Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel

Chapter 34

I finally figured out what Gaia was being used for. I was looking at the code's history, all the way back to the very first commits, when Taye had been writing the code himself. That code was very easy to understand. Sophisticated, certainly. But straightforward.

As I suspected, he was applying Ancien's machine learning algorithms to computer code itself. Taye's earliest code was a simple big data importer script. It worked diligently to import billions of lines of code directly from GitHub into Ancien. This part had probably taken weeks.

It also imported all of the code's history—so as individual lines of code were improved and debugged and made more secure, Ancien learned the difference. Bad line of code. Good line of code. Billions of times. In dozens of programming languages.

One of the guards raised his hand to his earpiece and whispered something. I couldn't make it out. I pretended I didn't see it and kept working.

It was shortly after this big data dump into Ancien that I started to see small code changes being made to Gaia. I assumed those small changes were Gaia's experiments at improving its own code. It was still writing human language code, but they were small changes compared to the ones Taye seemed to have been making himself.

That's when the bad news started. Taye had apparently been trying to use Gaia to write better code. But someone else was making changes to Gaia too. The author of those changes was anonymous. That person had flipped a switch in the code, though. Instead of finding ways to improve bad code, now Gaia would simply find and report bad code. Shortly after, Gaia was modified further to exploit the bad code it found. Like me, Taye hadn't immediately recognized how powerful Gaia could be in the wrong hands. Looking at the early code history of Gaia was like watching at a tragedy unfold.

I'd just found a particularly interesting change in the code history when the guard came up to me and dropped his enormous paw on my shoulder.

"Is it working yet?" he growled.

"Was that Thor? Tell him I'm making good progress, but it's complicated. I need more time."

"Time's up."

"I'm not done." He grabbed my shoulder to pull me out of the chair. "Hey, I said I'm not done. Let go of me."

"You're done for today."

"Where are you taking me?"

The guard didn't respond. He just started dragging me away like a lion pulling a carcass.

"Can I go home now?"

The guard said nothing.