DAY 7 11:57 P.M.
It’s late.
Almost midnight. The house is silent around me. I am not sure how this will turn out. The kids are all desperately1 sick, throwing up after I gave them the virus. I can hear my son and daughter retching in separate bathrooms. I went in to check on them a few minutes ago, to see what was coming up. Their faces were deathly pale. I can see they’re afraid, because they know I’m afraid. I haven’t told them about Julia yet. They haven’t asked. They’re too sick to ask right now.
I’m worried most about the baby, because I had to give her the virus, too. It was her only hope. Ellen’s with her now, but Ellen is vomiting2, too. The baby has yet to throw up. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad. Young kids react differently.
I think I’m okay, at least for the moment. I’m dead tired. I think I’ve been dozing3 off from time to time all night. Right now I’m sitting here looking out the back window, waiting for Mae. She hopped4 the fence at the end of my backyard, and is probably scrambling5 around in the brush on the slope that goes down behind the property, where the sprinklers are. She thought there was a faint green light coming from somewhere down the slope. I told her not to go down there alone, but I’m too tired to go get her. If she waits until tomorrow, the Army can come here with flame throwers and blast the hell out of whatever it is.
The Army is acting6 dumb about this whole thing, but I have Julia’s computer here at home, and I have an email trail on her hard drive. I removed the hard drive, just to be safe. I duped it, and put the original in a safe deposit box in town. I’m not really worried about the Army. I’m worried about Larry Handler and the others at Xymos. They know they have horrific lawsuits7 on their hands. The company will declare bankruptcy8 sometime this week, but they’re still liable for criminal charges. Larry especially. I wouldn’t cry if he went to jail. Mae and I have managed to put together most of the events of the past few days. My daughter’s rash was caused by gamma assemblers—the micromachines that assembled finished molecules9 from component10 fragments. The gammas must have been on Julia’s clothing when she came home from the lab. Julia worried about that possibility; that was why she took a shower as soon as she got home. The lab itself had good decontamination procedures, but Julia was interacting with the swarms12 outside the lab. She knew there was a danger. Anyway, that night she accidentally let the gammas loose in the nursery. The gamma assemblers are designed to cut microfragments of silicon13, but faced with a pliable14 substance like skin, they only pinch it. It’s painful, and causes microtrauma of a sort that nobody had ever seen before. Or would ever have suspected. No wonder Amanda didn’t have a fever. She didn’t have an infection. She had a coating of biting particles on her skin. The magnetic field of the MRI cured her in an instant; all the assemblers were yanked away from her in the first pulse. (Apparently that is also what happened to the guy in the desert. He somehow came in contact with a batch15 of assemblers. He had been camping within a mile of the Xymos desert facility.) Julia knew what was wrong with Amanda, but she didn’t tell anybody. Instead she called the Xymos cleanup crew, which showed up in the middle of the night while I was at the hospital. Only Eric saw them, and now I know what he saw. Because the same crew arrived here a few hours ago to sweep my house. They were the same men I’d seen in the van on the road that night.
The lead man wears a silver bunny suit that’s antimagnetic, and he does look ghostly. His silvered mask makes him appear faceless. He goes into the environment first to check it out. Then four other men in coveralls follow, to vacuum and clean up. I had told Eric he’d dreamed it, but he hadn’t. The crew left behind one of their sensor16 cubes, under Amanda’s bed. That was intentional17, to check for residual18 gammas in case they’d missed any. It wasn’t a surge suppressor; it was just constructed to look like one.
When I finally figured all this out, I was furious with Julia for not telling me what was going on. For making me worry. But of course, she was diseased. And there’s no point in being angry with her now.
Eric’s MP3 player was cut by gamma assemblers, the same way the cars in the desert were. And just as the MRI was. For some reason the gamma assemblers cut memory chips and leave central processors alone. I haven’t heard an explanation why. There was a swarm11 in the convertible19 with Julia that night. It had come back with her from the desert. I don’t know whether she brought it intentionally20 or not. The swarm could collapse21 into nothing, which is why Eric didn’t see anything when he went out to the car to look. And I wasn’t sure of what I saw when she pulled away, which was reasonable enough. The swarm was probably catching22 the light in odd ways. In my memory, it looked a little like Ricky, but it was probably too soon for the swarm to be taking on appearances. It hadn’t evolved that much, yet. Or maybe I just saw an indistinct shape, and in my jealousy23 I imagined it to be a person. I don’t think I made it up, but maybe I did. Ellen thinks I might have. After her car crashed, Julia called for the cleanup crews. That’s why they were there on the road late that night. They were waiting to go down the hill and clean up the site. I don’t know what caused the crash itself, whether it was something to do with the swarm or whether it was just an accident. There’s no one to ask about it now.
