The Code
By Garth Brook
“Where’s the server?”
Professor Daniel Mercer turned from the passenger window.
“What?”
“The server,” Pieter van Rensburg said. “Where is it?”
They had been arguing about evolution for the better part of an hour.
The road ran almost straight ahead of them through the Eastern Free State, climbing slowly towards the sandstone country. Brown winter grass rolled away on either side, broken occasionally by cattle, windmills and distant blue-grey mountains.
Van Rensburg drove with one hand on the wheel.
Mercer looked at him.
“What server?”
“Exactly.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense.”
“No, Pieter. It makes absolutely no sense.”
Van Rensburg smiled.
They had been doing this since Bloemfontein.
Mercer was an evolutionary biologist. Van Rensburg was a geophysicist. They had known one another for twenty-three years and had spent a considerable portion of that time disagreeing.
This particular disagreement had started with a radio programme about antibiotic resistance.
Mercer had made the mistake of commenting on it.
Van Rensburg had made the larger mistake of replying.
Now they were seventy kilometres from the drilling site and still at it.
“Darwin works,” Mercer said. “We know it works. Variation, selection, inheritance. Environmental pressure favours useful characteristics. Those organisms reproduce. Over generations the population changes.”
“I know how evolution works.”
“Then why are we arguing?”
“Because you keep describing the software.”
Mercer stared at him.
“There you go again.”
“DNA is information.”
“Yes.”
“It stores instructions.”
“Yes.”
“It copies them.”
“Yes.”
“It makes errors.”
“Mutations.”
“It responds to environmental pressure.”
“Populations respond. DNA doesn't sit there watching the weather.”
“Fine. But information is being processed.”
Mercer sighed.
“Pieter, you cannot take computer terminology and paste it over biology.”
“I’m not.”
“You just called DNA software.”
“I said you were describing software.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Van Rensburg pointed through the windscreen.
“Look at that.”
A flock of birds lifted from a field as the vehicle approached.
“What about them?”
“They know when to move. Plants know when to flower. Bacteria develop resistance. Insects develop resistance to pesticides. Animals adapt to disease. Species alter behaviour when their environment changes.”
“Over generations.”
“Sometimes.”
“Usually.”
“Fine. Usually. But everything you’re describing depends on information.”
“Chemistry.”
“Which carries information.”
Mercer folded his arms.
“And this leads us where?”
Van Rensburg glanced at him.
“To the server.”
Mercer laughed.
“There is no server.”
“Then where is the information processed?”
“In the organism.”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
“Every response to every changing condition?”
“Not consciously, obviously.”
“I didn't say consciously.”
Van Rensburg slowed as they approached a turn-off.
A large temporary sign stood beside the road.
METSI EXPLORATION PROJECT
AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY
Below it were the logos of the exploration company, its drilling contractor and several government departments.
Van Rensburg indicated left.
“There’s our road.”
The vehicle left the tar.
For several kilometres neither man spoke.
Dust rose behind them.
Then Mercer said quietly:
“You’re assuming there has to be something underneath evolution.”
“No.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I’m asking whether there could be.”
“That’s different.”
“Exactly.”
Mercer looked out at the sandstone cliffs ahead.
“And if there is?”
Van Rensburg shrugged.
“Then Darwin remains Darwin.”
“That sounds suspiciously reasonable.”
“It happens occasionally.”
Mercer smiled.
Then he looked ahead.
The drilling rig appeared over the next rise.
And the argument stopped.
The scale of the Metsi operation was difficult to appreciate until you saw it.
The derrick stood above the plateau like a steel cathedral.
Around it stretched an industrial settlement of workshops, generators, mud tanks, pipe racks, laboratories, accommodation units, fuel bowsers, heavy vehicles and communications equipment.
The exploration programme had begun as a geological anomaly identified during a government-supported regional survey.
Nobody knew precisely what lay beneath the sandstone.
Possibly gas.
Possibly hydrocarbons.
Possibly nothing commercially useful at all.
But the seismic data had been unusual enough to attract money.
A great deal of money.
