“Real Dad!” cried Annie. “As opposed to . . . ?” asked Eric.
“Fake Dad!” she said tremulously, pointing at the android, now sprawled at a crazy angle across the armchair, still clutching Annie’s bear. The light in his eyes had gone out, which seemed to mean he had switched himself off.
“My personalized robot!” said Eric, his own eyes lighting up instead. “He’s arrived!”
“Your what?”
“He’s my helper-bot—or Ebot, if you like,” Eric told Annie, going over to where the robot sat, unmoving. “I ordered him ages ago. He’s me in robot form. He even has all my biometric measurements, so in certain situations it would be quite tricky to tell the difference between us. When did he get here?”
“He just arrived!” chipped in George. “We got back from the market square—”
“What were you doing there?” Eric stopped examining his robot and looked round sharply. “Why were you in the middle of town? Why weren’t you safely at home?”
“We saw the commotion from my tree house,” George admitted. “So we just went to see what was going on. We didn’t realize it would be like that.”
Annie gave him a grateful smile for not including the part about her wanting to see her favorite boy band.
Eric’s eyes widened. “But that was the most dangerous afternoon there’s ever been in the whole history of Foxbridge!” he said. “I can’t believe you kids were in the middle of it! When I left the office, I had to take the long way round because the center of town is still blocked off—all those people fighting and rioting over the money that came out of the banks. You’re not hurt, either of you?”
George and Annie shook their heads.
“It’s not just Foxbridge!” Annie checked her phone again. “It’s happening everywhere! All over the world!”
“I know,” said Eric seriously. “Look at this.” He produced an iPad from his messenger bag. He showed them a video clip of people rioting, the Eiffel Tower clearly visible in the background. Above their heads floated bits of blue, green, and brown paper; rioters were leaping up and trying to grab them.
“And New York . . . ” He showed them another video clip: yellow taxicabs were hooting furiously in the avenues between huge skyscrapers as the same scenes played out, only all the bits of paper were green. The streets were overrun by people frantically trying to catch the bills as they drifted about on the breeze.
Eric tapped the screen, and the two friends saw another city jammed between a white beach and tall green mountains, a huge figure with outstretched arms perched on the highest one. “Rio,” he told them, “South America. But watch . . . ” This time they saw how the whole process had begun. They watched as a bank machine on an ordinary street in Rio suddenly started to spew money, bills pouring out of it. On the video, a passerby doubled back in astonishment as the money just kept on coming. He looked around furtively, and then started stuffing his pockets with bills. But within seconds, more and more people had appeared, attempting to push each other out of the way to get the cash. The view shifted, and they saw how, all over the densely packed city, cash machines were behaving in the same inexplicable and bizarre way, spitting out bills . . . unnoticed at first—until some passerby saw what was happening and then, a few minutes later, a fight broke out.
“It’s the same the world over,” said Eric. “Here’s Beijing.” They saw red yuan notes floating above the Forbidden City; euros trodden into the ground in St. Peter’s Square in Rome; purple Turkish lira being chased by thousands of eager hands in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul; and rupees whirling like a cloud of insects through the narrow streets of Delhi.
“There’s money everywhere,” he went on. “There seems to have been some kind of massive global glitch in computerized banking systems that has caused ATMs everywhere to start giving out cash.”
“Wow, but that’s really cool!” exclaimed Annie. “I bet loads of those people don’t even have enough money to buy food to eat or get shoes for their kids. But the banks have squillions to spend: it’s all just sitting in their vaults while people go hungry. Now they’ve shared their loot with the world, which is brilliant. Don’t you think that’s how it should be?” Annie appealed to George and Eric.
George thought about it. Unlike Annie, he had actually grown up without all sorts of things that kids around him seemed to take for granted—new clothes, computers, skiing trips, or meals in restaurants—because his parents couldn’t afford them. But even though part of him would love to be given money to spend on anything he wanted, he couldn’t quite agree that it was a good thing. It seemed as if someone somewhere had taken a radical decision about how people should live their lives, without actually asking them whether this was what they wanted. After all, whose money was it that the banks were giving away? It might belong to a bunch of very rich people . . . but what if it was the savings of old people or really poor people who would now find themselves with nothing? Was that fair?