The facility in the desert was entirely24 destroyed. There was enough methane25 in the main laboratory to produce a fireball in excess of two thousand degrees Fahrenheit26. Any biological materials would have been incinerated. But I still worry. They never found any bodies in the ruins, not even skeletons.
* * *
Mae took the bacteriophage to her old lab in Palo Alto. I hope she made them understand how desperate the situation is. She’s being very quiet about their reaction. I think they should put the phage into the water supply, but Mae says the chlorine will take it out. Maybe there should be a vaccine27 program. As far as we know, the phage works to kill the swarms. Sometimes I have ringing in my ears, which is a worrisome sign. And I feel a vibrating in my chest and abdomen28. I can’t tell if I am just paranoid, or if something is really happening to me. I try to keep a brave face for the kids, but of course you can’t fool kids. They know I’m frightened.
The last mystery to be cleared up was why the swarms always returned to the laboratory. It never made any sense to me. I kept worrying about it because it was such an unreasonable29 goal. It didn’t fit the PREDPREY formulations. Why would a predator30 keep returning to a particular location?
Of course, in retrospect31 there was only one possible answer. The swarms were intentionally programmed to return. The goal was explicitly32 defined by the programmers themselves. But why would anybody program in a goal like that?
I didn’t know until a few hours ago.
The code that Ricky showed me wasn’t the code they had actually used on the particles. He couldn’t show me the real code, because I would have known immediately what had been done. Ricky didn’t ever tell me. Nobody ever told me.
What bothers me most is an email I found on Julia’s hard drive earlier today. It was from her to Ricky Morse, with a CC to Larry Handler, the head of Xymos, outlining the procedure to follow to get the camera swarm to work in high wind. The plan was to intentionally release a swarm into the environment.
And that’s exactly what they did.
They pretended it was an accidental release, caused by missing air filters. That’s why Ricky gave me that long guided tour, and the song and dance about the contractor33 and ventilation system. But none of what he told me was true. The release was planned. It was intentional from the beginning.
When they couldn’t make the swarm work in high wind, they tried to engineer a solution. They failed. The particles were just too small and light—and arguably too stupid, too. They had design flaws from the beginning and now they couldn’t solve them. Their whole multimillion-dollar defense34 project was going down the drain, and they couldn’t solve it. So they decided35 to make the swarm solve it for them.
They reconfigured the nanoparticles to add solar power and memory. They rewrote the particle program to include a genetic36 algorithm. And they released the particles to reproduce and evolve, and see if the swarm could learn to survive on its own. And they succeeded.
It was so dumb, it was breathtaking. I didn’t understand how they could have embarked37 on this plan without recognizing the consequences. Like everything else I’d seen at Xymos, it was jerry-built, half-baked, concocted38 in a hurry to solve present problems and never a thought to the future. That might be typical corporate39 thinking when you were under the gun, but with technologies like these it was dangerous as hell.
But of course, the real truth was more complicated. The technology itself invited the behavior. Distributed agent systems ran by themselves. That was how they functioned. That was the whole point: you set them up and let them go. You got in the habit of doing that. You got in the habit of treating agent networks that way. Autonomy was the point of it all. But it was one thing to release a population of virtual agents inside a computer’s memory to solve a problem. It was another thing to set real agents free in the real world. They just didn’t see the difference. Or they didn’t care to see it.
And they set the swarm free.
The technical term for this is “self-optimization.” The swarm evolves on its own, the less successful agents die off, and the more successful agents reproduce the next generation. After ten or a hundred generations, the swarm evolves toward a best solution. An optimum solution. This kind of thing is done all the time inside the computer. It’s even used to generate new computer algorithms. Danny Hillis did one of the first of those runs years back, to optimize40 a sorting algorithm. To see if the computer could figure out how to make itself work better. The program found a new method. Other people quickly followed his lead. But it hasn’t been done with autonomous41 robots in the real world. As far as I know, this was the first time. Maybe it’s already happened, and we just didn’t hear about it. Anyway, I’m sure it’ll happen again.
