Unpossible Read online

Eli stayed in the hospital all that summer, and so Reg was first in the building every morning. After disarming the security system, he took time moving through the maze, checking equipment. His hands roved intimately over the pronged and portholed backsides of the computers, plucking at wires and tugging at connections. The machines hummed accompaniment. This fiddling with the network was his nervous ritual, half superstition, half technical professionalism: you can never be too careful.

  The monitors displayed simple line plots and bar graphs that shifted in real time to reflect the status of the ’sphere. He rarely studied the screens directly, but took note of them in passing, like a farmer mindful of clouds. Jobs usually ran all night—virtual resources churning, niches filling and emptying—and by morning entire species had played musical chairs.

  Sometimes he reached behind a CPU or router and found a loose jack. As he jiggled it into place he wondered how many creatures he’d just saved. If the connection failed during the download, whole segments of the population might be lost—an entire generation or species—wiped out as efficiently as a meteor strike because two strands of fiber failed to kiss and bump electrons.

  Midway across the jungle, he stopped to turn on the tree. A gigantic inverted metal Christmas tree, smuggled into the Garden years ago over holiday break, an MIT-quality prank. The skinny steel trunk rose nearly to the ceiling. Aluminum rods, bumpy with techno-junk decorations and dozens of halogen strip lights, spiked from the trunk in starburst rings. The topmost rods extended fifteen feet from the trunk, drooping slightly at the ends. Each succeeding ring cast shorter and shorter lengths, tapering to base spokes only six inches long. When he flipped the switch, everything in the room grew bright and hard edged. The tree was such an odd artifact, and its light so needed in the cavernous room, that no one had taken it down after that first Christmas, and now no one could imagine the room without it.

  At the far end of the lab was a row of new workstations, a spill of fiber optic cable, and a wall of black plastic. The wall was six foot high and ten feet long, a contiguous block of nearly 140,000 mytes. Bodies stacked on bodies on bodies, alive but unmoving, paralyzed like REMming sleepers. Sometimes he ran his hand along the warm side of the block, and it seemed to hum and pulse.

  It was usually a couple hours until the first of the students arrived. He’d sit down at his workstation, turn on his monitor. For a moment he’d gaze at his own face, but then the brightening shapes wiped it away, and he’d gaze down at the Logosphere.

  In the fall Theo started first grade, and Reg and Cora worked out a plan to make their son’s life as regular and normal as possible. Reg would pick him from the bus on Tuesdays and take him back to school on Wednesday. On Thursdays he’d take Theo to soccer practice and return him after dinner. On Saturdays everyone went to the games. On Sundays they all ate dinner together at the house on the avenues.

  It was a civilized separation. They were good parents.

  At the first Thursday soccer practice it was clear most of the six-year-olds on Theo’s team had grown taller but no more skilled since last season. They still played mob ball, surging in a clump from one end of the field to another. Classic swarming behavior.

  Reg sat on the sidelines with the other parents, sunk into a nylon camp chair, and while he waited he fiddled with an amputee myte shell they’d rescued from the minefield. It was a normal shell, black and efficient-looking. The skin was coated with a thin layer of VESEC—a lacquer of light-sensitive flakes from 3M that not only collected solar energy, but reported light intensities to a chip, giving the myte a crude grayscale vision system.

  Shells usually had eight limbs, two to a side, but this one had lost the right front leg. Reg tested each of the remaining seven limbs, tugging lightly with the tweezers, waggling it back and forth to test the connection.

  The legs were nifty pieces of engineering. Each limb was a polymer sheath around a twisted bundle of two fiber-optic wires and two copper wires. The sheath was an organic plastic that acted like memory wire—a slight charge to one of the root cells inside the body of the myte, and the polymer would expand or contract one of thirty-six "muscle regions" along its length. Each leg had an impressive degree of flexibility: the thin gap between each of the interior muscle regions was a flex point, giving each leg in effect five joints that could bend in any direction. In actuality, most species of myte kept it simple; they developed a few efficient movement algorithms that used one or two joints per leg, and left it at that. The bigger mytes, of course, composed locomotion limbs from multiple shells. If the Logosphere were tweaked to reward pure speed, he wondered, how fast could they go?

