Death Match (14 page)

Why, indeed?
Lash thought.

“But that’s just the beginning. Our most important use of genetics comes in the matching process itself.”

Lash looked from Mauchly, to the lab workers moving busily beyond the Plexiglas wall, and back to Mauchly again.

“You’re no doubt more familiar with evolutionary psychology than I am,” Mauchly said. “In particular, the concept of gene spreading.”

Lash nodded. “The desire to send your genes on to future generations under the best possible conditions. A fundamental impulse.”

“Precisely. And the ‘best possible conditions’ usually means a high degree of genetic variability. What a technician might call an increase of heterozygosity. It helps ensure strong, healthy progeny. If one mate is blood type A, with a relatively high susceptibility to cholera, and the other mate is blood type B, with a heightened susceptibility to typhus, their child—with blood type AB—is likely to have a high resistance to both diseases.”

“But what does this have to do with what’s going on in there?”

“We keep very close tabs on the latest research in molecular biology. And we’re currently monitoring several dozen genes that influence the choice of an ideal mate.”

Lash shook his head. “You surprise me.”

“I’m no expert, Dr. Lash. But I can offer one example: HLA.”

“I’m not familiar with it.”

“Human leukocyte antigen. In animals it’s known as MHC. It’s a large gene that lives on the long arm of chromosome 6, and affects body odor preferences. Studies have shown that people are most attracted to mates whose HLA haplotypes were
least like their own
.”

“Guess I should be reading
Nature
more carefully. Wonder how they demonstrated that?”

“Well, in one test, they asked a control group to sniff the armpits of T-shirts worn by the opposite sex, and to rank them in order of attractiveness. And the scents the group universally preferred were of people whose genotypes were
most different
from their own.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. Animals also display this preference for mating with partners whose MHC genes are opposite their own. Mice, for example, make the determination by sniffing the urine of potential mates.”

This was greeted by a brief silence.

“Personally, I prefer the T-shirt,” Tara said.

It was the first time in several minutes that she’d spoken, and Lash turned to look at her. But she wasn’t smiling, and he was uncertain whether she’d meant it as a joke.

Mauchly shrugged. “In any case, the genetic preferences of the Wilners and the Thorpes would be pooled with the other information we’d gathered on them: monitoring data, test results, the rest.”

Lash stared at the gowned workers on the far side of the glass. “This is amazing. And I’ll want to see those test results in due time. But the real question is
how
, exactly, did the two couples get together?”

“That’s our next stop.” And Mauchly led the way back into the hallway.

A confusing journey through intersecting corridors; another brief ascent in an elevator; and then Lash found himself before another set of doors labeled simply: P
ROVING
C
HAMBER
.

“What is this place?” Lash asked.

“The Tank,” Mauchly replied. “After you, please.”

Lash stepped into a room that was large, but whose low ceiling and indirect light gave it a strangely intimate atmosphere. The walls to the left and right were covered with various displays and instrumentation. But Lash’s attention was drawn to the rear wall, which was completely dominated by what seemed some kind of aquarium. He paused.

“Go ahead,” Mauchly said. “Take a look.”

As Lash drew closer, he realized he was looking at a vast translucent cube, set into the wall of the chamber. A handful of technicians stood before it, some scribbling notes into palmtop computers, others simply observing. Inside the cube, innumerable ghostly apparitions moved restlessly back and forth, colors shifting, flaring briefly when colliding with other apparitions, then dimming once again. The faint light, the pale translucence of the entities within, gave the cube an illusion of great depth.

“You understand why we call it the Tank,” Mauchly said.

Lash nodded absently. It
was
an aquarium, of sorts: an electromechanical aquarium. And yet “Tank” seemed too prosaic a name for something with such an otherworldly beauty.

“What
is
this?” Lash asked in a low voice.

“This is a graphic representation of the actual matching process, occurring in real time. It provides us with visual cues that would be much harder to analyze if we were scanning through, say, reams of paper printouts. Each of those objects you see moving within the Tank is an avatar.”

