Maureen McHugh - After the Apocalypse

BHP DMS had been engineered by using genetic algorithms. Genetic algorithms weren’t genetic, actually. Damien had had an AI class in college, and they had talked about genetic algorithms. Programmers wrote a couple of different programs that solved a particular problem. Then they wrote some code that chopped and recombined chunks of programs and generated hundreds of program offspring, most of which didn’t work at all. They tested those programs by having them solve the problem, threw out the ones that didn’t work, and did the same thing all over again with the programs that were left. The result was messy and full of odd quirks, but sometimes the results were more efficient than traditionally written code. It had a lot of apparent junk. Spaghetti code that made no sense. BHP DMS made a Microsoft operating system look elegant and streamlined, but it could do some amazingly complex stuff. Damien was really interested in genetic algorithms. He had written some stuff into SAMEDI so that he could have it run a report that output variables at different points. He had shown Sydney a place where SAMEDI seemed to be reading stuff in and out of memory for no particular reason.

“That’s classic,” he said. “It looks pointless. But I bet if you take it out, the program crashes.”

In the last couple of months, BHP DMS subsystems had been crashing a lot.

Sydney was not really a code monkey the way Damien was. She had a degree in computer science, and she could write code, but she had come straight out of school into support. Damien had actually done programming for Threepoint Games. He had told her about the game-development death march to deadline, working eighteen-hour days in the crunch before release of their game, SphereGuardian, sleeping at work and living on cereal and Power Bars and caffeine. SphereGuardian had not been a success. In fact, it had sucked. The company had folded. Damien had ended up at Benevola “until he got a better job.” That had been three years ago.

Sydney did not expect to get a better job, at least not in computers. She was pretty sure she had gotten this job because she was a woman, and human resources had seen an opportunity to increase diversity. Most of the guys had more experience than she did. But she had been getting a lot of experience in the last year. Big systems like BHP DMS could get buggy, and BHP DMS had, so they had all been writing what Sydney thought of as code boxes. A subsystem would start doing something weird—crashing a lot, although when it was restarted they couldn’t find anything wrong. Then it would start doing something just plain weird, the way SAMEDI had just run the wave on the electrical systems. They would try to track down a point in the program where they could find something that triggered the event, and then they’d write some code to try to box that behavior in. Something that said, “when you want the electrical system to roll over that way, do this instead.”

Sydney was not all that good at it. Which was one reason why she answered the phone. It was a way of being useful. She did a lot of grunt work for Damien. A lot of coding is dull as hell. Database-dull kind of stuff. Sydney got stuck with a lot of that. That was why she stood up and looked over the cube wall and said to Damien, “I figured out why it started with Kensington and then went to Southpoint.”

Damien looked up at her. He was short, pale, with black hair. He was growing a goatee, and the hair was still sparse and wiry. But he had big, soulful-looking eyes which Sydney was beginning to suspect had caused her to attribute to Damien certain emotional characteristics—sensitivity, vulnerability—that he, in fact, did not have. But he was funny and fun to work with. On the wall of his cube was a poster for SphereGuardian showing a guy in a space suit that made him look like a large, red human-insect carrying a spiky-looking gun. Sydney had bought the game in the cheap rack for fifteen dollars. It had sucked.

“That’s the order they’re stacked in SAMEDI,” she said. “There’s a table.”

“That’s cool,” Damien said.

Sydney waited a moment and, when Damien didn’t say anything else, sat back down. Damien could get in the zone when he coded. He said hours could pass during which he forgot to eat. Didn’t notice what time it was. He was not that skinny for a guy who could forget to eat. Sydney had never forgotten to eat in her life. One of her secret fantasies had been that, as a girl who could code, she would work in the one place where a geeky fat girl could get dates. It had not been entirely untrue. But as someone had pointed out to her in school, although the odds are good, the goods are odd.

Damien believed that BHP DMS was aware.

Sydney had found the Wired magazine article where he’d gotten the idea, although she’d never told him that; she’d gone along with the fiction that Damien had figured it out himself. In the last couple of years, a number of big complex systems had, like BHP DMS, gotten buggy and weird and had started crashing in inexplicable ways. Eventually, all four of the systems had been wiped and reestablished from two-year-old backups, and in three cases, the problems had stopped. In one case, after several months, the problems had started back up again.

The guy who wrote the article had interviewed a scientist at MIT who thought that the systems had shown patterns that seemed purposeful and that could be interpreted as signs that the systems were testing their environments. Since their “environments” were the complex fields of data inputted into them, they didn’t see or hear or smell or taste. BHP DMS actually did monitor security cameras, smoke detectors, CO detectors, and a host of other machines, but it didn’t care what the security cameras “saw.” It checked them for orientation. It made sure that the smoke detectors had backup batteries with a charge. It didn’t use them to sense the world; it sensed them.

Sydney stood back up and looked over the cubicle wall again. After a moment, Damien looked up at her.

“What do you think DMS wants?” she asked.

He looked puzzled. Or maybe he was really not paying attention to her. Sometimes when she interrupted him, he only appeared to be looking at her.

“If it’s aware,” she said. “What does it want?”

“Why does it have to want anything?” he asked.

“Everything wants something,” Sydney said.

“Rocks don’t want anything.”

“Everything alive wants something,” Sydney said.

Damien shook his head. “I didn’t say it was alive. I said it was aware.”

“How can you be aware but not alive?”

“Do you believe in life after death?”

Sydney did not believe in life after death, but in her experience, admitting this could lead to long and complicated discussions in which people seemed to think that since she did not believe in God or the afterlife, there was nothing to stop her from becoming an ax murderer. She was pretty sure that Damien didn’t believe in God—he had a stridently pro-evolution T-shirt that said EVOLUTION How can 100 bazillion antibiotic-resistant bacteria be wrong? —but she wasn’t absolutely certain. “A ghost or a spirit was alive,” she said.

Damien shrugged and looked back at his monitor.

Which meant that Sydney should sit down, so she did.

After a minute Damien looked over her cube wall. His head was right above the Mardi Gras mask hung on her wall. She didn’t particularly want to go to Mardi Gras, which seemed to be mostly about blond girls flashing their tits; she just liked masks.

“I think DMS is aware but not alive,” Damien said.

“I don’t even know what that means,”

“Nobody does,” Damien said. Then he sat back down.

They decided to poke it. Or, rather, Damien did. Sydney pointed out that they didn’t know what it would do if they poked it—it could crash, it could shut down all the electrical systems, it could delete all the pharmaceutical records from the previous year.