The Long Road (Surviving the Fall 6)

Dr. Evans nodded. “I’m not surprised. My false name was all over research papers and theories that were developed related to practical artificial applications, specifically with a focus on—”

“Distributed applications. Right?” Rick finished Dr. Evans’ sentence.

“Exactly. You heard of it?”

“You could say that. My teams referenced your work a lot when we were furthering our development on car-to-car communications. Your work influenced a lot of what we did.”

“So that’s why they wanted you at Mount Weather.” Dr. Evans rubbed his chin, his eyes lighting up as he realized what Rick’s area of expertise was.

“I don’t think so, no. I think it was because I was asking too many questions about what they were doing with their imaging setups in Las Vegas. They heard me use a few technical terms and figured they stick me on a plane to their think tank.”

“Little did they know that you were probably one of the best people to actually be on that think tank.” Dr. Evans shook his head. “What a small world.”

“I wouldn’t say the best but… yeah. I don’t know.”

Dr. Evans sat quietly for a moment before he continued. “So you know about my alter-ego’s work. That’s good. But that’s only half of it.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.” Dr. Evans nervously picked at a seam on his satchel as he spoke. “I was one of the principle researchers who first developed what the government purchased and turned into Damocles.”

Rick raised an eyebrow. “You? You developed Damocles?”

“The concept of it, yes. That’s why I had to use a false identity. When the federal government found out what we were doing they bought us out lock, stock and barrel. We stayed on to help them develop it further for a year or two and then they let us all go to continue development in-house.”

Rick ran a hand over his hair and down the side of his face. “Damn. I’m impressed.”

“You shouldn’t be. My work was the genesis for this weapon and what’s happening today.”

“Boys?” Jane interrupted. “If you’re done being humble about your accomplishments you two might want to turn your attention toward something useful.” She looked at Dr. Evans. “You were telling me a couple days ago about some ideas you had for stopping Damocles. Maybe Rick here can help?”

Rick shrugged. “I’ll certainly try. I don’t think I’m necessarily the best but hey, if you want to bounce ideas off of me I’m all ears.”

Dr. Evans felt as though a weight was lifted off of his shoulders and he released his death grip on his satchel. “You have no idea how glad I am to hear that. Everyone I’ve talked to has either been a politician or a monkey with a gun and medals on their chest.” He opened his satchel and pulled out a stack of papers that he placed on the table in front of Rick, Jane and himself. “Give me a minute to get this organized and I’ll walk you through exactly what Damocles is, what it does and why all of the current attempts to stop it have failed.”

Rick snorted nervously and glanced at Jane and Dr. Evans. “That sounds… ominous.”

“Believe me, Rick, once you know what I know you’ll wonder why anyone’s still alive.”

***

“Damocles didn’t start out as Damocles.” Dr. Evans slid a few pieces of paper over toward Rick. “Before the feds bought us out we developed the idea of a mutagenic language through which different machines could talk to each other even if the base hardware and software was radically different. The idea was to make the ‘Internet of Things’ easier to develop for.”

Rick flipped through the papers. “A mutagenic language, eh? How would that work?”

“We’d have a very basic set of parameters through which the machines could talk to each other. Because the code was mutagenic

it could adapt to conform to whatever rigors were enforced by the system which it was on. So if you loaded it onto a smart refrigerator it would automatically figure out how to use the refrigerator’s networking commands to talk to a central server, for example.”

“That sounds incredibly useful. And also incredibly dangerous. How advanced was the mutagenic code?”

“Not very. Not at first, anyway.” Dr. Evans took off his glasses to clean them and massage the bridge of his nose. “We used learning algorithms to study the underlying structure of a few dozen different embedded operating systems to form basic rules that the code would follow. From there we let it learn on its own. By the time the feds kicked us out I think we were up to several hundred unique permutations of hardware and software combinations.”

“That’s a lot.” Rick shook his head. “But not nearly enough to cause this type of damage. Not when you’ve got military-grade hardened systems that are encrypted and protected against intrusion.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Dr. Evans flipped through his stack of papers until he found the folder he was looking for. “Before we got kicked out I was accidentally blind-carbon-copied on an internal email. The email was vague but it heavily implied that the NSA was absorbing our work. What they were doing with it I don’t know but it was... well, you can read it for yourself.”

Rick read through the pages in the folder, his eyes growing wide as he gently shook his head. “Wow. This is huge. But what’s this reference to an ‘internal learning matrix’ all about?”