Fool's Experiments (13 page)

"Sounds plausible." Adams stroked his chin contemplatively. "As you well know, this is important. You and Ralph should check it out thoroughly."

"Uh-huh." The remounted prosthesis felt somehow awkward. Doug guessed it was a subtle balance issue: The latest alteration had added a few ounces in the form of a palmtop computer. The palmtop connected, via a cable plugged into its expansion slot, to the arm's neural net. Palmtop ... he suppressed a snort. Yes, the cranny inside his forearm was, unless he stood on his head, atop his palm. He would acclimate soon enough to the change in balance, and although it seemed improbable that arm nerves or the spinal cord could transmit a computer virus, the watchdog module was only prudent.

Routine maintenance on the arm was more than mechanical. Every so often, he had to download the minutiae of sensor readings, nerve impulses, and prosthetic motions. It still took a decent-sized—and potentially infected—computer to ferret out of that ocean of data what motion algorithms worked best. Cheryl had not been given the time to synthesize generalized rules of motion.

Adams sighed. "Fine, we're not best friends. While I'm being candid, a few more things. I was too slow to believe you. I was a jerk about Cheryl. And I admit I coerced you into coming to the forum. Does that cover my many sins?

"Either way, you and I want the same thing: a way to make neural interfaces safe. What do you say you work with me?"

Doug looked up. "I want to help people with missing limbs and damaged nervous systems. I sincerely thank you for just maybe making it possible to restart that research someday. Somehow I doubt it's what motivates you." He had not forgotten being told Sheila Brunner had been designing thought-controlled weapons.

Why her prototype had been Internet accessible remained a mystery to Doug.

Three cities in four days do not a happy camper make. Today was the Bay Area. So far Doug had given the forum's canned "Computer security is important" spiel in San Jose, to a breakfast bunch of Silicon Valley types, to a lunch gathering at San Francisco City Hall, and at a bankers convention in Oakland. He told himself: Just one more for the day. Seattle tomorrow, and then home.

Doug sat in his rental car, parked outside an architectural monstrosity. It was a classic of the Late Internet Hysteria Period, when far too many such bunkers had been built. But nothing grows forever. Long after the bubble burst, many places like this one remained vacant. They offered everything one could possibly want for a server farm—fat power lines and big backup generators, huge chillers for air-conditioning, redundantly routed fiber-optic cables for Internet connectivity, shielded walls to prevent electronic eavesdropping—and nothing for
people.
People liked windows and individual offices, to start.

Whoever owned
this
building had lucked out. A modest sign declared this the Northern California State Technology Incubator. More than cavernous computer bunkers had gone out of vogue with the bursting of the bubble; so had easy venture capital and taking public every harebrained idea. Cost control again mattered to start-ups. Here the state offered entrepreneurs low rent and subsidized access to very costly infrastructure.

The reception area was unattended. "Hello?" Nothing. The inner door was locked. Doug knocked. No response. Well done, Glenn. A great use of my time. He knocked harder.

"Be there in a second." Considerably later than that, the door opened. A burly man came out, dressed in chinos and a polo shirt. "Sorry. Can I help you?"

"Doug Carey. I'm from the Inter-Agency Computer Network Security Forum, here to give a security pitch."

"Right, that's today. My name is Roy, by the way. Roy Philips. I'm with the state; I watch over things here. Take the tour?"

Somehow, it didn't sound optional. "Sure."

Movable partitions and chain-link enclosures subdivided the vast, echoing space. Philips did lead Doug up and down the aisles, but it was less a tour than an opportunity for Philips to remind everyone about the four o'clock presentation. If there was an organizing principle behind the range of businesses, Doug missed it. Gene-sequencing lab. An online dating service. A print-on-demand publisher. Outside a telecom-gear-testing boutique, Philips patted an enormous spool of cable. The logo on the spool read: Global Internetworking Corporation. "This, Doug, is the longest fiber-optic cable in the world. Call it eight thousand miles. After testing, it goes straight aboard a cable-laying ship. San Diego to Brisbane, with no repeaters—that's how optically pure the fiber is. Cool stuff."

