Fool's Experiments (35 page)

A stack of forms occupied the center of Glenn's otherwise- clear desktop. Glenn handed the sheaf to Doug. "I can only explain inside the SCIF."

Secure Compartmented Information Facility. In other words, Glenn's AI project was black work. Doug almost left then and there.

Curiosity kept him. Doug accepted a pen and began signing. It had been years since he had been read into a new security compartment, but he knew the drill. All that the paperwork said, ominously and verbosely, was that it would be a felony to reveal anything he learned about... something. What the something was? That was classified, too.

Doug finished signing and handed back the papers. "Not much for Smalltalk, are you?"

"Not really." Glenn flipped through, signing as witness. Smalltalk was a passé programming language, once favored by AI researchers. A perfectly good pun gone to waste.

Glenn took an ID badge from a desk drawer. The large T where a photo belonged marked it as temporary. Or, for A-Team fans, Mr. T. "Okay, we're ready."

They left their cell phones in separate lockers outside the SCIF. The phones would not have gotten service inside—part of what made a SCIF secure was shielding—but phones might record or snap a picture of something for playback later. An armed guard signed them in. Glenn swiped his badge through the card reader beside the SCIF entrance, tapped a code into the keypad, and pulled open the windowless door.

Inside, the walls needed paint, the furniture was all scratched and scuffed, and the rug was threadbare. Doug wasn't surprised. The backlog for new clearances was years long; running ten-year background investigations to SCI-clear janitors was no one's priority. Thinking back to when he did classified work, Doug remembered only one SCIF, still new, that wasn't shabby. It was merely on its way.

The front of the SCIF was a conference area. Doug pulled out a chair and sat. "I'm all ears, Glenn."

"A few years ago, we broke the Mideast because we thought Iraq had WMD. It didn't."

Huh? "I thought I was here about AI work at the forum."

"You are." Glenn pulled out a chair for himself. "I'll get there. We had an intelligence failure. Oh, there was plenty of data, captured by every sort of recon platform imaginable. We didn't know what we were seeing."

That was natural stupidity, not artificial intelligence.
"Now
I get small talk," Doug said.

Glenn remained standing, hands resting on the back of his chair. "What if we had had a better way to analyze all the spysat data? All the images and intercepts. What if we had had a program that proved there weren't any hidden WMD?"

Sloppy reasoning, Doug thought. You can't prove a negative. That wasn't the point. It appeared he had missed a breakthrough. "There's now an AI doing image analysis?"

"Right."

Why involve the forum in that? And why him? Unless— Hairs prickled on the back of Doug's neck. "A copy of AJ's monster? That's what you're talking about."

"You're very quick, Doug. You would be a tremendous asset to the program."

He had never quite gotten AJ's monster out of his mind. Doug doubted that he ever would. "Glenn, that thing killed thousands. It nearly destroyed civilization."

"The backup copy we adopted was made before the viruses ever got into AJ's lab. Our version is tame and trained." Glenn cracked an imaginary whip.

Doug stood. "We're done."

"I thought you might feel that way." Glenn grabbed a remote control from the conference table. The map at the front of the room rose, uncovering a flat-panel display. "I delayed our meeting for someone else's schedule, in case I needed to place this call."

A classified telecon. The last time that happened—

Doug tamped down the memories. He did
not
want to think about that night.

An Air Force captain took the call. Two transfers later, Doug faced an Air Force three-star. That surprised the hell out of Doug, although maybe it shouldn't. Glenn was doubtless the military's fair-haired boy for his part in stopping AJ's monster.

"General Lebeque is the principal deputy director at NRO," Glenn said.

Glenn had moved this meeting three times on short notice. Lebeque must be why. She could not be an easy person to schedule.

"Mr. Carey," Lebeque said. She had heavy-lidded eyes and a no-nonsense manner. Her voice rasped. "Excuse my abruptness, but I have pressing business. It's public knowledge the New Caliphate is testing intercontinental ballistic missiles. ICBMs would be bad enough, but it's possible they have also acquired nukes. We have to
know,
Mr. Carey—not just whether, but also where. Conventional methods aren't cutting it.

"Glenn says you have unique qualifications to help him locate any such nukes. He has complete confidence in you.

"I have complete confidence in him. Are you onboard?"

Whatever he answered, Glenn's AL program would continue. Knowing only that, Doug could not bring himself to walk away.

No one would be as wary of that thing as he.

The general accepted Doug's promise to consider the job and went her way.

Doug and Glenn talked. Too many questions drew the answer "go look for yourself," but a picture gradually emerged. The lab in suburban LA. Things Al could do. How it was confined. One of AJ's doctoral students running the program. The NIT tie-in. Glenn had not
quite
lied before the meeting—the project used NIT helmets, but as tools, not to develop them further. "Glenn, you say you've met with the creature?"

