Digital Life Form part 9

 

Chapter Three

 

We sat in a greasy spoon cafe somewhere between Manchester and Liverpool, on a minor road that had been a major trunk route at some time in the fifties or sixties; its glory gone and used only for commuters and truckers looking for respite from the major arteries of northern England. 

The driver, who Geek called John, stayed outside smoking, watching for other arrivals.  Inside, apart from Winston, Geek and myself were a couple of truckers tucking in to plates of grease-ridden sausages, bacon and eggs, their trucks neatly stowed at one end of the car park.  The man behind the counter seemed to be the only staff on duty at this time of morning and apart from stirring the frying pan occasionally while he made up our breakfast, seemed more preoccupied with the tabloid newspaper spread across the counter.

I looked at Winston, particularly at the bulge where he'd pushed paper hand-towels down his sleeve to stem the blood.

'You need a doctor,' I said. 

'Got one coming, UNISC guy used to be a medic in the special forces.  He'll sort this out.'

'Just a flesh wound, then,' said Geek, concern clearly kept under tight control.

'I've honestly had worse,' replied Winston, letting his arm rest casually across in front of him on the table, the torn fabric on his deep blue suit darkened with blood barely visible to any passing person.

'We'll need to inform the police,' I said, sipping from the mug of tea Geek had brought back after ordering us all breakfast.  Geek shook his head.

'Not worth it, there'll be nothing for them to investigate.'

'How about two dead men and a smashed up car, customers of an all night bar traumatised by a shooting and chunks of pavement torn out by bullets?' I asked.  Winston held his hand up to silence us as the breakfasts were brought over and then took up the conversation.

'Your friend's probably right.  Our intel about the bar indicates that they cover up a lot of violent crime generally, it's a popular haunt for the drug community, especially the middle rankers.  There isn't anything that happened this morning that the customers haven't seen before, not the ones hanging around at three in the morning.  

‘Plus, and this is supposition at the moment, if the guys who followed you and me last night are typical of their breed then they'll leave no trace of the events.  The bar staff and any customers who stuck around will have been paid off handsomely unless they refuse the pay off.  In which case they'll turn up in a land-fill, sometime today, probably.'  My head churned over.

'What sort of shit are we involved in?' I asked.  Geek looked away, left Winston to do the talking.

'You asked about DLFs.  That's the shit we're involved in.  It's my life for certain, I don't know about your friend.  My guess is that he knows about DLFs but you've introduced him to his first real examples.'  Geek looked back but didn't give any clues. 

'To answer your earlier question, a DLF is a Digital Life Form, probably alien in origin, a sort of artificial organism.'  He paused, possibly for effect, maybe to let me digest this information or, I suspected at the time, to gag on what sounded and therefore must smell like, bullshit.  Geek decided to pitch in.

'You know there isn’t any "probably" about the origin, Winston,' he said.  Unsurprisingly this didn't help me, and I guess it showed as Winston pulled us together conspiratorially.

'OK, it's considered to be the case that DLFs originated from space, from some long lost planet, but the point is that most now are many generations distant from space origin DLFs.'  Geek took over again.

'Meteorites have been striking the planet for as long as it’s been around - you of all people know the planet was created by the accumulation of dust and space debris from long destroyed stars and planets and subsequently has continued to be bombarded by this type of material.  As you also know from the Prof's field trips much of this material is reduced to dust on the way in but occasionally some survives the process.

'There's a lot of evidence that meteorites originating from a planet long destroyed has been periodically striking earth, stuck in a cosmic racetrack around the solar system, occasionally being pulled to earth by gravity.'  So much for inter-stellar one-oh-one.  I was about to remind Geek about my first degree when Winston pitched in.

'A minority of meteorites contain DLFs but most don't survive the journey or find the right conditions to thrive if they do.  Occasionally they do find the right conditions, and that's when the fun begins.'

'Fun?'

'DLFs use electricity like we use oxygen, materials such as silicon like we use food, computer code as their DNA.  Given a power and food source they reproduce rapidly, creating advanced learning circuits, reproducing through replication and evolving at a worrying rate.  Provide them with a computer circuit that's powered then they'll modify and adapt the circuit, change the code that runs through it and hijack its purpose. 

