<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #37

A long time later Fede woke to a gentle buzzing against his face. He woke slowly, wiping one hand against his cheek and rolling over, the soft edges of his consciousness curious but lazy. The sensation faded.

He woke again, unsure how much time had passed, suddenly aware of what the feeling had been and of what it had meant. He sat up. There was sand on the futon, his stumps itchy where a bit of seaweed had stuck to them. His brain reeled, and he staggered up and out of the truck. It was cold, the top of the beach soft with a thin layer of dew.

The chairs and tables were empty except for Cessus. His hair was unkempt, twisted dreads sticking out at odd angles atop his white robe. One long black leg stuck out cantilever, his foot buried in the sand, and his fingers drummed a mad beat on the tabletop.

Fede rounded the table and dropped into a chair, his thoughts confused. Cessus’s eyes were distant over the horizon, the light of his lenses glimmering and winking against his corneas.

“What time is it? Did I sleep all day? What’s going on?” asked Fede, fumbling to get his goggles into place.

Cessus grunted, then; “Morning; yes; and see for yourself.”

Fede scanned the local data network and found Cessus’s com. He logged in with his guest account and opened up a view.

His hands trembled.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“That’s your code. Those are results” said Cessus.

“But” said Fede. “But that’s almost the complete data set.”

Cessus let his hands fall flat on the table, turned towards Fede, smiled.

“You don’t say” he said.

“But how?” asked Fede.

“It looks to me like your code took a while to propagate, but pretty much did as we’d planned. We got 67% penetration by midafternoon yesterday. That in itself is pretty good — better than expected. The spike in downloads from the data set peaked around 9 last night. Six hours later we started seeing results, and the upload rate has increased exponentially until now.”

“That’s... nine hours from the peak download of the data set to peak data return. That’s incredible!” said Fede.

“That’s some impressive fucking code is what it is” laughed Cessus. “Go get Tonx. I’ll keep monitoring this. We need to know how to verify our results, now that we have some.”

Fede ran out to the tents, not sure which of the identical white cotton V-shapes was his brother’s. He danced around between them, shuffling sand and shivering in the morning air, frantic with excitement.

“Tonx” he hissed, peering at sandals in front of a long tent. “Tonx!”

A bleary Japanese face stuck out from between the flaps of the tent. Fede caught a glimpse of shadowed tattoos spilling across the man’s back before he met his steel-hard eyes. The head disappeared with a frown.

“Tonx” he hissed again, softer.

There was a rustling followed by a stream of quiet curses from the opposite side of the field of tents. Fede heard Cass’s laugh and saw Tonx stagger into view, pulling on his shorts. He saw Fede and ran over, limping as he lost one sandal.

“Cessus comm’d me. What is it?” he asked.

“We got results. Almost the whole data set” said Fede. He was hopping up and down now, rubbing his goose-pimpled arms to keep warm. The sun broke over the horizon and spilled onto Tonx’s face in a golden glow. He shaded his eyes, squinting at Fede.

“Already?” he asked.

“No shit. Cessus says my algorithms adapted faster than expected. China’s networks are going to have a glut from all the traffic” he said. His own gut clenched as he realized what he’d said, thought about the high traffic rates Chinese officials would see from all over their network. The algorithm would be changing itself, spreading new versions with each iteration. If it was producing results at this kind of rate it must be rewriting itself on every system as fast as it could spread.

Fede stopped moving, pulled his chord out of his pocket and stared at Tonx’s bare chest through the data field overlaid by his goggles. He pulled up a news filter, watched. There was nothing. No news from China about overworked systems, no decrease in traffic in or out of their networks — nothing unusual.

“Come on” he said, breathless. He turned to run back, but Tonx was already ahead of him.

They skidded to a stop next to Cessus just as Marcus was returning with a pair of cups of coffee. He looked at Tonx and handed one to him and one to Cessus and turned and went back towards the bar.

“Why aren’t we seeing anything from China if we’ve got this sort of data rate?” asked Fede. “It should be propagating like mad and...”

Cessus held up one long hand, sipped from his coffee cup.

“Calm down and think it through. All this shit’s load balanced. You wrote the code, Fede, you know that. It’ll propagate, but no faster than standard updates would, and it’s only a small subset of the code. It’s a lot more processing than usual, but nothing that’d break anything down. Nothing China would want to brag about.”

“But that data set is huge” said Fede. “Its crunching major numbers across...”

“Across thousands and thousands of computers” interrupted Cessus. “Dude, have faith in your code. It’s exceeding your expectations. So be happy. I’m sure we’ll see reports of congestion in the Chinese systems later on. Just because it isn’t making the headlines doesn’t mean it isn’t working.”

“Can I see what we’ve got?” asked Tonx. He was excited too, his face flushed pink and eyes wide.

“Sure, but it won’t make any sense. It’s filtering in bit by bit, so you won’t be able to get any useful data for another couple hours. That’s if we keep our current rate. It’s leveled, by the way. Still freaking incredible turnaround time, though.”

Fede ran back to pull on his jeans, cleaned and pressed in the truck with the water filtration system and delivered to him tied with brown twine. When he returned Tonx had gone to get some more clothes on himself and to ready his com. Once the full data set was returned he would have to run a simulation over the differences Fede’s code recommended, but unlike the actual combination matching it should only take little while to confirm it made sense.

Fede and Cessus and Tonx huddled together over Cessus’s laptop, pulling over a couple beach umbrellas for shade to make Cessus’s screen readable as the sun came up. They drank hot coffee and, later, fresh rolls cooked by the bread machine in the bar. The data trickled in.

“That’s it” said Cessus. They watched as the peaks and troughs of the uploads to the three online locations suddenly dropped. The lines bounced a few times, peaked once or twice, and went flat.

“We got it” he said. His fingers flew over the tabletop in front of the laptop’s keyboard as he keyed in a copy function to Tonx’s machine.

“All you, man” he said, pointing a long finger at Tonx.

Tonx started the process and Fede showed him how to connect the results screen over the network to Cessus’s laptop so they could all watch. It didn’t make much sense to him, number chains and DNA sequencing color-coded and flashing, but the rising progress bar was clear enough.

They sat, and waited. Cass came by, sat quietly next to Fede as she ate her breakfast. Marcus fussed about the truck, cleaning out cookie wrappers and soda bottles.

The computer dinged.

“What do we got?” said Cessus and Fede simultaneously. Tonx’s face showed nothing, his eyes scanning a long list of odd-sounding acronyms and short chemical chains. He slowly shook his head.

“Something’s not right. This doesn’t make sense” he said.

Fede’s gut twisted. His head ached, suddenly, a rising pounding heat across his temples.

“What’s not right?” he asked.

“This is all wrong” Tonx said again, tabbing through his results. “Let me run it again. Give me the data. Maybe it got corrupted in the transfer.”

“I’ll re-download the entire set. Maybe we got a little spike afterwards with corrections” said Cessus. He pushed Tonx’s window behind his own and reconnected to the data Fede’s code had returned. There were no new uploads, but he got all the data again anyway and pushed it to Tonx. The colored tabs and number chains processed, again, and they waited.

There was a faint taste of metal in Fede’s mouth.

It seemed to take twice as long to process this time. The ocean roared distantly, the light suddenly tinny and cold. After a short forever the computer dinged again. They all stared.

Tonx shook his head.

“These results are completely incompatible” he said softly. “Something’s fucked with the data set.”

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