Doctor Who_ Blue Box Part 20

'Take another look at the times,' said Bob. 'A group of images every fifteen minutes. Then, for about the last four hours, nothing.'

The Doctor sat back, steepling his fingers. Sometimes his face would go blank for a few long moments, as though his eyes were seeing some internal chalkboard where he was mentally writing out equations, trying to solve some problem.

Peri had obviously learned to wait for him to snap out of it.

Bob and I exchanged annoyed glances.

'Bob,' said the Doctor abruptly, 'see if you can hack into Swan's account. Check if she's removed our email forwarding program.'

'Right What are you going to do?'

'I'm going to give the Eridani a call,' he said.

The Eridani, apparently, had retired to their s.p.a.ce craft, which was lurking in one of the Earth's LaGrange points6. They were able to transmit and receive by hijacking communications satellites, hiding their own messages amidst the flood of traffic pa.s.sing through. Supposedly, then, the Doctor's conversation with his alien pals was travelling along a channel that started with a satellite at one end, meandered through the international 6 A stable orbit point between the Earth and the sun, ideal for placing satellites.

phone system like breath through a tuba, and emerged from a speakerphone on my desk. Not exactly a Close Encounter.

The Doctor seemed to have a lot of trouble getting the connection to work. There was that annoying delay you always get with satellite phone calls (supposedly made a lot worse by the Eridani being around five light seconds away) but there were also a bunch of whooping and shrieking noises.

The Doctor listened patiently to these, like a blind phreak listening to the phone system's language of clicks and clunks.

Finally the conversation got going. The Doctor brought the Eridani up to date. They seemed relieved that we knew where the missing component was, even if it was in Swan's hands.

And they confirmed what we thought we'd seen in Swan's crude camera pictures: it was alive. The ideal way for their colony to make more of the machines, they said, was for at least part of it to be able to reproduce itself.

The component forms a close bond with its user,' said Ghirlain's voice through a background hiss of s.p.a.ce static.

'Swan won't harm it. She will have an instinctive sense of how best to take care of it.'

The Doctor was scribbling comments on a bit of paper for our benefit. 'INSTINCTIVE?' he wrote, and underlined it a couple of times. He was impatiently doodling up and down the margin of the sheet while Stray Cat lolled in his lap like the s.l.u.t she was. 'Can I a.s.sume you will collect your property at the first available opportunity?' he asked.

A few moments of static. Then: 'Breaking the bond may damage both the component and the organism to which it has bonded. It would be safer to wait for the component to mature.'

The Doctor sat forward. 'And precisely what happens when it reaches maturity? Do we have any alarming physical transformations to look forward to?'

Ghislain seemed to be groping for the right terms. 'It is a nymph, not a larva. There is no metamorphosis. Only, the development of its nervous system will be complete. It will be ready to interface with the other components of the system.'

Bob cut in. 'Will it be sentient? Come to think of it, is it sentient now?'

Crackle. Hiss. 'Not in the sense that you understand the word.'

The Doctor pounced. 'And just what do you mean by that?'

'Its nervous system is extremely specialised,' said the Eridani. 'It is expert in certain tasks, but incapable of others.'

'If we're going to contain this situation until it's safe to wean the creature away from its foster "mother", I need to know precisely what it's capable of' said the Doctor.

'Without the other components, its abilities are limited, said Ghislain. 'Its task is to a.n.a.lyse systems and adapt itself to them, or them to itself.'

The Doctor didn't like the sound of that at all. 'What do '

The voice cut him off. 'There is a further cause for concern. The component will have initiated its own gestatory process while still in ovo in ovo.'

'It's parthenogenetic?' said the Doctor 'As will be its offspring.'

Peri saw me looking lost. 'It's born pregnant. And its kids will be born pregnant. I guess they wanted to get their factory conveyor belt rolling,' she added bitterly.

The Doctor was saying, 'Not only have you unleashed a mind-altering living computer on this b.u.mbling little planet, but you've placed a miniature horde of them into the hands of a sociopath!' He stabbed at finger at the speakerphone. 'You said the creature can adapt systems to itself. There's more to this than a clutch of baby components running about. That "specialised" creature can modify machines. Computers.