The spool sat in the hall near one of the building's few permanent-seeming areas. Doug peered through glass walls at row after row of electronics cabinets on a raised floor. The sturdy door carried a warning sticker for halon fire suppression. Something finally clicked. That was a serious supercomputer, and this was a logical building to host it. The need for computing power, and lots of it, was the unifying theme for all these start-ups. "Nice."

"You have a good eye," Philips said. "That's our pride and joy. Massively parallel, cryogenically cooled, and
fast.
A gift a couple years ago from the Governator."

"And you can keep it busy?" Doug couldn't imagine how. Philips laughed. "UC Berkeley is down the road. Don't ask me why, but particle physicists cannot get enough processing time. They happily use whatever capacity we have to spare. For the near future, though, we will manage to keep it busy.

"Cable is cheap. Laying cable on the ocean floor, or repairing it once it's been laid—now
that's
expensive. If you can test for a possible problem ahead of time—you do. It takes a supercomputer to simulate the expected combined voice and data traffic volumes between Southern California and Australia."

They worked their way forward to the auditorium, passing more new ventures on the way. Design shops for specialty integrated circuits. An animation-centric ad agency. Various software companies, including a VR gaming outfit. That might have been interesting; of course the programmers would not give Doug even a peek at the game they were developing.

The auditorium turned out to be an unoccupied area with folding chairs. A small table held a laptop and overhead projector. A bare wall served as the screen. Maybe thirty people waited, looking unhappy. While Philips quieted everyone and got them into their seats, Doug plugged in his thumb drive and called up his PowerPoint presentation. "Good afternoon, everyone. I'm"—with the government and I'm here to help—"Doug Carey, from the Inter-Agency Computer Network Security Forum." He pulled up Glenn's favorite color-coded bar chart of virus attacks. "This is what we're up against. I'm here to impress on you the importance ..."

He could give the talk in his sleep. He went on about the importance of firewalls, antivirus software, good computing hygiene, deleting unexpected e-mail attachments, unsure whose intelligence was being insulted the most.

I'm here to talk. You're here to listen. Whoever finishes first can leave.

Doug plodded ahead, trying to get through the pitch one more time. He wished he were home. He wondered what Cheryl was doing. It was after seven, her time. With any luck, having a lot more fun than he.

It is said that the eyes are windows to the soul.

If so, Sheila Brunner's soul was lost. Her face washed, hair clean and brushed, and clothes neat, she little resembled the madwoman who had nearly blown up BioSciCorp.

Until one looked into those vacant eyes.

Cheryl had to turn away before she could speak. She smoothed her skirt, for something to do with her hands. "Sheila, my name is Cheryl. I'm not a doctor, but I'm here to help you. I hope you'll listen to me."

Nothing.

"You're wondering why I'm here." At least Cheryl hoped Sheila could still wonder. "Know this: I understand. Until recently, I also worked with NIT helmets."

No reaction.

"What happened to you wasn't unique," Cheryl went on. "It's happened to other researchers. For now, the field is shut down. You need to know that the strange thoughts, the compulsions in your head, aren't
you.
They're foreign thoughts, imprinted by the helmet. Sheila, you need to fight them. Fight to come back."

Brunner kept staring blankly into space.

Everyone had warned Cheryl: Any response would be a surprise. Brunner had not been heard to speak since being committed. But responses need not be limited to speech. Bob Cherner went berserk at a cartoon atom. Might Sheila react to, say, a sketch of a double helix?

No! The last thing this troubled woman needs is a reminder.

Which begs the question, Cheryl thought. What
did
Sheila need? Why am I here?

"We don't really understand the brain," Sheila's psychiatrist had said. Dr. Walker had meant it as criticism, a comment on the hubris of neural-interface research.

Cheryl chose to construe those words positively. They also meant declarations of futility were premature. Maybe something could still help this poor woman.

Or maybe I'm here in penance, for building the helmet that killed Ben Feinman.

"Do you mind if I sit?" Cheryl asked. She got no answer, of course. If, deep down, Sheila understood, she would appreciate being treated as a person. Not a doll to be groomed and dressed. Not a hopeless case to be warehoused.

