Breakpoint (5 page)

“New species? Or just one with the mistakes corrected?” Susan asked, flipping through the journal to be polite. “What's the concept?”

Myers sketched a graph on her whiteboard. Across the middle of the chart she drew a line. Below the line she wrote “Corrections,” and above it she wrote “Enhancements.” The arc on the graph passed through the line at a point indicating 2008, four years before.

“Something very big happened around 2008. We crossed over from just doing genetic corrections to creating genetic enhancements. That's where we are going now, to a human so enhanced, so improved, that some would say it is no longer human. Part carbon-based life-form, as you and I are, and part silicon-based, as this thing is.” Myers whacked the computer console by her desk. “And the poor old carbon part will have been so transformed that it will be as far superior to us as we are to Neanderthals. You should catch up on the technological changes.”

Susan unfolded a chart from the journal, showing the advances in several sciences and their convergence into a Transhuman over the next two decades. “Margaret, I have China blowing things up in the U.S. I don't have time anymore to keep up on all this crazy stuff, with what the Transwhatevers fear might happen someday.”

Myers smiled her motherly look, then spoke softly and slowly, as if explaining about boys to an innocent young daughter. “Susan, this ‘crazy stuff,' as you call it,
is
happening. Of course, the fundamentalists, Christian and Muslim, really hate it.”

“That's not the only thing they have in common,” Susan said, and laughed.

“True, but because of the political power of the fundamentalists in this country, stem-cell research was delayed and all sorts of rules imposed on federally funded research that prohibited work in genetics to enhance humans.” Myers lifted a big publication from the National Institutes of Health. “Nonetheless, it is happening quietly in labs all across the country and overseas. Private research money, people skating around federal rules. A lot of it is now done in secret, or offshore.”

Susan Connor was intently studying the large foldout chart, the arrows showing milestones of progress in genetics, nanocomputing, robotics, pharmaceuticals, information science, brain studies.

“That chart you have there is already out of date. Many of the key breakthroughs have taken place experimentally. Now it's a matter of scaling and integration. It's just that most people don't know how far the technologies have come, or don't see their implications.” Professor Myers seemed almost weary. “Most people are focusing on the latest Hollywood murder scandal or on what's going on in Iran. Most Americans may know only about one or two scientific fields and don't see the combined effects of the several sciences that are now racing through advances.”

“Racing?” Susan asked skeptically.

Myers seemed to get renewed strength when challenged. She rose quickly and went to the whiteboard and began sketching lines that were at first parallel, then intertwining, then spinning out in all directions. “This is what you have to internalize. Knowledge builds on itself, always has. Now armed with cheap, highly capable computers, the rate of progress in all of these fields is accelerating, building on itself, speeding ahead. And these fields are merging, reinforcing, enabling each other. The rate of acceleration today is five times what it was forty years ago when the internet was creeping out of the BBN labs up the street. In three years, 2015, scientific engineering will be blindingly fast, and in eight years, humans may not be able to keep up with it.”

Susan's head was spinning; there were details, concepts that Myers was assuming she knew. “Okay, okay…there's a lot of catching up I have to do. But let me bring you back to the internet bombings. Any thoughts on them? Who actually did them? What will they go after next?”

Myers sat back down. “The attacks will slow things down enormously. China may be able to catch up. We have been moving out faster than China in the last few years. They can't invent well, it seems. They can copy and understand theory, but that's not enough anymore. Labs in other countries around the world are collaborating, sending huge chunks of data back and forth, petabytes, on fiber-optic cables under the sea. Just look at the Globegrid Project. How, Susan, can you merge the three biggest civilian supercomputer farms in the U.S., with ones in France, Russia, and Japan to create into one virtual machine, as was planned, if there is now no big pipe to connect them? Note, please, that we left China out of the project because of U.S. paranoia.”

“Wait, Globegrid. Was the U.S. end of that network going to be in CAIN, the building over at MIT that burned down Friday night?” Susan asked, looking at the soot on her shoes.

“The penny drops? Globegrid was to go online this month. Think what could have been done with all of those huge parallel processors working as one. Then Friday night, CAIN catches fire, and Sunday morning truck bombs take out the fiber-optic beachheads. Had you all really not put that together yet?” Myers asked incredulously. “The other two U.S. computers are at Stanford and UC San Diego.”

Folding her hands together under her nose, Susan framed her question carefully. “What was Globegrid really going to do?”

Again, Myers pushed herself up out of the chair and began sketching on the whiteboard behind her. “Once the supercomputers were linked, a special version of the new Living Software would be added to them as the control program. It would be given the task of making the three supercomputers into one virtual machine. Living Software would then be proliferated throughout cyberspace to prevent another cyber crash like the one in 2009. A grid with that power could also solve the remaining problems in genomics and brain science. And that's what they intended to use it for. Their first task was to test the results of the consortium's work on reverse-engineering the human brain.” Myers looked at her former student, who sat in front of her silently, glumly, with a facial expression that cried out, “I still don't get it!”

“Susan, Susan, Susan…don't worry. I didn't understand much of this either until the last year or so. You have to master so many disciplines simultaneously to get it, and even then you can't know everything that is going on in the labs now. Much of it has gone underground.”

Susan stacked the last of the fallen books back on Myers's desk. “Underground? What about your principles of open scientific inquiry, about sharing information?”

“Some of the work on genomics and the human-machine interface activity have raised so much of a political stink that its gone quiet. We really should not have laws telling scientists what they can and cannot do.” Myers moved the mouse to access a database on her screen. “There are two people here in Cambridge whom you need to see in order to understand the computer science part of this. Let's start there, while I put together a reading package for you on the other technologies, genomics, pharma. First, go see the boys up the river at Kamaiki Technologies, while I set you up on a date with a young man named Soxster, the best hacker in town.”

