DAY 6 11:42 A.M.
That was how, with a splitting headache, I found myself on the phone to the hospital in San Jose. “Julia Forman, please.” I spelled the name for the operator. “She’s in the ICU,” the operator said.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I’m sorry but direct calls are not allowed.”
“Then the nursing station.”
“Thank you, please hold.”
I waited. No one was answering the phone. I called back, went through the operator again, and finally got through to the ICU nursing station. The nurse told me Julia was in X-ray and didn’t know when she would be back. I said Julia was supposed to be back by now. The nurse said rather testily1 that she was looking at Julia’s bed right now, and she could assure me Julia wasn’t in it.
I said I’d call back.
I shut the phone and turned to David. “What was Julia doing in all this?”
“Helping us, Jack2.”
“I’m sure. But how, exactly?”
“In the beginning, she was trying to coax3 it back,” he said. “We needed the swarm4 close to the building to take control again by radio. So Julia helped us keep it close.”
“How?”
“Well, she entertained it.”
“She what?”
“I guess you’d call it that. It was very quickly obvious that the swarm had rudimentary intelligence. It was Julia’s idea to treat it like a child. She went outside with bright blocks, toys. Things a kid would like. And the swarm seemed to be responding to her. She was very excited about it.”
“The swarm was safe to be around at that time?”
“Yes, completely safe. It was just a particle cloud.” David shrugged5. “Anyway, after the first day or so, she decided6 to go a step further and formally test it. You know, test it like a child psychologist.”
“You mean, teach it,” I said.
“No. Her idea was to test it.”
“David,” I said. “That swarm’s a distributed intelligence. It’s a goddamn net. It’ll learn from whatever you do. Testing is teaching. What exactly was she doing with it?”
“Just, you know, sort of games. She’d lay out three colored blocks on the ground, two blue and one yellow, see if it would choose the yellow. Then with squares and triangles. Stuff like that.”
“But David,” I said. “You all knew this was a runaway7, evolving outside the laboratory. Didn’t anybody think to just go out and destroy it?”
“Sure. We all wanted to. Julia wouldn’t allow it.”
“Why?”
“She wanted it kept alive.”
“And nobody argued with her?”
“She’s a vice8 president of the company, Jack. She kept saying the swarm was a lucky accident, that we had stumbled onto something really big, that it could eventually save the company and we mustn’t destroy it. She was, I don’t know, she was really taken with it. I mean, she was proud of it. Like it was her invention. All she wanted to do was ‘rein it in.’ Her words.”
“Yeah. Well. How long ago did she say that?”
“Yesterday, Jack.” David shrugged. “You know, she only left here yesterday afternoon.” It took me a moment to realize that he was right. Just a single day had passed since Julia had been here, and then had had her accident. And in that time, the swarms9 had already advanced enormously.
“How many swarms were there yesterday?”
“Three. But we only saw two. I guess one was hiding.” He shook his head. “You know, one of the swarms had become like a pet to her. It was smaller than the others. It’d wait for her to come outside, and it always stuck close to her. Sometimes when she came out it swirled10 around her, like it was excited to see her. She’d talk to it, too, like it was a dog or something.” I pressed my throbbing11 temples. “She talked to it,” I repeated. Jesus Christ. “Don’t tell me the swarms have auditory sensors12, too.”
“No. They don’t.”
“So talking was a waste of time.”
“Uh, well ... we think the cloud was close enough that her breath deflected13 some of the particles. In a rhythmic14 pattern.”
“So the whole cloud was one giant eardrum?”
“In a way, yeah.”
“And it’s a net, so it learned ...”
“Yeah.”
I sighed. “Are you going to tell me it talked back?”
“No, but it started making weird15 sounds.”
I nodded. I’d heard those weird sounds. “How does it do that?”
“We’re not sure. Bobby thinks it’s the reverse of the auditory deflection that allows it to hear. The particles pulse in a coordinated16 front, and generate a sound wave. Sort of like an audio speaker.”
It would have to be something like that, I thought. Even though it seemed unlikely that it could do it. The swarm was basically a dust cloud of miniature particles. The particles didn’t have either the mass or the energy to generate a sound wave.