Heaven only knows what Swan might be able to do with it.'

Bob said, 'What does that mean, it can modify computers?'

'Think of it as the ultimate programmer. It can acquire computer languages the way an infant acquires a human language. A native speaker of hexadecimal. Hacking a system in either sense would be as natural to it as playing with blocks. As natural to it as giving birth.'

Bob slowly said, 'Do you mean it could make-a copy of itself into a computer? A machine language version of itself?'

'That's precisely what I mean.'

'It is true,' admitted the Eridani's crackling voice.

'The human race is just entering a phase of its history in which it relies heavily on computers,' the Doctor told the speakerphone. 'And you have introduced this spanner into those delicate works.'

'The device will not operate without commands.'

'Swan is right there to give it those commands. Intuitively, remember? Your ham-fisted-contraption '

'All right, CUT IT OUT!'

The Doctor swung around. Stray Cat leapt out of his lap and ran for the safety of the kitchen. Peri was standing with her fists planted firmly on her hips. 'I can't believe I'm hearing this!' she said. 'You're both as bad as each other.'

'Peri, I'm in the middle of a very delicate negotiation' said the Doctor.

She emitted an exasperated hiss. 'Listen to you, talking about that poor little thing in the tub as though it was a machine.'

'It is a machine,' said the Doctor. 'Of sorts.'

You wouldn't talk about some poor kid like that. You know, one of those autistic kids who's a mathematical genius.

Whatever that little alien guy can do, it's still a living, breathing creature. It's got rights. I mean, for heaven's sake, it's just a baby.' The Doctor's shoulders were progressively slumping in the blast. 'It's not a stolen computer, it's a kidnapped kid. And you and those other guys have to get it back before it gets hurt or sick or Swan makes it do something awful. And that goes for its babies, too.'

'Peri,' said the Doctor, 'we're not talking about a lost puppy. The component has the potential to wreck your civilisation in a very short s.p.a.ce of time. What's worse, it's affecting Swan's already unpleasant mind.' He steepled his fingers. 'It probably interferes with the brain's opiate receptors. Like a particularly powerful addictive drug. You saw how desperate her friend Luis was to retrieve it.'

'It makes them want to own it?'

'That's right. For our lost idiot savant idiot savant, it's become a survival mechanism. It needs to be sheltered and fed and supplied with technological toys.'

Peri said firmly, 'I want to talk to those guys.'

The Doctor sat back from the speakerphone. Peri hesitated, but Ghislain's voice said,'We are listening.'

'What will you do with it when you get it back?' she asked.

'We will return home with it. It will be put to normal use. '

'What about your colony world?'

A new slow packet has already been launched. Its guidance systems now include Earth and its radiosphere on their charts.'

'What is normal use, anyway?'

'Be a.s.sured the component will be healthy and busy, as will its offspring. Such devices are an integral part of our society.'

Peri looked as though she'd tasted something sour, but the Doctor said,'Is it worse than training a dog for police work?'

She admitted, It's gotta be better than whatever Swan's planning to use it for. All right, Doctor. Let's send that kid back home where it belongs.'

'If it's sitting in Swan's bathtub,' I said, 'why don't we just go and nick it?'

'Because I wouldn't advise it,' said the Doctor, and wouldn't say more.

Four.

Swan was well aware that something was happening in her head. Her guess was that the creature was releasing pheromones, those chemicals bugs use to attract mates.

It took to the terminal in her kitchen like a fish to water. It seemed to understand the keyboard moments after the rippling tentacles in its fur had moved across the letters. It began to type commands, imitating what it saw on the screen, generating one error message after another, faster and faster, until its commands began to make sense and, the machine began to respond.

Swan watched, leaning back against the kitchen sink, both hands gripping the cold metal rim. It was just an animal. How could it possibly understand letters and numbers? How could it possibly turn them into commands? What kind of secret superproject had she got her hands on?

