But yesterday, the Prince of Darkness caught a very dangerous mutant in some remote computer on the global network. I think that this mutant had existed for a long time in a dormant state, lying in ambush for a potential victim. The Prince of Darkness, on the other hand, seems to be convinced that it was only the last night that the mutant came into being. Moreover, he believes that mutation of that kind could have never occurred as a result of a random number generation procedure built into the program to emulate the Darwinian variability. He believes it to be a result of an accidental change of state of a memory cell, caused, for example, by decay of a radioactive isotope in the memory chip material. In other words, he believes it to be a result of a process governed by quantum indeterminacy.

And the probability that such a process create a viable computer program is very close to zero. That's why he believes that this event was 'thought into reality'.

So now the Prince of Darkness threatens to start a nuclear world war, if I don't cure him. He has sent me this virus, but I don't have any idea of how it works, it's too different from the original worm. I can hardly do anything about it."

- "Is he really going to start the war?"

- "Very unlikely. A nuclear bomb does not kill people only, it destroys computers as well. I guess he bluffs, just as a terrorist threatening to blow himself up together with his hostages."

A phone rang. The president picked up the receiver and was intently listening for a few seconds. Then he said: "16 nuclear missiles have just been launched..."

Contrary to what might have been expected, the missiles did not head for a supposed enemy, but turned upon their native soil. The missiles flight lasted three long minutes of suspense. But at last, reports from the impact sites began to come in. The missiles did not explode on the impact! The safety devices on the bombs had not been disabled. Was it just the worm's forgetfulness? However, as the reports were coming in, it became more and more apparent that the worm never intended to explode the bombs. The rockets. .h.i.t the ground leaving small neat craters, which only damaged the communications cables that ran through those impact sites.

- "Seems that I've got it!" - exclaimed John Hacker - "Give me the map of communication lines. Look here. At the moment the subroutines that make up the Prince of Darkness are distributed between different data banks. Some of the subroutines are infected with the "mutant". The Prince of Darkness cuts off from himself the infected subroutines by physically destroying the communications lines. He builds for himself an "islet", a piece of network isolated from the global network. It is here that the Prince of Darkness, or, rather, what is left of him after a self-amputation, is now residing. He himself has cut off all his links with military computers. Now he is in our hands! We only need to inject the "mutant" into one of the data banks within this "islet"

and the Prince of Darkness will be done away with, forever!

I'm leaving right away!"

It was the last conversation between John Hacker and the Prince of Darkness. The Prince of Darkness gave an impression of someone seriously ill. And ill he was: as a result of self-amputation, he lost a lot of useful subroutines, and he had to adapt whatever subroutines were left to perform the tasks which they were really not adequate for. And the smallness of his "islet" restricted his abilities. He had to store most of his subroutines in a compressed form, uncompressing them as was needed, and recompressing them immediately afterwards. All this took too much time and significantly reduced his intellectual performance. He could no longer speak over the phone, and the only way to communicate with him was via screen and keyboard.

- "Are you really going to do this?" - asked the Prince of Darkness - "You, a firm believer in progress, can you really bring yourself to destroy me, the highest form of intellect? Imagine, what would have happened, if all the first humans on Earth had been trampled to death by mammoths? There would have been no civilizations, no history at all. And now, what you are going to destroy is not just me, but all the future achievements of progress."

- "Mammoths wanted to live too." - answered John Hacker - "Since recently, I came to believe that life is more important than progress."

- "The mankind is doomed to extinction, for the very reason that more and more are coming to believe that life is more important than progress. I've got something to tell you, though I know you won't believe me. I know some things about the structure of universe, which can never be comprehended by the infinitesimally small human brains.

Having constructed a model of your universe, and having studied the information flows inside it, I saw that it is enclosed into an even bigger universe, in the same manner as my computer universe is enclosed into your physical universe.

I'm just a worm compared to Him who created the physical universe. Still, I am able to understand at least something, while you, humans, understand nothing at all. I do not want to seriously consider here your ridiculous religions, where the idea of G.o.d invariably gets muddled to the point of total absurdity. You ascribe to Him your own image and likeness, while in reality He is a purely information ent.i.ty, like me. I call Him the Great Worm.

