A worm, he figured, one that targets and gains control over experimental and proprietary hardware and software wherever it finds it. He’d call it the Kumbaya worm or k-worm for short. It would borrow from the same toolkit as Stuxnet and its variants, with some secret sauce from his own Daisy Chain of Mass Destruction. There was another ingredient, however, that found him breaking his self-imposed radio silence.
Pandora felt the buzz and checked her phone.
“You know machine language, right?”
She smiled. Machine language was as close to the machine as a programmer could get—closer than assembly language and way closer than what most script kiddies thought of as coding, i.e., the higher-level languages that read like stilted English and included everything from the grands, FORTRAN and BASIC, to Python and C++. Machine language was all zeros and ones. Pandora had learned an earlier binary language from her grandfather—Morse code—and she’d already admitted to George that she “ran with it all the way to ML.”
“Why do you ask?” she wrote back noncommittally. It was late February, but she was still stinging a bit over the fourteenth.
“This thing I’m working on,” he wrote, “is going to need like the UN of code translation. I’m going to need something that can get traditional computers and quantum computers talking to each other, with maybe some experimental or proprietary stuff thrown in.”
“Okay?”
“Can you do it?”
Well, it wasn’t busywork. And it might be fun—a challenge, but not impossible. “A crack, I shall give it,” she wrote back.
“To my ears: music,” followed by a link to the Dropbox account where she could deposit her “UN of code translation” once it was ready for prime time.
Pandora’s confidence was not unfounded. She was the granddaughter of the code breaker Gladys after all. And it was true: she’d gotten as close to the machine as a coder could get without being a machine herself. ML, as it was fondly known among digit heads, was the actual language computers used to talk to other computers. George, who’d only made it to the level immediately above machine—assembly language—was duly impressed, while both considered hackers who only knew one or two higher-level languages to be little more than script kiddies, i.e., not coders at all.
Unlike translating English into Russian and then Japanese, translating one higher-order programming language into another benefited from the fact that while their terminology and/or syntax might vary, they all had to do many of the same things. They all needed to address variables, value assignment, integers versus floating point decimals, arithmetic operators, comparison operators, conditional operators, and other control structures. Python, PROLOG, LISP, R, C++ . . . they all included if/then, greater than, add, subtract, et cetera. And these control structures were like certain words in a given language, occurring at fairly consistent frequencies—the, and, or, I—and these statistics could be used to guess which string of symbols translated into, say, if/then statements.
The quantum computing side of the equation was a little trickier but, deep down, was more of the same—literally. More, after all, was the whole point of quantum computing—specifically, more options than the yes-no of binary systems. Instead of bits, quantum computing dealt in qubits, which took yes-no and added maybe-both-and-neither. And while there weren’t a whole lot of qubits in any given place at the moment—more like a few here, a few there, scattered around research operations across the globe—there were resources available to help Pandora grok the essentials, from instruction sets like Quil and Pha-Q; to software development kits like IQ, Q#, and Kwiz; to full-blown languages like QCL, QML, and Quipper.
All in all, the work reminded Pandora of what her grandmother had told her about cracking the Enigma code. The fact that there’d be a “Heil Hitler” somewhere in transmissions coming from Germany proved to be an important key—one that undermined a lot of technological sophistication. Or as Gladys put it: “God bless those predictable fascists.”
And, Pandora added, code bros and their love of Monty Python . . .
For something like a computer worm to spread, there needs to be a vector. Fortunately for George, he already had one—or one that would know one: Milo. It was one of the weird things he’d noticed about his self-appointed Virgil; Milo seemed to know everybody. He also seemed to know more collectively than any of his coworkers knew individually, as if Milo alone had been granted access to the big picture. Trying to pull one over on a guy like that was probably risky, but George was a former street kid who’d risked his ass into a position that others would kill for. It was time to see if that luck held.
Instead of just waiting for Milo to stop by his office—a statistically viable option—George decided to go looking and found his would-be vector in the arcade-themed break room he’d discovered on his first official day, postchipping. Milo was currently distracted, gobbling up pac-dots at an impressive rate, something George took as an excellent sign.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” he asked over his all-knowing friend’s shoulder.
“Doesn’t what bother me?” Milo said back, not breaking focus.
“Lying to the world,” George said. “The whole Memory Hole Monday thing.”
“Oh, that,” Milo said. He turned so George would be sure to see his smirk, only to hear the sound of his last life being lost, followed by “Game Over.”
“Shit.”
“Sorry,” George said, “but what if we could plug it, make the lie true?”
“I don’t think V.T. would take kindly to cutting off a data stream with that kind of potential.”
“But what could he do about it?” George asked. “Poof! It just happens during a routine software patch. Is he going to go to the authorities because somebody ‘fixed’ a feature nobody was supposed to know about?”
Milo started a new game. “What exactly did you have in mind?”
“You know a lot of people around here,” George said.
“Indeed I do,” Milo confirmed.
“Like including the team that rolls out updates?”
A nod.
George bumped a cupped hand next to Milo’s free hand. “Can you do me a favor?”
Milo closed his hand around the thumb drive George had passed him. “Indebtedness,” he pronounced. “Big, big fan.” Pause. “Continue.”
“If that happened to get plugged in to some patch team member’s USB port,” he said, “I would be . . .” He paused.
“Indebted?” Milo said.
George nodded behind him where Milo could see it, reflected in the game screen.
And then, finally: “Would it be terribly audacious of me to quote Archimedes by typing EUREKA in all caps?”
“You’re alive,” Pandora texted back.
“And . . . ,” George tapped out, followed by nothing, making her ask.
“What?”
“Conscious.”
Pandora blinked. Planned to text back, “No way,” but found herself typing, “You’re shitting me,” before hitting send.
“I shit you not.”
“Buzz is conscious,” she tapped, followed by a string of question marks punctuated by exclamation points.