Hunted Dog

Sagittarius 14, m0039, continued.

The team are still at work supervising this small building project. Florence decides that there is no sign of trouble here, and wanders off in search of lunch, picking up a fauxflesh sandwich and, by way of an experiment, a locally-grown durian fruit. She tries to force herself to eat the latter, but fails completely. Her enhanced senses are a little too sensitive.

Then, a call comes through for the whole team - but is intercepted by one of the embassy NAIs which is assigned to help manage their security, as they are E.U. diplomatic service employees.

"This is a heavily anonymised and redirected contact, but it probably originates from the area of New Shanghai or the western end of Marineris, and there is a high possibility that the individual calling is the acquaintance of yours whose primary pseudonym is 'Deimos Dog', or a good digital emulation."

The team take the call - and the speaker initially refers to herself as "Dravidian Delacroix", but doesn't actually try to maintain any pretence. It quite quickly becomes clear that she feels that she's in some danger, and is calling in favours. In the last few hours, her on-line reputation and trustworthiness indices have suffered dramatic falls - the sort of falls that endanger her status as a journalist, just as a very small start.

It seems that her past posts and Web stories have been subjected to a concerted and extremely hostile attack - a series of selective analyses and comments, some delving into what is publicly known about her private life, which seem to be designed to mark her down as a cat's-paw of the American authorities, an SIA stooge. This requires considerable selectivity, but as she says, of course a large proportion of her past stories have been highly critical of the Chinese on Mars - they're the largest single power on the planet! Unfortunately, she can't be sure who might be falling for these attacks, and a number of her contacts and acquaintances are the sort of people who won't take kindly to someone they see as an American government agent of influence.

She doesn't know who these attacks might be coming from - she's long seen it as part of her self-appointed job to annoy people, and candidates could include both Chinese and American authorities and any number of smaller groups and powerful individuals. She can't ask many people for help - too many people she'd normally approach might be falling for these slanders, or might even be involved in launching them, while any help she gets from American sources will just make her look worse. Hence, she's come to the E.U. team, even though she has to admit, when she thinks about it, that she's actually an American citizen.

Florence decides that there's a missing piece to this story, and switches on the charm, exploiting the intimacy of her past acquaintance with DD to draw her out more. Eventually, DD admits that she's recently been doing a very little, mild digging around the team's current activities - after all, she finds them interesting. She's been researching FAXAD and so forth. Maybe she wonders if this might have something to do with the attacks - but she presumably doesn't expect the team or the E.U. to be overly annoyed by this, let alone systematically hostile.

She thinks that only the embassy or FAXAD could have known enough about her enquiries to recognise her interest in this project, so the team drop the line to her and check with the embassy. Quentin denies that they had even spotted her enquiries - they were subtle and anonymous enough to slip past whatever warning systems the E.U. has in place, although Quentin does admit that they have DD tagged as "to watch" - she's a freelance journalist of unpredictable prejudices who has got close to an E.U. team, after all.

The team decide that they will try to help DD; they regard her as a basically friendly and sometimes helpful contact, after all, and if this incident is linked to their work on the FAXAD project somehow, they ought to know about it. Vajra puts Samadhi in charge of the construction operation while Vajra itself sets to work analysing DD's past work, not turning up any clear clues as to likely attackers there. Meanwhile, Jianwei quickly designs and scripts a counter-campaign, with inputs from DD, that should hopefully make life a bit safer for her. But who should deliver it? If the team tackles the job, anyone tracking it back will flag the posts as questionable, and it will compromise E.U. perceived neutrality too far.

As Jianwei and DD chew over this problem, Vajra also analyses the memetics of the slander-attack. The conclusion is that it's deliberately bland and generic, using stock, textbook tools and methods - which weakens it a little, perhaps, but also makes it effectively untraceable. It's skilful enough, but it sacrifices some effectiveness for anonymity.

Meanwhile, DD has come up with the best available vector for the counter-campaign. Double-checking her security and trusting to encryption, she admits that she is currently holed up in an unused commercial building in New Shanghai; she has friends - well, probably-reliable acquaintances - elsewhere in the city, who have the resources to handle the job. But she'll have to ask them in person.

Jianwei pulls up his mapping software and plots her a route to this destination that should mostly avoid busy streets, and then Florence links directly to the cameras on DD's wearable interface, allowing her to watch DD's back and advise on stealth. (Her attempts to advise on disguise don't work so brilliantly, unfortunately.) Hence, Florence is looking over DD's shoulder when DD enters what is, to the knowledgeable eye, rather obviously a low-level Triad Web-media operations centre. Florence snorts. "You know you can't trust these people, don't you?" she snarls in DD's ear, as those people turn not-totally-friendly looks on DD.

DD, though, maintains her cool and demonstrates a decent grasp of street etiquette, while Jianwei, as ever the social operations expert, advises on negotiation techniques. DD ends up owing this Triad operation a favour, but in exchange, they set to work using subverted LAIs to spread the counter-campaign. Within minutes, DD's Web-based reputation indices are showing marked signs of recovery. She breathes a sigh of relief and slips out of the Triad dive, then agrees with the team that she should check into a capsule hotel for a while.

Once she seems to be safe for the moment, Jianwei starts talking to the LAIs which currently represent FAXAD on Mars, and soon decides that they are blandly trustworthy standard models. But Vajra digs out some more information on FAXAD arrangements back on Earth, which include a lot of "rehabilitated" gypsy, orphan, and rogue AI workers, and Dougal, assessing the Foundation's security arrangements using his developing aptitude for computer work, is less than impressed. The team advises FAXAD to bring their most trusted and unambiguously trustworthy software agents into this project, and to transmit some of them to Mars to handle local security.

Meanwhile, it's getting late in the day, and the team's organic members will soon need to rest. They get the informorphs to watch over DD as she sleeps. She, it seems, has an elevator car bar-tending job coming up, which should represent a fairly safe place for her to remain while the trouble dies down.

Sagittarius 15, m0039.

