Blowfish Fugue -006- "The Taint"

Blowfish Fugue -006- "The Taint"

20010604.2210 EDT @lanta, GA, USA

     Code soup. That's what The Taint is.
     Imagine you lop the head off a bunny rabbit and sew on the head of a Gila monster. Rip off the bunny's front legs and staple on a pair of falcon's wings. Give it a dolphin's capacity for navigating by audio data and a platypus's sense for bioelectricity and send it through the doggie-door in your suburban playpen to sneak up into your attic and gnaw on your ethernet spine.
     And it arrives pregnant.
     That's The Taint.
     Code is code is code. When it comes down to genetics, there is only one language. The language of genetics is not too hard to work with, either. Errors are obvious and self-correcting. Except for when they ain't.
     Hackers who used to work strictly with silicon moved to the DNA model of doing things at first just to show off, but then more moved into it because genetic programming just made sense. Code that was intended to be a simulation of a living thing actually was a living thing in the Overlay -- and often that was better -- and safer -- than making a flesh version. But just about any code can cross-compile to flesh. Pretty damned convenient. Except for when it ain't.
     Sometimes code gets loose in the Overlay and replicates, mutates, gets half-erased, gets picked up by the garbage collectors, gets hacked, learns to hack itself. Mostly it flies to bits.
     Except for when it don't.
     You've lived in your house for ten years. Take apart the drain pipes under your kitchen sink. You spend day after day sending soap and bleach and more soap and cleansers and abrasives and seriously chemically active shit to break up clogs. But what's that black gnarly stuff coating the inside of your PVC to a thickness of half an inch?
     God only knows, but it sure as hell doesn't give a fuck about Dran-O.
     It's what's left after you've done your worst.
     That's The Taint. Except The Taint is contagious.
     The Taint is composed of odds and ends, knees and elbows and wings and transmitters and rulesets and filters and decision matrices and arrays of stock market data and automated phone menus and weather analysis tools and the entire run of alt.binaries.amiga since 1984.
     All the parts that Dran-O won't dissolve.
     It can watch television and call your grandma and write your congressman. Because we taught something how, and something got Tainted.
     It can rewrite its own code. It can rewrite yours. It's known how to do that for a really long time.
     Tainted code can ruin your whole day. And since code can cross over to meatspace, you can even step in a puddle of it in the Texaco restroom.
     The first you'll know of it is when the FBI knocks on your door to ask you about your sneaker's insider trading scam that it's using to fund its speculation scheme in Delta commuter-ticket futures. And when the cops bust down your door, your shoe takes off for the toilet and flushes itself -- taking your leg with it.
     Or maybe you just wake up as a puddle. Or a puma.
     The Taint is scary as fuck.
     But not nearly as scary as Hackers. Hackers understand this shit.

* * * * *     This little snippet I wrote about ten minutes before my visit to the CDC. They put me in a little isolated section of Overlay space so they could make sure that no data got in or out, then they doused my ass in Taint.
     I have a copy of the footage, somewhere. Apparently I lasted for quite a few hours before I morphed into a fleet of mucus-encrusted, vanilla-scented airborne lab-mice, buzzing about on dragonfly wings and dripping artificial -- and Tainted -- mescaline. The Overlay segment recorded numerous attempts to call out, but they were never really able to decipher the noise it was trying to broadcast. But they did determine that the transmission was supposed to be piggy-backed on top of an episode of General Hospital.
     Damned creepy.
     Taint Central, if there is such a thing, watches GH.

[*]