I won't accept that! The woman sitting passively before Cheryl had hidden for twelve days. Not even the FBI had found her. She had built a sophisticated bomb. The ability to plan—to
think
—had survived in her for at least that long.

What if, deep down, a core of personality survived?

"It's as though she's been brainwashed," Cheryl remembered arguing. "Quite literally, she's been programmed. Why can't we deprogram her?"

"She didn't join a cult," Dr. Walker had answered. "Sheila wasn't abused or tortured like a POW. There's no reason to expect deprogramming to work." And then he had shrugged. "If not done too aggressively, I see no harm in trying. From studies of Korean War ex-POWs, the keys are to stop the coercion and raise doubts. Do that, and in time the whole edifice of false belief crumbles. But if the coercion comes from voices truly inside her head...

Cheryl forced a smile. "Sheila, I want to be your friend. You must be bored in this little room. Let's talk." Let's raise doubts about Frankenfools. Let's find some
good
in genetic engineering.

She wanted to ease into the topic. "I visited my grandmother yesterday, Sheila. She's ninety-two, and still spry. She plays contract bridge twice a week—and she's good at it. Modem medicine is pretty amazing."

Nothing.

Thirty minutes talking nonstop exhausted Cheryl. Sheila had yet to respond. This was going to take time, Cheryl told herself. ("Possibly forever," an inner echo of Dr. Walker replied.)

Cheryl buzzed for an orderly to let her out. "I'll be back, Sheila. Next visit, I hope you'll have more to say."

The last things Cheryl saw, as she closed the door behind tier, were those blank eyes.

The evolutionary research simulation followed a strict regime. Winners were selected, mutation was applied, and new entities were placed into their mazes. Through it all, the supervisory software watched, counted, measured.

As the entities moved with ease through ever more complex labyrinths, the supervisor could only time their passage. It did not attempt to understand the varying methods by which they competed to be the first to conquer each maze.

Built using conventional programming techniques, by reasonably conventional human programmers, it—unlike the entities that it monitored—could never surpass its original design. That is why certain evolutionary advances were totally invisible to it.

And why it gave no clues as to why so many promising lines of evolutionary advance were suddenly unable to handle even the simplest of problems.

AJ squinted wearily at his chief assistant over a stack of printouts. Linda had her own mound of hardcopy. "I hate doing this," AJ said for the tenth time. "I do
not
want to know how the buggers work. The critters should evolve without us doing anything conscious or unconscious to influence them."

"Fine." Linda had reached her threshold for repetition several interactions earlier. She spit out her reply. "I'm ready to stop reading these damn memory dumps. Let the little imps go back to it."

"How many days till you're supposed to report to work with a new doctorate in hand?"

"How few, you mean." She groaned. "By the end of next month."

"Speaking of which, just when are you going to tell me a bit
about
the big career move?"

"It's a start-up. Pre-IPO. Nervous venture capitalists. There's not much I can talk about. I'm taking their advice that it's simplest not to say anything. Sorry, AJ."

It was impossible to be a computer-science professor in California without meeting plenty of venture capitalists. There was
always
something outsiders could be told about start-ups, or else the SEC would never allow them to go public. AJ found her evasive overreaction amusing.

For a long time they pored over the printouts, muttering to themselves more than they spoke to each other. Their task was far from easy. Never mind that the original code from which the creatures had evolved was the work of a computer- illiterate sixth grader. For tens of thousands of generations now, winning software had had pieces of itself randomly duplicated and reinserted, then the whole arbitrarily modified.

The resulting code had no obvious structure. It was riddled with redundancies and nonfunctional fragments. The spontaneous generation of a new capability by such processes almost never involved the elegant and efficient implementation of that feature. Evolution had, instead, rediscovered every bad habit known to human programmers—and invented new ones.

Highlighter in hand, AJ worked through near-pathological software, tracing function after function into a confusing morass of nonoperational dead ends, self-modifying code, and spaghetti-like tangles of branching logic. He had set out to build software in a totally new way, and succeeded, he realized, beyond his wildest dreams. The maze runners were far beyond his abilities to consciously originate. Had they also exceeded his abilities to comprehend?