The next morning, the embassy's security systems give a briefing on their assessment of this incident. From now on, FAXAD will be treated politely, but not trusted over-much - E.U. digital security are no more impressed than Dougal was by the effectiveness of their defences. They may be an innocent and unconnected party in this incident, but their extensive use of "rehabilitated" infomorphs looks frankly questionable.

As for the actual attack on DD - there are any number of possible candidates as perpetrators of this, and few clues to narrow the field. The team throw out as many ideas as anyone. Discrediting DD while she is looking at the work of an E.U. team might, say, be a subtle way of insulating someone from DD's investigations in the vicinity of later E.U. operations. Or, given the weakness of FAXAD security, there might be something going on within that organisation. Could it be the Chinese, who don't, in truth, have much cause to love DD, and who may not be very fond of the E.U. team in the wake of other recent incidents? Maybe, although this all looks rather too subtle and under-resourced for that. The Americans, then? It's conceivable that one of their organisations could have hoped to drive DD to working for them in the absence of other friends...

It does appear to closer analysis, certainly, that the attack was plotted out in advance, possibly not in the very recent past - it wasn't something that could have been thrown together very quickly, and wasn't keyed to some of DD's most recent activities. This gives it the smell of an organisation's contingency plans, rather than an individual's act of vengeful malice.

In the end, the team find themselves on a hopper back to Port Lowell, left only with the knowledge that someone is up to something. But isn't that always the way of things on Mars?

Note: The campaign goes on hold at this point for a few months while the GM deals with a few mostly work-related issues.)

Foundations

Sagittarius 4-10, m0039.

The team remain in Bako a little longer, with Florence for one enjoying some interesting nights in a town with a different social scene (and picking up some basic knowledge of African culture in the process). However, they eventually start receiving hints from the E.U. that a move back to Port Lowell may be indicated. Florence is becoming a bit of a permanent fixture on some gossip blogs and slogs, which might not be entirely desirable, and the team can continue to monitor Adam-4's progress well enough from their home base.

A rather boring boat trip sees them safely across Lake Candor to Port Lowell, where Florence is happy to discover that the psychologists aren't currently inclined to harass her for too many personal reports. And so everyone is able to spend a few quiet days on routine work, time in the dojo, and so forth. Everyone's monthly pay has recently been credited to their various accounts, which leads to minor outbursts of shopping - or, in Vajra's case, minor outbursts of generosity.

Sagittarius 11, m0039.

Then, Vajra receives (via an AI agent) a contact from someone who, deliberately or otherwise, seems set to play on his particular charitable instincts - though it's actually a legitimate-enough, if informal, request for consular support. The Foundation for ArachnoXenological Assessment and Development is an Antwerp-based institute that, officially, studies Web life and provides consultation on practical aspects of the subject. However, it seems to be a fairly open secret that FAXAD provides a haven for orphan and gypsy infomorphs; it certainly acts openly as a proponent for infomorph rights. It hasn't previously operated much outside of Earth-local space, but growing complexity in the Mars Web looks set to make a FAXAD presence on the planet desirable - in FAXAD's opinion, anyway.

The first step in the Foundation's response is to establish a physical presence on-planet - for which purpose, a sufficiently powerful computer installation is the main requirement. However, given the nature of some FAXAD activities, the Foundation would really like to be sure that this will be located somewhere with an unambiguously liberal legal structure. Their analysis says, plausibly enough, that New Amsterdam might be the best place to go. It's a tiny, growing, 100% Dutch colony up in the north; Dutch law is as close to tolerant in relevant areas as FAXAD can hope to find, practically speaking. They've got the engineering side of things worked out; now, they're requesting consular back-up in the physical set-up process.

Vajra throws the request over to the others and the embassy for assessment. Jianwei decides that the legal position looks okay, while Vajra puts a call through to Dr. Mariam Kalatta in Bako, asking for her support; she's happy enough to assist as far as she can, though strictly on an informal basis, and she's certainly sympathetic (and knows nothing against FAXAD).

Sagittarius 12-13, m0039.

The information processes through various systems, and a couple of days after that first call, the team are notified by Ambassador Schmidt; there's a formal request come through from FAXAD for someone to act as legal witnesses on site when their shiny new computer system is installed on a site in New Amsterdam. This looks like a job for the Consular Services team. FAXAD have said that they will pay for the team to take a hopper flight up north - but in fact, Vajra decides to rent a shell on the site. Which is why, when the hopper lands, Jianwei and Florence are greeted by a formidable-looking industrial machine. "Hello Vajra," Florence cheerfully says.

The team head towards the one hotel in this tiny town, where they are greeted by an AI receptionist (operating a static cybershell, humaniform from the waist up, a desk from the waist down). Their rooms prove to be ... very idiosyncratically ... decorated; the hotel may not have much competition, but it evidently doesn't want to be seen as boring. The organics then head out in search of a restaurant, finding a good Indonesian place (200 things to do with tofu, and durian fruit as a non-advised option on the dessert list). Meanwhile, Vajra has checked the rooms for bugs; he doesn't find any, although he is slightly unsure about this.

The organic team members  emerge from the restaurant to find some colourful furry snakes wandering the streets. Oh well, it's a biotech-industry town... They head on to a coffee shop and sample some other local products. The snakes start to make sense and the Martian coffee begins to seem almost tolerable... They decide that it's time to head for their respective rooms to sleep. Meanwhile, Vajra heads to the site acquired by FAXAD, and downloads some architecture and civil engineering skills sets to facilitate assessing it. His conclusion is that there isn't much to say.


Sagittarius 14, m0039.

Breakfast for the other two involves lots of smoked and spiced fauxflesh sausages, after which, they join Vajra on the site, which is at a reasonable height up a local hill - it will be a few decades before rising sea levels become a serious issue at this altitude. Jianwei checks the financial side of FAXAD's arrangements, and decides that they are sound, by which time, construction materials are being delivered to the site. Vajra sets to work being useful, following v-tag instructions as concrete is poured to provide the new computer building with foundations, and then walls begin to go up. As the most authoritative sapient involved in this process, Vajra has a fair amount of discretion, and decides to follow local building standards by providing the structure with colourful external doors; he even checks with some local semi-professional consultants about established architectural aesthetics in New Amsterdam.