The monster was programming programming. It had created a file and was pounding in lines of code as fast as the machine could take them, building up a huge set of instructions. Swan could only catch s.n.a.t.c.hes of the code as it flashed past. The monster seemed to be debugging as it went, running little bits of the program over and over until it was satisfied with them, their adding them to its ma.s.sive project. It was learning only slightly faster than it was producing output.

The system crashed a few times as the big hairy bug tested its lengthy program. Each time it restarted the machine, ma.s.saged it a little to fix whatever it had broken, and then started its tests again.

Swan was cold and her arms were stiff by the time her furry baby was done. It just stopped, with the same abruptness with which it had started, and sat back a little froth the machine. The rippling in its fur quieted for the first time she could remember.

She wasn't sure how it would react when she picked it up out of the seat, but it seemed quite happy to be carried back to its bathtub. She poured in the milk crate of Legos. At once it started picking them up, the tentacles moving them along its surface until it was half-covered in coloured plastic shapes.

She sat down at the computer in the kitchen. The seat was still a little warm.

Swan tried to a.n.a.lyse the code, but she couldn't seem to stay on task. She played with pens, she rearranged the mess of cords behind the table, she even washed up some coffee cups.

Twice she found herself halfway up the stairs.

If she was going to get any work done, it would have to be at the office.

Three times she had to stop herself from turning the car around and racing home. But after a few hours in the office, she was sure her head felt a little clearer, she had more perspective.

Somewhere deep in her head, she knew that no-one was going to take the creature away from her. It was hers now, and it knew it.

It took Swan about fifteen minutes to hack a program for her Unix box that would display the pictures from her home cameras. After that, every quarter of an hour, she checked baby. Improve the picture quality, add some sound, and you'd have a dandy software package to sell to nervous parents.

She picked through the creature's code. The printout ran to hundreds of pages; she had stuffed them into a couple of binders. She had forgotten the last time she slept. Teaspoons full of instant coffee held under her tongue helped keep her focussed on the problem.

The simplest thing would be to just run it and see what it did. Swan wasn't quite ready to take that step yet. Not on her computers. And not on the network, where any weird effect was liable to spread from one machine to another, all of them pointing back to her. She didn't want to let this puppy loose until she was sure she knew how to control it.

Swan sat back from the screen, scratching her scalp with a ballpoint. The start of the program didn't make sense. It poked around in the computer's memory, as though trying to make a map of it, finding out things which it must already know. But it was tightly written, deliberate. The hairy bug had refined and refined the code until it was pared to an elegant minimum.

Was this program the whole point of the monster's existence? By planting it in front of her home terminal, had she detonated its payload?

It didn't make the slightest bit of sense. If the Reds or anyone else wanted to sneak a program into American computers or vice versa, for that matter a hormone-secreting, Lego-obsessed Sesame Street Sesame Street monster was not the way they would try to accomplish it. I mean, who would think to put it in front of a computer in the first place? Or would it have waited for her to take a nap, and then clumped down the stairs to reach her machine? Or had its cloud of chemicals somehow instructed her in what to do? monster was not the way they would try to accomplish it. I mean, who would think to put it in front of a computer in the first place? Or would it have waited for her to take a nap, and then clumped down the stairs to reach her machine? Or had its cloud of chemicals somehow instructed her in what to do?

Was she being used?

The temptation to fire up the program and let it run struck her, and she couldn't be sure if it was some sort of mind control, or curiosity, or just plain exhaustion. No. She'd keep decoding the program until she knew what she was playing with.

It was instinct that told her the mainframe was running a little slowly, a subconscious awareness that commands were taking a fraction of a second too long to be executed, a change in the rhythm of the machine.

She brought up the logs on her screen. They didn't show anything unusual no-one else on the system, no record of anyone trying to dial in from outside.

Swan stepped out of her office and headed for a printer in the corner of the cubicles. She had inserted a command into the system that printed out a hard copy of the logs every five minutes. She lifted a handful of the blue-lined tractor-feed paper and ran her eyes over the last half-hour's records.

There. A fourth person was logged into the system. He had immediately edited the logs when he arrived, leaving only the paper copy to give away his presence.