Fool's Experiments (11 page)

"Join the Army and see parking lots explode?"

The forum wasn't the Army, and anyway, the goal was to keep parking lots from exploding. Glenn finished his second beer rather than respond, then took Doug's still-untouched bottle without asking. "You
know
the forum's not military." Christ, you think any service branch would ever tolerate a Pittman?

"I already have a job, Glenn. No, make that a calling."

"You won't make this easy, Doug, will you? Look, you're smart. Brilliant. And determined. I would stand here and compliment you all day if I thought flattery would get me anywhere. Here's the deal, point-blank. I
need
you at the forum."

"Why me, Glenn? And why now?"

"For starters, you pulled a rather large and nasty rabbit out of a hat for me, a rabbit I've wanted to smash flat for a very long time."

"Tell me more. I love a good hare-razing tale."

"Damn it!" Glenn slammed the bottle onto the table. Beer shot out the top: theatrical but, he hoped, attention getting. "This is serious. Will you
be
serious, please?"

"Sorry, reflex. I'll try to be good."

Glenn chose his words carefully: the truth, if not the whole truth. "Before you can restart work on your calling, the forum needs to declare NIT work safe. You know that. Hell, you asked for that. How do you suppose that pronouncement is going to happen?"

Doug shook his head. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, but the forum isn't my kind of place. Not to worry, though, I'll be focused on that problem at BioSciCorp. I'll keep you posted."

"Can't blame a man for trying. Still, I want—no, I absolutely need—fresh talent downtown. Obviously I need someone on my team who understands NIT. If you turned me down, I'd thought I might invite Cheryl." As Glenn drained the rest of his beer he studied Doug. For the first time in their brief acquaintance, Carey was speechless. "You don't look happy."

"No shit, Sherlock."

Keep digging, Watson. "Doug, I owe you big-time. That's why I mentioned the idea to you first instead of just asking her." Glenn stood. "Man to man, though, tell me. What right do you have to be so protective?"

Doug's face paled. "You wouldn't understand."

"Christ, yes, I understand." The engineer had a top-secret, if currently inactive, security clearance; Adams had pored over the Defense Investigation Service file. Police reports always found their way into such dossiers. "Would you like understanding in a word? 'Holly.' For fifteen years now you've flogged yourself over her death. Cheryl is a substitute Holly for you to protect."

"You bastard," Doug hissed. "Go. Get
out
of my house."

"Death happens. It's part of life. You have to deal with it."

"You deal with it, Colonel."

"Let me tell you a story. Tell me then if I understand." This time, as Glenn opened still another beer, he felt he really needed it.

"No reason why you would know this, but I was in Desert Storm. I commanded a battalion posted to the Saudi side of the Neutral Zone." The room faded as Adams thought back, swirling sand emerging from some recess of his memory. "From Day One, the Iraqis put very few planes into the air, except occasionally to cut out to Iran. Their only intelligence about coalition troop dispositions came from snooping around on the ground."

On the ground. Mile after endless mile of featureless sand, of windblown dunes. Baking by day and freezing their asses off by night. Not a beer to be had for a thousand miles.

Schwarzkopf's grand plan was to send out troops on an end run. We were dangerously vulnerable until enough units got into place on the left flank. My battalion's job was to keep the Iraqis from seeing any of this.

"We patrolled endlessly. So did they. It was a game of cat and mouse." Glenn stared at nothing in particular. "One day it ceased being a game."

Grit blowing everywhere: endlessly stripping and cleaning the guns, endlessly changing the oil in the APCs and Humvees. Hiding in the sand. Feints and probing attacks, Thank God for the night-vision gear that the ragheads didn't have.

Until one patrol did.

No one knew that anyone was even there until the bad guys were spotted on their way back home. No telling
what
they had seen. They couldn't be allowed back into Iraq. Radios crackled; orders were issued. Keep the intruders in sight until fighters could be scrambled to investigate. By the way: It might be a while. Every plane in Saudi or the Gulf was hunting Scuds that night.

