From: stevec@bu-pub.bu.edu (Steve Connelly)
Subject: The Decryption Key
Date: 16 May 92 22:18:41 GMT


The Decryption Key
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

	A cabbage patch Hitler doll floated by, saying, "Today feels like
a C sharp."
	Tumbling twin cheerleaders with white sweaters and no facial
features backflipped over a convertible couch that snapped open and closed
fitfully.
	A businessman who wore lungs as a vest and a heart and carotid
artery as a necktie said, "Socket caps and set screws.  Eye bolts and
toggler anchors...."
	As Mickey Mouse came into view, the two dish antennas atop his head
rotated to track a Voyager satellite which sailed past while its engravings of
the prototypical nude man and woman danced to the Beatles.
	A locomotive steamed motionlessly around the circular tracks of a
gerbil's exercise wheel.
	A six-armed jade Shiva riding a unicycle threw one of the nine
eggs that she was juggling.  It was caught by a baseball catcher with a
bird's nest mit.

	With agitation, Dominic Tanner removed the computer's viewing goggles.
	The detective said to him, "That was quick.  What did you learn?"
	Tanner held the goggles at arm's length, peering in at the visuals.
	"Well?" urged the director of the computer products division.  "Did
you see how his program transmits the virus?"
	Tanner looked up.  "Oh.  No.  I didn't.  He's encrypted his program.
His design environment is garbage now."
	The director growled. "Dammit, I'm gonna nip van Loo's virus in the
bud.  My man Kanatani can decode the program.  I hired him myself; stole
him from my old company...."  The director rambled out of the office,
followed by the detective and an entourage of Helix Pharmaceutical's public
relations people.
	Remaining behind was Dr. Sands, the psychologist who had been called
in to assess the man suspected of planting the computer virus.  The suspect,
Peter van Loo, lay in a coma after an overdose of sleeping pills.
	Sands strolled over to watch the screen of the graphics terminal that
Tanner was now sitting at.  Dom Tanner's fit physique, all-American looks,
and heavy-rimmed glasses reminded the doctor of Clark Kent.  Dense line
drawings of protein backbones swimming with three-letter annotations flashed
and vaporized while diagnostic messages rolled up the screen.
	The doctor asked, "Is that what an encrypted program looks like?"
	Tanner chuckled.  "No, these are standard tests of van Loo's system.
I'm trying to uncover the virus by getting it to infect our own computer,
where it can't do any harm.  Maybe I'll see how infection can be avoided in
the systems we have in the field."  Stick figure drawings continued to pulse
on the screen several times a second.  "It's van Loo's programming
environment that's encrypted."  He pointed to the opaque black goggles.
	Sands picked them up.  "Can I look?"
	"Be my guest.  You should be sitting, though; there's no gravity or
ground plane...."
	Gingerly, the doctor put on the heavy goggles and wrapped their
curling earpieces around till the tiny audio pads were in position.

       Objects floated randomly across the featureless white background of
the viewing space.  Sands turned his head and saw a dark belly dancer in
bangles and colorful silks smiling at him.  Through the round glass door in
her stomach, Sands could see laundry being agitated by her energetic
gyrations.
        A pinball game the size of a tennis court slowly approached.  The
game was laid out as a graveyard, with parking meters at each plot.  Bodies
were kept in the slots of large buried toasters.  A grounds keeper was tiling
the yard with squares of sod; he defecated onto the dirt and then tore off a
sheet of sod from the nearby roll and pressed it over his pile.  The huge
flippers knocked the steel ball into one of the stone markers, causing a
toaster to eject a decomposed corpse which began to sing,  "It's not easy
being green...."

	Tanner mentioned, "You can use the manipulator wand to point at
objects and move them."
	"That's okay."

	A chubby boy in knickers wandering by on a bicycle fired a mortar
which launched a rolled-up newspaper.  From miles in the distance, a frog's
tongue flicked into view, grabbed the paper, and disappeared.
	An old woman in a dowdy gray dress leaned heavily on her cane while
stooping severely.  She stooped steadily lower and lower.  Her head swung
between her legs and then upward until she was peering over her backside.
She cackled gleefully, threw her cane away, and waddled off.
	An iguana wearing heavy rouge and eye shadow and a necklace of shiny
baubles leered at Sands and began to swim toward him.