“I do agree,” chipped in Eric, “that wealth should be shared out across the world in a better way. Right now, we’ve got billionaires spending more on snacks than other people will earn in the whole of their lives. But I am not at all sure that what went on today is the way to fix it.”
“But how could it have happened?” George asked in amazement. “How could all those machines have gone wrong at the same moment?”
“I have no idea! I don’t think anyone knows. One thing is for certain—I’m going to have to find out. Because this seems to be a computer-based problem—and as I’m the government’s ‘Information Technology Czar,’ it looks like I’ll be drafted in to solve the problem.” He looked at his robot and sighed. “I won’t have time to get old Ebot here working properly, which is a shame. Where’s the box he came in? There should be some other bits and pieces with him.”
Annie jumped up and ran into the hallway. They heard the noise of her rooting around in the big cardboard box; then she returned carrying a sleek black bag, which she handed to her father.
“Oh, wonderful!” Eric pulled out a lilac-shaded pair of glasses with a strange attachment at the side. He put them on and wiggled his eyebrows, which caused the robot in the chair to come back to life with a start.
“Remote-access glasses,” said Eric happily. “I ordered them specially! When I put them on, I can give commands and see through Ebot’s eyes!” He searched around in the bag and found a pair of gloves. “Haptic technology,” he murmured, putting on the gloves. He waved his hand, and Ebot waved his hand in exactly the same way.
Just then, Eric’s cell phone rang. He reached into his pocket for it—which caused Ebot to mimic his movements, reaching into his pocket for an imaginary phone, which he also pulled out and pressed to his ear. As Eric spoke into the phone—“Yes . . . Really? Oh, no! I’ll come straightaway”—Ebot imitated his movements perfectly.
Eric hung up and turned to Annie and George. “Okay, kids,” he said. “You’re in charge of Ebot. Here are the glasses. . . .” He passed them to Annie. “Here are the gloves. . . .” He gave them to George. “Now I have to dash.”
He already had the absentminded look that appeared whenever he put his enormous brain into gear and started thinking about a new problem.
“What’s going on?” Annie jumped up and down with the glasses on. “Ooh, these are really weird,” she said. “I can see me, but I can see me as Ebot sees me! It’s so strange. . . . It’s like I’m seeing myself on TV or something. This is soooo cool!”
George had quickly put on the gloves and was making Ebot lift up first one hand and then the other. It was brilliant to have a machine that did exactly what he commanded! This was much better than dealing with people, who behaved in random and weird ways just when you least expected it.
“I’ve been asked to go to a meeting with the Prime Minister,” Eric informed them as he gathered his things together.
“The Prime Minister?” squeaked Annie. “Why?”
“She wants me to help her understand how all those banks could have decided to give away money at the same moment,” said Eric. “She’s worried it might be a cyber-attack. We’ve got to look at what happened to the financial systems and stop it from happening again.”
“Is it a cyber-terrorist?” George wondered. “Like Beryl was saying last night, maybe someone has worked out how to read the secret messages and use that information . . . ?”
“That could be it,” Eric agreed. “But it’s very strange. How did all those different banks in different countries come under attack at the same moment? To do that would be a huge job, and I didn’t think anyone had the computer power to do that. Anyway, I’ve got to go—the PM doesn’t want me to communicate with her by Internet or phone: it has to be in person. Be good!” With that, he whirled out through the front door and was gone.
George, Annie, and Ebot all waved good-bye to his departing back. Silence fell, but only for a second.
“So what shall we do now?” asked Annie. “We’ve got robo-Dad to look after us, so we should be allowed to go and see what’s happening in Foxbridge!”
“But he’s not a real adult, is he?” said George doubtfully. “And if we lose him in the crowd, your dad isn’t going to be very pleased.”
“Dad’ll never know! We’ve got the remote glasses, so it’s not like he can look through Ebot’s eyes and see where we’ve gone.”
“Hmm . . .” George scratched his chin, causing Ebot to do the same.