So Glenn had ordered three poor dumb bastards in a Humvee to keep the ragheads in sight "at all costs." Three guys carrying nothing but small arms, three guys whose sole qualification and misfortune it had been to have spotted the patrol in the first place.

What do you do when your vehicle breaks down and you must keep a motorized enemy in sight "at all costs"?

You take a few potshots at them to draw their fire.

The three Americans had the advantage of surprise but little else. The firefight lasted for five minutes only because the Iraqis, fearing a trap, closed in cautiously.

The Americans lasted long enough for a fighter returning from the Scud hunt to vector over the sudden coruscation of light that had erupted on the desert. They lasted long enough to direct the fighter, which had no armament left but its machine guns, on a strafing run.

Onto their own position.

Adams shook his head violently; the memories did not shake as easily. "My best friend was commanding that patrol." His voice dropped to a near whisper. "Holly died in a stupid, pointless accident. Some worthless slime of a drunk killed her, and you can at least hope that before too much time had passed, he wrapped
himself
around a tree, too. You got to be there at the end, to comfort her.

"I
ordered
Tony to do what he did, and then I listened over the radio while he died. I've thought about that order for every day of my life since. God help me, if I had it to do all over again, with the same responsibilities, I would do the j very same goddamn thing."

Glenn locked eyes with Doug.
"Now
tell me I don't understand about ghosts and duty."

"Mad Scientist Stops Mad Scientist."

I wasn't so much mad as scared spitless, Doug thought, eyeing the headline of the newspaper he could not j bring himself to recycle. Sheila Brunner wasn't so much mad as possessed. And I'm an engineer, not a scientist.

Truth seldom lends itself to crisp synopsis.

Accompanying the article was the grainy blowup of a frame from a parking-lot security camera. More than three weeks later, the image of the unfortunate Dr. Brunner haunted him; her eyes squinting furtively, her hair filthy and matted, her mouth agape in confusion. Now little beyond the Frankenfools virus' hysterical Luddite screed ran through what remained of the poor woman's mind. No wonder she had tried to blow up the nearest biotech company, which just happened to be where he worked.

Used to work, Doug corrected himself. You chose to take a leave of absence.

Jaw clenched in rage at the still-unidentified bastard who had unleashed the virus, Doug snatched at the newspaper. Plastic fingertips extended fractionally too far jammed the kitchen table, and an electronics-mediated sensation akin to pain jolted his all-natural upper arm. Simple inattention? Emotional turmoil clouding the brain/nervous-system/ prosthesis protocols painstakingly developed in endless biofeedback sessions?

New anger bloomed, this time at his loss of self-discipline. He wadded the newspaper and stuffed it into the trash.

Take a deep breath, Doug.

Before research into neural interfaces could resume, things had to change. Someone had to figure out how to defeat malware attacks from the Internet, like the one that violated Sheila Brunner. More despite than because of Glenn's invitation, Doug had committed himself to that task. The forum
was
the place to do it.

The last incident had nearly gotten him blown to pieces. Why was it that he expected the next event to be
so
much worse?

"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." The voice booming forth from the forum's break room segued from almost George Bernard Shaw to, Doug suspected, originality. "Those who can't teach, consult."

Whoever was speaking couldn't have known Doug was rounding the comer on a quest for caffeine—nor could that loudmouth have known the new consultant
wasn't
nearby. The blatancy of the taunt was part of the message: New Guy, know your place.

Doug strode into the break room. He was here to do a job. If that meant butting heads with some resident hotshot, so be it.

A familiar fellow with a close-cropped red beard held court by the coffeepot, entertaining two other staffers Doug didn't recognize.

Ralph Pittman: That was redbeard's name. He had brought Doug and Cheryl to meet Glenn Adams that first visit. Pittman was lanky, with casual posture and what until that moment Doug would have considered impossibly curly hair.

"Ah, our infamous new colleague. Made friends with the colonel, did we?"

Doug didn't hold back. "Complete the progression, Ralph. The bottom-feeders of the economic food chain are people taking advice from consultants. So what can I do to you today?"

