Richie Boss: Private Investigator Manager - Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse - page 323

manual interface to invoke the thing. The whole node was still loaded down crazy,
so it chugged along, but block by block, it scanned all available storage, finding
nothing.
I pinged my phone—it was still in contact with my implanted thought-to-text
channel, so dumb logic seemed to still be working. Only higher-level constructs—
indys—were affected. I was about to message my friend Kernighan Wilson up in
Toronto, but he beat me to it.
Wilson ->Boss: <sm>Epicntr</sm>
Boss ->Wilson: <sm>What?</sm>
Wilson ->Boss: <sm>Wht r u seen? Yr at teh epicentr.</sm>
He had to have been working from a manual keyboard, and in a hurry. Or panic.
Boss ->Wilson: <sm>What are you talking about?</sm>
Wilson ->Boss: <sm>Half the NE sctr just crshd.</sm>
Half the sector? It was past time to kill this thing. I found the power plug for my
local workstation and yanked it.
Boss ->Wilson: <sm>Any better?</sm>
Wilson ->Boss: <sm>N. Grwing expntlly.</sm>
My workstation was meshed in with all the other machines in broadcast range, so
it hardly made a dent on the local cluster, even as cutting-edge as my hardware was.
If Kernighan could pin this down to my location, so could the feds, and after this
they'd be after a hunk of flesh for restitution of the economic damage of a downed
net. I needed to solve this now .
I plugged my workstation back in, and whatever the spreading blight was, for the
moment it ignored me, leaving a sliver of bandwidth in which to do something. But
what to do?
I still had the code from Pandora's USB drive. The archive contained all the
secrets to what this thing was, all its strengths and weaknesses. All I had to do was
understand it. Without indy assistance.
And they told me that being a manager was a safe career choice.
Judith had done well organizing the code's gross structure. It was segmented into
modular pieces, each of which had an obvious function at a glance. This indy—for
I had come to the conclusion that code represented an indy construct, not a mere
program—wasn't evolved in the usual fashion. It appeared to have been built by
hand, or in some cases, assembled from off-the-shelf modules. Looking through the
code was like a walk through a historical library. I wasn't even sure if it would need
a separate training phase in its lifecycle; all bets were off.
The largest module was named simply memories . It was evident that this indy
didn't go through a conventional education process. Incredibly, Judith had hand-
entered much of the information in its memory, core functions like common sense,
logic rules, and language fundamentals. With no training regimen, the indy wouldn't
even have an assigned a PID. How could that even work? It flew in the face of the last
50 years of research. Nevertheless, I now had a name for the rogue indy: Pandora.0.