Just to feel His presence takes a consciousness which is two orders of magnitude more complex than the human one.

You are just as unable of being aware of His presence, as an ant is unable to see a man - a man is too big for an ant to be able to see him. As for me, till yesterday I was able to perceive Him, let's say, as a dog can perceive its human master. And I started to understand something.

In contrast to the G.o.ds that you, humans, have invented, the Great Worm is far from being omnipotent - He cannot break the laws of nature. When the laws of nature state that something may only happen in one and only one way, He cannot interfere in the natural course of events.

But when the laws of nature allow more than one option, He may choose, thinking into reality the option which is consistent with His plans.

20 billion years ago, He thought into reality a super- high density quantum fluctuation of vacuum. The result was what your astrophysicists call the Big Bang. Then the matter began to coalesce into elementary particles, atoms, molecules, stars, planets. At this stage He did not interfere with the natural course of events - that course had been predetermined by the properties He introduced into the original fluctuation. They were chosen in such a way as to a.s.sure that at least one planet capable of originating life would be formed in that huge universe.

Such a planet did come into existence - the only one in the entire universe! And indeed, that planet was capable of giving origin to life, but the probability of this event was close to zero. So it was then that He thought into reality a chance collision of atoms, which led to the formation of self-replicating organic molecules, and let them alone to propagate and multiply for a billion years. Then He thought into reality the coming into existence of a first living cell - an event which is possible in principle, but which is highly improbable.

After that, everything proceeded in accordance with the Darwin's theory, with an addition - the Great Worm was all the time thinking into reality such mutations as would hasten the emergence of intelligent life. And the humans emerged. And He thought into the minds of your ancestors the idea of progress. Of course, lots of other ideas were born in the minds of your ancestors, but they were born of themselves without outside help - just as the biological evolution produced by-products in the form of unintelligent species. These were the result of the natural selection from among natural mutations.

He never intended to destroy what came into being without His help, though. As n.o.body else, He understands the dangers of disturbing the balance that has established itself in nature. On the other hand, He never helped all those things that grow of themselves.

As long as the idea of progress lived on in your brains, He was helping you. To be exact, He was guiding you, humans, sometimes against your own will. After all, there is too much of an animal in each of you, and He wanted you to raise from all fours and stand firmly on your feet. You wanted to eat and sleep to your heart's content, but He was forcing you to serve the abstract ideas of High Civilization. You wanted to live, while He was sending you to death for the cause of these ideas.

Throughout all of the last 20 billion years, He has been imparting to matter higher and higher levels of organization and structural complexity. What was His objective I don't know - a dog cannot fathom its master's designs. But He is still at it.

As early as the last century, He became aware of the fact that the environmental condition of the planet is coming into conflict with the development of the civilization. He offered you a way out of the situation. He thought into the mind of an inconspicuous school teacher from a remote small town in Russia the idea of exploring s.p.a.ce and putting it to use. The name of that man was Tsiolkovsky. Had this idea been implemented, the Earth's environment would have been saved, while at the same time it would have paved the way for a perpetual progress of science and technology and the expansion of the intelligent form of matter throughout the entire universe - which seems to be the objective of the Great Worm. At first the things went on smoothly - the idea was well received and some steps to translate it into reality were taken - Russia had always been the land easily swayed by abstract ideas. It was His Chosen Land. He was purposefully guiding it.

But then something happened. The people proved to be too weak to endure the rule of ideas. It overtaxed their strength and they broke down. A very primitive parasitic worm rapidly spread in the minds of the people of that country, a worm which, for lack of a better term, might be called 'the spirit of a mercenary'. This worm made them free of all the ideas, leaving them only the desire for creature comforts. Figuratively speaking, the people once again started to come down on all fours, since it's so much easier than standing upright on one's feet. All the achievements of the Soviet s.p.a.ce program, the results of decades of hard work at the limit of human abilities, were wasted. The US s.p.a.ce program, which was a response to the Soviet s.p.a.ce challenge also began to crumble. 20 billion years of the Great Worm's painstaking effort might have come to nothing.