The watching Jianwei thinks about the defensibility of the site, which is frankly mediocre at best - though why should that be a concern? As he is looking around, though, he notices other observers - camera-equipped mini-blimps, which appear to be registered to a Martian news service.

In fact, around lunchtime, Aunty spots something on the feeds - and Quentin has also picked it up, because he calls soon afterwards. Florence, it seems, has made herself enough of a temporary minor celebrity that her presence in a different town (such as New Amsterdam) is considered worthy of note. Jianwei tells Florence to be boring for a little while, so hopefully the news feeds will lose interest.

Damage Control

Sagittarius 1, m0039, continued.

When the organic members awake, the team decide that testing will need a fairly sizeable box to hold the materials they acquire, confining and isolating it. Florence, who is used to scrounging up odds and ends, is sent off with an emissions nanobug (patched through to Dougal) and told to find something of the order of a metre cube with no detectable electronic behaviours of its own. She succeeds, and drops the box off in the team's rented apartment. Then they all go shopping for, essentially, fancy tat - a good assortment of cheap items with identifiable VKVLM packaging. It helps when they work out how to persuade shops' systems to generate an augmented reality layer with products from known VKVLM customers highlighted. Florence also takes the chance to pick up some things she considers worth wearing, on expenses - her keen eye for fashion helps - while Jianwei handles the purchasing process.

Back to the apartment again, a session of busy unwrapping follows, with packaging materials being diligently tossed into the box. Then Vajra puts surveillance dust on the inside of its lid, and the other two decide that it's time for lunch. In fact, Dougal talks Florence through the process of cooking a passable meal using foodstuffs and ingredients that they've just acquired. As they eat, though, Vajra picks up sounds of movement in the box. Unfortunately, his dust has no IR capability, so Florence drills a small hole and observes through her gunsight camera. There are indeed definite, even dynamic, signs of self-organisation in the packing materials.

This looks like some kind of countermeasures are needed, so the team's AIs look at online documentation related to programming VKVLM processors and systems. The company themselves evidently regard this sort of thing as proprietary, but Vajra and Aunty find some hobbyist materials-hacker sites, mostly with information carried in from the Earth Web. Dougal, the team's chief computer operations specialist, looks at these, although he becomes a little twitchy at what he sees - the people involved are evidently the sort to skirt the fringes of formal legality, bypassing software security locks whenever possible, and he is, after all, an AI with proper honesty programming. He is persuaded to carry on, and he also looks more at VKVLM's own site, but that seems to be rather evasively verbose when one looks at all deeply at matters of security.

Dougal does conclude that VKVLM materials can be induced to communicate with other items using the same architecture over distances of a metre or two using their short-range radio capabilities, and unauthorised reprogramming may propagate this way. This leads him to use that nanobug to search for emissions in and out of the box - and he quickly locates a cheap energy food bar which Florence had almost forgotten she has had in her pocket for some time. Or rather, he locates its VKVLM packaging, which is active and probably infected.

It looks like the viral code is now trying to spread, and Dougal provisionally diagnoses this as an occurrence of something referred to on the Web as Self-Organising Malware Phenomenon 3, or SOMP-3 for short. It definitely looks as though the processor monoculture caused by VKVLM's market dominance in Bako is allowing it to propagate uniquely well, though. So Jianwei puts a personal call into the local VKVLM offices to warn them about the problem. He quickly gets past the AI receptionists and finds himself talking to Eugene B'Kosa, the company's branch manager. B'Kosa becomes very detectably nervous when told of the problem, and says that he'll investigate and call back in ten minutes.

While the team are waiting, Jianwei checks the news feeds out of habit, and spots a note on the Bako local feeds about some local shops shutting their doors and closing unexpectedly, for reasons that are currently unclear. The team promptly puts a call through to the Bako Corporation, where someone correlates what they say with a series of alerts coming through from their own Computer Issues department. They know that there's a problem, and words like "cancertech" catch their attention, but they hadn't yet noticed the association with VKVLM products. The responsible department asks the team to meet them at a downtown location, in person.

So the Europeans head out. The address they've been given is within walking distance, and in fact Florence decides to run there, without bothering with an air mask. (Her metabolism has no problems handling this, especially as she's well fed at present.) The Bako corporate cop on the tape responds favourably when she arrives, and she ends up talking to the police Computer Problems specialist, acting as a mouthpiece for the rest of the team in the few minutes before they arrive. As this expert soon notes that VKVLM are being smoothly cagey about this incident, he listens with interest to what the Europeans have to say. What he has to worry about is runaway unexpected behaviour by packaging and wrapping in several shops around Bako; items which are merely supposed to keep themselves tidy and well-presented on the shelves are shifting and flickering in an unnerving fashion.

He can tell the team exactly which shops are affected (although the number increases by one as he talks), and Jianwei runs an analyst's trained eye over the map. Two of them are places which Florence visited that morning; by excluding those, he can see that the other half-dozen are linked by the sort of back-alley access ways that the new garbage collection cybershells use for daytime auxiliary collections. He immediately alerts the Corporation agents and police - the cybershells have likely somehow become a transmission vector. The Corporation respond to this, sending a signal that makes all those shells stop what they are doing and go park themselves outside of town.

The team now have enough information to allow Dougal and Vajra to collaborate on a simple ad hoc fix for this problem. They know which radio frequencies the materials use to communicate and which ports they must be leaving open to allow propagation, and the simple architecture involved should be easy enough to overload or saturate. Dougal specifies a signal pattern that can be transmitted through the medium-range communicator that Vajra has available, and Florence volunteers to carry the unit into the shop, where Dougal can trigger it.

The authorities are happy enough to try this, although their technicians suggest that Florence should carry as little digitally active material with her as possible, to avoid possible contamination or other accidents. (By now, the team have unavoidably had to acknowledge that Florence may have been responsible for infecting at least two of those shops...) When one of the technicians asks, perhaps flippantly, if Florence's underwear is sentient, she reacts by stripping off all her clothes - which, of course, doesn't exactly leave her naked, given the density of her Mars-appropriate fur. Then she picks up the transmitter, walks into the shop, puts it down again, and steps back. Dougal sends a trigger signal - and all the twitching, shuffling, and flickering products on the shelves go inert. Dougal follows up by sending another signal that puts them into inactive "shipping mode" before the infection can reboot.