A thought occurred to me. “David,” I said, “was Julia out there yesterday, with the swarms?”
“Yes, in the morning. No problem. It was a few hours later, after she left, that they killed the snake.”
“And was anything killed before that?”
“Uh ... possibly a coyote a few days ago, I’m not sure.”
“So maybe the snake wasn’t the first?”
“Maybe ...”
“And today they killed a rabbit.”
“Yeah. So it’s progressing fast, now.”
“Thank you, Julia,” I said.
I was pretty sure the accelerated behavior of the swarms that we were seeing was a function of past learning. This was a characteristic of distributed systems—and for that matter a characteristic of evolution, which could be considered a kind of learning, if you wanted to think of it in those terms. In either case, it meant that systems experienced a long, slow starting period, followed by ever-increasing speed.
You could see that exact speedup in the evolution of life on earth. The first life shows up four billion years ago as single-cell creatures. Nothing changes for the next two billion years. Then nuclei17 appear in the cells. Things start to pick up. Only a few hundred million years later, multicellular organisms. A few hundred million years after that, explosive diversity of life. And more diversity. By a couple of hundred million years ago there are large plants and animals, complex creatures, dinosaurs18. In all this, man’s a latecomer: four million years ago, upright apes. Two million years ago, early human ancestors. Thirty-five thousand years ago, cave paintings. The acceleration19 was dramatic. If you compressed the history of life on earth into twenty-four hours, then multicellular organisms appeared in the last twelve hours, dinosaurs in the last hour, the earliest men in the last forty seconds, and modern men less than one second ago. It had taken two billion years for primitive20 cells to incorporate a nucleus21, the first step toward complexity22. But it had taken only 200 million years—one-tenth of the time—to evolve multicellular animals. And it took only four million years to go from small-brained apes with crude bone tools to modern man and genetic23 engineering. That was how fast the pace had increased.
This same pattern showed up in the behavior of agent-based systems. It took a long time for agents to “lay the groundwork” and to accomplish the early stuff, but once that was completed, subsequent progress could be swift. There was no way to skip the groundwork, just as there was no way for a human being to skip childhood. You had to do the preliminary work. But at the same time, there was no way to avoid the subsequent acceleration. It was, so to speak, built into the system.
Teaching made the progression more efficient, and I was sure Julia’s teaching had been an important factor in the behavior of the swarm now. Simply by interacting with it, she had introduced a selection pressure in an organism with emergent behavior that couldn’t be predicted. It was a very foolish thing to do.
So the swarm—already developing rapidly—would develop even more rapidly in the future. And since it was a man-made organism, evolution was not taking place on a biological timescale. Instead, it was happening in a matter of hours.
Destroying the swarms would be more difficult with each passing hour. “Okay,” I said to David. “If the swarms are coming back, then we better get ready for them.” I got to my feet, wincing24 at the headache, and headed for the door. “What do you have in mind?” David said.
“What do you think I have in mind?” I said. “We’ve got to kill these things cold stone dead. We have to wipe them off the face of the planet. And we have to do it right now.” David shifted in his chair. “Fine with me,” he said. “But I don’t think Ricky’s going to like it.”
“Why not?”
David shrugged. “He’s just not.”
I waited, and said nothing.
David fidgeted in his chair, more and more uncomfortable. “The thing is, he and Julia are, uh, in agreement on this.”
“They’re in agreement.”
“Yes. They see eye to eye. I mean, on this.”
I said, “What are you trying to say to me, David?”
“Nothing. Just what I said. They agree the swarms should be kept alive. I think Ricky’s going to oppose you, that’s all.”
I needed to talk to Mae again. I found her in the biology lab, hunched25 over a computer monitor, looking at images of white bacterial26 growth on dark red media. I said, “Mae, listen, I’ve talked to David and I need to—uh, Mae? Have you got a problem?” She was looking fixedly27 at the screen.
“I think I do,” she said. “A problem with the feedstock.”
“What kind of problem?”
