In November 1988 a graduate student wrote a program to answer a simple question: how big is this internet we have built? It stole nothing. It deleted nothing. Its entire purpose was to exist, spread, and count.
Within hours it had brought down roughly a tenth of the network.
Not because he was careless — because he was careful. He knew a self-copying program could smother a machine, so he built a check: ask whether a copy is already here, and if so, bow out. Then he realised someone could defeat that check by simply answering “yes” to everything. So he protected the safeguard: one time in seven, don’t bother asking.
And the same piece of code that asked the question was the piece that listened for it. So one worm in seven arrived deaf — unfindable, untellable, immortal.
The Magnanimous Doctor Warthan opens the file on the guard that ate the internet, and on the extraordinary night of volunteer engineering that took it apart by Friday.
The Doctor’s voice and the Society’s imagery are synthesized.