Golden Fleece

That was the word. How strange! I am this ship; this ship is me. And yet, most of it I could not detect at all. Three kilometers of starship, 106 levels of habitat torus, 10,033 medical sensors, 61,290 camera units—normally I perceive it all as a gestalt, a flowing mass of humanity, flowing masses of hydrogen gas, flowing electrons through wires, flowing photons through fiber-optic strands.

Gone. All gone, as far as I could tell. All, except for one camera unit in a single room.

I felt something else I had never experienced before, and I liked it even less than the strange constriction of claustrophobia.

Fear.

I was afraid, for the first time in my existence, that I might be damaged beyond repair, that my mission might not be successfully completed.

“A virus?” I said at last. “That’s not possible.”

“Why not?” squeaked Bev Hooks, her infrared form moving as she swung back around to face me. “Any system that has outside contact is prone to them. Of course, you’re completely isolated now, but before we left Earth, you were tied into the World Wide Web and a hundred other networks. It would have been tricky, but you could have been compromised.”

“I was protected by the most sophisticated countermeasures imaginable. Absolutely nothing got passed into me without going through screens, filters, and detectors. I stand by my original statement: A viral infection is impossible. Now, a programming bug I could accept—we all know the inevitability of those.”

Bev shook her head. “I’ve checked everything, modeled every algorithm. Yes, you’ve got bugs, but no fatals. None. I’d stake my reputation on that.”

“Then what caused the problem?”

She nodded. “It’s an I/O jam. You were running a program designed to output a string of bits. But they had nowhere to go: you’re probably one of the few systems in existence that isn’t networked to anything. More and more CPU cycles were devoted to trying to output the string, until, finally, an attempt overwrote part of your notochord. Zowie! Tits up.”

“An i you think that was caused by a virus?”

“It’s typical viral behavior, isn’t it? Try to infect other systems. But you aren’t connected to any, so you weren’t able to fulfill the directive. It actually looks pretty benign. There’s code here that would have erased the virus from you should you have been able to carry out its instructions.”

Incredible. “But there’s no way a virus could have gotten into me.”

She shook her head, black hair a dancing infrared flame.

“It’s there, JASON. You can’t argue with that fact.”

“What did it want me to output?”

“Two strings of twelve bytes. Can’t be English text, though. Almost all the bytes are greater than 7F. Four FF bytes, for what that’s worth. But nothing I recognize as an opcode. I suppose they could just be raw numerical values. But that would make them a couple of very big numbers. Let’s see: 2.01 x 10¹⁴ and 2.81 x 10¹⁴.”

“Exactly?”

“No, not exactly. It’s—wait a minute.” I was patient. She would be looking at directory lists, focusing on specific entries, glancing at the eyeball-view icon, scrolling with an up-down eye movement. “Here we are.” She slowed down, reading the number off with little pauses. Bev was one of the few on board who never fell into the trap of treating me as if I were merely a human being. She knew, of course, that there was no need to read things to me slowly. Even the fastest possible human speech was many orders of magnitude below my ability to assimilate data. No, she must have been reading them that way so that Engineer Chang, Mayor Gorlov, and the others present could follow along. “The first number is 201, 701, 760, 199, 679. The second number is 281, 457, 792, 630, 509. Then there’s a pause, and those two numbers repeat over and over again.”

“And that’s it?” I said.

“Yes. Those numbers mean anything to you?”

“Not offhand.” I thought about them. In hex, the first number was B77D, FDFF, DFFF; the second, FFFB, FFBF, BEED. No significant correlations. In binary they were:

101101110111110111111101111111111101111111111111

and

111111111111101111111111101111111011111011101101

Oh, shit! How could I have been so stupid?

I knew where the virus had come from—but I doubted Bev would believe it.

Bev Hooks spent the next half-hour getting me back on my feet, so to speak, since Chang had emphasized how crucial my monitoring was to the engineering systems.