‘Your Sat Nav blended the various technologies that Geek tried to merge and in the short time it was powered managed to interface with our world.  That's why it learned what it thought was our language - the music you were playing - and hesitated when running the navigation software.'  I swilled my breakfast down with tea while Winston rattled this lot off then put the mug down carefully before launching into the two men.

'I haven't heard anything yet that explains rationally what has happened in the last twelve hours: flat being burgled, me being followed by thugs, people being killed and only me being bothered. Suppose I believe this DLF nonsense, take it as true - I know as well as anyone that the chances of such a meteorite landing and finding these "right conditions" are extremely slim.  Most will end up at sea or in very remote locations. 

'But more than that, if such a meteorite did find the "right conditions" surely we'd be over-run by these things by now? If the reproduction rates are as rapid as you say then I think I'd have heard something.'  Geek and Winston exchanged looks, then Winston took up the explanation again.

'Taking your last point, Royston.  You've not heard about this because you've never listened, never looked.  Try the internet, you'll find lots there - conspiracy theories, blogs, chat rooms discussing these things.  Some are pure supposition, rumours and guesswork, others are calls to the public to be aware, to be frightened.'   Geek snorted.

'Frightened, that's what your lot would have us believe.  Because you suppress this, try to keep it from the public, you help the mega-corporations to exploit it and us.'  Winston shook his head.

'Everyone has benefited from this technology and I'm the first to admit that it has been manipulated by those companies that have access to it to make excess profits.  We can't undo that knowledge, can't make it right with hindsight, but making it common knowledge, letting the world know officially isn't the answer.  The organisations that have this technology look after it at great expense, guard it closely, prevent others from getting it.  My job it to limit the spread and to police the users.'

'Like the Japanese?  You did a real good job there,' sneered Geek.  Winston didn't flinch.

'Before our time, a decision made by others in good faith,' he replied.  I interrupted.

'What decision?'  Winston sighed.

'Towards the end of the second world war the Japanese had their backs to the wall, were being pushed back to the land of the rising sun by waves of Allied attacks.  Then their fortunes seemed to turn, they were developing technologies that were giving them an edge in communications, radar and navigation.  The Special Operations Executive – the forerunner of the CIA - had reasons to believe the Japanese had acquired alien technology that was being investigated with little success in Nevada, were winning a race we'd thought only the US were running in. 

‘Of course, back then, we didn't know the technology was alien; just that exposure to it changed the way electronic devices worked.  The Japanese had looked at it differently, had realised that it worked in a non-random fashion, made devices work better, do things that they had never been designed to do.

'Military intel decided that the technology was being developed in one of two locations - Hiroshima or Nagasaki, possibly both.  The rest should have been history, except that the Japanese had a third location, in Osaka.  After the war they continued developing the technology in secret.  Eventually the world woke up to find a country that had been beaten into submission was now leading the way, driving the other economies into the ground, wiping the floor with all comers.  The cell phone you use today, the microwave oven, plasma TV set, they all owe their heritage to the DLFs the Japanese harnessed.' 

I looked out at the morning drizzle misting up the window as I crunched all of this information; at the guy who'd driven us away from flying bullets an hour or so earlier and then at the grey Welsh hills in the distance, trying to put this into some sort of sense.  There were so many questions that I could ask, so many answers I wouldn't be able to believe.

'So, Japanese electronic corporations have this technology.  Who else?'  Geek smiled.

'Look around you, recognise the main players, the innovative names, the brands that lead the pack.  The American, British, Japanese, Korean, Swedish companies.  All of these, and quite a few others, have access to this technology.  It falls from the sky and responds well as long as you feed it with silicon and let it breathe electrons.  Anyone with any money wants in on this, it's the only true measure of being a superpower.  Anyone wanting to join the club has to find a compliant rock or has to steal from someone with the technology.'

'So, why aren't we over-run?' I asked, expecting Winston to answer this.  Judging by his look, he did too.  Geek leant forward.

‘DLFs reproduce at an alarming rate, mutating pseudo-randomly depending on the environment they find themselves in.  But their limiting factors are physical space and their food of choice.’

‘Silicon, you say?’

‘Well, kind of.  Pure silicon is no good to them; it’s the minute impurities that only exist in silicon and similar materials that provide the food.  Once that’s consumed then the population starts to die out, begins the passive state. When that’s happened the circuit is safe to expose to the outside world, to interface with other devices.’  I wasn’t buying this.