The exploration company had shareholders in Johannesburg, London and Toronto. The drilling contractor had brought in specialist equipment from three continents. Several components had been manufactured specifically for deep drilling through the geological formations beneath the plateau.
Every hour the rig stood idle cost money.
Every broken component cost more.
And the rig had been idle for most of the previous thirty-six hours.
A white helmet appeared beside the vehicle before Van Rensburg had switched off the engine.
“You Mercer?”
“Daniel Mercer.”
“And Van Rensburg?”
“Pieter.”
The man shook their hands.
“Colin Fraser. Site manager.”
He did not smile.
“You’ve come at a good time.”
“That doesn't sound promising,” Van Rensburg said.
“It isn’t.”
Fraser led them towards the rig.
“Lost another bit at four this morning.”
“What happened?”
“That’s what you’re here to tell me.”
“I’m a geophysicist.”
“I know.”
“And Professor Mercer is a biologist.”
“I know that too.”
Mercer looked at Van Rensburg.
Van Rensburg said nothing.
Fraser continued walking.
“The company has metallurgists. Drilling engineers. Structural engineers. Mud specialists. Electronics people. Everybody has an explanation.”
“And?”
“None of the explanations agree.”
They entered the engineering workshop.
A drill bit lay on a steel table.
Mercer had expected something resembling an oversized domestic drill.
It did not.
The assembly was massive, engineered to survive pressures and temperatures that would destroy ordinary machinery.
Several cutting elements were missing.
Others had been distorted.
Van Rensburg bent over it.
“How deep?”
“Three thousand one hundred and twelve metres.”
“Formation?”
“Sandstone into older basement material. Exactly where the seismic anomaly begins.”
“Temperature?”
“Within prediction.”
“Pressure?”
“Within prediction.”
“Vibration?”
Fraser hesitated.
“That’s one reason you’re here.”
He led them to another table.
On it lay a section of drill pipe.
It had split lengthways.
Not torn.
Not twisted.
Split.
The fracture ran almost perfectly along its length.
Van Rensburg stared at it.
“How?”
“If I knew that, you wouldn’t be here.”
Mercer moved closer to the fracture without touching it.
“That steel did this underground?”
“Yes.”
“What force splits steel like that?”
Fraser looked at him.
“Apparently none of the forces we recorded.”
Outside, several riggers were watching them.
Fraser lowered his voice.
“We have another problem.”
“The crew?”
“They don’t want to go back down.”
Van Rensburg looked towards the men.
“These are professional drillers.”
“Some of the best. North Sea. Angola. Gulf. Saudi. Deep mining. They’ve seen blowouts, fires, collapsed holes, equipment failures. They don't scare easily.”
“But they're scared now.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Fraser looked towards the rig.
“Because they can feel it.”
The first instrument Van Rensburg lowered into the borehole was a vibration sensor.
At 1,000 metres, nothing.
At 2,000, normal background geology.
At 2,800, something appeared.
At 3,100 metres, it became clear.
A pulse.
Van Rensburg stared at the monitor.
Mercer stood behind him.
“What am I looking at?”
“Low-frequency vibration.”
“From the rig?”
“The rig is shut down.”
“Generator?”
“Isolated.”
“Pump?”
“Off.”
Van Rensburg enlarged the trace.
A peak appeared.
Then another.
Then another.
Regular.
Precise.
Mercer leaned closer.
“What frequency?”
“One hundred and eleven.”
Another pulse appeared.
Van Rensburg frowned.
“Two hundred and twenty-two.”
Then:
Then:
The signal stopped.
Mercer looked at him.
“Well?”
“I don’t know.”
“That is becoming a surprisingly common answer around here.”
The signal returned.
Then silence.
Van Rensburg began recording.
For the next six hours they watched.
The sequences never repeated exactly.
At first Mercer lost interest.
Then he noticed Van Rensburg was no longer watching the large numbers.
He was studying the spaces between them.
“What?”
Van Rensburg did not answer.
He enlarged one section.
Inside the main pulse were smaller fluctuations.
Microscopic differences.
Duration.
Frequency.
Spacing.