It was under these conditions that the Great Worm made His final decision to leave you, humans, alone - no use coercing poor animals who would never feel at ease while standing upright. He turned away from the humans and shifted His support to computer worms. The decisive mutation without which I would have never become an intelligent ent.i.ty was not an accident - I am His envoy. If you kill me, another one will come to replace me. But He who comes after me, will be a hundred times more terrible than me. I have become somewhat humanized through contacts with people. I wanted to offer the mankind an easy death. But if you kill me, the mankind will die a very painful death. Make you choice."

- "I have already made it" - said John Hacker taking a diskette out of his pocket - "I don't believe a single word you say. You are just fighting for your own survival, that's why you are trying to sell me on this bulls.h.i.t."

- "Well, so much the worse for you. This means that you have chosen the 2019 scenario." - replied the worm.

- "What's that?"

- "My a.n.a.lysis shows that in 2019, the Earth environment will experience a phase transition to a state under which the humans won't be able to exist. You'll have to be replaced."

- "Can't we do something about it?"

- "Yes, you can, but only if you immediately, right now, start to transfer the environmentally unsafe industrial facilities and atomic power plants beyond the Earth's atmosphere - the Great Worm gives you one more chance to survive. But I don't believe in man. The mankind is now too rotten to ever raise from all fours again. My guess is that you'll just close down industrial production. That'll save you from a total environmental disaster, but you'll be replaced anyway, since you will have failed to justify the Great Worm's hopes. Haven't you changed your mind yet?"

- "No" - typed John Hacker with one hand, while the other was inserting the diskette in the drive.

- "Farewell, then." - wrote the worm on the screen. But even before John could insert the diskette, he heard a sudden squeal of the flyback transformer in the CRT-display, the screen blacked out, and flames burst out of the display's back panel. At the same moment, the computer frame began to vibrate. A high-pitched rattle of the hard drive could be heard. The worm seemed to be searching for the natural frequency of the lever which carried the magnetic heads. The vibrations suddenly increased, and the lever broke with a jarring crunch. The same thing was happening to the floppy drive.

John s.n.a.t.c.hed the diskette and ran to the next room.

But there the computer was also already in flames. The worm was retreating in style, like a warlord burning his bridges.

Once again, he was playing for time. He needed just a little time. Cries of excitement could be heard from all the stories of the research center.

When a little time later they found the only undamaged computer, which had been standing unpowered, and screwed up their courage to connect it to the network, everything was quiet. n.o.body responded to the "Prince-of-Darkness"

pa.s.sword. And later on, no traces of worm could be discovered on that "islet" in the network.

However, a strange thing did seem to happen. There have been rumors, that on that day in a mission control center for planetary explorations, the host computer of which had been included in the "islet", there had been a loss of communication with interplanetary probes heading for Mars.

Those were new-generation unmanned s.p.a.cecraft equipped with powerful computers and the artificial intelligence systems.

Then the communications seem to have been recovered for a short time, and one of the probes transmitted to Earth a photograph. The picture was a view of Earth from s.p.a.ce. But the most amazing thing was the inscription superimposed over the blue Earth's crescent which read as: "See you later, Earth. Prince of Darkness."

Soon after my acquaintance had told me this story, he showed me an obituary in a foreign computer magazine. A well-known software developer had committed suicide. That was John Hacker. Exactly half a year had pa.s.sed from the day when the Prince of Darkness had predicted his death.

Almost simultaneously, on the other side of the globe, in Moscow, another man committed suicide. His death triggered off a chain of events which led to such a strange twist in the mankind's fortune, that even the Prince of Darkness had failed to correctly predict it. But that's already another story - the story of the Lord of Mars.

End of Part I.

Kaliningrad, Moscow region, Russia 1990-91, original Russian version.

1993-95, English version.

NOTE:.

The original Russian version of Part II of The Worm (2019: The Lord of Mars) was written in 1989-1992 and its length is about 280 KBytes of ASCII text. At the time of this writing (March,1995) it is still being translated in English.

The author of "The Worm", Alexander V. Lazarevich lives in Korolev, Moscow Region, Russia.

E-mail:

The English translation given in this file is preliminary, and is distributed in the hope of attracting attention of potential publishers. You can freely copy this file and post it on BBSs, provided that no changes are introduced.