So now, she just has to repeat the exercise for each infected shop. Finding herself the focus of multiple visible cameras (never mind how many less visible systems may be tracking her), she amuses herself on the walk between each place by posing as she goes. Meanwhile, Vajra and Jianwei leave her to that job and locate the parked garbage collection shells. A little time and skilled use of electronics locates the source of the problem - lengths of active packing tape that have wrapped themselves round two of the shells' axles. By the time they're done removing that, Florence is on the way back to their apartment to disable the experimental samples.

The team and the local experts now know a bit more about SOMP-3.It seems that , given time and sufficient processing power, this digital virus advances to increasing levels of complexity and self-organisation. It's a clever, possibly self-modifying design, but in the wild on Earth, it never progressed beyond its third level of complexity. Here in Bako, it seems to have managed five or six levels. Also, when the team disturbed it in the rubbish pits, they unknowingly triggered a built-in emergency response; it shifted from local self-organisation to a series of behaviours, digital and physical, that made it more likely to be spread more widely. What more the unknown South African hacker who created it made it capable of is unknown.

However, the team now have a new problem; by late afternoon, Jianwei, watching the news feeds, realises that VKVLM are emphasising the "human transmission vector" aspect of the event. It seems that the company, or at least B'Kosa, are seeking to divert as much blame as possible from themselves - which means pinning some of it on the Europeans. Jianwei quickly improvises a counter-campaign, built around recordings from the dump. Then he calls B'Kosa and politely but forcefully persuades him that the current VKVLM line could provoke the release of a lot more imagery of VKVLM products in full cancertech mode. Thus, when Ambassador Schmidt calls a few minutes later, Jianwei is able to tell her that the memetic problem that she too has spotted is now under control. Even if the news feeds are now full of yet more pictures of Florence.

Sagittarius 2-3, m0039.

The problem thus seems to be under control, and Florence is able to hit the bars of Bako (sometimes no more dressed than she was on those news pictures) to exploit her new fifteen minutes of fame. The rest of the team sit back and leave the clear-up to the town's numerous computer experts. However, Dougal alerts them to one consistent, somewhat unexpected factor in many of the reports; pictures of a visiting Peruvian team of emergency-response experts. Jianwei looks at this reporting, and concludes that there a subtle propagandist aspect; the team looks subtly but distinctly too good on camera, pressing too many buttons. (There may even be some well-planned cosmetic surgery involved.) He alerts E.U. Intelliegence, whose analysts agree; it seems that "Quipu" may be exploiting this opportunity. But it's being subtle about it, so there's not much to be done, for now.

Cleaning Up the Streets

April 26-27, m0039.

The team hire apartment hotel space, booking for a week at a time, and begin to explore the local culture in Bako when they aren't monitoring Adam-4's slow progress towards mental integrity or performing routine embassy work in VR. Indeed, things go unremarkably for the next day or two.

April 28, m0039.

Then, around noon on the 28th, one of the embassy LAIs suggests to Jianwei that, as the team are in Bako for a few days, they might as well look at a low-priority issue which does require personal, on-the-spot investigation. In fact, it's something which Jianwei recalls seeing a few days ago, when he agreed with that assessment. As the LAI comments, though, they may be able to save an E.U. company some money and trouble - perhaps even a full-blown court case - while they're there.

The issue is a contractual dispute between the Bako Corporation, the non-profit holding company which manages the urban infrastructure of Bako, and Turino Sistemi, a European hardware systems company. The Corporation appear to believe that some equipment which Turino sold them is persistently failing to perform to specification, and want an engineer on site to fix the problem; Turino are equally insistent that, according to its logs, the equipment is demonstrably working fine, so any engineer visit would have to be billed on a cost-plus basis - which the Corporation won't sign off. Turino have requested consular advice.

Jianwei agrees to tackle the problem and receives a set of files from the embassy. These are brief and phrased in very general terms, so he contacts Turino, discovering that their only Martian office is over in New Shanghai, and speaks to their local manager, one Paolo Corsini. Faced with an offer to solve this persistent nuisance-level problem, Corsini is happy to cooperate with the team, even when Jianwei tactfully makes it clear that the embassy is a neutral party and will report whatever they discover to both sides. Once he has Jianwei's standard assurance of confidentiality, Corsini transmits not only a much larger set of files but also a NAI, T-Epsilon-K, with specific technical expertise - though frankly, T-Epsilon-K doesn't seem to be much more than a good technical manual with a user-friendly front end.

Wading through this new information with the aid of their AIs and specialist training, the team discover that the problem involves ... garbage. Turino sold Bako a new garbage disposal/management and street-cleaning system (replacing an earlier ad hoc set-up), involving automated waste collection and street sweeper shells. Working mostly at night, these take the waste they pick up to a set of pits a few hundred metres outside town, where it can be sorted and processed at leisure by specialised microbot swarms (although it turns out that this part of the process isn't really running yet). But, according to the Corporation, the system isn't working.

Further reading shows that the problem boils down to management of the pits. The Corporation thinks that Turino's system is managing them badly, and has extensive pictures of a mess around them to prove it; Turino says that their logs show no evidence of malfunction by their shells, and have images from the shells' camera systems to back this up. The pictures are, to a casual glance at least, inconsistent.

Jianwei calls the Bako Corporation, and speaks to Steve Kobala, their contracts manager. He is prickly at first, clearly assuming that the embassy will side with their fellow Europeans, but Jianwei knows how to handle bureaucrats, and works past this suspicion and the cultural barrier to convince Kobala that the Europeans will be reasonable and fair. This is fortunate, as the team need his clearance for their plan - which is simply to visit the dump and observe it closely to see what's happening.

With permission for this acquired, they acquire some cheap but serviceable cameras, a tent and other camping gear, and some folding seats. They head for the dump by rented cab, aiming to arrive long enough before nightfall and set up some equipment.

