Free Cyber Rogues by James P. Hogan

he was standing up he never failed to cut a distinguished figure, with his elegant crown of white hair, deeply lined face and inevitable immaculate, dark three-piece suit. Dyer had always found him something of an aloof and remote kind of person, but right now Lewis was showing every sign of distress and genuine concern.
    “Certain events have happened recently, Ray, that have caused CIM to reconsider the whole philosophy of adding HESPER capability into the net,” he said. “Some very senior people are pressing for TITAN to be reverted back to EARTHCOM until we get firm answers to some important questions. In a nutshell, they’re saying that the move to upgrade EARTHCOM was premature, that we didn’t know enough about HESPER at the time and we still don’t, and that HESPER ought to be pulled out until we do.”
    Dyer looked from one to the other and spread his upturned palms.
    “Events . . . ? What events?”
    “About a week ago, TITAN came within a hair’s breadth of killing five people,” Lewis told him somberly. Dyer stared at him incredulously. Before he could say anything, Lewis went on. “It appears that HESPER program structures are capable of integrating to a far greater degree than anybody thought. They’re starting to link things together in ways they were never supposed to and the results in behavior are impossible to predict.”
    Hoestler explained, in response to the still bemused look on Dyer’s face. “It used the Maskelyne mass-driver to bomb an ISA survey team on the Moon. Could have wiped them out.”
    “What?” Dyer turned an incredulous face toward Lewis but the Dean nodded regretfully to confirm Hoestler’s words.
    “One of the HESPER-controlled subsystems in the Tycho node was given the job of shifting a piece of terrain that was forming an obstruction,” he explained. “It was supposed to use normal earth-moving equipment to do it, but nobody bothered to tell it that. Somehow it managed to connect together information from several subsystems that shouldn’t have been connected, and came up with what it thought was a better shortcut to solving the problem. According to the people who analyzed the system dump afterward, it seemed quite proud of itself.”
    Lewis went on to describe the incident on Luna in greater detail. As Dyer listened, his initial astonishment changed to growing concern. In 2020 he had moved out of neurological research in order to apply his knowledge of learning psychology to the field of self-adaptive programming and, after spending some time at M.I.T., had come to CUNY to set up the HESPER Unit, which had since gone on to spearhead development of the very techniques that were now being applied worldwide to transform EARTHCOM into TITAN. His knowledge of the technicalities of HESPER programming was shared by fewer than a handful of people. If it was anybody’s, it was his baby.
    “Unfortunately there happened to be an ISA team sitting practically on top of the target,” Lewis continued. “But naturally, that didn’t mean very much to the computers.”
    “Twenty sixty-pound packages of rock coming down at over a mile a second,” Hoestler commented. “Every one was roughly equivalent to a two-thousand-pound bomb.” He shrugged and made a face.
    HESPER machines were learning machines, designed to be capable of identifying connections between previously nonrelated factors in order to solve new problems or to solve old ones in newer and better ways. But if what Lewis had said was correct, this capability was beginning to extend itself in ways that had never been intended, nor in fact even foreseen as possible. If the obstruction had been on the edge of Maskelyne Base itself instead of out on some remote construction site on Procellarum, there could easily have been a death toll of hundreds. And if this kind of thing could happen in the circumstances surrounding the events on Luna, what other kinds of things might happen anywhere, at any time?
    They could