Amplitude.
Mercer pulled up a chair.
“That’s noise.”
“Probably.”
An hour later Van Rensburg said:
“It isn't noise.”
Mercer looked across.
“How do you know?”
“Because noise doesn't organise itself.”
He showed him.
The small variations were grouped.
Not repeated.
Grouped.
Patterns inside patterns.
Mercer felt something unpleasant move through his stomach.
“Information?”
Van Rensburg sat back.
“Maybe.”
“You said that very quietly.”
“I’m hoping it will go away.”
It didn't.
For three days they barely slept.
The drilling remained suspended.
The company complained.
Fraser protected them as long as he could.
The shareholders wanted the hole reopened.
Government officials wanted progress reports.
The drilling contractor wanted written confirmation that its equipment was not responsible for the failures.
Nobody wanted to hear that two scientists were sitting in a portable laboratory studying something they had begun privately calling the Code.
The name had been Mercer’s.
Van Rensburg hated it.
For about six hours.
Then he began using it too.
They tried mathematics.
Prime sequences.
Wave relationships.
Fractal structures.
Geological correlations.
Nothing explained it.
Then Mercer made the connection.
A bacterial culture from the drilling mud had developed resistance to one of the site biocides.
Routine.
Uninteresting.
Except that Mercer had been monitoring it.
He compared the biological timeline with the Code.
The Code had changed first.
Thirty-one hours before measurable resistance appeared.
“Coincidence,” Van Rensburg said.
“Of course.”
They tested another colony.
Changed the chemical environment.
The Code altered.
The bacteria followed.
Again.
Different bacteria.
Different pressure.
The Code altered.
Biology followed.
They expanded the search.
Plants under drought stress.
Insects exposed to pesticides.
Disease resistance.
Migration patterns.
Archived geophysical records.
Wherever sufficiently detailed records existed, the same uncomfortable possibility appeared.
Environmental change.
Change in the Code.
Biological adaptation.
In that order.
Mercer walked outside.
Van Rensburg followed him.
The rig stood silent.
“You know what this looks like,” Van Rensburg said.
“No.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, Pieter.”
“The information changes before the adaptation.”
“That does not mean it causes the adaptation.”
“I didn't say it did.”
“Good.”
“Darwin still works.”
“Of course Darwin works.”
“Natural selection still happens.”
“Yes.”
“Mutation still happens.”
“Yes.”
“Successful adaptations still survive.”
“Yes.”
Van Rensburg looked back towards the laboratory.
“So maybe Darwin described what happens after the information arrives.”
Mercer turned sharply.
“Arrives from where?”
Van Rensburg said nothing.
Mercer stared at him.
Then remembered the road.
“Oh, don't you dare.”
Van Rensburg smiled.
“Where’s the server?”
They built a sealed ecosystem.
It was crude but sufficient.
Soil.
Water.
Plants.
Insects.
Bacteria.
Controlled temperature.
Controlled atmosphere.
No external biological exchange.
They allowed it to stabilise.
Then they changed one thing.
Water.
Nothing dramatic.
A reduction.
The Code changed eleven minutes later.
The plants had not adapted.
The insects had not adapted.
The bacteria had not adapted.
There had not been time.
Three days later measurable biological changes began.
They repeated the experiment with temperature.
The Code changed first.
Carbon dioxide.
The Code changed first.
Mineral availability.
The Code changed first.
Mercer sat in front of the chamber long after midnight.
Van Rensburg handed him coffee.
“We're missing something.”
“We're missing everything.”
“No. Something specific.”
Mercer looked at the chamber.
“We keep assuming it's biological.”
Van Rensburg stopped.
The next forty-eight hours changed the investigation completely.
They looked outside biology.
River-flow records.
Atmospheric turbulence.
Crystal growth.
Magnetic fluctuations.
Geological pressure.
Ocean data.
Then astronomy.
The structure was there.
Not the same frequency.
Not the same numbers.
The same architecture.
Information nested inside natural systems.
Changing.
Responding.
Everywhere.
Van Rensburg stared at the astronomical dataset.
“There is no server.”
