Blind Lake (12 page)

And it had worked. For a while. Then the telemetry from the Array began to deteriorate.

The signal faded slowly but relentlessly over a period of months. After an intensive review NASA pinpointed the source of the failure as a few lines of bad code so deeply embedded in the onboard Galileo architecture that they couldn’t be overwritten. This was a risk NASA had assumed from the beginning. The Array was both complex and radically inaccessible. It couldn’t be repaired in place. A technological triumph was on the way to becoming an insanely expensive joke.

“NASA didn’t have an O/BEC processor back then,” Charlie said, “but Gencorp offered them time on their unit.”

“You worked at Gencorp?”

“I baby-sat their hardware, yeah. Gencorp was getting good results doing proteinomics. You could do the same stuff with a standard quantum array, of course. Engineers used to think of the O/BECs as unnecessarily complicated and unpredictable, a fancy kludge—like a vacuum cleaner with an appendix, people used to say. But you can’t argue with results. Gencorp got faster results with a O/BEC machine than MIT could coax out of a standard BEC device. Spooky ones, too.”

“Spooky?”

“Unexpected. Counterintuitive. Anybody who works with adaptive self-programming will tell you it’s not like running raw BECs, and BECs can be pretty strange all by themselves. What I can’t really say, because I’m supposed to be a levelheaded and factually oriented kind of guy, is that an O/BEC just plain
thinks
strange. But that’s as good an explanation as any, because nobody really knows why a BEC processor with an open-ended organic architecture can outthink a BEC processor alone. It’s the fucking ghost in the machine, pardon my French. And what we do in the pit, it isn’t just amps and volts. We’re tending something that’s very nearly alive. It has its good days and its bad days…”

Charlie trailed off, as if he realized he’d overstepped the bounds of engineering propriety. He doesn’t want me quoting this, Chris thought. “So you went to NASA with the O/BEC processor?”

“NASA ended up buying a few platens from Gencorp. I was part of the package. But that’s another story. See, basically, the problem was this: as the Galileo Array’s output got fainter, it was increasingly harder to separate the signal from the noise. Our job was to extract that signal, hunt it down, subtract it from all the rest of the random radio garbage the universe belches out. People ask me, ‘So how’d you do it?’ And I have to tell them, we
didn’t
do it, nobody did it, we just posed the problem to the O/BECs and let them generate tentative answers and bred them for success… hundreds of thousands of generations per second, like this big invisible Darwinian evolutionary race, survival of the fittest, where the definition of ‘fittest’ is success at extracting a signal from a noisy input. Code writing code writing code, and code withering and dying. More generations than all the people who ever lived on the earth, almost more generations than
life
on the earth. Numbers complexifying themselves like DNA. The beauty is the unpredictability of it, you understand?”

“I think so,” Chris said. He liked Charlie’s eloquence. He always liked it when an interviewee showed signs of passion.

“I mean, we made something that was beautiful and mysterious. Very beautiful. Very mysterious.”

“And it worked,” Chris said. “Signals out of noise.”

“Whole world knows it worked. Of course, we weren’t sure of that ourselves, not while it was happening. We had a few what we called threshold events. We’d almost lose everything. We’d have a good clean image, then we’d start to lose it, almost pixel by pixel. That was the noise winning out. Loss of intelligibility. But each time, the O/BECs pulled it back. Without our intervention, you understand. It drove the math guys nuts, because there’s obviously a level where you just
can’t
extract a meaningful signal, when there’s just too much lost, but the machines kept on pulling it out, rabbit out of a hat, presto. Until one day…”

“Until one day?”

“Until one day a man in a suit came into the lab and said, ‘Boys, we got confirmation from upstairs, the Array just stopped broadcasting altogether, shut down entirely, you can get ready to close up shop and go home.’ And my boss at the time—that was Kelly Fletcher, she’s at Crossbank now—she turned away from her monitor and said, ‘Well, that may be, but the fact is, we’re still making data.’”

Charlie finished his sandwich, wiped his mouth, pushed his chair away from the table. “We can probably get into the stacks now.”