But at that moment a new sound reached their ears: fat little feet were thumping along the hallway, accompanied by high-pitched squeals. A few seconds later, two very grubby small girls burst into the playroom. Spotting their big brother, Juno and Hera crowed with delight and ran to give him sticky hugs and sloppy kisses, which he fought off as tactfully as he could while Ebot mirrored his movements behind him.
“Urgh,” he muttered as he wiped drool off his cheek.
A hacker is someone who tries to find weaknesses in the software or setup of a computer to obtain unauthorized access.
• “White hat” hackers may do this with the permission of the computer’s owner as a test of its security.
• More commonly, a hacker is a “black hat”—someone with only mischievous or criminal intentions. And if you have a computer connected to the Internet at the moment, it is quite possible that a black hat somewhere in the world is trying to break into it!
A bot army
A hacker can use or develop software to target automatically many internet addresses. The attack may even be coming from another computer on your street, which—totally unknown to the computer’s user—is already controlled by the hacker and has joined what is known as their “bot army”! The hacker directing this army of compromised computers may be in another country and be difficult to trace.
Malware
An attachment to an email—or a link posted on a social media site like Facebook—could be a piece of malware—this is hostile software that is a help to the hacker when run on your computer. For example, it could be:
• a computer virus that inserts itself into files and tries to spread to other computers. Early viruses could do things like delete any photo you look at, or replace text with rows of gibberish. Imagine losing all your school coursework as a result of a virus!
• a program that starts recording your key presses and activity and sends them to the hacker, in order to capture passwords and credit card numbers used to buy goods online.
• a program that directly connects to the hacker and gives him or her remote control (your computer just joined the bot army!).
Why do hackers hack?
It’s illegal but hackers may like hacking because . . .
• They enjoy the challenge or thrill.
• They may disagree with the policies of an organization and want to embarrass it by getting hold of and publishing private data, or by vandalizing their website. It is possible, for instance, to make all the computers they control try to log on to the same website, so that the website crashes. This is called a “distributed denial-of- service” attack.
• And many are serious criminals who just want your money! These people want to trick you into giving away your passwords and secret information so that they can buy things with your money, or simply steal money out of a bank account. They may also want to pretend to be you online, to hide their own identity while they do something illegal. Or use your computer in their bot army to attack someone else.
How do hackers hack?
1. Physical attack
The computer itself might be stolen, and then you have to assume that the thief will get access to all your files on it, even if you used a strong password. Everything on the hard drive is at the mercy of the hacker, who can play your music, look at your pictures—even read your blogs and email messages to your friends!
Stop the hacker! If you own a laptop, take great care if keeping data you wouldn’t want to lose—or have read by someone else—on its hard drive, because a laptop can easily be stolen. And keep backups at home.
2. Software attack
If your computer is connected to the Internet, there can be vulnerabilities (mistakes!) in its software that could allow a hacker to gain access remotely, through the network. Some of these mistakes could allow a hacker to run programs on your computer without even having to trick you into doing something first, and if hackers find out about these security holes before the people who write the computer software do, they can exploit them before anyone has time to fix the problem: these attacks are known as “zero-day” exploits because they take place on zero-day of the vulnerability becoming generally known.
Stop the hacker! Updates (patches) are made available by the software company to fix vulnerabilities. Nowadays, your computer will usually let you know if a patch is available, and you should always install these—ask your parent or guardian to do so, or help you to do so, if it is their computer—otherwise the computer, the data on it, including any of your private information, may be at risk. Additionally, make sure any computer connected to the internet has its firewall turned on—a firewall is a barrier that can block uninvited connections to the computer from the internet.
3. User attack
A hacker may try to trick the computer user into doing something for them. For example, you could receive an email asking you to click on a link, or open an attachment, or a link might send you to what looks like the genuine web page of your favorite site. But email is totally insecure—in fact, anyone can send a message that claims to be from someone else, and can attach a link that looks genuine. So an unexpected message like this could be from a hacker, and the attachment could be a nasty piece of malware.
Stop the hacker! Never open a strange attachment—even if the message appears to come from someone you know and looks like it would be a lot of fun to look at! Would your friends really just send you a link without a message too? Watch out too for fake web pages and never enter your username and password on any site unless you are positive it is the genuine site. Don’t even click on a link that comes out of the blue, because the link itself may contain malicious code that your web browser will then execute. Beware!
