those fish aren’t natural, are they?"

"No, that’s something Danny was working on for his son," Jerry told him.

"Do they change?" he asked in a peculiar voice.

Jerry frowned, remembering his earlier misgivings. "Yeah. He made them so they’d change over time. They kinda mutate."

"But they don’t follow a pre-programmed pattern?"

"I don’t think so."

Taj turned back to the fish tank and stared fascinated.

"Bingo!" he breathed softly. "Oh, boy howdy!"

"You’ve found something?"

"Alfie."

"Huh?"

"Alfie-A-Life, you know artificial life."

"What do you guys know about artificial life?"

Jerry shrugged. "It only got hot after we came here. We’ve been following the newsgroups on the net."

"Its a very rapidly developing field."

"As good as its hype?"

Taj snorted. "Get real. But they’re still getting some interesting results, especially with evolutionary systems." He paused. "What’s more, I’ll bet your enemy isn’t ’someone’, it’s ’something’-the mother of all artificial life programs."

Zombie army ants. The phrase flashed in Jerry’s mind.

"Meaning the thing’s not alive?"

Taj shrugged. "Define ’life’ and I’ll tell you. What it definitely means is that you’ve got stuff breeding out there."

"Wait a minute, A-life has to have a purpose. There’s a design."

Taj gave another of his satanic smiles. "Teleological reasoning. The A-life we’re familiar with is designed originally because humans created it. But there’s nothing that says there has to be a designer. If you’ve got the right conditions and the right precursors it could arise spontaneously." He looked over at the fish tank "Offhand I’d say you have the right conditions here.

"From what you’ve told me, there’s natural magic everywhere, but the spells didn’t combine very well. So now you guys come along and develop your spell compiler that sticks little spells together and eventually these things pick up the trick."

"But we didn’t write anything like that," Jerry protested.

"Not necessary that you do. This kind of genetic crossover has been known for a long time in bacteria and a couple of workers have produced it in artificial life programs." He frowned. "So then the question is, how much available resources do they have? You sort of indicated that magic is an infinite resource here, right?"

"Well, not exactly. Some areas are more magical than others. There are dead zones all through the Wild Wood, for instance. And at times you can produce something like a magical drain effect and some resources become scarce. Wiz did that in his attack on the City of Night." It was his turn to frown. "But that kind of thing is rare. There’s an awful lot of available magic out there." Taj nodded. "Makes sense. If you’re really resource constrained it’s hard to get any kind of complex development. You get the equivalent of lichens and algae. If there’s no constraint you lose a potent driver for evolution. But if there’s a lot of resources before you hit the constraints:" he shrugged.

"Jeez," Jerry muttered.

"Okay, now suppose that these things are out there, these little spells, competing for resources. It becomes survival of the fittest. The things that can grab the most resources and hold on to them best survive longest."

"And we started that?"

Taj pursed his lips. "Actually that probably pre-dates you. I suspect that’s where this world’s naturally occurring demons and such come from. What you added were code fragments that made it easier for pieces to combine."

"So we are responsible."

"Law of nature, man. You can’t do just one thing. Anyway, eventually this proto-evolutionary process turns out our friend the glue-on." He nodded toward the desktop where the virus sat. Jerry thought it didn’t look like anyone’s friend, but before he could say that, Taj was off again. "Now you throw in something like this recombinant virus and the things that survive are the ones that get reproduced."

He shrugged, "Kind of like an artificial life version of Core Wars, only we’re in the core." He laughed. "Evolution in action. I’ll bet by now there’s a whole ecology out there."

"Wonderful," groaned Jerry.

"That too," Taj agreed, obviously having missed his tone. The big question is how high a lambda have you got?"

"Lambda?"

"Information mutability. If information is hard to change you stifle any kind of evolution. If it’s too easy to change self-organization doesn’t have a chance. There’s a fairly narrow band where A-life is possible."

Jerry thought about that. He didn’t like it, but it made sense. "We know some areas are less magical than others. The whole place around the City of Night is an especially magically active zone. Plus there’s a lot of leftover magic down there from the days of the Dark League."

"And we have kept scant watch there," Bal-Simba rumbled. "My fault, I am afraid."

"So," Taj said, "these things had the equivalent of a petri dish where they could grow and evolve. And now you’ve got something that’s looking to spread out."

"Why is it so hostile?"

"Because that’s the way it evolved. Maybe it gives the thing an edge in surviving, maybe it’s an accidental characteristic, like something it picked up along the way."