Rob slapped the phone out of Zee’s hand. The iPhone skidded and slid into one of the bathroom stalls.
“Who the fuck did you message?”, Rob demanded.
“Nobody — err..”
Rob waved the tazer in Zee’s face.
“My opsec. I alerted them to the virus. They’ll find it and eliminate it in no time.”
Rob sneered at him. “You really have no idea what’s going on, do you? I thought you were just putting on a show…”
“What happens now?”, Wint asked.
Rob shrugged. “Nothing? There’s nothing they can do.”
“They’re very good at what they do”, Zee said.
“I wish they could fix it. Maybe there is, maybe there’s something we haven’t thought about. But… well fuck, I guess I’ll have to tell you what’s going on. But let’s get out of this stinking toilet first.”
Zee was incredulous. What the man who had introduced himself as Rob told him was… incredible. Though far more limited in scope than Chakra, the details that emerged betrayed a very sophisticated learning model, on par with what Chakra’s hundreds of engineers had been able to implement. What he found most fascinating was how had the Struct been able to break through it’s pre-programmed edge conditions.
“Do you think it’s become sentient?”, he asked.
“That’s one hell of a conclusion you’re jumping to”, Rob said.
“It would explain it.”
“So would just a simple bug in the logic.”
“I want to believe”, Zee said, wryly.
They sat in the Starbucks across the square from the gallery. Zee had so many questions, but he felt weird that they were discussing a matter this explosive in a public place. As an outsider, he hadn’t yet learned that in London nobody cared about what anybody else did, and was not interested enough to listen in.
“One way or another”, Wint said, “I think we can all agree we need to stop it.”
“Obviously, but how?”
“Ok, can we somehow write a patch that neutralises it?”
“We tried it”, Rob said. We infected a few thousand virtual machines with the Struct and applied every type of patch we could. But the Struct was able to work around ninety nine point nine percent of the patches within a day.”
“Ok, how about we isolate the signal server somehow and make it always return a valid canary?”
“It’s the bitcoin blockchain. It’s distributed, there is no single source of truth”, Rob said.
“Hmm of course. What about writing some kind of bot that automatically generates the canary transaction every day. That way we wouldn’t be reliant on one person… the creator to upload it.”
“That’s a workaround we thought about, but unfortunately the creator predicted you’d approach it that way and programmed in a condition that if there are multiple canary blocks in the same day, it triggers the detonation. That would make the problem worse, because then anyone who could discover the pattern of the bot could simply repeat the same instruction and ka-boom!”
“Clever!” Zee said. Even at a time like this, he couldn’t help getting excited about a smart implementation. “But what happens when the the creator… really, guys, it would be a lot easier if you told me who it is? No? Ok. What happens when the creator kicks the bucket? Then the system will self-destruct.”
“Yeah”, Rob said. “That was sort of the plan. But the only systems it was supposed to take down were yours, so that was more of an added benefit than anything.”
“Wow, ok. That’s pretty harsh, but ok. So, I don’t think there’s an obvious solution to this. If I’m getting this right, it seems like the only way to keep the world from collapsing is that we have one keymaster at any given time who is entrusted with the secret, can be relied on to generate the block every single day, and when they become… incapacitated, someone else is able to pick it up the next day.”
“Precisely.”
“Could we create an… antidote? If it’s a virus, maybe there is a cure?”
“It doesn’t really work like that. Unlike a normal virus that evolves via random mutation, this one actively evades any tampering…”, Rob sighed.
“How about we create a virus that’s even smarter than this one. Someone who follows it everywhere it goes and comes up with a new antibody for every new strain.”
“Like the old send a cat after the rat problem? What happens when the cat gets out of control? Send a dog, then lion, ad infinitum. Besides, trying to fight the Struct only makes it stronger. Just like antibiotic-resistant bacteria, it becomes more resilient with every new attack.”
“That’s one gnarly problem”, Zee said.
“Couldn’t we create some kind of government institution to do it”, Wint asked.
“Which government can be trusted, though?”, Rob said.
“The one with the most to lose”, Zee offered.
“Maybe some kind of international organisation. Like the United Nations?” Wint suggested.
“It’s a big secret to keep. The more people you involve, the higher the chances the keys get leaked”, Rob said.
“It could work.”
“Let’s just get the Secretary General on the phone then, shall we?”, Rob said, sarcastically. “We need to solve the root cause here, we can’t keep building the future of societies on quicksand. One misstep and it all sinks into mud.”
Zee’s phone beeped. He checked the message. “Chakra’s opsec has found the Struct.”
“Maybe they can figure out something. Maybe they really are that very smart”, Rob said, doubtful.
“We have a bigger problem, though”, Zee said. “My boss has been alerted too. We’re in for a real shitstorm.”
“Your boss?”, Wint asked. “I thought you were the boss.”