“A date? Oh, no, no! Socks who?” Susan tried to stop Myers from calling the hacker. “Really, my social life is great. There's this doctor in Baltimore, a brain surgeon. I don't need any dates, expecially with geeks…”

Myers let her glassess lip down her nose so that she could look over them at Susan. “Do you really know who blew up the internet nodes for the Chinese? No. Do you have any real leads? I doubt it. Do you think they are going to stop there? I know you don't. Have you figured out where they will attack next? No because you don't understand the technology, either open or hidden. So you will go to Kamaiki and then you will have a beer with Soxster and be nice to him. Then, maybe, just maybe, he will tell you what you need to know.”

1400 EST
Kamaiki Technologies, Technology Square
Cambridge, Massachusetts

“So…what you see below us is a live reflection of cyberspace, a multidimensional model of it. We're currently showing it geospatially, so you can see physical nodes in the same relationship to each other that they would be on the Earth's surface or on a map. You're standing over Virginia, Mr. Foley.”

Susan Connor and Jimmy Foley were on a catwalk almost twenty feet above a surface in a cavernous, windowless room at Kamaiki headquarters in Cambridge. Below them, green and yellow lights shot horizontally to nodes, then shot up vertically, some almost reaching the catwalk. Thick, glowing green lights converged on northern Virginia, New York, and Boston. Tom Sanders, the chief technology officer at Kamaiki, hit a touch screen on the guardrail and said, “So. Now let's zoom back so we see most of North America.” The surface below seemed to drop off quickly. “Sorry about that. Hope I didn't do that too quickly—some people get vertigo.”

“If I understand you and all these lights, the internet seems to be really busy despite the bombings yesterday?” Jimmy asked.

“Yes. Much more so than during the '09 Cyber Crash. So that day, when we had Zero Day hacker attacks on Sytho Routers and SofTrust servers, almost nothing moved. The monoculture of their software being used by almost everyone cost the economy hundreds of billions. That's why the Living Software project got started, to generate error-free code. It's almost ready to deploy in the wild.

“Today, traffic within the Americas is normal, except for traffic trying to get to Europe and Asia, which just keeps trying and failing, for the most part. The packets that can't get through send messages back saying they're lost. That adds to the traffic load. But on a normal day there would be much more traffic. A lot of traffic from one point in Eurasia to another point in Eurasia normally goes through the U.S. Not now. So you know the old joke about the guy in Maine that says, ‘You can't get there from here'? Well, we're trying to map where those places are that now can't get through and where it is they can't get through to.” Sanders hit the touch pad and red dots starting blinking at locations on the surface below. “The trouble is that our sensors, Kamaiki's own servers on networks around the globe, are cut off. We have twelve thousand servers in Eurasia that we can't get to.”

Susan stared down into the pulsing, blinking representation of cyberspace. “Kamaiki has sensors?”

“Well, you could call them that,” Sanders replied. “So. We monitor the traffic loadings on the various internet companies' fiber lines from city to city, so we can help route our customers' traffic most rapidly and cheaply. Then we cache or store our customers' data on our servers around the world so that when somebody wants it, they just go to the nearest Kamaiki server to get it, instead of sending a packet all the way from, say, Yahoo in California to a user in Germany.”

“I'm not sure I followed all of that, “Susan admitted, “but would you monitor traffic for MIT—are they a customer?”

“So, we're all from MIT originally. We give them a price break. I still teach there, in Course Six. Why?” Sanders asked.

“Well, I see one of the red lights is labeled CAIN. I guess that's because they're offline now, huh?” Susan said pointing below.

“Terrible tragedy. Sent Globegrid back years.”

“Would you have been watching the traffic load going into CAIN just before it caught fire?” Susan asked.

“That's what they paid us to do for them, sure. So, we made sure that people trying to reach CAIN from anywhere in the world found the fastest, most reliable path through cyberspace,” Sanders boasted.

Susan was understanding the importance of Kamaiki. Getting excited, she asked, “Can you run this thing backwards? Could we look at what was happening with CAIN just before it blew?” Susan asked.

“Well, sure, but I don't think…” Sanders started typing into the console. “So, about sixty-five hours ago, zoom in on Boston, zoom in on MIT…” The world below them seemed to spin. Streets and buildings appeared, with the internet coursing through and below them. “Other side of Kendall Square…here's CAIN…”

Susan, dizzy with vertigo, grabbed on to the catwalk's guardrail. “Can you tell us anything about the traffic going into CAIN?”

“So…country of origin. Red is Russia, old habit. Blue is France. Green is Japan,” Sanders said as a hologram appeared hovering over the surface, with long lists of numbers spiraling down. “Those colors were from the other points in the Globegrid. They were doing test runs. The orange traffic is from within the U.S., other universities mainly. Some administrative, not sent to the Grid part of CAIN. Payroll, SCADA, and other things.”

“SCADA?” Jimmy asked.

“Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. It's the software program that runs digital controls for things like lights, heat, elevators. The devices communicate back to their SCADA system software manufacturer to tell it how they are,” Sanders explained. “Here, I'll pull it out. So here are all the messages from MIT's central SCADA system in orange, turning the exterior lighting on, dropping the heat after hours, monitoring the video-surveillance cameras.”

“What was that purple traffic a second ago?” Susan asked. “There's another one now.”

“Well, it's hard to say without knowing the codes they were using and what system in the building that was going to, but it was going to an Internet Protocol, or IP, address. MIT is unique for a school. It has its own class A range. So 18, that's MIT, 280, that's CAIN, 090, that's probably the SCADA system's subnet, and then 113. Maybe the elevator or something,” Sanders offered.