. . . 31 Hours and Counting . . .

Spurlock was exhausted by the time he finished burying the van. The PVC pipe stuck up about two feet above the mound of sandy earth. It looked like some kind of drainage system for the orchard, however, not like the tip of a tomb. As an afterthought, he shoved a half-eaten bag of cheetos down the hole. The bag stuck part way down, but he followed it up with his water bottle and the weight of it forced both of them down. He laughed, then called down the tube to the kid.

“Don’t eat and drink everything at once, kid! Otherwise you’ll be eating the vinyl off the car seats before I get back here with another little snack for you.”

“Mister,” he heard faintly come up the tube. Spurlock raised his eyebrows, the kid had rarely spoken. “Don’t leave me! It’s dark down here!”

Spurlock looked down the tube into the earth. He could see nothing. It was indeed as dark as the devil’s own eyeball down there.

Spurlock hawked a big one and fired it down the pipe. He couldn’t tell if the kid caught it in the face or not, but he hoped so. “See now, you don’t want to be calling up this pipe, boy. You never know what might come down to get you. Snakes would love this pipe, if they hear you. So, you just keep quiet until I bring you more food. If you’re real good, I might even let you out. If you’re not, I’ll cover up this last hole and you’ll suffocate down there in the dark. Now, shut up.”

With that, he walked back toward the road. There was still plenty of business to be done today.

#

Nog had plenty of snacks in his white Lincoln Town Car and Ray was so hungry that he couldn’t help himself. He felt vaguely ill to eat from the same bags of corn chips and boxes of cellophane-wrapped cakes that Nog had been pawing. Listening to Nog wasn’t helping his stomach, either.

“Where to?” asked Nog.

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, you’ve got the gun, Vance.”

“Right,” said Vance, feeling dazed. So much had happened today. He ate another chip, trying to think. “Let’s get out of here before the cops come. Just drive, Nog.”

Nog did a wide sweeping U-turn to get out of the dead-end circle. The big white car heeled over like a boat. The thought of Moby Dick, the great white whale, came unbidden to Ray’s mind. Kids on bikes scattered before their wake. Nog stomped on the pedal and they rolled quickly and quietly away from Brenda’s.

“I guess I can tell you some stuff, since you seem so convinced that I created this beauty,” said Nog, driving the car out of the neighborhood. “The virus is really a sophisticated piece of software. I can’t say that I completely understand what it’s doing now myself.”

“What do you mean?” mumbled Ray around his chips. He snorted quietly to himself; here was another nerd, telling him how cool a nerdy program was. They didn’t have many people to brag to, so he had always been a prime target during his office hours. He wondered vaguely what was happening to his students. Had they found a substitute for him?He hoped it wasn’t Waterson. The guy had his heart in the right place, but he couldn’t teach. He felt an odd pang of guilt for abandoning his classes.

“The virus is a real piece of work,” continued Nog, warming to his topic. “I always get a chuckle out of the news flashes—I’ve started watching CNN since your last visit—I love how they call it: adaptable. They have no clue.”

“Uh-huh.”Ray barely listened. Much of his attention was devoted to feeding his face and watching for cops. He wished there was something to drink. The only thing in sight was Nog’s sun-warmed, half-empty can of diet soda. He wasn’t that thirsty.

“A lot of the ideas in it come from your teachings, Vance. Particularly in the study of neural networks.”

Ray frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“Neural nets, my man. That’s what this virus is built from.”

Ray looked at him in surprise. Neural nets were software imitations of the human mind. They were currently a hot area of research in the artificial intelligence field, but few practical applications had yet been found. They were often found to be too large and complex for most projects. “They said the virus was big, but not that big.”

Nog nodded proudly. “I worked hard to shrink the neural nodes. They are both general problem-solvers and yet specialized to their task. But, that’s not the best part.”

Ray waited. Nog finally had his full attention.

Nog basked in it. “The worm is a fully-function learning system. It copies itself with both logical and random mutations. And it shares data on successful mutations with others of its kind, sort of cross-breeding.”

Ray thought about that for a moment. “That is some piece of software.”

“It’s more than that, Vance. It’s alive.”

“It’s just a bunch of bits set a certain way, Nog,” replied Ray. “It’s not going to pass the Turing test.”The Turing test, first described by Alan Turing in the fifties, defined a test which no computer had yet passed. Turing argued that if one could hold a conversation with a computer in another room and couldn’t tell its responses from those of a human, one had to admit it showed some degree of intelligence.

“No, no,” said Nog, “You miss my point. I didn’t say it was intelligent, Vance, I said it was alive.”

Ray was silent for a moment. “So, this thing makes copies of itself with variations in the copies?”