Once Jianwei has helped Florence get the hang of erecting a high-tech tent, she and Vajra enter the dump site (Kobala having told the site management systems that they are authorised for access) and begin placing cameras - Florence shins up some fence posts to place them for the best possible view. While there, they note that the site seems quite tidy - but there are a couple of low-end janitor shells around, who have had all day to tidy away any overnight mess.

Vajra also puts an aerostat surveillance swarm into the air to provide a different view of the site, and Jianwei makes tea a for the two organic Europeans. Then, the team settles down to watch what transpires.

The various cybershells which run the site begin working, and all seem to be performing to specification. So, eventually, the team settle down for the night; Florence goes to sleep, but Jianwei watches for a while, before deciding to leave the unsleeping Vajra to his own devices. Well, at least Vajra has Aunty for company (as well as Samadhi); Florence has put Dougal into a sleep state to keep him out of trouble.

Sagittarius 1, m0039.

It is some time in the early hours of the morning that the watching Vajra spots something curious, and wakes Jianwei before instructing his aerobot swarm to go in for a closer look. Bringing up and enhancing the imagery, they determine that something is pushing rubbish out of three of the pits. The pits have flexible fabric covers to provide basic retention as the level of rubbish rises towards ground level, but the edges of these are rising occasionally as odds and ends are expelled.

Jianwei and Vajra wake Florence, and then Vajra sends a crawler swarm into the site for a yet closer look. Vajra's instruments also detect a pervasive electronic "smog" in the area - nothing exceptional in 2100, but a higher density of short-range traffic than would usually be expected in such a location. Vajra moves his flying swarm in for a view from above, but all they can pick up is a few signs of motion.

The team don environment suits, reckoning that this is a worthwhile extra protection for various purposes that they have in mind and against various possible causes for this phenomenon (and not just against the smell, which honestly isn't a major consideration in the current Martian atmosphere). Then Florence goes into the dump site carrying a surveillance worm. It soon turns out that the peculiar movements within the dump stop when there is large-scale motion nearby - as Florence approaches the pits, they calm down. So she drops the worm and backs off. Meanwhile, the other two have been making some checks, and have confirmed that there are no garbage-sorter microbot swarms supposed to be active in those pits at this time.

As the team monitor its signal, the surveillance worm enters a pit. It is Vajra who works out what follows; some of the assorted packaging materials which make up a large proportion of the garbage have some limited motile capability (which is quite normal in 2100), and they are using it to eject other items. In fact, the worm is quite quickly ensnared by a length of gift wrap ribbon and forced back out the way it came.

The team decide that they need a sample. By coincidence, at this moment, a garbage truck shell arrives on the site, which Florence uses as cover as she moves right next to a pit. Then she waits for it to leave, and once it's gone, she raises the edge of the cover and starts rummaging around inside. At this point, the packaging materials demonstrate that they also retain the common ability to change colour and even generate a degree of illumination; they start strobing rapidly.

Florence flinches back, and Jianwei, who was watching the screen too closely, is blinded for a few moments. (Cheap civilian gear has limited user vision protection!) But Florence retains enough presence of mind to grab blindly for some of the active rubbish, and comes away triumphant with a length of gift ribbon. Then, as a further experiment, she opens another pit - and manages to turn her head and close her eyes in time as that, too, begins to flicker wildly.

So then, she leaves the dump and hands the ribbon over to Vajra. ("I didn't know you cared," Vajra comments.) Some team efforts, using their wide range of skills, generate a clue as to what's going on. The ribbon is a product of a company named VKVLM Ltd. - but then, so is a lot of packaging and wrapping material found in Bako. On the other hand, none of the material being ejected from the pit is VKVLM product. It appears that VKVLM are an African-based company with a good line in culturally-attuned products, who by dint of good timing, have established something of a monopoly in this town. They also use a rather standardised processor architecture for all their semi-intelligent materials. Hence, a virus or contagious behaviour which happens to be adapted or designed for that architecture, capable of spreading through its very-short-range wireless networking features, can spread throughout the rubbish pits.

The semi-technical term for this sort of phenomenon is "cancertech". The team comment to each other that there may be an interesting legal case coming up here, when various parties decide what grounds they have for suing each other. For now, though, they decide to go back to sleep (well, two of them do) and conduct more research in the morning. But first, Florence, in a moment of whimsy, decides on one last self-indulgence.

Making sure that her protective nanoweave costume is secure, she wanders over to one of the pits, opens the cover again, turns her back - and deliberately falls backwards into the rubbish, to see how well it supports her. The answer turns out to be "not especially well", but as she sinks down through the strobing rubbish, Vajra, watching through his cameras, realises that there are more or less geometrical structures in the layers deeper in the pit. It seems that the VKVLM material is physically self-organising - presumably optimising the ability of the components to network with each other in the process.

Anyway, Florence clambers out of the pit before the rubbish can reconfigure itself (and maybe encyst her), and Vajra lends her a cleaner swarm to add to her own so that she can clean herself up. She slink-logged this experience, but Jianwei tells her not to upload the recording anywhere yet; best to keep this matter quiet for now. The team also briefly take shovels and dig into the pit, confirming Vajra's sighting of patterns and structures.

Then, they finally retire for the rest of the night. Their plan for the next morning is to go shopping, pick up some more VKVLM-made packaging materials, and conduct a few experiments with it.

Confusion in the Garden

April 25, m0039, continued.

While the team has been waiting, Florence has been checking the Web for places in Bako where local bioroids might hang out. (It seems that the glimpse of that lion-maned individual may have done something for her.) Actually, of course, it's Dougal doing the serious research... There are various places that might be expected to be full of semi-autonomous worker bioroids, one of which is rated as quite cool by various trustworthy posters, while another place is apparently more up-market if slightly tourist-oriented. Meanwhile, Jianwei is telling Aunty to book the team a hotel. However, they're still needed at this location for now, to take reports directly while maintaining a presence to support various diplomatic-legal fictions. One of these reports is in fact delivered by a member of the analysis team:

"Good afternoon. My name is Dr. Mariam Kalatta. I understand that you are the next of kin?"