“Avatar?”

“The personality constructs of our applicants. Derived from their evaluations and our surveillance data. But Tara can explain it better than I.”

So far, Tara had stayed in the background. Now, she came forward. “We’ve taken the concept of data mining and analytics and stood it on its head. Once the monitoring period is over, our computers take the raw applicant data—half a terabyte of information—and create the construct we call the avatar. It’s then placed in an artificial environment and allowed to interact with the other avatars.”

Lash’s gaze was still locked on the Tank. “Interact,” he repeated.

“It’s easiest to think of them as extremely dense packets of data, given artificial life and set free in virtual space.”

It was strange, almost unnerving: to think that each of these countless gossamer-like specters, flitting back and forth in the void before him, represented a complete and unique personality: hopes and needs, desires and dreams, moods and proclivities, manifested as data moving through a matrix of silicon. Lash looked back at Tara. Her eyes shone pale blue in the reflected light, and strange shadows moved across her face. A faraway look had come over her. She, too, seemed mesmerized by the sight.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “But bizarre.”

Abruptly, the faraway look left her eyes. “Bizarre? It’s brilliant. The avatars contain far too much data to be compared by conventional computing algorithms. Our solution was to give them artificial life, let them make the comparisons
on their own
. They’re inserted into the virtual space, and then excited, much in the way atoms can be. This prompts the avatars to move and interact. We call these interactions ‘contacts.’ If the two avatars have already intersected in the Tank, it’s a stale contact. But if this is the
first
encounter between two avatars, it’s a ‘fresh contact.’ Each fresh contact releases a huge burst of data, which basically details the points of commonality between the two.”

“So what we’re looking at right now are all of Eden’s current applicants.”

“That’s correct.”

“How many are there?”

“It varies, but at any one time there could be up to ten thousand avatars. More are added constantly. There could be almost anybody in there. Presidents, rock stars, poets. The only people . . .” she hesitated. “The only people not allowed are Eden personnel.”

“Why’s that?”

Tara’s reply did not address this question. “It takes approximately eighteen hours for any one avatar to make contact with all the others in the Tank. We call that a cycle. Thousands upon thousands of avatars intersecting with every other, releasing a massive torrent of data—you can imagine the kind of computing horsepower required to parse the data.”

Lash nodded. There was a low beeping behind him, and he turned to see Mauchly raising a cell phone to his ear.

“Anyway,” Tara went on, “when a match is determined, the two avatars are removed from the Tank. Nine times out of ten, a match is made within the first cycle. If there is no match, the avatar is retained in the Tank for another cycle, then another. If an avatar hasn’t found a match within five cycles, it’s removed and the candidate’s application is voided. But that’s only happened half a dozen times.”

Half a dozen times
, Lash thought to himself. He glanced over at Mauchly, but he was still on the phone.

“But under normal circumstances, you could take one of these avatars, put it back in the Tank a year from now, and another match would be found. A
different
match. Right?”

“That’s a sensitive issue. Our clients are told that a perfect match has been found for them. And it’s true. But that isn’t to say we couldn’t find an equally perfect match for them tomorrow, or next month. Except in the case of the supercouples, of course—those really
are
perfect. But we don’t tell our clients about degrees of perfection, because that might encourage window shopping. Once we’ve found a match, that’s it. End of story. Their avatars are removed from the Tank.”

“And then?”

“The two candidates are notified of the match. A meeting is set up.” As she said this, her expression once again grew distant.

Lash turned to the Tank, staring at the thousands of avatars gliding back and forth within, weightless and alien. “You mentioned the need for computing horsepower,” he murmured. “That seems an understatement. I didn’t know any computer could handle such a job.”

“Funny you should say that.” It was Mauchly speaking this time, slipping the phone back into his jacket pocket. “Because there’s one person in this building who knows more than anyone else about that. And he’s just asked to make your acquaintance.”

