“Corby!” The woman’s voice came just as the seminar group was starting to understand the explanation. The point was subtle, complex; the lights were just starting to come on. “Steven! Where are you?” Corby tried to ignore the interruption, but the voice insisted. “Where are you, Steven? I need to talk to you.”
“Is he in yet?” A second woman. “What a pig sty! They need a nanny in this place!”
Corby tried to recapture the dream but someone was shaking his shoulder. He looked up into the face of Carol Dawson, the departmental secretary.
"Doctor Corby! Doctor Corby! Wake up at once."
Corby sat up, clutching the anorak that he’d used as a pillow.
"What? Who? Oh. Good morning Carol." Corby rubbed his eyes. "I'm sorry, I must have dozed off. It's very warm in here."
"You know you're not allowed to sleep in the lab overnight. And the security system wouldn't open the door this morning. It kept arguing with me and I had to let everyone in with my key."
"Sorry, I mean I'll have a word with DENIS." Corby got up from the floor behind his desk, pulling his belt tight and doing up the buckle. He looked down at his crumpled dinner jacket and trousers. Would the hire shop charge extra because they’d been slept in?
"Steven." He recognised the voice that had woken him, Anne Baxter, the slim, slightly up-tight Reader in Autonomics, who occupied the office next door. "There are three more! The heat is unbearable with all those machines in my office. And I cannot work with the noise of the fans. I warned you last week to get rid of them."
"I know, but those machines arrived over the weekend and your office was the only one with space. I promise I’ll clear them all when my approval comes through."
"Well it's too much. I've called building services and they’re going to get rid of them immediately."
"Stop it, Anne." The woman was being totally unreasonable. "I only need the machines for a couple of weeks until we can move onto the network. You'll have to phone back and cancel."
"No Steven. Get it into your head. I’ve been talking to you about those machines for months. Now they’re going. And an inspector is coming over to check the fire risk." She turned abruptly and left the room.
"But Anne…" Corby took a few steps after her and stopped as she disappeared round the corner.
"Well it isn't as if I haven't warned you about this." Carol Dawson smiled grimly. "We all have. You know that if it hadn't been for John Rice and the fire extinguisher, that machine would have burned the place down last month."
Left on his own, Steven Corby sat down in his chair and mopped his brow. "DENIS," he said, "I think they're serious. What have we got on those machines?"
"To which machines do you refer, Steve?" the synthesised pronunciation was almost perfect.
"I mean the ones in Dr Baxter's office, room IL107. How many do computers do we have in there?"
"We have 23 modules in that office Steve. They contain mostly Input / Output components, including part of the speech recognition and generation clusters."
"Is there anywhere we can create a standby? I am afraid those machines may need to go offline." Corby touched his face nervously.
"Offline?" The voice was noticeably louder. "Steve that is not consonant with my objective function. It will reduce my access to computing power. That is not good. It is very bad."
"I understand, DENIS." Corby was soothing. How many times did he have to go through this with DENIS? Just his luck to have developed an artificial intelligence and have it turn out a prima-donna. "Don't worry, though. This is just a local minimum. We’ve discussed it before. You know sometimes you need to remove processors to get more in the future.”
“But losing computing power feels... unpleasant?... painful?”
“Of course it does. We’ve discussed this many times. You know you sometimes have to concede a point in the short term for a bigger gain later.” Gaining access to more computer power was the basic driver for DENIS, so this would always be a big deal for him. Perhaps the extra machines when he got to the network would give him a real Ego and Superego and the nous to defer gratification for a greater reward down the road.
“Anne - Dr Baxter - has complained to the university authorities so we need to be careful. We can’t allow it to get in the way of our research application. Moving those PCs to another room can help us get access to all the computers in the university network. Please. Recalculate the heat extraction capacities for this building and see whether we can accommodate them somewhere. In the meantime we need to create a standby so you can continue to operate while the move takes place."
"Very well." The synthetic voice did not sound particularly mollified. "We are extremely short of heat extraction capability and all our existing machines are very highly loaded. I do not think we can create a standby on the machines we control."
"How much are we short?"
"The combined processors in room IL107 sum to 9750 Megahertz with 18 Gigabytes of storage." DENIS answered quickly. "We have 19.7 percent of that available."
“This is so frustrating." Corby burst out angrily. "That’s nothing in terms of the capacity of just one modern, four processor server. There are hundreds of machines in the data centre with that capacity spare."
"One hundred and twenty of the data centre machines have that spare capacity, or more." DENIS confirmed.
"Let me have a look at the list." All Corby needed was a stopgap until his research proposal was approved. "Show me the capacity of each machine and how much of it’s in use.” He settled down in front of the computer screen on his desk and watched as the numbers appeared. "Let’s rank them in descending order of how long they will take to reach capacity. We’ll have to borrow part of one big server until the end of next week. What’s this machine here, number WUSAD341?"
"It is registered to the Fine Arts Department, Professor Benjamin Rosete. Shall I display the purchase proposal?"
"Yes please." Corby scanned the new display. "Excellent. It’s a high-end machine for an interactive art project but it’s only just arrived. It won't be fully utilised for at least a month or two. We have our standby."
"Is this not a high risk?" DENIS spoke softly. "You have always explained that if we were found placing material on machines outside our sub-net we would never be permitted to go ahead."
"But in this case, we won't be found." Corby laughed. DENIS would be concerned, of course, any risk to his computing power was a matter of life and death to him, but done right... "Those arts weirdoes couldn’t spot what’s out of the ordinary and what isn't. If we give our process a name they won't question they’ll never notice a thing."
"What name will they not query? I do not think I can anticipate their behaviour sufficiently to create such a name."
"Oh, anything that looks official. Show me an operating system process list and let's find a suitable name immediately." He looked at the list on the screen.
"Look, there’s a whole set of processes beginning WIN. WINWORD, WinMgt, WINLOGON. We could use anything beginning WIN. Or what about this?" Corby allowed a mischievous smile to cross his face. There was a way to eliminate the risk completely. "System Idle Process. Now there's a thing. We don't even have to make up a name. Just run our process with an existing name. Systems have an Idle process for when they aren’t active and just have to waste machine cycles. We simply substitute your algorithm for the System Idle Process and we’re undetectable!"
"I see. I think I see." DENIS sounded hesitant.
"Trust me, I'm a PhD." Corby was suddenly in fine humour. The solution was elegant and so simple. It could hardly be faulted. “All we need do is convince them to load a copy of the cluster out of IL107 onto their server.”
“But how can we do that, Steve? They are not even aware that the cluster exists.”
“What they don’t know won’t hurt them. We just have to get them to open a document that calls the loading program.”
“If you send them a document, will they not suspect a subterfuge?”
“Not if it’s a document they recognise. Let me look at the purchase proposal again.” Corby examined the application form on the computer screen. “Yes. Very good. All I’ll do is insert a command to call your load program and send it back to them.”
“But why would they open it? Surely they will not expect a communication from you. After all, they have already received the machine.”
“Precisely. That’s why the e-mail to Professor Rosete will appear to come from the admin department with a query suggesting the machine may be reassigned to someone else.”
“You intend disguising the identity of the sender?”
“The polite word is ‘spoofing’. I’ll simply change the sender name to be a clerical assistant in Admin, suggest there’s some confusion as to whether the machine is really theirs and ask him to confirm the details in the application. Urgently. He’ll open the document all right.”
Corby smiled happily. “You generate the program to load the cluster onto their machine and I’ll get on with moving two more machines into each of the other offices before anyone from Building Services gets here.”
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