“The latest Theta-d stocks aren’t growing properly.” She pointed28 to an image in the upper corner of the monitor, which showed bacteria growing in smooth white circles. “That’s normal coliform growth,” she said. “That’s how it’s supposed to look. But here ...” She brought up another image in the center of the screen. The round forms appeared moth-eaten, ragged29 and misshapen. “That’s not normal growth,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m afraid it’s phage contamination.”
“You mean a virus?” I said. A phage was a virus that attacked bacteria. “Yes,” she said. “Coli are susceptible30 to a very large number of phages. T4 phage is of course the most common, but Theta-d was engineered to be T4-resistant. So I suspect it’s a new phage that’s doing this.”
“A new phage? You mean it’s newly evolved?”
“Yes. Probably a mutant of an existing strain, that somehow gets around the engineered resistance. But it’s bad news for manufacturing. If we have infected bacterial stocks, we’ll have to shut down production. Otherwise we’ll just be spewing viruses out.”
“Frankly31,” I said, “shutting down production might be a good idea.”
“I’ll probably have to. I’ll try to isolate32 it, but it looks aggressive. I may not be able to get rid of it without scrubbing the kettle. Starting over with fresh stock. Ricky’s not going to like it.”
“Have you told him about this?”
“Not yet.” She shook her head. “I don’t think he needs more bad news right now. And besides ...” She stopped, as if she had thought better of what she was going to say. “Besides what?”
“Ricky has a huge stake in the success of this company.” She turned to face me. “Bobby heard him on the phone the other day, talking about his stock options. And sounding worried. I think Ricky sees Xymos as his last big chance to score. He’s been here five years. If this doesn’t work out, he’ll be too senior to start over at a new company. He’s got a wife and baby; he can’t gamble another five years, waiting to see if the next company clicks. So he’s really trying to make this happen, really driving himself. He’s up all night, working, figuring. He isn’t sleeping more than three or four hours. Frankly, I worry it’s affecting his judgment33.”
“I can imagine,” I said. “The pressure must be terrible.”
“He’s so sleep-deprived it makes him erratic34,” Mae said. “I’m never sure what he’ll do, or how he’ll respond. Sometimes I get the feeling he doesn’t want to get rid of the swarms at all. Or maybe he’s scared.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Anyway, he’s erratic. So if I were you I’d be careful,” she said, “when you go after the swarms. Because that’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it? Go after them?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what I’m going to do.”
收听单词发音 |
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testily
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| adv. 易怒地, 暴躁地 | |
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jack
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| n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克 | |
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coax
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| v.哄诱，劝诱，用诱哄得到，诱取 | |
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swarm
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| n.(昆虫)等一大群；vi.成群飞舞；蜂拥而入 | |
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shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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runaway
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| n.逃走的人，逃亡，亡命者；adj.逃亡的，逃走的 | |
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vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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swarms
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| 蜂群，一大群( swarm的名词复数 ) | |
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swirled
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| v.旋转，打旋( swirl的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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throbbing
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| a. 跳动的,悸动的 | |
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sensors
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| n.传感器，灵敏元件( sensor的名词复数 ) | |
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deflected
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| 偏离的 | |
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rhythmic
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| adj.有节奏的，有韵律的 | |
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weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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coordinated
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| adj.协调的 | |
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nuclei
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| n.核 | |
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dinosaurs
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| n.恐龙( dinosaur的名词复数 )；守旧落伍的人，过时落后的东西 | |
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acceleration
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| n.加速，加速度 | |
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primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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nucleus
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| n.核，核心，原子核 | |
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complexity
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| n.复杂(性)，复杂的事物 | |
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genetic
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| adj.遗传的，遗传学的 | |
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wincing
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| 赶紧避开，畏缩( wince的现在分词 ) | |
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hunched
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| （常指因寒冷、生病或愁苦）耸肩弓身的，伏首前倾的 | |
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bacterial
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| a.细菌的 | |
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fixedly
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| adv.固定地；不屈地，坚定不移地 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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ragged
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| adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的 | |
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susceptible
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| adj.过敏的，敏感的；易动感情的，易受感动的 | |
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frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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isolate
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| vt.使孤立，隔离 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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erratic
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| adj.古怪的，反复无常的，不稳定的 | |
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