“Yes, logical mutations that stem from what it has learned. They vary greatly, too. I have no idea anymore what the virus has become. It mutates very quickly. Out on the open net, with a thousand conditions, it has turned into a thousand different viruses doing a thousand different things.”

“How many different moves does it know how to make? I mean, is it created to destroy data, hardware, what? What’s its trick?”

“You aren’t getting it, Vance.  The thing is rewriting itself, adapting. I have no idea what it might do. There is one main trick that remains to be seen. What other moves might it make? Who knows? Whatever works best.”

“You mean the thing evolves, experiments?”

“Yes, the same way that organic microbes do,” Nog beamed. “Actually, I modeled it after HIV. That biological monster is particularly hard to cure, because the outer coating of the virus resembles sugar, which is food for cells. It is really hard to teach our cells not feed themselves. My virus is like that, it pretends to be valid data from a valid source.”

“Spoofing,” said Ray, providing the term used for computer programs that tried to trick their way past firewalls.

“Right. But better spoofing than you’ve ever seen. The new computer accepts it and zap, it is infected. Just like HIV, mine has many strains and it mutates so fast that people might never figure out how to stop it. One copy might try to erase hard disks and copy itself using e-mail. Another might use VPN to other servers. Another might try to hide, lying dormant on disks everywhere until a certain time or date. Whichever works the best, that one will make more copies than the others. Some of the new copies will have mutations, which continues the cycle.”

“What if it chooses a bad strategy?” asked Ray, feeling a bit sick. Had he helped create this thing by teaching Nog the basics?

“That happens all the time. You ever see one of those nature-shows, where about a thousand baby shrimp explode out of their eggs at once? All the fish come and feast on them, but a few get by. Defective ones and unlucky ones die off, but many live.”

Ray nodded, overwhelmed. “Only the fittest survive.”

“Exactly.”

A flash of anger hit Ray. His head injury throbbed and his frustration reached a sudden flashpoint. He pointed Ingles’ pistol at Nog. “What’s to keep me from taking you right to the cops, Nog? Why shouldn’t I give us both up and let them grill you until you spill your fat guts on this virus?”

“Only one thing, Vance,” said Nog.

Ray sighed. Justin. Nog knew he couldn’t give up yet. Things had gotten crazy, but he felt that he was close, and he still had to try.

“Okay,” he said. “Just tell me why you were trying to dig up evidence at Brenda’s.”

Nog shrugged. “I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me that happened to you. That Santa-bastard planted something there to incriminate me as well. That’s his way.”

“You mean Ingles?”

Nog glanced at him. “So that was you listening in on No Carrier.”

Ray allowed himself a grim smile. At least he had done something right.

“Yeah, well, in later communications that you must have missed, Santa indicated that he was going to screw me too.”

“It did seem like a crazy way to try to make a million bucks.”

“You know, I don’t think that ever was his real motivation,” said Nog. “He had something else in mind.”

“Do you think he just wanted to burn the net? Is he paranoid? Does the net watches him while he sleeps?”

“Maybe,” said Nog, “he uses the net all the time, but he doesn’t seem to value it.”

“Well, whatever it is, I need to talk to Santa privately.”

“Yeah well, I guess this is the end of the line, then,” said Nog. He slowed the car on a country road and pulled over to the dirt shoulder.

Ray looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Look around, Vance. This is the back of Ingle’s place. You didn’t want me to drive you right up to the door, did you?”

Ray eyed the surrounding army of black-trunked almond trees. Far down one of the rows, he thought to see a house of white clapboards. Ingles owned a large ranch out here, it must have covered around a hundred-plus acres, mostly of trees. He recalled having been out here years ago for a faculty mixer. Sarah hadn’t come with him that day, he suddenly remembered. He had to wonder now if she had a special reason to not want to go to Ingles house.

Pushing that thought out of his mind, he opened the car door. He paused and looked back at Nog. Was this a set-up? He couldn’t tell.

“You’re one odd sociopath, Nog,” he told his ex-student.

Nog shrugged and didn’t meet his gaze. Ray could tell he was worrying at his tongue again.

“I’ll take that cell phone,” he said, disconnecting it from the dashboard power outlet. “I might need it.”

“Hold on,” said Nog, he reached behind his seat and pulled out a backpack. “Take this one,” he said, tossing another cell phone on the seat. “It’s got a longer range and a better, fresher battery.”

Ray nodded and took up the offered phone. He thumbed the power button. Digits flashed up on the display. It made a tone as it reached out and connected with another computer several miles away.

Ray climbed out of the car and looked back. Nog glanced at him.

“Good luck, Ray,” he said.

“Thanks.”

Then he drove off. Ray watched the big Lincoln roll smoothly away. It occurred to him that Nog had never called him by his first name before.