About "The Worm" by Alexander Lazarevich.

This page presents the English version of my science-fiction story (or, rather, a techno-thriller) "Worm". It is built around two rather intriguing ideas:

  1. The computing power of one, even the biggest, super computer at present still falls far short of what is required to achieve a real artificial intelligence comparable to the intelligence of man. But if we consider the total computing power of all of the millions of computers that constitute the global network, that computing power is much more than is actually required to eclipse the intelligence of man. The only thing this giant virtual global computer lacks, is the appropriate software which could make it work as one machine.
  2. Such software would be so complex, that it cannot be written by mere humans. However, tha blind process of Darwinian evolution has somehow managed to create Homo Sapience out of unthinking one-celled amoeba. True, it took several billions of years, but the processes in the virtual worlds of computers are so much faster than in the real world...

And so, a self-evolving computer "worm" (a kind of virus) finally succeeds in linking all the computers in the world into one giant virtual global computer. And with this comes the obsolence of Man...

This story, written in 1992 and never officially published, was very popular on Russian BBSs.
Click here to start downloading the file WORM1E.ZIP, 30 Kbytes, containing the English version of "The Worm" story.(ASCII-text file)

This story has a sequel, which I still have not had enough time to translate into English. I hope to do this in the future.

If you can read Russian you may click here to download the files containing the Russian versions of both the first and the second parts of "The Worm" story. (Both texts are in Cyrilic DOS encoding known as CP866. You will need a Cyrillic screen driver for DOS to read it.)

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Alexander Lazarevich.
E-mail:lazarevicha@online.ru