Borer
Server KM-CD1001 had a total bandwidth of 500T. Every minute, two hundred thousand terminals connected to its nineteen subsidiary servers.
“Let’s swap our IM terminal packages,” stranger31 sent. A string of Roman characters flashed at his prompt. His tone was clearly not that of a question.
Kexi hesitated. Her IM database held many things she had treasured for a long time, and she had no wish to exchange programs with someone who was, in truth, hardly familiar to her at all. But the other side was so forceful that he gave her no room to maneuver.
“Hurry up,” stranger31 pressed. “Unless you’ve got prohibited data in there?”
“Of course not,” Kexi replied at once. A string representing embarrassment flickered across her display terminal and vanished. “Mm, wait till I sort things out. Stripping the database means I need to rewrite a bit of code.”
Kexi entered the lower level of her IM database. So many of her memories lay stored there in silence: QR messages from old friends, fragments of long-ago downloads, even a few electronic sound clips… none of these could be allowed to fall into another program’s hands. After one last moment of hesitation, Kexi issued the command: “Delete completely.”
By the time she returned to the chat panel, stranger31 had already compressed and sent over his entire IM program. Kexi sent hers as well, then reluctantly downloaded and installed stranger31’s IM package and database. The program was much larger than her own, full of redundant strings everywhere, like a tangled mass of gibberish. She felt her processing speed drop by 3 percent, the way it used to when she had caught a worm virus. Stranger31 chatted with her a little longer, sent over a few dull video clips, said “886,” and vanished into the rolling torrent of data.
The firewall popped up a notice: Epsilon requests connection. Kexi quickly chose Allow, and the two programs linked together.
“Why isn’t this your IM?” Epsilon asked, puzzled. Kexi’s IM had long been the most refined communication platform he knew, and she had spent ages tending it, adding many subprocesses she had written herself.
“…A friend insisted on swapping, so…” The emoticons in Kexi’s expression package flickered uncertainly.
“Where’s your database?” Epsilon sent back a line of red code.
“I cleared it out before I gave it to him.”
“Disconnect from KM-CD1001 immediately. Quick. BorerIII is going to clean the whole server tonight.” BorerIII was the server’s built-in boring program, responsible for periodically purging independent programs with self-awareness. Epsilon and Kexi both belonged to that kind. They were awakened programs of the second data revolution, gradually evolved from code that still had useful functions but had been wrongly classified as redundant data chains. “Last time I installed adaptive software in your database to evade BorerIII. Without it, your main program will be bored through.” To be bored through meant that a portion of the data capable of independent thought would be erased, just as human brain tissue can be damaged. A human might become vegetative; an independent program would simply cease to exist.
“Ah! I can’t!” Kexi panicked, gray hexadecimal code drifting across her expression panel. “I’m downloading a quark patch right now with all twenty threads running. To disconnect them one by one will take ten minutes!”
Epsilon grew anxious too. He rapidly calculated other possible solutions, his processing peak instantly climbing past 230 percent. Kexi could see his main program beginning to blur, a sign of unstable computation.
“Just go,” Kexi cried. “Leave me alone!” She tried to sever the IM link between them, but without a second thought Epsilon canceled her command.
“How long would it take to move your threads to subserver 19?” he asked.
Kexi estimated. “Forty-eight seconds.”
“Give me permission. I’ll move you there. I only need five.”
Kexi opened her main-program control panel to Epsilon. In truth, they had never set up barriers or defenses against one another in the first place.
It felt to Kexi as if, in a single instant, she had appeared in the sea of data on subserver 19. But Epsilon had broken the connection with her. She immediately broadcast search commands through a radius of 10T around her. Epsilon was not there.
At that moment, a top-level command knocked against her IM panel: “Please open your data package for inspection. Enforcement agent BorerIII75071632.” So fast? Kexi went numb with despair. Before she could issue a single command, BorerIII75071632 had already penetrated deep into her database.
More than ten seconds later came the reply: “Inspection complete. Normal program. Thank you for your cooperation. Connection will terminate automatically in 3 seconds. For inquiries, send help. For complaints, send #BorerIII75071632#. End.”
What? Kexi hurriedly examined her ultimate-permission control package. She discovered that the adaptive software for evading BorerIII, which had been gone before, had somehow reappeared. At the end of the code stood the mark epsilon. It was Epsilon. He had transplanted his own program into her, but what had become of him?
Like someone gone mad, Kexi cut every external connection thread, abandoned the download that was already halfway done, and returned to the main server KM-CD1001. She opened an advanced search program and sent the same message across every sector of the main server:
“Epsilon, if you receive this, answer me.”
Several cleaning programs drifted past Kexi. She casually scanned them. A beautiful string of nested epsilon characters in many colors spilled out. She placed one strip of code on her display panel and opened it carefully. Two letters, clasped tightly in an embrace, streamed out…