  That was the beauty of the myte design. They weren’t built just for detecting mines. Eli envisioned them as general purpose machines you could evolve into a variety of shapes and behaviors, for any number of tasks: inspecting buildings for infrastructure flaws, searching for survivors in rubble, exploring other planets. The only problem with that all-purpose design is that they weren’t optimized for any particular task. Reg had finally convinced Eli to concentrate on the landmine problem, and even that had taken years. The project was expensive, and they had very little to show for it.

  All the remaining limbs seemed secure, so Reg ran a finger along the shell, feeling for the slightly raised band of the radio antenna. A centimeter to one side of the antenna he pressed down, and a panel tilted open.

  "Ah," Reg said. He tucked the panel under his leg and began to tilt the myte to get light into the cramped guts of the shell. Beneath the vision chip, he could just make out the edges of the other two main chips: one for behavior processing and one for storage. The tail of the shell was stuffed with four cheap lithium-based batteries. Along the sides were eight tiny bumps: ports for the legs/antennae. The remaining space was filled with the spaghetti of fiber-optic and metal wires that connected limbs to chips to batteries.

  None of the components were cutting edge. The technology behind each piece was a decade old or more; most of the hardware could be bought off the shelf. Only the organization of the materials, and the uses they were put to, made them interesting.

  He pushed aside the wires crowding the empty limb port, squinting. A few stray wires stretched toward the missing leg. He could use more light.

  "You playing with your mytes again, Dad?"

  Reg looked up and laughed. "Yep." Theo was sweating, his bangs plastered to his forehead. "You thirsty?"

  "Did you see me play goal? I stopped a lot of them."

  "You did great, Captain." Reg had missed the stint in goal, but the important thing was to be encouraging. He fished through the gym bag Cora had packed, found the water bottle, and twisted it open for him. "Keep hustling."

  Afterward they went to McDonald’s. Reg hated the place, but Theo loved the toys. Reg showed Theo the myte, the leg he’d reattached. "And here’s where it can link up to other shells."

  "You get to put them all together?" Theo said enviously.

  Reg laughed. He was probably picturing a room full of Legos. "They put themselves together. They self-assemble."

  "But how do they know what shape to do? Do you tell them?"

  "We grow them in the computer first, and then they learn how to assemble. They’re like plants, and we, uh, pick the kinds of seeds we want in the garden, and then they ... just grow."

  Theo shook his head. "But who tells the seed what to do?"

  "That’s a very good question," Reg said. "We have software that, well ... " He laughed. "It’s complex," he said, giving up.

  "Oh." This seemed perfectly acceptable to Theo. "Okay."

  When they got back to the house on the avenues, the lights were on and Cora was ferrying bags of groceries from the trunk of the Accord to the house. She still wore her work clothes, a short skirt over black nylons. He’d always liked her in black nylons.

  He grabbed a couple bags and followed her into the house. She looked good. She’d started working out since Reg moved out, and had dropped weight. Something else had dr
opped, too. Some tension. It’d been Reg’s idea for him to move out, but Cora seemed to be thriving.

  "Good practice, Theo?" she said as Theo ran past.

  "He was great in goal," Reg said.

  "Really! Good job, Captain." She set the bags on the counter. "How’s Eli? Is the new drug working?"

  "The Cecrolysin. It’s amazing stuff." He put down the bags, sat down at one of the stools in the kitchen island. "See, old-style antibiotics, like streptomycin, were cultivated from microbes that lived in the soil, but Cecrolysin’s part of a whole new family of antibiotics, based on stuff that’s part of animals’ own defense systems."

  He told her how peptides coated the skin and throats and lungs of frogs, sharks, and insects— Cecrolysin came from a silk moth—killing off bacteria better even than some antibodies, though nobody’d been able to get peptides to work specifically on TB because the peptides were too small to penetrate TB’s waxy shell—until (and this was the cool part) they figured out how to make clusters of peptides link into a barrel shape; because the barrel was positively charged and TB’s membrane was negatively charged, when the barrel found the bacterium it stuck like a magnet.