‘But you’ve just said it’s random, or pretty much random.  How does that account for millions of identical cell phones, microwaves and plasma TVs?’  Geek just smiled.

‘You’re right.  Given the same circumstances, materials and opportunities there’s a good chance that the same circuit will result, but a greater chance that a different circuit serving a similar or different purpose will be created.  Until the eighties these had to be reverse engineered using whatever tools and materials worked, the DLF providing a shortcut design workshop.  Then someone realized that this modelled life even closer than we had thought possible. 

‘The DLF that is found in meteorites is the electronic equivalent of the primordial slime we’re all supposed to have evolved from.  There are many varieties, but all share certain similarities too.  I guess that would have been the same of the slime way back, unless just one spontaneous occurrence managed to successfully populate the planet. 

‘Anyhow, depending on which variety is seeded, you will get quite different results even allowing for the pseudo-random mutations.  By the time the DLF has evolved to stability virtually every single element will have the same code as the rest – it will have iterated to a single design, a digital DNA so to speak.  These stable DLF can then be used to seed fresh silicon to create a mirror circuit in a replication process that can see a slither of silicon modified to stability in seconds.’

‘And that’s where the millions of cell phones come from?’ I asked, looking at Winston.  The dark patch was still growing and he was sweating rapidly.  His voice was still very calm though.

‘Yes, but what your friend either doesn’t know, or is just glossing over, is that occasionally there is the odd corrupt seed, which will either make a dead circuit or something that’s workable but different to the original design.  This is a problem because the difference may not be spotted so it may end up in the wild. 

‘Sometimes the mutated seed starts off a new process completely, taking over any electronic equipment it's connected to, modifying them, re-writing their code.  If it’s connected to a network it can spread to other circuits, could create a nightmare scenario that's virtually unstoppable. That's one of the reasons I have to police this process and stop it proliferating.’

‘How come that isn’t public knowledge, if some have escaped into what you call the wild?’ I asked, accusing.  Winston didn’t miss a beat.

‘Over a thousand new computer viruses hit the internet every day.  It would take a talented programmer weeks to create an average new virus, perhaps half that for a new variant on an existing one.  Do the math; that implies there are tens of thousands of talented programmers generating largely worthless code, keeping a similar amount busy finding solutions for them.  Did you really think there were that many people working on these things?  True, some are created by individuals and some are certainly created by criminals, but mainly they are generated by the DLFs that are floating around out there, often as a result of people,’ he said, throwing a thumb at Geek, ‘like him.’ 

 

I was about to ask more questions but became aware of movement outside as two black limousines swept into the car park, causing John to become agitated.  Winston followed my gaze and raised a hand.

'This is my ride,' he said, standing, 'I expect I'll be tied up for the morning.  Go back to your flat, wait for me, don't contact anyone.  Here’s my number if you need anything,’ he said, slipping me a business card, ‘I’ve arranged for a back-up car to follow you to the flat,' he said, leaving the cafe abruptly.  I turned to Geek.

‘Is all this for real?  Is Winston really part of a United Nations organisation?’  He wiped his face with a paper napkin.

‘UNISC are real enough.  They didn’t have to be part of the UN, there are plenty of other international organisations they could have hidden behind.  And yes, what you’ve heard today is more or less true – I have some issues with UNISC, with what they do and how they do it – but I agree that there are dangers with DLFs.  I don’t agree with driving the subject underground, though.  One thing Winston did say that was true is that the guys we met last night are a dangerous bunch.  The rewards of being a main player in this game are fantastic.  I must admit, when you handed me a DLF in that bar it was all I could do to sit there and talk, I wanted to run like hell with it, to get it home, test it.’

‘To make your fortune?’ I asked, wondering whether I should be bothered by this, by Geek potentially seeing me as a route to riches and failing to mention that I’d passed him a goldmine.  He shrugged nonchalantly.

‘The thought did cross my mind, but to be honest I was more interested in seeing a DLF at close range.  Once I got out of the bar I took it home as fast as I could so that I could hook it up to a power source.’  He stood up, pushing the plates into the centre of the table with a sweep of his hand, ‘let’s see what sort of game Winston is playing.’

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Digital Life Form will be back with part 10 soon.  Can't wait?  Like all of my books Digital Life Form is available as an eBook and paperback on Amazon and can be read for free if you're an Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited customer.