Back at Crossbank, Chris had toured the O/BECs from the gallery level. He hadn’t been invited into the works.

The sterile suit was comfortable as such things went—cool air piped in, a wide and transparent visor—but Chris still felt a little claustrophobic inside it. Charlie led him through an access door into the eerily quiet O/BEC chamber. The platens were white enameled cylinders each the size of a small truck. They were suspended on isolation platforms that would filter out any groundborne vibration short of a major earthquake. Strange, delicate machines. “It could end at any time,” Chris murmured.

“What’s that?”

“Something an engineer at Crossbank told me. He said he liked the rush, working with a process that could end at any time.”

“That’s part of it, for sure. These are technologies of a whole new order.” He stepped over a bundle of Teflon-insulated wires. “These machines are looking at planets, but ten years after that first NASA connection we still don’t know how they’re doing it.”

Or
if
they’re doing it, Chris thought. There was a fringe of hard-core skeptics who believed there was no real data behind the images: that the O/BECs were simply… well, dreaming.

“So,” Charlie said, “we really have two research projects going on at once: guys at the Plaza trying to sort out the data, and people here trying to figure out how we
get
the data. But we can’t look too closely. We can’t take the O/BECs apart or dose them with X-rays or anything invasive like that. You measure it, you break it. Blind Lake didn’t just duplicate the Crossbank installation; we had to walk our machines through the same development process, except we used the old high-def interferometers instead of the Galileo Array, deliberately stepping down the signal strength until the machines learned the trick, whatever that trick is. There are only two installations like this in the world, and efforts to create a third have been consistently unsuccessful. We’re balanced on the head of a pin. That’s what your guy at Crossbank was talking about. Something absolutely strange and wonderful is happening here, and we don’t understand it. All we can do is nurse it along and hope it doesn’t get tired and turn itself off. It could end at any time. Sure it could. And for any reason.”

He led Chris past the last of the O/BEC platens, through a series of chambers to a room where they stripped off their sterile suits.

“What you have to remember,” Charlie said, “is that we didn’t design these machines to do what they do. There’s no linear process, no A then B then C. We just set them in motion. We defined the goals and we set them in motion, and what happened after that was an act of God.” He folded the sterile suit crisply and left it on a rack for cleaning.

Charlie walked him through the busiest sector of the Alley, two huge chambers wallpapered with video surfaces, rooms full of attentive men and women hovering over mutable desktops. Chris was reminded of the old NASA facilities at Houston. “Looks like Mission Control.”

“For good reason,” Charlie said. “NASA used to control the Galileo Array with interfaces like these. When the problems got unmanageably bad they routed this stuff through the O/BECs. This is where we talk to the platens about alignment, depth of field, magnification factors, things like that.”

Down to the finest detail. A monitor on the far wall showed raw video. Lobsterville. Except Elaine was right. It was a ridiculous misnomer. The aboriginals didn’t look remotely like lobsters, except perhaps for their roughly textured skin. In fact Chris had often thought there was something bovine about them, something about their slow-moving indifference, those big blank cueball eyes.

Subject was in a food conclave, deep inside a dimly lit food well. Mossy growth and vegetable husks everywhere, and grub-like things crawled through the moist refuse. Watching these guys eat, Chris thought, was a great appetite killer. He turned back to Charlie Grogan.

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “it could end at any time, that’s the truth. You’re staying at the community center, Ari tells me?”

“For now, anyway.”

“You want a ride back? I’m basically done here for the day.”

Chris checked his watch. Almost five o’clock. “Sounds better than walking.”

“Assuming they plowed the road.”

A good couple of inches of fresh snow had come down while Chris was inside the Alley, and the wind had picked up. Chris flinched from it as soon as he stepped outside. He had been born and raised in Southern California, and despite all the time he’d spent in the East, these harsh winter days still shocked him. It wasn’t just bad weather, it was weather that could kill you. Walk the wrong way, get lost, die of hypothermia before dawn.

“It’s bad this year,” Charlie admitted. “People say it’s the shrinking ice cap, all that cold water flowing into the Pacific. We get these supercharged Canadian fronts rolling through. You get used to it after a while.”