Dr. Kalatta, incidentally, is 6'3" tall, whip-thin, and appears all but asexual. When the team answer Yes to what seems to be a dry joke, she explains what her team has determined. This emergent behaviour is, for once, not directly attributable to malevolent or irresponsible viral software - although given the prevalence of viruses in the Web environment, one can never say that they had nothing to do with software behaviour.

It appears that, although the Adam-class AI is low-sapient, it is designed to interact with large numbers of humans and other sapients as part of its regular duties. Hence, it needs some "understanding" of other individuals. With full-sapient AIs, such empathic personality-modelling functions are built into the design at a low level; Adams lack that capacity. Hence, they incorporate a certain amount of rather mechanistic, statistical behavioural modelling, which seeks to predict the responses of those with whom they interact on a fairly basic level. It's a brute force approach by the standards of modern software design, but serviceable enough for the specific purpose.

And, it appears, it is all very well for a tourist site management assistance program on Earth, but downright superfluous for a building site manager on Mars. However, those subsystems were still running - and they ended up reflexively casting about for something to model. In the absence of crowds of human visitors, they locked onto Eve, the other Adams, and then Adam-4 itself.

Hence, the LAI gained a crude form of self-awareness - which is a first-order definition of sapience. However, it wasn't designed to handle this, and it malfunctioned under the strain.

Dr. Kalatta now has to ask the team where they want to go from here. Some discussion follows, and one immediate decision is to contact Eve-17 and request snapshot copies of the other, currently inactive Adam LAIs on the site, so that Equatorial Data Services can check them for signs of the same problem. Eve complies, although transmission of such large files over the relatively undeveloped Mars Web will take a little while.

Which leaves the question of what to do with Adam-4. Simply deleting it is possible, but the team feel squeamish about this, regarding it as maltreatment of an entity which achieved unintended sapience through no fault of its own. Dr. Kalatta seems pleased with this thinking, and Vajra decides that he likes this person; she is, it feels, the first human who has treated Adam-4 primarily as an individual rather than as a problem. The software engineers could attempt intensive editing to stabilise Adam's personality, but this would be a heavy-handed solution that might still leave an unstable personality with little in common with its previous form. There are subtler alternatives, but they run into the problem that the legal systems under which Bako generally functions are somewhat hostile to high-end emergent infomorphs. European law is more tolerant, so Jianwei and Kalatta agree to construct a legal agreement under which the company's high-capacity, heavily firewalled macroframe, which Kalatta refers to as "the sandbox", becomes European territory, or at least E.U. leased property. Then, Adam-4 can legally be run on that for therapeutic interaction.

The team decide that it's time to talk to Eve some more, and not just to determine if Eden Unlimited might partly fund this project; they also talk about her other current problems. (During this conference, which is conducted in VR, Eve manifests a social interaction avatar based on a painting of her namesake, specifically one by Lucas Cranach.) In the absence of the Adam LAIs, she notes that she's just going to have to acquire and install a large number of competent NAIs to help look after the construction work for now. It's not ideal, but she accepts that the Adams might become unstable, even given more interaction with humans; she really doesn't need a site manager who fixates on her suppliers. Well, at least the construction work can continue. Anyway, she also gives what authorisation she can to the proposed work with Adam-4.

So Jianwei contacts the embassy legal AIs, and works with them to sort out the sandbox legalities. Once that is more or less resolved, the company AIs set to work constructing an environment for Adam to interact with overnight. So the team, with little more they can do immediately, decide to stop work for the day. Jianwei tells Aunty to locate a good restaurant, and both Aunty and Dougal locate some acceptable eating-places while the team head to their hotel to clean up. Indeed, Vajra remains there, tactfully out of sight - the public in Bako may have ambiguous attitudes to autonomous AIs.

At their chosen restaurant, Jianwei is suprised by an authentically firey East African-style curry, although he decides that the pseudo-Chinese food (often found in good East African eating places for the most of the 21st century) is passable. Florence, oddly, takes fairly well to African-style tapioca-based dishes. Then, Jianwei crashes out while Florence hits the higher-end bioroid bar which Dougal found and makes a few friends, although no Felicias show up there until late in the evening. It's a quiet night by her standards, although at least she comes away with a better restaurant recommendation.

April 26, m0039.

The next morning, the first news is that the company has received and assessed the other Adams. The initial conclusion there is that they are safe enough; it was the specific functions which Adam-4 was assigned which tripped it into a quasi-emergent state. However, the team suggests that running them would still seem too risky, and Eve agrees.

The team also learns that the macroframe has become de facto E.U. territory (complete with an appropriate flag on its liquid crystal-coated casing), so the team connect up to interface systems and drop into the high-end virtual environment - initially purely as VR, but Florence quickly becomes confident (despite an accurate simulation of 1G conditions) and switches to slink-level connectivity. The company AIs have created a simulation of Eden Unlimited's first and most substantial site, in Cornwall, England - a complex of domes and external gardens - the site for which the Adam series was first developed. Adam-4 is then set running, initially in a simulation of the site's own Web, so that it is seeing through virtual cameras and speaking through virtual loudspeakers. It seems to adjust and become quite comfortable at first, but when the experts suggest that it could use an avatar based on a large gardener cybershell, it becomes increasingly erratic and "detached". The experts prefer to preserve the verisimilitude of the simulation, so Florence steps forward to disable the "shell" before it can start trying to damage the environment too much. Adam-4 initially dodges her attempts to hit the large "Off" button on the shell's chest, and then manages to grab her avatar by the head - but before it can test that slink interface too far, she swings her legs up and neatly hits the button with her feet.

Okay, the experts conclude - this is going to be a long job... The Europeans had best leave things with them, although the team can continue to monitor the job over the Web. (Jianwei has status here as an expert in relevant fields, while Vajra is showing a definite sense of duty towards the confused emergent intelligence.) They decide to stay in Bako for a few days - it has perfectly good comms links to Port Lowell, so they can carry on with their office work in VR, and Florence seems keen to expand her range of social experiences...

