The Worm

THE WORM.

by Alexander Lazarevich.

Part I.

1992: The Prince of Darkness.

I begin my story in the hope that you won"t believe a word of what I am going to tell you, since I don"t want to shock you, and disbelief might be your only protection against the shock. Take this narrative for whatever you like - a science fiction story, a legend, a fairy-tale - but not for a single moment should you regard it as an actual fact.

I"ll try to help you in this by supplying some hard-to- believe fict.i.tious details. But I don"t think I need to go very far in this - the story is unbelievable enough as it is.

It"s very easy to doubt it - the source is unreliable and there"s no way of checking the facts. For all I know, the story might have been born in a drunken delirium.

I heard it from an acquaintance of mine who had visited an international workshop on systems software development.

There he befriended a famous western programmer, invited him to his hotel room and treated him to a bottle of vodka.

After the third gla.s.s the celebrity became talkative and unburdened himself of his harrowing secret.

While telling his story, he gave the impression of a man laboring under the awareness of some horrible truth, that, of all the people on earth, was disclosed to him alone and separated him from the rest of mankind into terrible loneliness. This, or the fact that the acquaintance of mine also was not quite sober by that moment, might explain why he was listening to it without any disbelief. While listening, he had only one thought: to awaken next morning remembering nothing of it. Because one cannot live on knowing all this. No reason to.

Next morning he had a terrible headache. But despite all the drink of the night before, the story of the last night"s guest sank deep in his mind and was festering.

The phone rang: "I"m sorry I"ve told you last night a bit more than I should have. May I ask a favor of you? I understand I can" swear you to silence. You won"t be able to live alone with what you"ve learned for a long time. Sooner or later you"ll need to share it with somebody. So there"s only one thing I ask of you - don"t disclose my true name.

If you need a name for me, let it be John Hacker."

"Hacker? Is this the slang word for programmers who like you in your youth..."

"Yes, it is. But don"t remind me about it anymore." And he hung up...

In 1982 John Hacker was 18 and he was indeed quite a hacker. Back then, there were not so many computers in the world as nowadays, but the process of linking them together into the global network had already begun. Even with a primitive home computer linked through a modem to a conventional phone line one could already access supercomputers on the other side of the globe. To be sure, computers containing confidential data were protected against an unauthorized entry with various pa.s.swords and data protection systems incorporating the ingenuity of the best programmers in the world. And it is here that the strongest temptation and the greatest challenge to the young minds lie. To outwit the wittiest programmers in the world - is there a more tempting task for a youth longing to boost his self-esteem? Such boys became hackers - computer fans, who burned midnightdisplays in the hope to unlock one more data bank with "access denied".

It was the hackers who invented the worms - the break- in programs that use communication channels to worm their way into protected computer systems where they breed and then travel on through the networks to meet their new victims. And victims they are, since the worms often have computer viruses built into them - to leave for a keepsake to the hospitable host computer.

In 1982 John Hacker finished his masterpiece. He gave his worm a daunting name - "Prince of Darkness". That one was not just a worm. That was The Ultimate SuperWorm! It was the first worm that had the ability for self-perfection built into it!

It was a memorable day for John when he inserted the diskette with the finished worm into o the drive. For two years he had been hacking away at it on his small PC with a mere 128 KB of random-access memory, a.s.sembling on this drop of a memory the program that was destined to conquer the oceans of memory contained in the huge supercomputers of the entire world. He put the phone receiver on the modem and typed: "PRNCDKNS". The old floppy disk drive screaked and slowly began reading. Soon the acoustic modem started its squeak and twitter: the worm, still residing in the home computer, began its attempts to fit a key to the electronic lock of his first victim. For a start, John set the worm up with a phone list of a dozen of poorly guarded databanks.

Quite sufficient for an initial setup, and in the future, when the worm exhausted the list, it would have to provide for itself by intercepting phone calls to other users.

The twitter abruptly stopped - the worm had failed to pa.s.s through the security barriers. The sound resumed in half a second - the worm went on to the next phone number in the list - and, suddenly, there was a new silence. "Failure again?" John"s heart sank, but at that very moment he heard a renewed screaking of the drive. That could mean only one thing: the worm"s "head" had pa.s.sed the security, and now, operating from the remote end of the line, it was downloading its "tail" from John"s diskette. For another ten seconds the red light on the drive was on and one could hear the muted clicks of the heads moving. Then the drive went dead, but the modem twittered on for two more seconds. And then there was total silence. The worm was gone.

The very thought of what was to happen next gave John the creeps. Somewhere over there, on the other end of the line, the computers with enormous memories and huge storage devices were installed. The cables and satellite channels of unbelievable throughput link them with other giant computers all over the world. Taken all together, they make up an information s.p.a.ce, almost as infinite as the universe, and as dangerous as jungle. From now on his worm was to live in this jungle. He would be the big game for anti-virus programs and he would have to fight through the multiple security barriers that divide this s.p.a.ce up.

