DRAFT: 7/26/98

SINGULARITY

More cofee. And some doughnuts. Collins was tired, as anyone would be after thirty-eight straight hours. But he was worried now, too. This wasnt at all supposed to be happening. A night and a half ago hed been called on the Intruder Line, the emergency com link from the Berkeley Virus Lab, and told to jack in immediately. Somebody was tooling around the North American phone grid. More to the point, they were inside the metalogic - - the grid-wide layer of self-modifying control code whose job it is to dynamically reroute gigabit message trains around the bottlenecks and packet storms always brewing up inexplicably but routinely around the great national city-nodes. Metalogic was deep, hypercomplex code; a no longer even remotely understood congeal of self-replicating processes and maximally evolved genetic algorithms, fashioned over countless electronic interactions and iterations. No one went in there. Period. Only certain system utilities, themselves erected by the metalogics self modifying code, could even monitor its actions, and then only in aggregates. You just didnt find hackers there. There was no way in. Naturally, metalogic was a national security concern - - but even NSA used the Berkeley Virus Lab. Thanks to a decade of pressure from the national weapons laboratories, BVL had amassed the most sophisticated facilities on the planet for trapping and holding live viruses long enough to analyze and dissect them, including a little mentioned but very efficient array of ion plasma magnets (compliments of NSA) through whose 10 million watt standing-wave emissions not even electron tunneling could penetrate. In counterpart to the metalogic, there was just no way out. Collins ran the plasma array. It had been his baby at Cal Tech, and theyd taken it and him into the NSA less than a week after it was calibrated. Based in Berkeley at BVL, hed had occasion to use it more than a dozen times, but each time itd been overkill, a cannon against ants. Not this time, though. An evening of perplexity had turned into a night and a half of sheer bafflement. Somebody was not only getting into the phone grids metalogic, but they were also getting into and out of the plasma array, at will. Or at least it seemed so. There was no doubt about it now. Something was inside, and moving. My god: it had seen him coming. He reached for the kill switch but it was too late. Lights

everywhere in the city flared, then dimmed out. His screens were black. Whatever it was had taken off, fueled by a grid-wide gulp of juice. Now it was out there, on the loose. And growing. But into what?