Maybe so, Chris thought. The way you get used to living under siege.

Charlie Grogan’s car was parked in the roofed lot, plugged into a charge socket. Chris slipped into the passenger seat gratefully. It was a bachelor’s car: the backseat was full of old
QCES
journals and dog toys. As soon as Charlie pulled out of the parking compound the tires slipped on compressed snow and the car fishtailed before it finally gripped the asphalt. Harsh sulfur-dot light columns marked the way to the main road, sentinals cloaked in vortices of falling snow.

“It could end at any time,” Chris said. “Kind of like the quarantine. It could end. But it doesn’t.”

“Have you turned off that little recorder yet?”

“Yes. You mean, is this for the record? No. It’s conversation.”

“Coming from a journalist…”

“I don’t work for the tabloids. Honest, I’m just mumbling. We can go on talking about the weather if you like.”

“No insult intended.”

“None taken.”

“You got a little burned on that Galliano thing, right?”

Now who’s pushing? But he felt he owed this man an honest response. “I don’t know if you can say that or not.”

“I guess if you say unflattering things about a national hero, you’re taking a certain risk.”

“I didn’t set out to tarnish his reputation. Much of it is deserved.” Ted Galliano had made national news twenty years ago by patenting a new family of broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. He had also made a fortune founding a next-generation pharmaceutical trust to exploit those patents. Galliano was the prototype of the twenty-first century scientist-entrepreneur—like Edison or Marconi in the nineteenth, also products of the commercial environment of their day, also brilliant. Like Edison or Marconi, he had become a public hero. He had attracted the best genomic and proteinomic people to him. A child born today in the Continental Commonwealth could expect a lifetime of one hundred years or more, and no small part of that was due to Galliano’s antiviral and antigeriatric drugs.

What Chris had discovered was that Galliano was a ruthless and sometimes unscrupulous businessman—as Edison had been. He had lobbied Washington for extended patent protection; he had driven competitors out of the market or absorbed them through dubious mergers and leverage schemes; worse, Chris had uncovered several sources who were convinced Galliano had engaged in blatantly illegal stock manipulation. His last big commercial effort had been a genomic vaccine against artheriosclerotic plaque—never perfected but much discussed, and the prospect of it, however inflated, had driven Galtech stocks to dizzying heights. Ultimately the bubble had burst, but not before Galliano and friends cashed out.

“Could you prove any of this?”

“Ultimately, no. Anyhow, I didn’t think of it as a muckraking biography. He
was
a brilliant scientist. When the book came out it got a good initial reaction, some of it just
schadenfreude
—rich people have enemies—but some of it balanced. Then Galliano had his accident, or committed suicide, depending on who you listen to, and his family made an issue of the book. Yellow Journalism Drives Benefactor to His Death. That makes a nice story too.”

“You were in court, right?”

“I testified at a congressional inquiry.”

“Thought I read something about that.”

“They threatened to jail me for contempt. For not revealing my sources. Which wouldn’t have helped, anyway. My sources were all well-known public figures and by the time of the inquiry they had all issued statements siding with Galliano’s estate. By that time, in the public mind, Galliano was a dead saint. Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.”

“Bad luck,” Charlie said. “Or bad timing.”

Chris watched the curtains of snow beyond the passenger-side window, snow trapped on the car’s exposed surfaces, snow piling up behind the mirrors. “Or bad judgment. I took a tilt at one of the biggest windmills on the planet. I was naive about how things worked.”

“Uh-huh.” Charlie drove in silence for a while. “You got a good one this time, though. The story of the Blind Lake quarantine, told from the inside out.”

“Assuming any of us ever get to tell it.”

“You want me to drop you in front of the community center?”

“If it’s not too far out of your way.”

“I’m in no hurry. Though Boomer’s probably getting hungry. I thought they were getting all you stray day-timers billeted with locals.”

“I’m on the waiting list. Actually, I’ve got a meeting tomorrow.”

“Who’d they set you up with?”

“A Dr. Hauser.”

“Marguerite Hauser?” Charlie smiled inscrutably. “They must be putting all the pariahs in one place.”