Spending three days in gaol is no picnic. The only friendly face Corby had seen was his lawyer. And Shaikh hadn’t helped much. The odd encouraging word, but mostly just defeatism and nothing concrete until he turned up to say Corby was being released. It was quite abrupt and then they were in Shaikh’s car with Anne in the back seat.
“You have to look on the bright side,” Shaikh said, as he drove out of the car park. “They’ve been indiscreet and you’ve had a lot of publicity but they haven’t charged you. Yet. I think the detective was hoping that if he held you for long enough the evidence he was looking for would just turn up.”
“That’s all very well; but this article in The Globe makes me out to be some sort of criminal idiot. How can I hold my head up on campus again? Have you seen the photograph on the front page?” It was the first time Corby had seen the paper and it came as a shock.
“Yes. They shouldn’t really have mentioned your name.”
“Is it libellous? Can I sue them?”
“We’d need to show what they said is untrue and then show damages. But perhaps the best thing would be just to let it go. What’s the point of revenge anyway? ”
“I’m not interested in revenge. But some money to restart my research... And what they’ve written’s definitely untrue. Here they say I unleashed an Internet Virus. Firstly, what I did wasn’t a virus. Secondly, it wasn’t on the Internet. Thirdly, they seem to be implying a link to some contract that the university have made to improve their computer room security. Listen to this. ‘Adrian Fielding! Adrian Fielding, responsible for detecting the virus. New security and disaster recovery facilities for the university computer centre.’ And ‘A contract for the Liverpool Royal Bank’. People will think straight away I’m about to break into every computer centre on Merseyside and wreak havoc. It’s totally ridiculous.”
“As I told you, Doctor Corby, the reporter – Warwick – must have had been smoking something seriously hallucinogenic.”
“Warwick telephoned me at home last night,” Anne chimed in from the back of the car. “I told him to get lost. Again.”
“Did he say how he got your number?” Shaikh asked.
“I didn’t ask. But it can only have been someone at the University. No-one else knew I was helping Steven.”
“Be very careful what you say to him.” Shaikh swerved out into the road to avoid a parked car.
“I won’t say anything at all to him,” Anne said.
“Anyway,” Corby persisted, “What do you think will happen next?”
“I don’t know.” Shaikh frowned. “You know that computer crime is a hot topic these days. The detective in charge of the case said the investigation was – how did he put it? – ongoing. He’s convinced your computer was involved. We’ll have to wait and see whether they charge you or not.”
“I couldn’t dispute that my computer was involved.”
“You mean you’ll be suggesting somebody else might have used it to send the e mail?”
“No.” If only he hadn’t used the spoof e-mail. “They’d probably be able to prove from the e-mail server it was one of my IP addresses. When I tried to make a backup on the data centre machine my assumption was they’d never actually notice.”
“Just say that again,” Shaikh interjected. “You said you were making a backup copy?”
“Well of course. I was going to lose some of my machines. I thought it was temporary, so I backed them up to an unused machine in the arts department.”
“Interesting. You know I’ve been looking at your contract with the university? They were obliged to keep a backup of your research in the university data centre. You’ve muddied the water, of course, using a false e-mail address, but I believe you may have been entitled to save your work.” Shaikh slammed on the brakes as the lights changed to red. The car behind hooted furiously. “I wonder if that one will fly. There isn’t a huge amount of precedent but it may cast sufficient doubt to deter a prosecution. We’ll have to take advice on this one, I think. The best thing would be to go and sit down with a barrister and see what he has to say.”
He took out his mobile phone and dialled a number as the lights changed and the car behind hooted again. As Corby listened to his half of the conversation, he decided that he wouldn’t be driving with Shaikh in the future. He’d been warned about his drinking but not his driving. Although, thinking about it, perhaps the two went together. With the smell of peppermints, too.
“Let me check.” He turned, almost facing Corby and nearly hitting another parked car. “Would you be available Monday afternoon?”
“That’s nearly a week. But I suppose so if that’s as soon as we can make it. It’s not as if I have all that much to do.”
“OK Ibrahim. Half three? Fine.” He put the telephone down. “Ibrahim Hassan. His father was a partner when I was articled. He’s a real high flier and he’ll be able to give us a view on what the chances are.”
“This sounds expensive?” With no salary coming in...
“It will cost a couple of hundred, but this is potentially a serious criminal charge. And we can discuss the civil case with him at the same time. You don’t want to take chances. You could end up sitting in a small place for a long time if this goes against us. It could be that the best thing, if they charge you, is to find a deal where you plead guilty.”
“Plead guilty? Never. They’ve wrecked my research. Do you realise what they’ve done? This is three years down the drain. And DENIS is gone. There’s an issue of principle here I have to defend. If they’d gone into my office and burnt a filing cabinet full of papers everyone would see how serious it was. The whole thing is confused because what they destroyed was recorded on disks but the issue’s just the same.”
“But how did writing a virus have anything to do with all that? That’s what I can’t understand.”
“It wasn’t a virus! I’ve explained that.” Was the man stupid? “What I’ve developed is a way of distributing a neural network across a group of computers. What it does is the nearest we can get to the way natural – animal and human – intelligence works. When a human or an animal perceives a stimulus, say hears a sound or views an object, a pattern of nerve cells in the brain are stimulated.
“You’ve seen those maps in railway stations where you select your destination and the stations on your route light up? This is a bit like that. You see a cat and one pattern lights up. A different pattern comes up for a bird. A dog is more like a cat so the pattern is similar. Anyway, when a pattern comes up the neurones change so they’re more likely to form that pattern in the future and associations build up in the brain that mould the interpretation it puts onto what it perceives.”
“And you discovered all that?”
“What I’ve just said is pretty well known. But I had no money to buy a powerful computer so I had to find a way to divide it all up across a lot of ordinary personal computers I could lay hands on.”
“And that’s difficult?”
“You can ask Anne. It’s harder than it sounds and nobody had really done it before. If the patterns were random then it would be impossible. Luckily, though, the patterns were structured in the same way as the real world that I was trying to model. Like a dog is closer to a cat than to a musical note or a television commercial, so I could keep similar things together. And once I had got past a certain point, I had DENIS to help me.”
“Yes, you’ve mentioned DENIS before. A colleague? Or a friend of yours?”
“No. Yes. Well, in a way. DENIS is the artificial intelligence that came out of the process. From quite early on, I could use the system to experiment with different ways to organise the information and he – it – DENIS – learned to distinguish good organisations from bad ones, so really he helped to build himself.”
“But surely you have a back-up of the program? I’m not an expert, but everyone says that’s what you have to do.”
“It’s more complex than that.” How to explain this to a layman? “The program itself is relatively small, and, yes, there’s a back-up of that. But the real intelligence was in the network of associations distributed across the machines that were stolen. The copy program backed up some of the database to another machine at the university but, from what the police said when they charged me, the university computer department have managed to lose even that. DENIS, as I knew him, is gone. Even if I could get the computers back and start again, the new intelligence would have to build itself again, from its own experiences. It would start from a different point, learn from its own sensations. The result would be completely different. As different as humans are from each other.”
“OK. I think I understand. From what Hassan said on the phone it sounds as if we do stand a chance of getting the criminal charges dropped. Let’s hold on until we’ve spoken to him next week before doing anything else. Can you make it to my office for, say, two thirty?”
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