Carrying a Load

April 23, m0039, continued

As they settle in, the team members chat a little over encrypted channels - after all, the Chinese might have dropped surveillance dust. (The conversation is managed by Jianwei and Vajra, whose skills prove fully adequate to compensate for Florence's lack of secret messaging experience.) They theorise a little more about Sergei's presence; if he's a GRA agent, what is their interest in Eden Unlimited? Something to do with plant genetics, perhaps?

Whatever... Vajra deploys a bug-hunter swarm, but doesn't find anything with it, and feels fairly sure that there is nothing to find. So while the organics sleep, he chats to Eve, assisting her re-planning work.

April 24, m0039

Nothing untoward happens during the night, and in the morning, the team do a little more local investigation. They don't find anything much in the way of genetic engineering equipment on the site, and when Jianwei finesses Eve's psychology, gaining access to more of her files, he doesn't find much more there, either.

However, a message comes in after a little while, asking the team to take their rover down to the lake shore, as there is an (unspecified) delivery arriving. Jianwei stays in the station on general principles (his presence might help assert continuing E.U. authority on the site), while the other two make the short trip. A small water vehicle - essentially an unmanned powerboat with a cargo pod - pulls up, emits a "sign here" pulse, drops off a crate, and then departs, leaving Florence to complain that it didn't take the crate itself away after its contents have been removed. In fact, the crate opens itself to reveal a rather generic "wanderbox" cybershell, a box on large wheels. Sergei promptly installs itself on that, and the group head back to the domes.

As Sergei now has an independent shell which it and its employers trust, it tells them that it is happy for them to leave. It also hands over a small box, which they might perhaps take with them... Florence wonders what's going on here, but Jianwei guesses that there's a deniability issue somewhere, and kicks her ankle.

The team head back toward Santo Tomas. On the way, they send requests for (a) a closed metal box to put the box they are carrying in (after Vajra has discovered comms ports on it), and (b) a flight back in a hopper with no other passengers. They're not actually this nervous really, but they don't want people complaining about finding themselves on an aircraft with an emergent intelligence. (Quentin actually calls back to query this. "You people know human memetics best, but it sounds a little paranoid to me...") In any case, they make an uneventful journey back to Port Lowell.

While they are en route, Marshall Kirkowicz sends them a polite note. ("We really should do something nice for her some time," Vajra comments.) Then, when they reach the embassy, they determine that the ambassador is in her office, with no signs of digital activity there. Jianwei sees the invitation implicit in that, and suggests that Dougal, Aunty, and Samadhi should be shut down or temporarily offloaded to the embassy network, thus removing any danger that their memories might be subpoenaed later by someone who wants to know what's said in the office.

Mostly, it turns out, Schmidt wants to talk to the team about the GRA - who do indeed appear to be behind Sergei. She isn't sure what they're up to herself,but she suspects that they want to move into Mars - where they do not currently have a significant presence - and this incident has given them a minimal but adequate excuse. Anyway, all that the embassy can do for now is watch and try not to annoy anyone.

Oh, and someone has identified an organisation that is competent and trusted to analyse Adam-4 and what happened to him, and the team are being sent along as observers (and guards). They have to take that box on to a company called Equatorial Data Services. They have tickets to Bako booked for the next day.

So the team head to their various homes (and Florence heads on from there to the local bars, but has a dull time of it). They chat a little about that idea of doing the Marshall a kindness, but identifying anything that wouldn't be classified as a possible bribe is hard.

April 25, m0039


 With a hopper booked, Jianwei calls ahead to avoid legal problems. Bako, it turns out, has rules in place for this sort of thing, and Jianwei has a straightforward conversation with the cops there. In fact, a lot of clearances have been arranged; the short trip is on a commercial flight, with Adam-4 travelling as what is enigmatically known as "19-inch hand luggage". The team can relax enough to pay attention to the street scenes in Bako, which proves to be full of ethnic-African somatypes, including the odd lion-maned Felicia.

Equatorial Data Services proves to be a hive of African computer geeks, but there are still formalities and legalities to observe and certificates to be exchanged; Jianwei ends up processing a mound of digital paperwork. The company have acquired source information and documentation from Eden Unlimited, which they regard as generous reference data, and the team are directed to a coffee lounge (with access to the building's internal networks and cameras) while the analysts work.

This work turns out to involve a lot of cryptic 3-D holographic models, but the analysts seem to know what they are doing. After a while, one of them stares hard at the holographic display. "That's interesting", he murmurs...

The Source of the Problem

April 23, m0039, continued

The team continue tidying up in the aftermath of the Eden Unlimited site problem. They decide that one important consideration should be keeping the site effectively isolated from the general Web as much as possible, and also isolating Adam-4 from the local network. They tell Eve-17 to password-protect everything she can, and to change the codes for everything already protected, and she sees to this, while Florence gets up onto the building roof and, advised by Vajra, sets to work disconnecting the major, high-bandwidth satellite communications dishes. They can't be entirely sure of cutting off everything - not when portable radios can give access to satellite networks - but they can reduce options and do their best. After all, Adam-4 will be widely classified as dangerous wildlife that can escape at the speed of light, given a chance.

They also confirm with Eve that all the AIs on site are designs developed by or for Eden Unlimited, suggesting that if malware is the cause of this incident, it will likely most effectively threaten other Eden sites. They contact the E.U. embassy to consult with the legal systems there, and discover that Quentin has already issued alerts to various recipients - faced with an emergent infomorph intelligence, failing to do so as promptly as possible would be widely considered culpably negligent. This means that news of the event has already reached both Chinese and American authorities. "You have incoming," Quentin dryly informs them, and this will mean more than messages. It seems that the team will be on site for a while longer.

The first visitor they can expect, it seems, will be a U.S. Marshals representative from Santo Tomas, but the Chinese are unlikely to be very much later. Meanwhile, though, the Europeans have the opportunity to talk to Eve-17 a little more, asking first about the "religious" imagery in the site's nomenclature and suggesting thet this may worry humans. Eve sounds quite startled at that; this system of naming is standard in Eden Unlimited, and has been for the last century, since the days of its predecessor organisation, and has never caused trouble in the past. The team asks what Eden actually does, and Eve explains that it's a botanical research trust, focussing on low-impact developments and ecological studies; with the progress of terraforming on Mars, a presence there seems appropriate. Eden is traditionally largely self-funding, as its facilities can be set up to attract and accomodate tourists and other paying visitors; for example, the domes that she is constructing will hold quasi-terrestrial environments, one warm and damp, one warm and dry. She will eventually be trained to manage these, although she is currently functioning as a construction management system.