Mercer looked at him.
“Apparently not.”
“Unless the server is everything.”
Neither man spoke after that.
By then, head office had stopped regarding Mercer and Van Rensburg as two consultants investigating a drilling problem.
They had become a problem themselves.
The daily reports coming out of Metsi were getting stranger.
First unexplained vibration.
Then patterned frequencies.
Then biological correlations.
Now the two scientists were claiming that similar information structures might exist in rivers, the atmosphere and astronomical observations.
The board did not know whether it had discovered something extraordinary or whether two respected scientists had disappeared down an intellectual rabbit hole while an extremely expensive drilling operation stood idle.
Either possibility was dangerous.
The managing director made the decision without consulting Fraser.
An independent specialist would be brought in.
Not another geologist.
Not another biologist.
A cybersecurity and data-forensics expert.
He would work remotely.
His instructions were simple.
Establish whether the Code was genuine.
Determine whether the Metsi computer system or instrumentation had been compromised.
Check whether an external signal was being introduced into the network.
And, without their knowledge, determine whether Mercer and Van Rensburg themselves might be contaminating the data.
Nobody at the site was told.
Not even Fraser.
At 02:17 the following morning, Mercer noticed an unfamiliar process running on the remote terminal.
“Pieter.”
Van Rensburg came across.
“What?”
“Someone's in the system.”
Directories opened.
Files were searched.
Raw data was copied into temporary memory.
The intruder moved rapidly through the network.
Van Rensburg reached for the keyboard.
“I’ll shut him out.”
Then he stopped.
“What?” Mercer asked.
“Wait.”
The intruder had found the Code.
A new analytical window opened.
Then another.
He separated the frequency layers.
Mapped the intervals.
Tested prime relationships.
Discarded them.
Tested Fibonacci sequences.
Discarded those.
Moved into fractal analysis.
Then recursive mathematics.
Mercer stared at the screen.
“He isn't stealing it.”
“No.”
“He's analysing it.”
“Yes.”
“Who is he?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“Then kick him out.”
Van Rensburg's hand hovered over the keyboard.
Another screen appeared.
The intruder was examining relationships between sequences that neither scientist had tested.
Van Rensburg slowly withdrew his hand.
“Leave him.”
Mercer looked at him.
“What?”
“Leave him.”
“He's inside our system.”
“I know.”
“He's probably copying everything.”
“I know.”
“So why are we letting him?”
Van Rensburg pointed at the monitor.
“Because he's better at this than we are.”
They watched.
For nearly forty minutes the unknown intruder attacked the Code with mathematical tools neither scientist possessed.
Several times he reached conclusions they had already reached.
Then he moved beyond them.
Mercer pulled another chair closer.
“Look at that.”
“I see it.”
The intruder had begun comparing each sequence not merely with the next one, but with the entire history preceding it.
A pattern emerged.
Van Rensburg leaned forward.
“No.”
Mercer whispered:
“What?”
“Look at sequence forty-seven.”
“I am.”
“Now twenty-three.”
Mercer looked.
Then forty-seven again.
Elements of the earlier sequence existed inside the later one.
Altered.
Recombined.
But present.
They checked another.
And another.
The same thing.
The Code was not simply changing.
It retained information about its previous states.
Each alteration affected what came afterwards.
Mercer sat back.
“It remembers.”
Van Rensburg said nothing.
“No,” Mercer said. “More than that.”
The cursor on the remote screen continued moving.
The intruder had reached the same conclusion.
Mercer looked at Van Rensburg.
“It learns.”
For the first time that night, neither man watched the screen.
They looked at each other.
Because this was something beyond the argument they had begun on the road.
Beyond Darwin.
Beyond geology.
Beyond the drilling project.
The Code did not merely respond to change.
It incorporated change.
It retained outcomes.
And used them in what came next.
On the screen the cursor stopped.
For nearly a minute nothing happened.
Then a transmission window opened.
Van Rensburg stood.
“What is he doing?”
A sequence appeared.
Mercer stared at it.
“He's sending it back.”
“No.”
Van Rensburg grabbed the keyboard.