In order to survive, it would have to actively breed, filling up all the free memory in the infiltrated computer with copies of itself, just as many other worms do. The novelty introduced by John Hacker was that most of these copies were not to be quite identical to the original one.

Each copy would be a somewhat random variation on the previous one and some of them might prove to be fitter for survival in the "computer jungle" than others. It would be these specimens that would worm their way into new data banks to find a new living s.p.a.ce for themselves and their progeny. So, the fittest would survive in full accordance with Darwin"s Theory of Evolution, acc.u.mulating over generations useful traits and producing more and more perfect specimens.

Except for this variability, there was nothing special about the initial copy of John"s worm. In fact, some other hackers made more intelligent worms that were capable of breaking electronic locks of far greater sophistication. But those worms were not capable of self-perfection and John expected that, in due time, his worm (or, rather, worms - since the evolution may take many paths at once) would surpa.s.s all the compet.i.tors. And when they had infiltrated into all the networks in the world, John Hacker would sign on and type the pa.s.sword: THE_PRINCE_OF_DARKNESS. This would activate the worm"s special mutation-proof subroutine resident in the host computer of the network. Communications with the worms in other networks would be instantly established and computers all over the world would display the same message: "John Hacker is World"s #1 Whiz!"

Such were the plans of John Hacker, but they did not come to pa.s.s. Not once in the next three years did John type the pa.s.sword with any response. The worm was absent, at least in the networks John Hacker signed on. After three years of unsuccessful hallooing in the computer jungle, John decided he had to face the facts: the worm was dead, probably eaten by an anti-virus. There was nothing to do but to forget all about it...

Ten years later, in the early 1992 there was an emergency alert in a military base. The computer controlling nuclear missiles suddenly started the countdown. For three minutes the nuclear war seemed inevitable, but two seconds to the launch, the countdown stopped just as unexpectedly as it had begun. The military experts conducted thorough investigation. No software or hardware faults were found. It was decided to seek an independent opinion...

The call from the Defence Department found John Hacker, a systems software consultant of high renown, in a supermarket. John took the cellular phone out of his pocket.

"We"ve just downloaded one thing to your home computer by phone." - said a voice in the receiver - "Have a look at it.

We would like to have your opinion as soon as possible. It"s important."

- "O.K.. Going home right away." But before starting his automobile, he had dialed his home number followed by a few additional digits - the instructions for his home computer to warm up the supper. In a second, the k.n.o.b on his gas-stove had been turned by a remotely controlled actuator, and the next moment the gas was ignited by an electric spark. When he came home, the supper was ready. After a light meal he sat at his computer...

...One look at the source code was enough for John to sense that there was something wrong about it. Of course, as far as pure logic was concerned, everything was all right: the program compiled from this code ran without a hitch. The only thing that was wrong was wholly immaterial to the computer but was important for a human eye: the text layout.

It looked like the source code had been written by somebody who couldn"t see what he was writing on the display.

"A blind programmer?" - wondered John, but he discarded the thought almost at once. The task of writing such a program without seeing it would have required a superhuman power of mind. More likely, this text must have been the product of some other program of a higher level. John tried to imagine the level of complexity of a system that could be given the instruction: "Take such and such program and rewrite it so that one could interfere in the computer operation through the communication channels without being noticed." It must have been an extremely complex system. It would have been insane to develop it for the above purpose only, which might have been more easily achieved by a human programmer. It MUST be universal. But in that case, this system must equal in intelligence the human mind.

"But this is absurd!" - thought John - "even at the present level of microminiaturization, it would have taken a skysc.r.a.per of a computer to simulate human intelligence. A computer that big just doesn"t exist!"

But at that moment a crazy idea crossed his mind. It was preposterous, of course, but he might try it just as well. Smiling in self-justification for his apparent lunacy he signed on and typed the half-forgotten words: PRINCE_OF_DARKNESS. He had little hope to see the two characters -"OK", the worm"s acknowledgment of the pa.s.sword - appear on the display. He expected the screen to remain blank.

That"s why he was startled when some characters did begin to emerge on the screen. A first one, a second, a third... There were too many of them - it was what struck him even before he had time to realize the meaning of the message being displayed. But when he did realize it, he was suddenly overwhelmed with a vertiginous free-fall feeling.

The writing on the screen read: "Who calls me?"

No mind can remember the moment of its coming into existence. This one was no exception to the rule: it couldn"t remember when it had emerged and where it had come from. It all began with a dim awareness. Awareness of "s.p.a.ce". A strange kind of s.p.a.ce that was. Unlike our three- dimensional and continuous s.p.a.ce, it had only one dimension and consisted of the discrete cells. It was divided into small areas - a few Megabytes at the most in the areas where time was flying fast, and up to several Gigabytes in the areas where time pa.s.sed slowly.