Probably soon.
It’s two in the morning. The kids finally stopped vomiting. They’ve gone to sleep. They seem to be peaceful. The baby is asleep. Ellen is still pretty sick. I must have dozed42 off again. I don’t know what woke me. I see Mae coming up the hill from behind my house. She’s with the guy in the silver suit, and the rest of the SSVT team. She’s walking toward me. I can see that she’s smiling. I hope her news is good.
I could use some good news right now.
Julia’s original email says, “We have nothing to lose.” But in the end they lost everything—their company, their lives, everything. And the ironic43 thing is, the procedure worked. The swarm actually solved the problem they had set for it.
But then it kept going, kept evolving.
And they let it.
They didn’t understand what they were doing.
I’m afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.
I hope it’s not.
We might get lucky.
收听单词发音 |
1
desperately
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| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
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vomiting
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| 吐 | |
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dozing
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| v.打瞌睡,假寐 n.瞌睡 | |
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4
hopped
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| 跳上[下]( hop的过去式和过去分词 )； 单足蹦跳； 齐足（或双足）跳行； 摘葎草花 | |
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5
scrambling
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| v.快速爬行( scramble的现在分词 )；攀登；争夺；（军事飞机）紧急起飞 | |
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acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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7
lawsuits
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| n.诉讼( lawsuit的名词复数 ) | |
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8
bankruptcy
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| n.破产；无偿付能力 | |
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9
molecules
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| 分子( molecule的名词复数 ) | |
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10
component
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| n.组成部分，成分，元件；adj.组成的，合成的 | |
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11
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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swarms
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| 蜂群，一大群( swarm的名词复数 ) | |
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13
silicon
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| n.硅(旧名矽) | |
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14
pliable
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| adj.易受影响的；易弯的；柔顺的，易驾驭的 | |
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15
batch
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| n.一批(组，群)；一批生产量 | |
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16
sensor
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| n.传感器，探测设备，感觉器（官） | |
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intentional
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| adj.故意的，有意（识）的 | |
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residual
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| adj.复播复映追加时间；存留下来的，剩余的 | |
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19
convertible
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| adj.可改变的，可交换，同意义的；n.有活动摺篷的汽车 | |
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intentionally
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| ad.故意地，有意地 | |
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21
collapse
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| vi.累倒；昏倒；倒塌；塌陷 | |
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22
catching
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| adj.易传染的，有魅力的，迷人的，接住 | |
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23
jealousy
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| n.妒忌，嫉妒，猜忌 | |
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24
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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25
methane
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| n.甲烷，沼气 | |
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26
Fahrenheit
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| n./adj.华氏温度；华氏温度计(的) | |
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27
vaccine
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| n.牛痘苗，疫苗；adj.牛痘的，疫苗的 | |
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28
abdomen
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| n.腹，下腹(胸部到腿部的部分) | |
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29
unreasonable
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| adj.不讲道理的，不合情理的，过度的 | |
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30
predator
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| n.捕食其它动物的动物；捕食者 | |
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31
retrospect
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| n.回顾，追溯；v.回顾，回想，追溯 | |
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32
explicitly
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| ad.明确地，显然地 | |
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33
contractor
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| n.订约人，承包人，收缩肌 | |
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34
defense
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| n.防御，保卫；[pl.]防务工事；辩护，答辩 | |
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35
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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36
genetic
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| adj.遗传的，遗传学的 | |
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37
embarked
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| 乘船( embark的过去式和过去分词 )； 装载； 从事 | |
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38
concocted
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| v.将（尤指通常不相配合的）成分混合成某物( concoct的过去式和过去分词 )；调制；编造；捏造 | |
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39
corporate
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| adj.共同的，全体的；公司的，企业的 | |
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40
optimize
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| v.使优化 [=optimise] | |
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autonomous
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| adj.自治的；独立的 | |
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42
dozed
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| v.打盹儿，打瞌睡( doze的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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43
ironic
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| adj.讽刺的，有讽刺意味的，出乎意料的 | |
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