Don’t make it easy for hackers! Passwords are really important. Weak passwords (less than ten characters long, or containing obvious words like part of your name, or no punctuation characters) can often be easily found with modern computers. So always choose a good password—never just use “password,” for instance, and don’t be guilty of using the same one for everything!
Annie looked on in amazement. “How did they get in?” she wondered.
“I told you,” said George, who had given in and collapsed back into the armchair, where he was being warmly embraced by his two little sisters. Ebot was copying his movements in a very awkward manner: the poor robot had no one to hug and no chair to sit on, which made him look most peculiar. “They get everywhere.”
Annie’s mom stuck her head round the door. “Hello, everyone!” she said cheerfully. “My goodness! What is that robot doing? What a funny way to stand.”
“Don’t ask, Mom,” said Annie. Susan wasn’t an enormous fan of science and technology: they seemed to have taken over her life more than she had bargained for when she married Eric as a graduate student.
“How sweet of you to bring your sisters round, George,” she said. “But don’t you think it’s getting a bit late for little ones? Perhaps you should take them home now. . . . And, Annie, don’t you need to get on with your vacation project?”
George tried not to look too disappointed. He had been really looking forward to working out how to operate Ebot—and having a chat with Annie about what had happened in Foxbridge earlier. Now, thanks to his sisters, it didn’t look like he’d get the chance to do either. He stood up, holding one sister under each arm, their fat little legs kicking wildly, while behind him, Ebot produced an exact copy of his actions.
“Gracious me!” said Susan, noticing Ebot properly this time. “That robot looks just like your father!”
“We know.” Annie sighed. “Seriously, Mom, please don’t ask me to explain.”
“Well, it’s not my fault that I’m always the last to know,” she said huffily. “No one in this house tells me anything!”
“C’mon, George,” said Annie. “Let’s take the little ones back to your house.”
“Straight back when you’re done,” her mother warned. “You need to get that chemistry project under way. You know why. . . .”
Annie sighed again.
George plonked his sisters down on the ground, and he and Annie set off for his house, each holding a small hand; Ebot followed behind, guiding an imaginary child as he did so.
Annie was quiet as they walked through the garden. She looked a bit glum at the prospect of going home alone to work on her project.
“At least you’ve got Ebot to keep you company now,” said George, trying to cheer her up. “I’d rather have a robot in the house than twin sisters.”
“But a robot is just a machine,” said Annie sadly. “It’s not like Ebot will grow to love us, is it?” As she spoke, she heaved Juno through the hole in the fence and hopped through after her.
“Unless you program him to,” said George. “You could see if your dad could get Ebot to have feelings. You can probably download ‘robot emotions’ from the Internet.”
“But it wouldn’t be the same as being loved by your sisters. They aren’t programmed to love you; they just do it naturally.” Annie caught Hera as she stumbled through the hole in the fence and hugged her before setting her gently down on the ground. “Look, babies!” Annie pointed up to the clear evening sky where two stars blazed. “That’s Castor and Pollux, the twin stars. That’s you, if you were stars.”
The twins gazed upward, plump hands outstretched as if they could grasp a star each and bring it down to Earth. “Reach a star?” they asked Annie hopefully.
“Sorry, girls,” she said. “Even I can’t make a star fall to Earth for you. You just have to look at them in the sky.”
The duo toddled toward their house, followed by Annie and George.
“It’s spooky,” said George, turning to look behind him. “Ebot really does look just like your dad.”
“Except that he’s not alive,” said Annie. “He’s just like Dad, except that Dad is living and Ebot isn’t. . . .” She paused. “I know!” she exclaimed, jumping up and down in excitement. “That’s what I’ll do!”
“What?” asked George.
“For my project!” She was bouncing around on her toes. “Why is Ebot not alive when Dad is alive? What’s the difference between the two of them? What is Life? That’s my vacation project.”
“Your vacation project is ‘Life’?” asked George. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah!” Annie looked absolutely delighted, her earlier gloom forgotten. “But not just that,” she said. “I already know the first bit—how life developed on Earth and how Charles Darwin sailed on the Beagle and found all that out. Now I’m going to do how life came to Earth from space! I’m going to do the Cosmic Chemistry of Life! Ha! Take that, Karla Pinchnose . . . ,” she muttered.