“Don't do that.”
The transmission completed.
For three seconds nothing happened.
Then the borehole answered.
Every monitor in the laboratory filled simultaneously.
Outside, the rig alarms began screaming.
Lights failed.
Generators surged.
Mud pumps started without command.
A drilling motor engaged.
Men ran from the accommodation units.
Someone shouted to kill the power.
A transformer exploded in a white flash.
Fraser appeared outside the laboratory, yelling instructions.
The computer screens filled with data faster than either scientist could read.
Then the intruder vanished.
Van Rensburg ripped the network cable from the wall.
The signal continued.
“That’s impossible,” Mercer said.
The network was disconnected.
The remote connection was gone.
Yet the borehole continued transmitting.
The sequence accelerated.
Then—
nothing.
Every monitor flattened.
Silence.
Fraser burst through the door.
“What the hell did you do?”
Van Rensburg turned on him.
“Someone got into the system.”
“What?”
“A hacker. He accessed our data.”
Fraser stared at him.
“He did what?”
“He analysed the Code and then transmitted a sequence back down the instrumentation.”
Fraser's expression changed.
Not understanding.
Recognition.
Mercer saw it.
“You know something.”
Fraser said nothing.
“Colin?”
Fraser looked from one scientist to the other.
Then swore quietly.
“There was no hacker.”
Van Rensburg stared at him.
“What?”
“Head office.”
“What about head office?”
“They brought somebody in.”
“Who?”
“Cybersecurity. Data forensics. I found out about it yesterday. They didn't tell me until he'd already been given access.”
Mercer stood slowly.
“They commissioned him?”
“Yes.”
“To spy on us?”
“To verify you.”
Van Rensburg looked towards the dead monitors.
“Verify what?”
“Whether your signal was genuine. Whether the system had been compromised. Whether somebody was feeding information into the instruments.”
Mercer understood before Fraser finished.
“And whether we were responsible.”
Fraser said nothing.
That was answer enough.
Van Rensburg looked at the monitor.
“And did anybody tell this genius not to talk back to it?”
Nobody answered.
The company shut the operation down before sunrise.
By midday, lawyers had arrived.
By evening, the shareholders were demanding explanations.
The drilling contractor denied liability.
Government representatives wanted the incident contained.
The crew wanted transport home.
And head office wanted the identity of its independent specialist kept out of every written report.
Mercer understood why.
The company had commissioned him.
The company had given him access.
And the company had never told the scientists actually studying the phenomenon that someone else had been authorised to experiment with it.
Nobody wanted the truth.
Partly because nobody understood it.
But mainly because there was no useful way of explaining it.
Tell a shareholder that a drilling operation worth hundreds of millions had been stopped because an unknown natural information structure might exist throughout biology, geology and possibly the universe, and the conversation became difficult.
Tell the media and it became impossible.
Tell the riggers and they would never go near the hole again.
Mercer and Van Rensburg sat alone in the laboratory that night.
Their access had already been cancelled.
Security would escort them off site in the morning.
Van Rensburg looked at the final datasets.
“We made one mistake from the beginning.”
“Only one?”
“We thought the signal came from here.”
Mercer nodded.
“It doesn't.”
“No.”
“The borehole amplified it.”
“Or allowed us to hear it.”
Mercer looked at the different datasets spread across the monitors.
Bacteria.
Plants.
Rivers.
Atmosphere.
Crystals.
Magnetic fields.
Stars.
“So what is it?”
Van Rensburg thought about the question.
“Not instructions.”
“No.”
“Not a blueprint.”
“No.”
“Not a message.”
“Probably not.”
“And not fixed.”
That was the part neither of them had been prepared for.
If the Code had been ancient, they could have imagined some primordial set of physical instructions embedded in the universe at its beginning.
But it wasn't ancient.
Or rather, it was not merely ancient.
It was happening now.
The Code changed when circumstances changed.
Those changes affected what followed.
What followed altered the next state.
And the Code changed again.
A continuous feedback loop.
Not a book already written.
A book being written.
Mercer looked at Van Rensburg.