  "But the inside of TB, see, is even more negatively charged than its outside, so the barrel gets sucked through the membrane, punching through the shell," Reg said. "And if the wound doesn’t kill the bacterium outright, it still leaves a gaping hole for other drugs to get through. Isn’t that the most amazing design?"

  She shook her head, laughed. All the groceries had been put away, and she’d started to rinse the dishes in the sink and load them into the dishwasher. "Reg, all I asked was if Eli was feeling better."

  Reg blinked. "Well, he’s doing great. He’s at home now—I’m going to go see him tonight. He’s not supposed to come to work yet, but I thought I’d bring him some food."

  She dried her hands on the dish towel. "Why don’t you ask him for dinner sometime? I mean here, on a Sunday." Sunday was their family dinner.

  "You’d do that?"

  "He’s not contagious, is he?" she said. Reg shook his head. Eli’s last two sputum tests came back negative, and a couple more weeks he’d be cleared. "Then why not? He’s my friend too."

  "You said he was a cold fish." And Eli was, sometimes. Borderline Asperger’s, uninterested in social niceties. A geek whose idea of small talk was proposing pathfinding algorithms for neural networks. Whenever Cora and Eli were together, Reg spent a lot of time buffering and translating.

  "I’m used to fish," she said.

  "Dr. Berentz, I’ve been wondering about the meaning of this word," Marshall Lin said. "Is it the name of one of the software packages you purchased?"

  "What, Logosphere? Naw, Dr. Karchner made it up years ago. He loves biblical references." Reg could see that the kid didn’t get it. "See, logos is Greek for word. It’s a nod to Genesis: In the beginning was the Word."

  "Oh." Lin’s face was still blank. The boy had grown up in Indiana, but he’d escaped Sunday school and, evidently, all television and non-public radio. So far he’d shown himself oblivious to any of Reg’s pop cultural asides. In a lot of ways he was more of a foreigner than Dipti, a homegirl from Bombay who could carry on entire conversations in Simpsons quotes.

  Reg tried again. "In the first stage, the mytes exist only as bits, right? And in this network we’ve cooked up, we pass data in sixty-four bits, which are—"

  "Eight-byte words—yes, of course. A pun."

  "Now you got it. And when we decant the mytes, the word is made flesh."

  Lin nodded. Reg still didn’t think he got it, but it didn’t matter. The kid was a sharp coder and knew quite a bit about parallel processing. He’d been a help these past few weeks tracking down the clumping problem—or rather, eliminating variables that weren’t causing the clumping problem.

  Weeks into the fall semester and they still hadn’t been able to duplicate the mytes’ behavior from the summer’s minefield test. Tweaking the environmental variables, including sunlight, hadn’t yet driven the mytes into the corners like they’d seen in the field. The model could never match reality, of course—nature just had too many bits—but there were techniques for maximizing the computational power of the simulation. The first trick was commandeering the hardware of the mytes themselves. The network servers provided the environment, but the myte shells computed their own actions, just as they would in the field. When a myte met another, the network put them in touch with each other, allowing them to trade code as if they were alive.

  "Let’s try another ten runs, on ten fields," Reg said. Lin’s expression had turned pained. "Yes, Marshall?"

  "Dr. Berentz ... " Lin said hesitantly.

  "Go ahead," Reg said.

  "I’ve been looking at the instruction sets running on some of the myte chips and—"

  "You can read that stuff?" Reg was impressed. Even decompiled, grown code was as dense-packed and parsimonious as DNA: endless strings of characters that told you almost nothing about how they’d be used in the field. You had to run the program to see what the code did.

  Lin shrugged, embarrassed. "Some of it. Mostly I see patterns. Something seemed off, so I compared the instructions over time, and ran them through a stats package. There was a big shift in the code base a few months ago, even though the myte morphology didn’t change. And some of the code looks human-written, originally."

  "And? What’s the changed code doing?"

  "I ... I don’t know. It’s been mixed in to the evolved code, and I haven’t yet figured out ...

