Questing Beast (Page 2)

“What about the back-up?”

Santos sighed. “As I said, the millipede lay dormant…”

“And when Julia brought the Dwarf to back up the FER, the millipede transferred into it?”

Santos nodded.

“Both back-up drives?”

Santos nodded again.

“What about the back-up disks?”

Santos’ stoic face gained a troublesome hint of emotion. “I’m worried about you.”

That’s right, the fuzzies had stolen the hard disks two weeks ago. He hadn’t worried too much at the time. After all, they still had Snow White and the Dwarf.

“So we’re screwed.”

Santos nodded. “Indeed.”

It occurred to Sean that he was dead and that Santos, with his somber impenetrable face, was his Thanatos come to take him to Hades to be judged for his earthly transgressions. He rocked back. Perhaps he wasn’t dead. Perhaps he was merely sleeping. Soon he would wake up and everything would be fine.

“Sean?”

“I’m not dreaming?”

“No.”

There was no possible way to recreate the report in four days, not with the amount of research material he had. The two standard years worth of data accumulation, analysis, hard work, frayed nerves… The section chiefs still had their paper notes, but the totality of their labor amounted to nothing unless it was presented to the committee. It would have catastrophic consequences on their careers.

He could always take the easy way out of this situation. He could bash his head against the wall and save himself the pain. He could…

His brain clicked.

“Nannybot,” he said. “Nannybot is the tertiary back-up. We back up all files to it every other week. It would have everything before I plugged Timur’s geosurveys in. I can fix that in four days.”

Santos sighed. “That’s the bad news…”

*****

Sean crossed his arms on his chest and watched as the bio-storage unit, otherwise known as Nannybot, tried to ride a dwarf cow. The dwarf cow resembled a miniature Terrestrial buffalo with orange fur. In its quadruped mode Nannybot resembled a large but slender canine with a smooth indigo skin and a single lens in the middle of a tubular head. In its bipedal mode, it resembled an alien from early Terrestrial UFO mythos.

Neither mode was suited to riding. Particularly to riding terrified dwarf-cows, while holding a broomstick in one appendage.

“Why the broomstick?” Sean asked.

“Verne isn’t sure,” Santos said.

The cow charged a small bench, where Emily, the oldest of the children, sat reading her book. For a terrified moment Sean was lost between being frozen in panic and springing to the rescue. The cow veered left, avoiding the bench by a hair. He exhaled. “Tell me how this happened again?”

“The best Verne can figure out is that the millipede’s protocol pegged Nannybot as an AI during the back-up and spawned. Only of course, Nannybot isn’t a regular AI, so instead of shutting down it made it do… Whatever it’s doing right now.”

“But there was no Nannybot back-up scheduled for last night.”

Santos coughed. “Julia thought you were taking the back-up protocol too lightly. She’s been backing up to the Nannybot every night for the last week.”

Sean looked past the school yard, past the spasmodically jerking blue monstrosity on the cow’s back, to where Ino forest reached toward the sky, its smooth silvery stems intertwining and braiding. Garlands of ino-ino fruits beckoned from the branches like enormous dandelions. The air smelled of red wine.

“Why me?” he wondered idly. He hadn’t even wanted Nannybot in the first place. Officially classified as Independent Biological Reasoning Unit, Nannybot was neither independent nor reasoning. An abacus was a better substitute for a computer than this genetically-engineered collection of muscle and ganglia. Designed as an alternative to regular data storage, Nannybot had an enormous capacity, but it took forever to transfer even a small data cluster from the Dwarf into it. He voted to have it deactivated, but the majority vote sent it to tutor the children instead. And now his entire future depended on Nannybot. The Universe was mocking him.

The dwarf cow buckled and kicked, catapulting Nannybot into air. The IBRU flew over the fence, cleared their heads, flipping in the air like a cat, and landed on all fours. Santos snapped into a shooter stance, pointing his zapper at Nannybot.

“If you shoot it, I’ll kill you,” Sean said evenly. “The report’s still in it.”

Nannybot rose slowly. Its limb still clutched the broomstick. The round lens of its ocular swiveled. The vocal slit opened and smooth baritone issued forth. “Knights full of thought and sleepy, tell me if thou sawest a strange beast pass this way?”

“Dear Gods,” Sean said.

“The Beast!” Nannybot proclaimed, swinging the broomstick in a dramatic fashion. “I have followed this quest this twelvemonth, and either I shall achieve him, or bleed of the best blood of my body.”

“What does it mean?” Santos asked.

“It means nothing. It’s gibberish.” Sean said.

“Mallory,” Emily said.

“What?”

Emily looked up from her book. “It’s not gibberish, it’s Mallory. Arthuriana. Nanny thinks he’s Sir Pellinore.”

“Emily, honey, what is it trying to do?” Sean asked.

Emily smiled. “He’s trying to hunt the Questing Beast, of course.”

A small light of hope flared in the deep black void filling Sean’s head. “Tell me more.”

*****

“There are only two ways to break down a third-order AI like Nanny: a chaotic protocol or a goal-oriented protocol.” Sean strode to the Chief Programmer’s block, Santos in tow. “The chaotic protocol floods the AI with a random avalanche of tiny tasks, which throws the system out of whack and drives the AI insane. There is no cure for that one. The goal-oriented protocol locks the system into a loop with a definitive goal in mind. Achieve the goal and the virus purges itself. The first way is tedious and doesn’t require much imagination. The second takes far greater skill.”

He paused but Santos offered no comment.

“Arbian hackers take pride in their work. They love a challenge. They wouldn’t slap together a chaotic protocol for that millipede – any hacker can do that. They sent a goal-oriented virus, so they could watch us squirm trying to solve it.”

“You think Emily is right?” Santos said.