	Sands quickly removed the goggles.  He rubbed his eyes.  "What is it
supposed to look like?"
	Tanner glanced over.  "A normal programming environment has tools
like queues, stacks, trees, pipes and joins.  In molecular work, you also
have spheres, connecting springs, chains of amino acids, maybe ribbons for
protein armatures."
	"What happened?"
	"Van Loo ran an encrypter that changed his tools into a bunch of
seemingly random objects.  An object-level encryption is simple, so Kanatani
should have it cracked in a couple minutes."
	Sands nodded in vague understanding.  He asked, "Normally, you use
van Loo's systems to make new drugs?"
	"The hospitals make the drugs.  They feed patient data into the
systems, which output genetically matched designs.  Van Loo's systems
describe the molecular interaction strategies needed to design and
genetically produce drugs automatically."
	"That's quite a task for one young man, isn't it?"
	"Well, sure.  That's why he's 'Can-Do' van Loo."
	"Did these responsibilities put a lot of stress on him?"
	"No.  His latest version shipped two months ago, ahead of schedule."
	"So he wasn't having any problems at the office."
	"Not that I know of," Tanner said.  "Last week he presented some
heuristic AI tricks for inferring residue sequences from protein folding
geometries, but the directors decided to put a lid on it."
	"What do you mean?"
	"They aren't going to implement it, but they're holding the rights
so that no other company does either."
	"Did that disturb Peter?" Sands asked.
	"It's hard to say.  Nobody knows him very well.  He doesn't talk
much, I guess because of that funny way he talks, you know, the speech
impediment."  Tanner typed a command, and a page of numbers splatted onto
his screen.  "Implementing the new stuff would have meant a ton of
programming for him, so he was probably relieved.  Programming this stuff
is no fun...."
	Sands slumped low in his chair, and he eased the goggles back on.

	A buddha made from quivering multicolored balls of jello said, "Kep,
flange, castle, wing, tee, flexloc, stop, lag, and left hand nuts.  Threaded
rods and studs.  Screw eyes, shots, pins...."
	A convertible couch folded out spastically, launching four blonde
cheerleaders who landed in the seats at a long pink marble vanity table.
They were soon joined by other cheerleaders.  A pair with no facial features
began to draw their mouths with lipstick.  Another pair was slapping on soft
contact lenses that were the size of their heads.  One used a blow dryer to
melt her head away.
	A bald man in a tuxedo blew into a 20-foot-long straight brass horn,
emitting aimless screeches.  The instrument looped into the circular shape of
a sousaphone and finally sounded a clear tone. The man continued to blow
until he deflated and his body sagged into a heap.

	Dr. Sands asked, "Are you sure van Loo planted a computer virus?"
	Tanner said, "Maybe it's a worm or a runner.  But his note said,
'My virus will get you all!'.  Didn't it?"
	"Sure, but you'd agree a scrawled suicide note is open to
interpretation?"
	"Of course, but it's all we have to go on.  How do you interpret it?"
	"I don't know.  What about a normal, medical virus?"
	Tanner turned his chair to the goggled doctor.  "You mean that van Loo
himself has the virus.  Maybe he has AIDS?"
	"No, the hospital said he was healthy.  I was wondering, though, is
it possible to make a virus?"
	Tanner smiled.  "Design and engineer a virus?  No.  Viruses are very
complex; they're lifeforms.  Our synthesis methods couldn't do it."
	"How about totally new methods?"
	"Even if you could build a virus, it would have to work like a drug
for it to get through the quality control simulator."  Tanner turned back to
his computer screen.

	The cheerleaders that had assembled at the vanity table reached out
to the side and the thin ribbons of their pompoms interlinked.  One opened
her mouth to allow the frog inside to shoot its tongue across the table into
the mouth of the opposite cheerleader.  Another leaned across to plug her
head into the open neck of a cheerleader whose head had been melted away.  In
unison, the cheerleaders leaped into space, and the table disintegrated into
a herd of orangutans in black leotards.
	A Clydesdale with a large beer tap for a head pulled a line printer
that spewed hundreds of pages per second.  A surfer in a rubber wetsuit
guided his board through the tumbling wash of printout while explaining,
"Being an 'educated consumer' has nothing to do with formal education."  He
crashed into a plywood circus taxi cab, which disintegrated into a dozen
clowns.