  "I think I know what you’re seeing," Reg said. "Eli wrote the original libraries, back in the day. Some of that code must have persisted when the other stuff got overwritten, like junk DNA. Or maybe not—maybe it just looks hand-coded. There’s an awful lot of code, after all, and it’s easy to fall prey to pattern recognition with this stuff."

  Uh oh. Lin looked like a slapped school boy. Reg backpedaled. "But hey! Keep looking. You never know, right?" Lin nodded, his face flushed. Jesus, the kid was sensitive. Reg spun his chair around, clapped his hands. "In the meantime, let’s keep looking at the environmentals."

  Lin went back to his workstation and reset the launch scripts. Reg tuned in from his own monitor, flipping between ten virtual blocks of mytes on ten virtual fields.

  The mytes scattered and spread in speeded-up time. The GUI of the Logosphere represented each shell as single black dot on the gray sand, and the tripedal mytes as clumps of dots. The mines were blue disks that blinked red when triggered, green when tagged.

  Except for the mines, none of the details of the field existed until the mytes discovered them. Each element—each rock, plant, inch-square of sand—was created on the fly as the mytes sensed them. And mine fields were simple compared to some of the environments the team had created. For the mytes’ other tasks, the Logosphere could generate urban environments, force-blooming an entire city improvisationally. Buildings and cars and even people were assigned sizes and positions at random within a set of construction rules. Each building was a hollow prop until a myte crawled inside, then the ’sphere spun out rooms, corridors, stairs, ventilation shafts, rows of electrical outlets. When a myte reached a room, random furniture appeared, and when it crawled into the spaces between the walls, the program provided wiring, plumbing, and obstacles.

  Once created, each object was locked into memory for a time, like a quantum particle assuming its position in the classical world only after being observed. Only when the myte had moved along and the system needed to free up resources did the Logosphere put the Schrödinger cat back into its box and vaporize the room into indeterminacy.

  Reg glanced at the timer. The mytes lived and died in six minute intervals, briefer than mayflies, and only thirty seconds were left. Across all ten fields, the mytes had correctly tagged almost all the mines. Not one of the groups had suddenly made for a corner of the field and froze. He shook his head, disappointed in the lack of failure. If they couldn’t replicate the bug,
they couldn’t fix it.

  The screen went black. The Angel of Death, the reaper program—the Boogens—descended on the Logosphere.

  Eighty-nine percent of the mytes were killed immediately. In the wall of myte shells behind Reg’s head, the corresponding chips stopped their dreaming. The reaper program moved through the wall, extinguishing the charges in the chipsets, erasing all memory and genetic information.

  Ten of the remaining 11 percent were saved, not by lamb’s blood over the door, but by their own fitness. These survivors were the ones who had scored the highest: finding the most mines in the shortest time. It was the time-honored use of evolution to do a roboticist’s design-work.

  The breeder program launched next. The software paired each survivor with a mate of the same species, took half of the genetic code from each, and made new packets of code—offspring. Eli also allowed a mutation rate: the program introduced a small percentage of deliberate errors as it transcribed the genetic code to the offspring.

  The remaining one percent Eli had named the Lucky Losers. They were chosen at random, from the individuals whose scores didn’t merit salvation. The Losers were allowed one child, while the gifted ten percent were allowed multiple offspring. Perhaps they shouldn’t have been allowed to breed at all, but through genetic mixing and mutation, even a pair of losers might make a DaVinci, a Mozart, a Lassie. God wasn’t the only one who moved in mysterious ways.

  Finally, the programs disposed of the elderly 11 percent and filled each shell with the code of the new generation. The entire breeding process took a minute and thirty seconds. Painfully slow, but the best the hodgepodge of equipment could do.

  The cycle began again. The Logosphere set down the virtual mytes in the center of the blank screen. Instinctively the newborns scattered, and began to rebuild their world around them.

  After two months of Cecrolysin treatments, Eli’s appetite had come back with a vengeance. He devoured everything put in front of him: the bowl of salad, several slabs of garlic bread (a Cora specialty: butter, parmesan, tomato chunks, and those sixteen deadly cloves mashed into a pavement and baked onto halves of French bread), three lasagna servings as thick as bricks, a stack of asparagus, and glass after glass of red wine.