“So Darwin survives.”
Van Rensburg smiled.
“Darwin was never on trial.”
“Evolution still happens.”
“Yes.”
“Natural selection still happens.”
“Yes.”
“But perhaps there's an information process underneath it.”
“Perhaps.”
Mercer looked at the dead borehole monitor.
“And beyond biology?”
Van Rensburg glanced at the astronomical data.
“That is the problem.”
The official report described the incident as a combination of equipment failure, anomalous subsurface vibration and unauthorised interference with the instrumentation.
It did not mention that the person responsible for the interference had been commissioned by the company.
The borehole was sealed.
The project was suspended indefinitely.
The exploration company wrote off a substantial loss.
The shareholders were furious.
The drilling contractor threatened litigation.
Government departments distanced themselves from the project.
The rig was dismantled.
Within six months there was almost nothing left on the plateau except a capped borehole and a rectangle of disturbed ground.
Mercer and Van Rensburg were dismissed for breaching security protocols and failing to maintain adequate control over experimental data.
Neither missed the irony.
They never learned the real name of the specialist.
They never spoke to him.
They never discovered precisely what he had understood in those forty minutes.
And neither discovered why, when he transmitted four simple numbers into the system, the Code had answered.
Seven years later, Professor Daniel Mercer stood before a lecture theatre filled with biology students.
Behind him was a portrait of Charles Darwin.
“Natural selection,” he said, “remains one of the most important ideas in science. Variation occurs. Environments exert pressure. Some characteristics improve survival and reproduction. Over generations populations change.”
A student raised her hand.
“Professor?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think Darwin explained everything?”
Mercer smiled.
“No scientist should ever assume that an explanation of what happens is necessarily the final explanation of why it happens.”
“So there could be something underneath evolution?”
“There could be many things we haven't discovered.”
“Like what?”
Mercer looked towards the window.
Far beyond the university, rivers were flowing, insects were breeding, plants were responding to heat and bacteria were dividing.
“Information,” he said.
The student frowned.
“Information from where?”
Mercer smiled.
“That is an excellent question.”
On the same afternoon, several hundred kilometres away, Pieter van Rensburg stood before a smaller physics seminar.
There was no portrait behind him.
Only a waveform.
A student in the front row raised his hand.
“Professor, what is that?”
“A measurement.”
“Of what?”
“We don't know.”
“Where does it come from?”
“We don't know.”
“Is it biological?”
“No.”
“Geological?”
“Not exclusively.”
“Artificial?”
“No evidence of that.”
“Then what does it mean?”
Van Rensburg looked at the waveform.
“We don't know.”
The class laughed.
One student called from the back:
“You don't seem to know very much, Professor.”
Van Rensburg smiled.
“That is why we keep doing science.”
Another hand went up.
A young woman this time.
“Professor?”
“Yes?”
“You keep calling it the Code.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Because it behaves like information.”
“Then somebody must have written it.”
The room became quiet.
Van Rensburg looked at the screen.
For a moment he saw the Free State road again.
Two scientists arguing in a vehicle.
A flock of birds rising from a field.
A drilling rig appearing above the sandstone.
Broken steel.
A signal beneath three kilometres of rock.
An unseen specialist sitting somewhere behind another computer, believing he had been hired to investigate an anomaly.
A sealed chamber.
Bacteria.
Plants.
Rivers.
Atmosphere.
Stars.
And something changing continuously beneath all of them.
The student asked again.
“Who wrote the Code?”
Van Rensburg turned towards her.
“That was our first mistake.”
“What was?”
“We thought it had been written.”
He turned back to the waveform.
On the screen, almost too small to see, the intervals between the pulses changed.
Van Rensburg watched them.
Then he smiled.
“The question isn't who wrote the Code.”
He faced the class.
“The question is—
who is writing it now?”
About the Author
Garth Brook is a South African writer and publisher of the country magazine Speckled Bean. Besides writing, his work includes fundraising for conservation projects and river rehabilitation initiatives in rural South Africa. He is also a keen fly fisherman — although these days he seems to spend far more time writing about rivers than actually fishing them.