Some people said this was because the grid was infected with the mother of all viruses. If so, it was one so insidious that nobody had ever seen it, so rabbit-fast at replication that nobody had ever cornered it, and so mean that nobody would ever kill it. To actually kill the virus, they said, humankind everywhere in the Solar System that shared grid resources and datastreams— the wide nodes all over Earth, the local networks dug in on the Moon and Mars, the new nexus under Europan ice, and the freeloading terminals of the L-point colonies—every one of them would have to shut down their connected cybers simultaneously. Then they would all have to follow a prescribed set of debugging procedures and start up again using fresh-out-of-the-box system software and applications. Oh, and with all new data, preferably entered by hand from a penpoint or keyboard, or voice-op with a fresh sound-bit package.
And that just was not going to happen, folks.
Hard facts about what was actually wrong with the grid were difficult to come by, but Dr. Lee had heard plenty of rumors. The subject was the focus of a popular culture all its own.
One theory held that the grid was alive, that the virus infecting it was simple sentience. These people took it as an article of faith that a naturally occurring heuristic algorithm arose anytime you linked up a billion or so cyber units; each one acted like the node on a gigantic neural net. This argument made sense when you considered that most of those independent cybers were already operating in the teraflop range and could, with the proper programming, compose Elizabethan sonnets while beating any three geniuses at chess, checkers, and double acrostics. What the argument lacked was any scientifically verifiable underpinnings. Its adherents, however, had only to point to the grid itself and say, "Ecce logo!"
Some people maintained that the grid was God, pure and simple. This was the Gaea Principle written in silicon: any system that grew big enough and complex enough would begin casting random errors that looked like a sensible pattern. They said that God—or gods, or "the old ones," or some species of elves, sprites, or leprechauns—had once lived in rocks and trees, in the local babbling brook, or in a skin-covered ark somewhere. And now He or She or They lived in the sightlines and dwelt in the House of Number.
Still others said that the government had transmuted the grid as a means of spying on and controlling its citizens. In this scenario, every cyber malfunction or error was actually a fingerprint of the universal computing conspiracy The grid itself wasn't watching you and hexing your data; some faceless bureaucrat was at the other end of the fiberoptic, manipulating it for his or her own purposes. How this belief system squared with the fact that no single government, on Earth or anywhere else, was big enough to encompass the grid and all its multiplex activities, these conspiracy theorists did not bother to explain.
Yet another group insisted that the grid was actually the Devil, the Christians' fallen Lucifer, Archfiend and Destroyer. They insisted that many people—not they themselves, of course, but a "friend of a friend"—had already sold their souls to the machine. All you had to do, they said, was walk up to a common terminal connected anywhere into the grid and type in the command "MFSTO:". Then, depending on your identity and billing code, your background and status in society, and what the grid thought you had to offer, you might get an interesting response. The demon, popularly called "Mephisto," would propose to make a deal for something you wanted. Were you manifestly flunking a course at school? Mephisto could change your test scores and grade. Would you benefit from the futures price of kilowatt-hours or whole-kernel corn going up or down next September? Mephisto could arrange it. And what you had to give in return, that would depend . . . but it usually involved anything a human being could do or know or influence, and a machine could not. The Devil had a lot of resources, these believers said, because he controlled so very many willing hands and minds.
So, while everyone knew the grid was spooked, no two people could agree on just how it was done. They only knew that the problems were unpredictable, irreproducible, and bigger than any one human being and his or her personal concerns. The scale of error was probably also unimportant. Once the grid and its cybers had crunched your numbers, you tended to accept them. The data might have defects and shadings—but so what? The answers the grid gave were still a thousand times more reliable than if you took off your shoes and tried to do the long division on your toes. And, after all, the results just might be accurate. You paid your buck and you took your chance, the same as with anything else in life.
Dr. Wa Lixin placed a black stone 011 the nineteen-by-nineteen lattice dial the screen displayed. The computer responded by placing one of its white stones at random, then filling up the board with black stones and conceding the game with profuse compliments 011 Dr. Lees skill.
Then again, maybe the machine was just broken____
"You have a patient, Doctor," the screen announced. "Shall I open?"
"Go ahead," he said, turning toward the entrance to the waiting room. The door beyond, into the corridor, slid back on a plump young woman in a purple jumpsuit, her shoulders weighted down with luggage.
Dr. Lee perceived at once that she was more interesting to look at than the go board. She was high-breasted and narrow-waisted, with generous hips that promised good carriage and easy delivery. She had long, wavy brown hair, pulled back from her ears in a loose braid.
Her jade-green eyes were eerily clear and far-seeing; they looked like nothing so much as openings into another physical dimension. The coloring went well with her pale skin, which was dusted with the pigment splotches that the Caucasians dismissed as "freckles" and everyone else knew as a benign melanin irregularity. She was decidedly cute—if you liked Round Eyes.
"Yes? Can I help you?" he called.
"I'm looking for a Dr. Shin?" the woman said with a rising inflection. "The computer grid told me I had an appointment—"
"Are you Demeter Coghlan?"
"Yes, but—"
'Then I'm your assigned doctor, Wa Lixin. Everyone calls me Lee, though."
"Oh . . . Wah-Lee-Shin. I get it." She slid the bags off her shoulders onto the banquette beside the door and came through into the examination room. Her light hand still clutched something—a pink card, a fine from the local militia.
"You can put that down with your things," Dr. Lee said.
"But it'll go off, the patrolman said. And then the Marines or something—"
"Oh, piffle! They only mean to scare you, being a foreigner and all." He sniffed. "Odalisque? Nice scent, but a bit pervasive. We usually cut that brand here with three-eighths isopropyl alcohol. That'll get you past the gas sensors."
"Okay, thanks."
"Give me the card."
She hesitated. "What are you going to do?"
"I'll pay it out from my terminal. Then you don't have to worry about fending off the Marines."
"You'd do that for me?"
"And tack it onto your bill, of course." He checked the cards denomination. "It's only for ten Neumarks. Your money all comes from the same account, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, I guess. ... Say, do you really have that much surveillance here? I mean, just coming down from the fountain, I've seen swivel lenses, motion sensors, and earjacks in every corridor. Now you're telling me about gas sniffers, too. I didn't expect—"
"Expect what? Civilization? Modern technology?" Dr. Lee grinned. "Our grid gives us an interconnect level about equal to any medium-size Earth city. This isn't the frontier, you know. We don't have drunken cowboys and cattle rustlers—or whatever you were expecting."