Cyber Rogues Read Online Free PDF Page B

thought, he decided he wouldn’t stand the pace for a month. Maybe Tony had the same problem.
    At thirty, Kim was the second oldest after Dyer among the unit’s technical staff, which included everybody except Betty and Pattie, and was generally acknowledged as unofficial second-in-command. Dyer often had the feeling that she shouldn’t have been in research at all. She operated in perpetual top gear, managing to combine a demanding career with an impossible private life that was jammed with citizens’ meetings, committees for this and associations for that, and eternal campaigning, usually against bureaucracy in some form or other. She assailed both with the fervor of an evangelist on doomsday’s eve with half the world still to be saved. Dyer thought she’d have been better placed managing a firm of stockbrokers on Wall Street, maybe a multinational or even the government. But computers had always been her passion and she held a long list of academic and innovative distinctions to prove it. And when a woman like that developed a passion like that, other people’s ideas on how she might otherwise be employing her talents ceased to matter very much.
    Two main projects accounted for most of the HESPER Unit’s time. The first was FISE, which was concerned essentially with developing reliable methods of programming computers to exhibit common sense; Chris and Ron were handling that. The other project involved refining existing techniques for constructing self-modifying programming systems that were capable of evolving their own problem-solving strategies as ascending structures of goals and subgoals. In a way it was analogous to implanting basic “instinctive” drives which the machine could then develop progressively more effective ways of satisfying. The process mimicked natural evolution but at electronic speeds. This was Kim’s project, in which she was assisted by Allan Morrow, youngest of the team and one of the two postgraduate students assigned to the unit. The other, Judy Farlin, was also theoretically under Kim’s wing, but spent most of her time working on her doctoral thesis (“Evolution of Objective Hierarchies in Goal-Oriented Self-Extending Program Structures”) and consequently was not really involved actively.
    “Oh yes,” Kim said, looking up. “Another thing I wanted to mention. We’re still having problems with Services about the graphics-room reservation system. Somebody really ought to talk to Hoestler about it and get somebody’s butt kicked good and hard over there. I tried getting some sense out of them this morning but it’s useless.”
    “Screwed up the bookings again?” Dyer guessed. Kim nodded and tapped the screen of the viewpad emphatically.
    “Exactly. Ray, I’m sick to death of them over there. Twice last week Judy was told she had a slot reserved for a room and then couldn’t get in because it’d been double-booked.”
    “Aw Christ! Judy again, huh?”
    “Yes, that’s the whole point,” Kim said with feeling. “The kid’s right in the middle of trying to get her thesis straight and she needs some time on mural graphics. Those buttheads in Services keep blaming it on the computer instead of learning how to do their jobs. If they don’t know how to run a system properly—here of all places—then they ought to be kicked out and replaced by people who do!”
    “Okay, okay,” Dyer held up his hands to stem the tirade. “I agree. They’re doing a lousy job. I’ll talk to Hoestler about it. For the amount they’re charging out of our budget for when we do get in, we could almost set up our own graphics room here in the unit. What’s next?”
    “It’s not as if there were anything difficult about it,” Kim went on. “All they have to do—”
    “Okay,” Dyer said again, “It will be done. What’s next?” Kim glanced down automatically.
    “I guess we’re about done,” she said, cutting the pad off and snapping it shut. She glanced at the clock behind