Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(16)
Heather felt as if she’d faded into a grotesque old Twilight Zone episode. Of one thing she was certain. Another life-altering event had just sucked everyone on that Bolivian porch across the threshold of reality.
The liquid crystal displays glistened with each new input to the neural search algorithm, almost as if it wanted the answer as badly as Denise did. But, of course, it didn’t. The massively parallel supercomputer known as Big John had only one purpose: to mine all available data on selected targets, then to cross-correlate that data with all other available information. And Denise knew: Big John’s tendrils extended into everything. When it came to data mining, like its namesake from the old Jimmy Dean ballad, Big John did the heavy lifting.
The most amazing thing about Big John was that nobody understood exactly how it worked. Oh, the scientists that had designed the core network of processors understood the fundamentals. Feed in sufficient information to uniquely identify a target and then allow Big John to scan all known information: financial transactions, medical records, jobs, photographs, DNA, fingerprints, known associates, acquaintances, and so on.
But that’s where things shifted into the realm of magic. Using the millions of processors at its disposal, Big John began sifting external information through its nodes, allowing the individual neurons to apply weight to data that had no apparent relation to the target, each node making its own relevance and correlation calculations. While one node might be processing Gulf Stream temperature measurements, another might access data from the Ming Dynasty.
No person directed Big John’s search. Nobody completely understood the complex genetic algorithms that supplied shifting weights to its evolving neural patterns. Given enough time to study a problem, there was no practical limit to what Big John could accomplish.
Therein lay the problem. Denise Jennings knew all too well the competing demands for the services only Big John could provide. Her software kernel had been inserted into antivirus programs protecting millions of computers around the world. And although those programs provided state-of-the-art antivirus protection, their main activity was node data analysis for Big John.
Big John was a bandwidth hog. No matter how big a data pipe fed it, Big John always needed more. Denise’s software provided an elegant solution to that problem. Commercial antivirus programs scanned all data on protected computers, passing it through node analysis, adding their own weighting to the monstrous neural net. It didn’t matter if some computers were turned off or even destroyed. If a data node died, more and better processors constantly replaced it. And through a variety of domains, Big John managed the entire global network.
Denise had been at the heart of the program from its beginnings in the late twentieth century, her software underpinning the secret government effort to encourage hackers to develop computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and on and on until everyone needed protection. And to fill that need, huge antivirus companies rose up to meet the challenge.
The funny thing about it was that every Tom, Dick, and Harry had an antivirus package on his computer to protect it from unauthorized access. Little did they suspect that her kernel lay at the heart of every single one of those packages, constantly scanning every piece of information on the system as well as every bit of Internet traffic passing through the computer’s network cards. Now cell phones needed antivirus protection, providing hundreds of millions of new nodes for Big John’s neural net.
Denise ran a hand through her graying hair and leaned back in her chair, letting the Herman Miller lumbar support stretch her lower spine. What time was it? Midnight? A glance at the lower right corner of her monitor provided the answer. Two thirteen a.m. Leave it to Dr. Hoffman to schedule an eight a.m. senior staff meeting. Ah well, might as well make it another all-nighter, especially since she needed to be extra careful covering her electronic tail.
Damn it all to hell! It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She was supposed to do her job and then retire, not get involved in international intrigue likely to get her killed. She knew Big John wasn’t alive, but she couldn’t help hating him for what he’d done to her, for what he was still doing to her. He’d shoved this in her face until she couldn’t resist a little extra digging.
The November Anomaly was still top secret, but with leaders of the world’s most powerful countries scared shitless, it wouldn’t stay that way much longer. The Anomaly had attracted Big John’s attention on multiple levels, but if Denise had been a typical nine-to-fiver, she’d never have noticed the interwoven threads tying the event to something far more disconcerting. Jesus. It was insane to even think that something could be more terrifying than a singularity sitting at the center of the ATLAS detector, threatening to destroy Earth. But what she’d found while tugging on those threads filled her soul with a horror that crept into every idle thought, invading her dreams until she dreaded sleep.
Because the Anomaly had occurred on Friday morning, November twenty-seventh, she’d missed the association, but Big John hadn’t. Here in America it had still been November twenty-sixth, Thanksgiving night. And what a night of activity that had been. That was the night that Jack Gregory had attacked the GPS satellite command center, uploading a signal that had effectively disabled most of the world’s nanite inoculations. It was the night that military personnel at Schreiver Air Force Base had found Eduardo Montenegro’s body, not far from where Jack had performed the uplink. It was also the night the government discovered that Dr. Donald Stephenson had participated in a number of unauthorized activities under the umbrella of the Rho Project, activities that included the horrifying experiments in the warrens beneath Henderson House and modifications to the nanites that made them programmable through an external signal via the GPS system.