‘Hutch up.’ Excited, Daisy sat on one half of the chair. She took the mouse out of Jazir’s hand, steered the pointer to the domino, did the double-click thing. Nothing happened.
‘Needs a little help from the Chef’s Special,’ said Jazir, loading a new disk.
‘What’s that?’
‘My own recipe. Hacker mix. Watch this. It’s good, this bit.’ The curry sauce started to fill the screen, and the domicon went straight for it. More or less dived right in. ‘You see? You don’t have to drag it anywhere. The domino’s attracted to the sauce. This is how I caught the blurb in the first place. It kept flying into the screen and becoming drowsy.’
‘What’s in the chef’s program?’
‘Just the usual algorithms. Codebreakers, splicehounds, infobots. You know much about hacking?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No matter. I mixed it all with the latest fractal paths. This is a curry with a thousand spices. Infinite knowledge, right?’
‘If you say so.’
‘I can only guess that Mister Million feeds these blurbs on some kind of fractal sugar base. It’s attracted, you see. Look, it’s opening.’
The domicon split in two right along the divider, a six and a six, separate now, hinging apart…
‘How many people would like to do that?’ asked Jazir.
…out of which poured a swarm of tiny blurb icons, a few pixels to each of them, with tiny wings. Too many to count, they started to feed off the curry. Pretty soon two of them were fighting over a juicy morsel, while another two were actually working together to fight off a third. Some more were staking out territory.
‘There’s one hundred and sixty-eight of these flies to start with,’ Jazir said. ‘You know that number?’
‘Sure,’ answered Daisy. ‘The total number of dots on a set of dominoes.’
‘And what does the screen remind you of dominoes?’
The Game of Life.’
‘Right. One of the first artificial life systems. Cellular automata. You set up a map, an environment inside a hard drive, design some creatures to live in it, give them some basic rules, randomize the pattern and start the program. Evolution inside a computer. When you read Hackle’s papers you’ll see he was involved in this work, only he called his system nymphomation: sexy knowledge. Look! Two of them are at it already.’
Indeed, two of the minute blurbs were merging together on the screen.
‘That’s enough, you guys. Time for bed.’ Jazir clicked down the window. It dwindled to a domicon on his hard disk, aligned with another seven. Jazir clicked on the first of these. ‘Here’s one I made earlier.’
The screen was pitch black with a throbbing mass of information.
‘What’s happened?’ asked Daisy.
‘They’ve reproduced. This is only five days old. Very fast permutations. I’ll scroll down to find an edge.’
He did so. It was ragged, like shadows of itself, smoky tendrils. Occasionally a tiny shape would escape from the mass, to float away into space.
‘It’s a fractal!’
‘A new one. And it’s just given birth. Believe me, Daze. This is big. It’s like AnnoDomino have taken Max’s work and pushed it to the limits. I’ve found another three of these masses floating around. Sometimes they fight each other, like galleons. They steal supplies off each other. They eat each other. They fuck each other. They give birth. The cycle goes on. This is only a representation of the process. Imagine what it’s like in real life. There’s no end to it.’
‘How does it help with breaking the dominoes?’
‘Right. I gave a disk of this to Joe, and a tube of Vaz to Benny.’
‘You’re really calling it Vaz?’
‘For now. Benny did the DNA analysis on it.’
‘And?’
‘He didn’t have a clue. Said it was an unknown genetic structure. We showed the results to Hackle. He went crazy, saying it was a Hackle Maze made flesh. Apparently the genes don’t just split in two, like in men and women. They split into many different strands. A more random way of reproducing. More chance for evolution to make play. Benny couldn’t keep track of it. Hackle said he never would.’
‘What about the disk? What did Joe do?’
‘He only gave it to Dopejack, didn’t he? I mean, all my own work, going to waste,’
‘And I bet Dopejack did good.’
‘Sure, he did good. Used my findings, didn’t he, to find a deeper way into the bones. But I could’ve done good as well. I could have.’
‘You could have done better, Jaz.’
‘Dopejack’s got better equipment than me, that’s all.’