Pittman winked at his audience. "It has fangs. How cute." He turned back to Doug. "What kind of name
is
Carey? I had caries once, but the dentist drilled 'em out."

"It takes one pit man to know another."

Pittman's nostrils flared; perhaps he was unchallenged as the resident wit. The programmer—jeans and a T-shirt made that a safe guess—gawked at Doug's prosthesis. "So how did you lose the arm?"

That story was too personal to share with this jerk. "I need to be more particular about when and to whom I say, 'Unhand me, you fiend.' "

Pittman threw back his head and roared in laughter. As though they had needed his approval, their heretofore-silent observers joined in. "A couple of zingers at me, and one right back at yourself." Pittman took the empty mug from Doug's hand. "You're okay, Carey. The next cup is on me."

After the
Hartford Courant's
gee-whiz article and a fat grant from a Connecticut computer manufacturer, AJ was thrilled at the interview request by Bev Greenwood of
Smithsonian
magazine. He was even more delighted by her on-target questions and evident grasp of AL principles. She had done her homework before flying west to see him.

She also had red hair in lush waves, a pixieish twinkle in her eyes, adorable dimples—and no ring on her left hand.

AJ's wedding band had been off for two years. In theory, he hoped Amy had found herself. Once the papers had been signed, Amy did nothing to help AJ or their daughters find her.

He gave the VIP tour, showed videos of typical test generations, and introduced his research assistants. Bev's photographer, now strolling the campus, his work completed, had tilled three memory sticks with pictures. Yes, a good start.

Closing his cubbyhole door, AJ trapped the chemical- lemon scent of spray cleaner:
Smithsonian
was the big time. He managed not to crinkle his nose at the unfamiliar odor. Odds were this office was cleaner than at any time during his occupancy. Certainly it was tidier and more free from dust than his house. "Tell me what you think."

"It's fascinating." She popped the tab of her Diet Coke can. "Truly, absolutely fascinating. And you say that no programming or design was involved?"

"Only the initial maze runner was programmed, to save time, and it was intentionally dumbed down. A friend of mine teaches in junior high; his sixth graders do a four-week Introduction to Programming unit. As a favor, he assigned a two- dimensional, random-motion program to the kids. We took one of the more mediocre results as the first of the maze runners."

"But surely no twelve-year-old could program the display graphics you showed me, or the underlying experiment- control software that must be behind the scenes."

"Quite right." Hot
and
smart. Raging pheromones had AJ in their grip. He thought to fidget for the distraction, but the cleared desktop stymied him. "The maze runners operate inside a supervisory program that one of my Ph.D. candidates
did
write, and that
is
quite complex." Linda took almost two years, in fact, and several iterations, to complete it to his satisfaction. "Each maze runner reports its every attempted move. The supervisory program determines whether or not a wall was in the way, then tells the maze runner whether the attempt succeeded. The supervisor tracks positions and notes progress. It also has a display mode to visualize the maze and the runners." He was oversimplifying, but only for clarity.

"I saved a few questions earlier so that I wouldn't interrupt, and I
know
there's something else I intended to ask." Bev had the can of soda in one hand and her palmtop in the other. She scanned the never-before-cleared desktop for, he presumed, a coaster. (This was a new experience. AJ's usual visitors were happy for any stable, horizontal surface.) She accepted a magazine, set her soda on it, and checked her notes. "Aha. I wondered about the code quality of the successful maze runners. How does it compare with what a good programmer can achieve?"

"Beats me." To her startled look, he explained, "Merely staying objective. I don't want, or need, to know that yet. Knowing how the code is structured might somehow influence what experiments I add, what mazes I use. Maybe far, far downstream I'll peek."

Bev was bright and pretty; she got his work, but not enough to get immersed in it. She smiled understandingly, and there were those killer dimples again. He rolled the dice—even for an untenured professor, some things come before the next grant. "Nor do I want to know ahead of time what our children will be like."

And when her smile broadened, he added, "How about some dinner? I know a terrific Thai place."