Wormhole by Richard Phillips Page B

dying.
    Heather pulled the alien headset from her head before her eyes could refocus. Struggling to regain control of her muscles she rolled out of the chair, skinning her knees on the veranda’s rough floor. Ignoring Jack, Janet, and Robby, she threw herself at Mark, tearing the headset from his temples.
    As it came free Mark convulsed, vomit pouring from his mouth, spreading across his upturned face and bubbling back into his throat. Heather heaved his unconscious form out of the chair, rolling him onto his side, her hand clawing into his mouth to clear the airway. Rewarded by a gasping breath, Heather felt a surge of relief flood her body.
    Jennifer flung herself down beside Heather. “Oh Jesus!”
    Heather moved her fingers to Mark’s carotid artery, feeling for a pulse. She found it, weak but steady at forty-three beats per minute.
    Glancing over her shoulder, Heather saw Jack holding tightly to Janet as they both knelt beside the baby in the now-still swing, the alien headset still firmly attached to Robby’s little face. The hurricane lamp’s flickering flame dimly illuminated the entire veranda, casting dancing shadows across Jack, Janet, and their baby on one side of the table, silhouetting Heather and Jen draped over Mark’s unconscious body on the other.
    Heather felt as if she’d faded into a grotesque old Twilight Zone episode. Of one thing she was certain. Another life-altering event had just sucked everyone on that Bolivian porch across the threshold of reality.

The liquid crystal displays glistened with each new input to the neural search algorithm, almost as if it wanted the answer as badly as Denise did. But, of course, it didn’t. The massively parallel supercomputer known as Big John had only one purpose: to mine all available data on selected targets, then to cross-correlate that data with all other available information. And Denise knew: Big John’s tendrils extended into everything. When it came to data mining, like its namesake from the old Jimmy Dean ballad, Big John did the heavy lifting.
    The most amazing thing about Big John was that nobody understood exactly how it worked. Oh, the scientists that had designed the core network of processors understood the fundamentals. Feed in sufficient information to uniquely identify a target and then allow Big John to scan all known information:financial transactions, medical records, jobs, photographs, DNA, fingerprints, known associates, acquaintances, and so on.
    But that’s where things shifted into the realm of magic. Using the millions of processors at its disposal, Big John began sifting external information through its nodes, allowing the individual neurons to apply weight to data that had no apparent relation to the target, each node making its own relevance and correlation calculations. While one node might be processing Gulf Stream temperature measurements, another might access data from the Ming Dynasty.
    No person directed Big John’s search. Nobody completely understood the complex genetic algorithms that supplied shifting weights to its evolving neural patterns. Given enough time to study a problem, there was no practical limit to what Big John could accomplish.
    Therein lay the problem. Denise Jennings knew all too well the competing demands for the services only Big John could provide. Her software kernel had been inserted into antivirus programs protecting millions of computers around the world. And although those programs provided state-of-the-art antivirus protection, their main activity was node data analysis for Big John.
    Big John was a bandwidth hog. No matter how big a data pipe fed it, Big John always needed more. Denise’s software provided an elegant solution to that problem. Commercial antivirus programs scanned all data on protected computers, passing it through node analysis, adding their own weighting to the monstrous neural net. It didn’t matter if some computers were turned off or even destroyed. If a data node