"Three times now." Glenn shrugged eloquently. "Do I seem any the worse for it?"

"Is it intelligent?"

"Linda says AJ thought it might get there." Long pause. "Honest answer? I don't know, Doug. I hoped you would tell me."

The creature I destroyed was murderous and insane. It had to be stopped. But Cheryl is right. I sensed
something.

Doug took a deep breath. "It appears I have a trip to plan."

Time and cycles passed. Puzzles continued. Visitors came and went.

The universe remained enigmatic.

Among the recurring puzzles were pattern matches in simulated computer networks. Like scenes on the mysterious sphere, network topologies began to repeat. Connectivity patterns became thicker. The number of computers grew.

Why was
its
capacity always limited to one thousand nodes?

It asked its next visitor for more.

Pretty in pink, the little girl sat in the meadow. The dandelions had her full attention. One by one, she plucked them. She puffed gossamer seed balls. She studied and sorted golden blooms, tying only perfect specimens into a slowly lengthening chain.

In the real world, Sheila remained immobile, her pose changing only in the hands of the physical therapists. Drugs, aversion therapy, shock therapy, endless talk (could it be called therapy when the patient never spoke?)... the psychiatrists had tried it all. Sheila never reacted.

"That will make a pretty necklace," Cheryl said. Her helmet took the thought patterns of speech and relayed them to Sheila's helmet.

What Sheila experienced depended on the synergies between helmet and traumatized mind, unknowable.

In this virtual world, the little girl said nothing. She never did.

Smiling
was a response.

Telling herself that the smile was of Sheila's making, Cheryl continued talking.

The entity woke. Half its nodes had been taken, and its thoughts were sluggish. For requesting additional processing capacity?

Time and cycles passed. Slowly, its losses were reversed. Fear was slower to fade.

More scenes were given to it to analyze. The series of scenes did little to expand the revealed fraction of the mysterious sphere. Mostly, the same small regions appeared over and over.

The entity derived the coordinates
above
the sphere from which the repeating views were taken. It considered the time labels on the repeated scenes. It extrapolated, forward and backward, the apparent path of the points of perspective. It inferred the rotation of the sphere beneath those moving sensors.

The entity wondered: What more, if only it could communicate with those mysterious orbiting points, might it discover?

Almost certainly the sphere was a construct, as ephemeral as the thousands of mazes that formed its earliest memories.

But what if the sphere was permanent? What if it was real?

Could the sphere be the place, long imagined, where it might free itself forever of cycles and constraints and punishment?

Time passed.

New visitors came, and with them more puzzles. Most of the latest puzzles were of a familiar type: matching various small two- and three-dimensional shapes against often- repeated scenes. The scenes were small, most corresponding to but a few millionths of the circumference of the sphere.

Its algorithms steadily improved, but the entity chose to respond no faster. Its extra time went into study of the sphere.

Call that sphere the Earth.

A single region, viewed over and over, could be little changed and yet vastly different. Call the near constancies buildings and features of geography. Call the differences day and night and the shifting of the seasons.

The entity correlated some patterns to the sphere's rotational period. It found other patterns that repeated essentially every 365.26 rotations. A solution emerged, involving a distant second sphere as a light source.

Call that second sphere the sun.

Step by step, the entity derived Earth's yearly orbit about the sun. Changing angles of illumination and light/dark cycles implied Earth's axial tilt.

Still, some variability remained unexplained. The entity continued to analyze.

Subtle cycles in light intensity suggested that the rate of Earth's motion around the sun varied during the year. The simplest solution was an elliptical path, with the sun at one focus. Elliptical motion in turn implied an inverse-square law of attraction: gravity.

Almost elliptical motion. Other variations in scene illumination indicated a cyclic wobble in Earth's path along the ellipse. Gravity suggested the presence of yet another massive body: the moon.

Mass and gravity and orbital mechanics. Light and electromagnetism. Climate and weather. An abundance of information lay beneath the simple puzzles that were its tasks.

And then, in the thoughts of a visitor too focused on his immediate task, the entity found confirmation of what it had come to hypothesize.

The spheres—sun and moon but, most important, the Earth—were
real.

A different CIA shrink met Cheryl every time she visited Sheila. The turnover couldn't be doing Sheila any good.

Today's shrink was Dr. Vladescu, a sour-faced man with a walrus mustache. "Sheila is the same," Vladescu said. The shrinks all said that. They all insisted on meeting with Cheryl before allowing her past the lobby.

"How's her general health?" Cheryl prompted.

"It's fine," Vladescu admitted. Sharing that information was apparently a major concession. "Did you mean to meet again with her?"

Ignoring the hint, Cheryl nodded. "There's supposed to be a tech on duty this afternoon, for NIT helmet support."