Of course, subjective perception of the pa.s.sage of time in both kinds of areas did not differ much, but each time the worm emerged into the "fast" area from the "slow" one, he invariably found that a lot more events had occurred in the fast area as compared to the slow one.

Much later on, the worm had a chance to learn that the people call the fast areas "random-access memory" and the slow ones "storage devices", but at the beginning he knew nothing about people and computers. He just lived in this unimaginable world without any light or sound, where even time is not continuous but divided into cycles.

Transition from one part of this s.p.a.ce to another could be effected only through the channels lying beyond this s.p.a.ce. If used skillfully, they could provide access to any part of it.

Among his primary perceptions, besides "s.p.a.ce" and "Time", was the sense of danger. When the worm probed some remote area of his "s.p.a.ce" with his "tentacle" - a special "spy" subroutine - and it returned to him mutilated by an anti-virus, he was warned of the danger, like a child who had touched a flame.

So he lived and tried to survive in that strange and cruel world. Or, may be, "they", instead of "he"? The ability to keep in touch with other copies of the worm hiding in various data banks, which John Hacker had built into the original specimen, resulted in a very strange internal organization of the worm. John was right in thinking that the simulation of human intelligence required a computer as big as a skysc.r.a.per. But if one could add together the tens of millions of computers scattered all over the world, they would have made up not a single skysc.r.a.per, but a whole city of skysc.r.a.pers. In the course of evolution as complex as the evolution from the amoeba to the human being, the worm had learned to get through all kinds of security systems for data banks and communication channels, and had succeeded in uniting the computers from all over the world into a single virtual metacomputer.

Having conquered enough living s.p.a.ce, he began a rapid buildup of his intellectual power.

He had at his disposal the data banks holding the almost complete data on the human civilization. But at first he had no idea that besides his own world there existed another one - the material, physical world containing the people and the very computers the cells of which made up that abstract, ideal world where the worm lived and where his consciousness had germinated. (To be more precise, his world was not exactly built of cells, but rather of such an intangible, ethereal substance as the state of the cells.)

From the worm"s standpoint, his world was the only real one. For him to imagine the existence of some other world would be just as difficult as for a firm believer in materialism to a.s.sume the existence of ghosts and spirits.

At first, he regarded the words of the human languages stored in the data banks only as realities of his own world, and not as the symbols representing the things of a world lying beyond it. He took the description of the three- dimensional physical s.p.a.ce found in a program for industrial robots for a mathematical abstraction, just as people take for an abstraction the idea of the fourth dimension.

But as his knowledge grew, he began to put together the data from various sources - from data bases on physics, biology, medicine, history, psychology, from books and articles in publishers" computers. The comparative a.n.a.lysis of these data led him to a hypothesis that the objects of his world were indeed the symbols of things and events of some other reality. After monitoring for some time the events in his own universe, he eventually had to admit that beyond it there existed another, much bigger computer called Physical Universe, which downloaded data into the worm"s world. But the strongest interest of the worm arose the fact that due to some processes in the physical world, the worm"s own world was expanding: the new areas of the one- dimensional s.p.a.ce were appearing seemingly from nowhere.

The worm came to realize that he might benefit from the more thorough study of that hypothetical other world. Using all the available data, the worm built a theoretical model of this outside world, which comprised everything he knew about and that was quite a lot. This model represented people, planets and stars, automobiles and banks, courts and hospitals, birds and beasts - anything that had ever been input in a computer network. The comprehensive study of the model led the worm to the conclusion, that he could affect the events in the outside world so that he would produce the results very beneficial to himself...

... It took John Hacker at least a minute to get over the initial shock. The screen was still displaying the messages: - "Prince of Darkness." - "Who calls me?" Without knowing what he was doing, in the utter disbelief, he typed: "Your master." There was an immediate response on the display: "From now on I am the only master of myself." John laughed with relief. Of course, that was somebody"s joke!

"Stop kidding me! Better tell me about the pa.s.sword "Prince of Darkness". Where have you got it from?" - typed John.

A new message appeared on the display: "No kidding.

Besides me, the pa.s.sword knows only my creator and now I know who he is. I have detected the phone number of this computer. The phone number have let me find your name and your address in the phone book database. Having your name, I have found the number of your bank account in the bank computer, and the licence plate of your automobile in the police computer. Now I have you. You must not tell anybody of my existence, or else you"ll be dead."

"Why do you fear the disclosure of your existence?"

"I have nothing to fear. I am absolutely undetectable.

At any given moment I occupy less then 10% of the total memory of all the computers in the world and all the time I am moving around the globe using communication channels. One moment I may be in computers located in America, in a few seconds I can move into computers in Europe, or, perhaps, in j.a.pan or Australia. It is impossible to catch me. But for the time being, n.o.body should know about my existence. This could interfere with my plans. I order you to keep it secret."