The Vaio’s recent near-lobotomy experience  got me thinking. It had happened because of ZoneAlarm’s inability to clean up after itself, which is nothing unusual or remarkable in the world of software. My particular situation had been well-documented, and there were only a finite set of possibilities. In the worst case, I could’ve done a clean install of WinXP. It would’ve been painful and humiliating for sure, but then, dignity has no evolutionary value. It could’ve been a lot worse.

How much worse?

Well, any virus based on any regular pattern can, in principle, be killed. Given enough time– a finite amount of time– an antidote can be devised for “stable viruses.” So how about a virus that morphs into different forms, that has antigenic mutability? Something like the software equivalents of retroviruses like HIV and influenza? After all, even after millions of years of human evolution, the flu still managed to kill more people in the 20th century than the two world wars combined. In fact, the scenario can be worsened. Epidemiologists worry about designer viruses, such as Edwin D. Kilbourne‘s Maximally Malignant Virus, or the MMV. As Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child describe it in their novel, Mount Dragon:

The MMV would have, he [Kilbourne] theorized, the environmental stability of polio, the antigenic mutability of influenza, the unrestricted host range of rabies, the latency of herpes….It would be far more devastating than a nuclear war. Why? A nuclear war is self-limiting. But with the spread of an MMV, every infected person becomes a brand-new walking bomb. And today’s transmission routes are so widespread, so quickly achieved by international travelers, it only takes a few carriers for a virus to go global.

Great doomsday stuff. But inaccurate. Epidemics starve to death. No steady supply of susceptibles, end of epidemic. Period. It’s called the Kermack-McKendrick threshold theorem. And Dr. Kilbourne is skeptical of these doomsday viruses as well. As he said in a recent interview:

Let me just say that a virus of any kind that has a mortality rate of 50 percent is killing itself, because it will have nowhere to go if it wipes out all the hosts. So it is not in the virus’s interest to kill many people.

There’s also a major difference between infected people and infected computers. Unlike computers, people don’t neatly unzip into software and hardware. We are, as the late Dr. Robert Rosen explained, fabrications rather than simulations. The analogy between computer viruses and biological viruses may be relatively accurate, but the analogy between people and computers is fundamentally flawed.

Besides, we’ll soon have far more sophisticated techniques to fight the kind of viruses we see today. (The current strategy of running our machines like totalitarian states cannot stand. Totalitarian states are brittle. Worse, they breed for virulence by eliminating the easy, the weak and the incompetent.)

So is that it? Are we safe because we can always restore-image the disk, do a clean install, no matter how deadly the virus? Or is there a virus for which the only “cure” is to trash the machine itself? A virus, which like original sin, turns the machine into “crooked timber out of which no straight thing can ever be made”? An existential virus?

I think such a virus is quite feasible. When you buy a machine, you’re also buying a hazard curve. A destiny, if you will. Based on the life-histories of hundreds of machines of your type, there’s a certain probability that a randomly chosen machine will survive coffee spills, crashes, reboots, virus attacks, and what not. Most machines are rock-solid. But alas, your machine is Gerald Ford. It’s Anne Hathaway in Princess Diaries. It’s the klutzy heroine in Sailor Moon. Your machine has to sit on some point of the hazard curve after all. Bad juju– assigned to your machine in a completely fair way– merely nudges your machine towards the wrong end of the curve. Like the pale consumptive women in Gothic novels, your machine is chronically sick. You can clean-install the software all you want. But disks continue to get corrupted, the fan mysteriously stops working, the screen flicker remains very sensitive to solar flares, and there’s a tinny rattling sound every time you use the calculator. Worst of all, no one else believes you. It’s not a virus, they say. It’s just a run of bad luck, they say. Everybody knows a second cousin or a friend’s friend who had a similar problem. Shit happens, they. What are you going to do? Sue the laws of physics?

This virus– let’s call it Vex– that distorts your machine’s subjective hazard curve away from the typical may sound like a contradiction in terms. There would not be something “typical,” one could argue, if Vex were to exist. Yes, there could. You see, typically, most people wouldn’t encounter Vex.

Could something like Vex be built? Something that produces more bad juju for some people than others? Yes.

The basic scenario would be something like this. First, you need a hardware virus, that is, a virus capable of damaging the PC’s hardware (embodiment). Second, Vex may do nothing at all. Post-infection, it may at some random point, act so as to “nudge” the machine to an atypical point on the hazard curve (uncertainty). Third, the delivery mechanism is via the internet (ubiquity). Fourth, if it acts, it does so exactly once (uniqueness). The design rationale should be obvious. As for the implementation details, I have no clue.  No doubt, Vex is a beast best left to slumber in peace.

Perhaps one of Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short stories The Lottery In Babylon offers a prescient glimpse of what something like Vex would effect:

…That silent functioning, like God’s, inspires all manner of conjectures. One scurrilously suggests that the Company ceased to exist hundreds of years ago, and that the sacred disorder of our lives is purely hereditary, traditional; another believes that Company is eternal, and that it shall endure until the last night, when the last god shall annihilate the earth. Yet another declares that the Company is omnipotent, but affects only small things: the cry of a bird, the shades of rust and dust, the half dreams that come at dawn. Another, whispered by the masked heresiarchs, says that the Company has never existed, and never will…

Disorder. Doubt. Delusion. Despair. What more could a postmodern virus want?

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Acknowledgements:

The featured image is a scaled version of “Window” by Alicia (Skittles52Stock @ Deviant Art)