	"You may be onto something, doc," murmured Tanner.  "I had van Loo's
system generate some designs, just to see how they work.  This one binds
with the viral receptor site as usual, but it doesn't block it; that can't be
good.  It has these external linkages, but I don't know what they're for...."

	Sands watched the sousaphone position itself around the buddha's
jiggling torso.  The buddha blew into the instrument and it knotted into the
conformation of a tuba, cutting the gelatinous body into five basketballs and
a Pillsbury doughboy.
	A leopard ran past by repeatedly turning itself inside out.  The hind
legs came forward and passed through the body and out the mouth; the rest of
the body followed.  During the next stride the mouth moved forward, passing
over the body and turning the leopard right-side in.
	A 30-foot glistening pink snake with the head of an elderly man
coiled its length until it had formed intestines.  Two mannequins started
disassembling each other and encapsulating the snake in their plastic body
parts.

	The director bustled into the office.  He was sweating and in shirt
sleeves.  "That imbecile Kanatani can't decode the program.  Do you have
anything for me, Tanner?"
	"We were wondering, sir, if van Loo's virus is in the drug designs
themselves."
	"God dammit.  That bastard.  How did he do it?  That goddam bastard.
The fool didn't actually try to make a virus, did he?"
	"No, sir.  But I don't know what he did.  The net electrostatic field
of some of his designs attract viruses rather than repel them -"
	"Ah.  Instead of blocking the receptor, he's leading the virus to it.
That's how he was gonna stick it to us.  The bastard."
	"But I still don't understand alot of it.  Like these rotating legs."
Tanner pointed to the line drawing on his screen.  "They have charged feet,
so they fold out, sort of like a blooming flower.  But when the viral capsid
approaches to bind, they fold in and clamp together like teeth.  So, the
design may cause infection, or it may bait a trap -"
	"Of course it causes infection!  The bastard's note said his virus
would get us."
	Without moving his goggled head, Dr. Sands murmured blankly, "I don't
put much stock in the suicide note.  Rage isn't the emotion of barbiturate
suicide.  And a man who's invested so much of himself in curing disease
wouldn't cause disease."
	"Sure he would," the director said.  "He's a nut.  He tried to kill
himself!"
	"I don't put much stock in the suicide attempt.  Van Loo knows a lot
about drugs.  I think he knew, at least in some part of his mind, how many
pills would have killed him."
	"Oh, now we're experts on his mind!  Then what's he trying to hide
by encrypting the molecular design program?"
	"This isn't encrypted.  This is the program."
	"Tanner," the director barked, "How did a product that causes
disease get through quality control?"
	"The simulator runs were all positive, sir.  The drugs were strange,
but they were effective.  In fact, I think van Loo may have implemented a far
more aggressive antiviral regime than we ever - "
	"Bullshit.  No more theories.  I'm recalling every copy of the
system before anyone is the wiser.  Like I should've in the first place.
Tell van Loo he's fired."  The director strutted out of the office.

	Tanner turned off the computer and put his feet up on the table.
	Dr. Sands asked, "Won't the hospitals wonder why the program is being
recalled?"
	Tanner sighed.  "The system's been in use for two months; of course
the hospitals will wonder.  Everybody will wonder.  I give it three days
before the tabloids scream, 'Helix Pharmaceutical Causes AIDS' or 'Drug Turns
Man into Swamp Thing'."  He shook his head.
	The doctor smiled.  Van Loo had finally launched his virus, and in
a few days it will have spread across the globe, proving fatal to Helix
Pharmaceutical.

	An astronaut in a spacesuit that resembled a koala bear was
water-skiing behind a large egg carton containing the heads of the cast of
'Twelve Angry Men'.  They shouted, "Coca-Cola.  Que Sabor!  Que Qualidad!
Y Budweiser.  Este Bud es para ti...."  while their carton was thrust along a
spiral path by a large shower massager that left in its wake a chain of
orangutans in black leotards linked hand in foot.

	Dr. Sands felt certain that van Loo's system would prove perfectly
safe.  He felt he understood more about the man than the man himself did, and
he looked forward to meeting him.


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Copyright (c) 1992  Steven Connelly                   stevec@bu-pub.bu.edu

Comments welcome.