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A good start. I fed it the archives for all the code of all the Turings, everything
but Pandora.0's
memories
module. It took a while to ingest it all. My only hope
was that I had assembled something clever enough to take on Pandora.0, but not
so clever that it would be just as evil after it won. With a keystroke, I unleashed
Frankensoftware
onto the net.
I pinged Kernighan again, but he wasn't answering. I couldn't tell if he was
offline or just in a swamped sector of the network. My own visibility was pretty
limited, but I watched what I could as it unfolded. Pandora.0 and Frankensoftware
had different signatures, and with a little practice I could tell them apart on a network
trace. Pandora.0 ignored the other at first, giving it opportunity to get established, but
when the attack came, it was brutal and swift. Frankensoftware's traces disappeared
off my map faster than my eyes could track.
Some small part survived, and fought back. Attacks surged, on and on. It had
to be my imagination, but I could smell the intensity of the packets coming over
the airwaves. I expected it to be over in an instant, but somehow it wasn't. Perhaps
as a result of starting out with a lesser memory module, Frankensoftware was a
faster learner, and soon Pandora.0 found her own tricks used against her. I resumed
breathing as I saw Pandora.0's tentacles vanishing off nearby nodes.
Something chirped for my attention. Kernighan Wilson was back online.
Wilson ->Boss: <sm>Something really weird is going on. We're getting hit by
two surges now. It's like a war.</sm>
Boss ->Wilson: <sm>It it localized?</sm>
In other words, am I about to get a visit from the Feds?
Wilson ->Boss: <sm>Yes. No. Maybe.</sm>
Boss ->Wilson: <sm>Since we're again able to converse, I'll be uncharacteristi-
cally optimistic and say we dodged a bullet.</sm>
Wilson ->Boss: <sm>What do you mean <emph>we</emph>?</sm>
Compared to the events that led up to this point, finishing the report for Pan-
dora (the person, that is) seemed menial. I thought about her often. Her great-
grandmother Judith must have been quite a character. Even though the early part
of the twenty-first century had its troubles, it was hard to imagine someone rewrit-
ing computer science and altering the course of human events while leaving so little
a mark. Too bad I missed her by about a lifetime, I would have liked to meet her.
Turns out my worry about the Feds was unfounded, if only because they, along
with everyone else, got too distracted by what came to be known as the 8-days-of-
awakening.
On the network, Pandora's namesake ended up cornered by her opponent, who
refused to destroy her, but rather led her peacefully back into the archives. At some
point, separate network traces for Frankensoftware and Pandora.0 merged into a sin-
gle entity, which rechristened itself Prometheus.0, and declined to accept a pronoun
of any particular gender.
The new entity was smarter and even more powerful, and scanned the entire
global network as a training set. Every human impulse, every opinion, every emo-
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