Part VII
Heisenberg’s Wave
19
Kelly stared at the glowing console panels, watching system after system coming on line, a look of amazement and pleasure on his face.
“It worked!” he exclaimed. “Heisenberg was right.”
“Heisenberg? What’s going on?” said Maeve. “Are you telling me that—“
“It changed.” The surprise in Kelly’s voice was edged with a hint of delight. “The program source code changed somewhere. The Golems are spotting variations, and the system called home, just like it was supposed to.”
Maeve was not happy. She had been battling the notion of unaccountable change for weeks, and this was the last thing she needed. “Maybe someone’s tampered with it,” she suggested. “Hackers are always pulling stuff like that.”
“He’d have to be a genius,” said Kelly, “with an open account on an Arion system, and a lot of time. I encrypted the source code with a 512 megabyte key. Yes, I know it’s illegal, but who’s telling. Now, it would take an Arion system about two years to power through that, let alone the fact that I set the key to mutate on a precisely planned route—I call it my guided key evolution. It would take a hundred years to break that—if it could be done at all.”
Maeve was just staring at him trying to absorb what he was saying. He was standing square in the middle of the room, his baseball cap tilted slightly to one side, hands on hips, and eyes scanning the consoles one by one as they came to life. She realized that he was using one part of his head to monitor the boot sequence while another part was explaining his code technique. He reached down to peck a keystroke on one of the systems, as if nudging something that seemed slightly out of place.
“Ah,” he said. “Someone turned this monitor off.” He poked the flat panel display power toggle with a look of satisfaction. All was in order. “So,” he continued. “Let’s just say that this key is unbreakable—for all practical purposes.”
“Unbreakable? Then—“
“At least not breakable with the systems available today. You either know the key or you don’t access the code. That rules out hackers—period. So when my Golem calls home, something is afoot. Something has changed. Let’s see if I can isolate the Heisenberg wave. I set this whole thing up to give us location. You’ll see.”
Kelly was all business now. He had his briefcase open and he was pulling out file folders and a small hand calculator. He marched over to a terminal and settled in, eyes scanning the screen while he waited for the boot sequence to stabilize. He was getting green readings on one board after another, ticking them off mentally in his head as the systems checked in. His little army of number crunching computers was alive and well, and he stretched his arms with a grin, cracking his knuckles.
“This is going to be interesting,” he said.
Maeve felt the flutter of anxiety ratchet up a level in her chest. Kelly had a knack for understatement. “OK,” she breathed. “Let me see if I have this straight. You’re telling me that your program spotted a change—but that it couldn’t possibly be tampering.”
“Correct.”
“And this means someone’s playing with time?”
“That’s my best guess. When I send out the program, it’s pristine. They install it, run it, and the code follows a precisely defined pathway, and constantly checks itself to be sure that nothing is amiss. Well something’s wrong. The only way that could possibly happen is if an element from the source code has been altered. Oh, its likely to be a little thing, like a change in a variable signifier, or something like that. Any serious change would crash the program entirely, and…” He keyed something on the system, squinting at the screen to read the result. “Just as I thought: no crash alerts. So the code changed. Looks like a very small mutation, but anything counts for this test.”
“Well what if someone’s hard drive died and the code was damaged or something?”
“I’d have checksum flags on that, and the basic integrity of the program is still good. See?” He pointed at a monitor, but Maeve could make no sense of the data he was indicating.
“Now I’m going to find out where the problem is, and possibly how it happened. It could be that our friends from the future are running a mission!”
Maeve didn’t like that idea. The notion that unborn people in a distant age were altering this very moment with the technology of the Arch was deeply disturbing, and a bit confounding. It meant that, in spite of all her arguments, the project would not be shut down. The technology would survive and proliferate, and spawn a thousand nightmares that would prey upon her from this day forward.
“And this Heisenberg wave?”
“Ah, yes.” Kelly reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out one of his favorite candies. “Necco Wafer?” He offered, but Maeve simply folded her arms, waiting. “The Heisenberg wave.” Kelly began to explain his theory again. “Ever throw a stone in a pool of water? Well of course you have. So you know what those little ripples look like after it goes ker-plunk. Well, I got this idea: if someone opened the continuum, the effects would ripple out from the breaching point, just like those little waves. It’s just quantum stuff. Paul and I were talking about it. In fact, he encouraged me to run up this program.”
“Ah,” Maeve seized on that. “A conspiracy!”
“Just a collaboration. I ran the theory by him and he said the quantum uncertainty principle had to manifest somehow. So I thought of the ripples in that pond and came up with—“
“A Heisenberg wave. How clever.”
“This is the cool part,” Kelly hurried on. “I have a good data map on the location of all the boxes running my Golem. All I have to do now is send out this query and have each box on-line report its code status. Then I’ll know exactly which boxes have a mutant running, and exactly where they are with the GPS sync that’s been built into all CPUs for the last five years.”
The Global Positioning System was another nifty little feature that had enjoyed wide proliferation. Ever since the US Air Force started turning dumb iron bombs into precisely targeted killers, GPS technology began to pop up in a wide array of appliances. It was a standard feature on all cars since the 2006 models, and now even computers could use the internet to tell the world exactly where they were. They sold the idea as a way of enabling new zip code like domain structures and IP addresses for the burgeoning Internet. It was a nifty anti-hacking scheme spawned by the Department of Homeland Defense. They wanted to know where every cell phone, vehicle, boat, plane and computer was, and once the technology was in place, their wish was made a reality.
“I just made the GPS feature a system requirement for my Golem.” Kelly was pulling up data as he spoke, eyes bright with the glow from the monitors. “Now I can plot where the corrupted systems are, and map the damage graphically… Like this!” He poked his finger on a key and leaned back, fingers locked at the back of his head and elbows splayed out like twin antennae. The screen began to display a map of the world, and tiny colored dots were winking on, slowly coloring the map with the data plots.