George stared at her in amazement. “Isn’t that, like, a bit overambitious?” he hazarded.
“Have you forgotten about my outstanding IQ?” she asked him. “C’mon, Ebot. We’ve got work to do. . . . Can I have those gloves back, George?”
He handed them over and, with a cheery “Good-bye!” Annie headed back toward her house, Ebot following, leaving George to babysit the twins.
Great, he thought. Annie’s off to do a superexciting science project without me. That’s just great. When I grow up, he grumbled, I really am going to live only with robots—no people whatsoever . . . except perhaps Annie occasionally. But no one else. Muttering under his breath, he turned and walked back into his house.
When we look at the animals and plants around us, the sheer diversity of life seems amazing. Even in a busy city a single walk brings us into contact with dozens of species, from insects so small we can hardly see them, to trees and large animals like birds and mammals. In the countryside there are literally thousands of species in even a small bit of forest, grassland, or marsh.
We still don’t know how many species there are in the world. About 1.2 million have so far been carefully identified by scientists, described, classified, and given a name—but the total figure is much bigger than that. The best current estimate is that there are about eight or nine million species in all, though some biologists think the figure could be much higher than this. This means that the great majority of species on our planet haven’t even yet been given a name. They could go extinct and we wouldn’t even notice!
Where do all these species come from? This is a question that humans have often asked. Many of the world’s religions have an answer. They talk about God creating life. This answer isn’t enough for scientists, though. Even if God did make species—including us—we want to know when and how!
It was Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century who provided the answer that we still think is correct. Darwin was a wealthy man and was happily married. He and his wife, Emma, had servants and his wife ran the household. That gave Darwin time to do his scientific work, even though he and Emma had ten children, most of whom loved nothing more than to rush into their father’s study and try to get him to play with them.
Darwin realized that just as farmers can produce new breeds of farm animals by selectively choosing to use only certain individuals to produce the next generation, so nature can produce new species by what he called “natural selection.” Suppose, for example, that a widespread species of seed-eating bird occurs in some places where plants produce mainly small seeds and in some places where plants produce mainly large seeds. Suppose too that there is inevitably some variation in the size of the birds’ beaks and that how large a bird’s beak is partly depends on the size of its parents’ beaks, so that birds with small beaks tend to produce offspring with small beaks and birds with large beaks produce offspring that typically also have large beaks.
Nothing very surprising, so far. But Darwin realized that if beak size is important for a bird’s survival and reproduction—for example, because food is sometimes in short supply—then natural selection would gradually lead to changes in beak size. Over time, birds that live where the plants have large seeds would come to have large beaks, and birds that live where the plants have small seeds would evolve small beaks. Given enough time, the original single bird species might evolve into two new species, each one well adapted to its food source.
Darwin published his theory in 1859 in a book called On the Origin of Species (the full title is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life—the Victorians liked long book titles). This is one of the most important scientific books ever written. It changed the way we see our world and has never been out of print. It is a long book but still very worth reading.
Darwin was the first to admit that his theory didn’t explain everything. In particular, how did the first species come into existence? After all, his theory may explain how species can change over time and evolve into new species but doesn’t say anything about how the whole process gets going.
Darwin was a bit of a genius. Actually, he was more than a bit of a genius; he was a total genius. The tentative answer he came up with for the origin of the very first species is pretty much what many of today’s scientists still think might be the case. On February 1, 1871, Darwin wrote to his close friend and fellow scientist Joseph Hooker:
It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (oh and what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity &c. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.
We still don’t know for sure how life started. It might well have been in one or more of Darwin’s warm little ponds, much as he suggested. But once it got going, there was no stopping life. As millions of years went by, life gradually reached more and more of the Earth’s surface. Species got bigger and hardier.
They colonized the land and took to the air. Eventually, three to four billion years after the process started, we have whales and hummingbirds and giant redwood trees and beautiful orchids and all the other eight or nine million species there are today, including us.
And we are still discovering some of these species. Maybe you too might one day find yourself journeying to a part of our wonderful Earth and being the first person to identify a new species!