SEVENTEEN

F
ive minutes brought them to a sky lobby: a two-story space on the thirtieth floor, surrounded by banks of elevators. One end opened onto an employee cafeteria, and Lash could see workers clustered around dozens of tables, talking and eating.

“We have ten cafeterias here on the inside,” Mauchly said. “We discourage people from leaving the building for lunch or dinner, and the excellent free food helps.”

“Lunch
or
dinner?”

“Or breakfast, for that matter. We’ve got technicians working shifts round the clock, especially in the data-gathering sections.” Mauchly made for an elevator at the end of the nearest bank. It was set apart from the others, and a guard in a beige jumpsuit was posted before it. When the guard saw them approach, he stepped aside.

Mauchly turned to Tara. “You’ve got the latest code. Go ahead.” And he indicated a keypad beside the elevators.

“Where are we headed?” Tara asked.

“The penthouse.”

There was a quick intake of breath, quickly checked. Tara punched in a code and, a moment later, the doors opened.

As he stepped inside the elevator, Lash sensed something was different. It wasn’t the walls, which had the same glossy wood grain as the others in the building; it wasn’t the carpeting, or the lighting, or the safety railing. Suddenly he realized what it was. There was no pinhole security camera in this car. And there were only three buttons on the instrument panel, all unmarked. Mauchly pressed the topmost button, placed his bracelet beneath the scanner.

The elevator rose for what seemed forever. At last it opened onto a brilliantly lit room. But this was not the artificial light Lash had seen elsewhere in Eden: this was sunlight, streaming in from windows that filled three of the four walls. He stepped forward onto a sumptuous blue carpet, looking around in wonder. Through the wall of glass, the dense cityscape of mid-Manhattan lay beneath a cloudless sky. To his left, and right—at what seemed great distances—other windows afforded unbroken vistas of Long Island and New Jersey. Instead of the fluorescent lighting panels of the floors below, beautiful cut-glass fixtures hung from the ceiling, unnecessary in this explosion of daylight.

Lash remembered seeing, from street level, the figured grille that set off the tower’s topmost floors. And he recalled Mauchly’s words:
The tower is made up of three separate buildings. Atop the inner tower is the penthouse
. This aerie that crowned the corporate tower could only be one thing: the lair of its reclusive founder, Richard Silver.

Except for the elevator door, the entire fourth wall was covered in rich mahogany bookcases. But they were not the leather-bound volumes one would expect in such a setting; there were cheap science fiction paperbacks, yellowing and broken-backed; technical journals, clearly well thumbed; oversize manuals for computer operating systems and languages.

Tara Stapleton had walked across the wide floor and was staring at something before one of the windows. As his eyes grew used to the light, Lash became aware that dozens of objects—some large, some small—were arranged in front of the huge plates of glass. He stepped forward himself, curious, stopping before a contraption almost the size of a telephone booth. Rising from its wooden base was a complex architecture of rotors, stacked horizontally on spars of metal. Behind the rotors was a complex nesting of wheels, rods, and levers.

He moved to the next window, where what looked like the metal guts of some giant’s music box lay on a wooden stand. Beside it was a monstrous device: a cross between an ancient printing press and a grandfather clock. A large metal crank was visible on one side, and its face was covered with flat, polished metal discs of all sizes. Large spools of paper sat on a wooden tray between its legs.

Mauchly seemed to have disappeared, but another man was approaching them from across the room: tall, youthful-looking, with a vast mop of red hair rising from a square forehead. He was smiling, and his watery blue eyes peered out through thin silver frames with a friendly sparkle. He wore a tropical shirt over a pair of worn jeans. Though Lash had never seen the man before, he instantly recognized him: Richard Silver, the genius behind both Eden and the computer that made it possible.

“You must be Dr. Lash,” the man said, extending his hand. “I’m Richard Silver.”

“Call me Christopher,” Lash said.

Silver turned toward Tara, who had turned wordlessly at the man’s approach. “And you’re Tara Stapleton? Edwin’s told me great things about you.”

“It’s an honor to meet you, Dr. Silver,” she replied.