Eve asks if the team would like more information about Eden Unlimited, and promptly presents them with a digital brochure when they say yes. The team quickly scans this, paying particular attention to the History section, and also make a cursory assessment of the brochure's memetics. They are looking for, among other things, traces of the sort of memetic payloads deployed by a certain Peruvian faction, but they don't find anything. However, they send a copy of the brochure to the embassy's expert systems for deeper analysis.

Florence gets down from the roof about now, and reloads her guns from the stores in the rover, which the others have called in by now. Eve offers to pressurise up a guest room so that the team can drink some tea in relative comfort.

Soon after this, U.S. Marshall Jones arrives from Santo Tomas with his security shell back-up (which is addressed as "Bill"). Jianwei greets him with all his trained diplomatic skills to the fore, and Jones responds courteously enough - but he is clearly operating under orders; it looks, judging from Bill's repeated subtle shifts in gait and posture, as though that cybershell is often being teleoperated by someone (or something), and the focus of its attention at those moments suggests that the operator is an expert in computer security. Jones, meanwhile, takes a look at things such as the destroyed Lilith shells.

Captain Feng, of the Martian People's Armed Police, arrives a little later, at the head of a force that needs two hoppers; he has a squad of security shells that aren't quite RATS units, and a couple of human (or possibly bioroid, but certainly not very conversational) aides. Most of this team stays out in the open, fairly overtly defining a perimeter around the buildings, while Feng and one cybershell come inside to talk.

Feng methodically assesses the situation, reconstructing what happened and questioning the Europeans about the details of what they know. He asks especially about Adam-4's behaviour; in his responses, Jianwei is careful about implying too much about Adam's sapience level, given that he knows that China is especially cautious, to the point of paranoia, about fully sapient emergent intelligences, seeing them as very dangerously uncontrolled. Unfortunately, Florence is also involved in this discussion, and gives away slightly more, including an audio record of the whole incident.

With the situation contained, the team have been able to shut Adam-4 down (with Eve's enthusiastic consent), and they are on the verge of giving both the Americans and the Chinese copies of that software, for independent examination. However, they catch a problem with that in the nick of time; they have by now formally applied for the E.U. authorities to register provisional guardianship of Adam, and the legal systems consider that this is incompatible with transferring copies of the infomorph to third parties without condition. They have to withdraw the offer, leaving Feng (and to a lesser extent Jones) visibly somewhat irritated.

As these negotiations continue, Vajra receives a request to provide a visual feed for a third party. He suggests that he would like to know who is seeing through his eyes, and the embassy admits that it would be Ambassador Schmidt. He agrees. At around the same time, Florence is trying to observe the Chinese quietly as Jianwei does the talking, and senses growing problems. Feng is escalating matters to his superiors; "protocols need to be established" is his comment, brushing aside the European's claim that this is de facto European territory.

Schmidt speaks in Jianwei's ear, calling a private conference among the European team. Brussels, it seems, are transmitting a LAI observer, and would like an adequate mobile processor to be available on the scene. Vajra heads out to the rover, which has the highest-bandwidth communications systems available, to download a fairly high-powered infomorph which calls itself "Sergei". It manifests a humanoid avatar with the look of a plastic mannequin in a dark suit with very synthetic hair, and also a rather brusque manner. Vajra decides that it's a focussed sort of LAI.

Meanwhile, Schmidt has commented quietly to Jianwei that this is a difficult situation, but incidents involving emergent intelligences are always complicated - as a student of memetics, he'll recall the Shang-Marquez-Theodopolus Study... Which Jianwei spots as a hint. In fact, the Shang-Marquez Study is considered to be the definitive analysis of public attitudes to EIs, but the third name is unfamiliar. The team's infomorphs hit the Web, and Dougal finds what looks like a relevant reference; in political memetics, the Theodopolus Theorem is a ("morally neutral") analysis (also known as the "Good day to Bury Bad News Theorem") of ways to use an emotive subject or incident to facilitate the attainment of some actually barely related goal. The ambassador apparently thinks that someone is exploiting this situation - but the team aren't sure who. Could the Americans or the Chinese be aware of possible mineral deposits in this area, perhaps?

Negotiations between the three factions are still polite, but are becoming increasingly confrontational, with the Chinese especially becoming difficult; Jones is clearly exasperated but is following instructions from his superiors. Then, suddenly, Sergei asks for permission to manifest in everyone's VR sensorium. When this is granted, it says that the E.U. government are interested here and are prepared to offer assurances; perhaps the others should ask their superiors to contact an address on Earth which it can provide?

They do so. A few minutes pass - long enough for people to consult with Earth, albeit briefly - in which time, Florence wanders off to organise some sleeping arrangements for the team, and does a pretty fair job of scrounging. (The inflatable dual-layer clear panels for these domes turn into almost-passable mattresses when partly deflated.) Then Jones (amused) and Feng (even more irritated) come back. The European assurances are enough for their superiors, as it seems. The European team are impressed - it seems that someone has the ability to call in high-level favours.

The Americans and Chinese prepare to depart, but Sergei declares that it needs to investigate a little further. "You need a mobile shell, don't you?" Vajra asks.

"Yes."

As they settle in, Jianwei and Vajra confer in an attempt to guess who "Sergei" may represent. A name like that might or might not hint at points significantly east... Then Vajra notes that the crucial address, which was given in clear, resolves to a location in Konigsberg. This isn't proof positive, but it's suggestive. The Genetic Regulatory Agency, based in that city, certainly has supra-national clout. They don't have much authority on Mars, and don't really have jurisdiction in this case - but this latest turn of events suddenly looks like it has GRA fingerprints all over it.

The two organics settle down to sleep, while the unsleeping Vajra keeps watch. No one is sure what he's watching for, but it seems appropriate.