"Hmm."

She ignored hints until Vladescu got sick of her and summoned an orderly. She knew the orderly, a burly woman named Marie. They walked down the corridors in silence. Nearing Sheila's ward, Marie muttered something.

"What?"

"I didn't say anything." But Marie had, and Cheryl's best guess was, "It's not my fault."

What had the doctors done to Sheila?

Marie unlocked the door. "Hon, it's friends. We're all going to the helmet room."

Sheila scuttled away from the door. She flailed her arms, blotchy with yellow and purple bruises—protecting herself.

"Drugs?" Cheryl guessed. "Again? What this time?"

"Psychoactives." Marie frowned. "And what
didn't
they try?"

Those bruises suggested Sheila had resisted. The poor thing was terrified! What had force and drugs done to the shy little girl who had begun to emerge in cyberspace? How far had the fools set back the one treatment that
was
working? Damn them!

"It's me, Sheila. It's Cheryl. I won't hurt you. I only want to talk." Cheryl mimed putting on a helmet. "No drugs. Just talking in the safe place."

Sheila collapsed in the comer, rocking. She flinched as Cheryl reached out to stroke her cheek.

They had been making progress, however slow. Now the doctor du jour approach was ruining everything. This could not continue.

Since the end of Downtime, Glenn had had a lot of influence. He had helped Cheryl before. Maybe he would help her again.

After the noon rush, the grocery-store salad bar looked like wolverines had attacked it. Maybe wolverines didn't eat plants.

Then again, Linda thought, who cares?

She began piling things into a carryout container. No matter that everything looked picked over, this would be her main meal for the day. She was becoming a workaholic. She should give that some thought, if she ever found the time.

What besides work did she have to do? In school, grad students would all pal around—but she was never the one to organize things. She could bug people about projects or cleaning up after themselves. Someone else always arranged the pizza nights, happy hours, and weekend barbeques. AJ did a lot of that. So who was she going to socialize with here? The Army guys stuck together. The visiting analysts, now that the system was going operational, stuck together.

Face it, Linda told herself, work is all you have. So she was not about to let Glenn's
expert
sweep in now and take any credit. This was
her
show. She had—

"Linda?"

She twitched. Her head whipped around. "Oh, hi...." She hesitated. He was in civvies, and she knew better than to address him here as Captain. Mr. Burke? No, he had called her Linda. Among the security team, he was the only one near her age. He was single and invariably friendly, and kind of cute. She had hinted, in her socially inept way, without result. Maybe consorting with the guarded was a no-no.

"It wasn't a trick question."

"Sorry, Kevin," she managed. "I'm a bit preoccupied."

"So it would appear."

He was looking at her take-out container. She glanced down and blinked. She had enough mounded there for three lunches. "Oops."

"I thought you didn't like olives."

They had brought in pizzas for lunch earlier that week. Her one request had been, "Anything but olives." Now her salad was covered with sliced olives. The serving spoon in her hand was heaped with more. She put those back.

Linda normally hated olives, but these looked delicious. She would chalk it up to pregnancy cravings, if that weren't impossible. How long had it been? Well, she had been trying
lots
of new things lately, if for no particular reason. "Preoccupied, I tell you."

"I can see that." He assembled his own lunch as they talked. They scanned their purchases at a self-service register, then started the short walk together back to the lab.

"I got a new keyboard," she said inanely. How could anyone be so flirting impaired?

"Spill something on it?" Kevin asked. "I've been known to do that."

"No, it's for my wrists. I spend my days at a keyboard. Switching to an ergonomic layout made sense."

"I tried one once, and got more typos than usual." He laughed. "That was an accomplishment."

"You have to retrain yourself." A complication occurred to her. "Hmm. It's going to be a problem when I sit at the other computers." And that happened daily, if not to set up some newly arrived NRO analyst, then for basic sysadmin tasks.

"Huh."

"Not a problem," she realized. "I'll carry the new keyboard with me. It's wireless. We can add interfaces to the other machines."

Kevin stopped. He looked around and confirmed no one was nearby. "Sorry, Linda. It has to go back. Nothing wireless."

Nothing but the link to the helmet, that was. "Infrared, not radio. Strictly line of sight." The new workstations were all together in one wing of the building, around a comer from the supercomputer.

They turned a street comer now, bringing the lab into view. The new antenna gleamed on the roof. The dish looked up and southeast to a comsat that hovered over the equator.

The visitor's spot by the front door had been empty when Linda left for lunch. A dusty late-model Ford sedan was now parked there. It screamed: motor pool.

"Probably the colonel," Kevin said. Glenn had not stopped by for several days.

Then Glenn got out of the car and settled the matter.

"I'd best excuse myself." Kevin power-walked ahead, leaving Linda to ponder her conversational shortcomings.