Forever Begins Tomorrow (7 page)

“Since it isn't the kind of question you can ask your parents,” said Dr. Remov with a chuckle.

“They could have asked me!” said Dr. Mercury, setting down his bubble pipe. “And since I'm here, I'll tell them!”

He turned to Rachel and Hap. “It's a simple matter of management. Our dear Dr. Hwa may come across as a pussycat, but the truth is he's about as soft as a concrete bed. He's well aware that your parents would go crazy if they found out some of the things you kids have been up to. He's also aware that if that happens it might interfere with his schedule for the project. So he simply doesn't tell them.”

Dr. Mercury picked up his pipe again. “You'll never make sense of this if you think of it as a case of adults against kids. Think of it as Hwa against anything—
anything
—that might stand in the way of his machine.”

He stirred the bubble water with his stubby fingers, then dipped his pipe back into it. “Am I right, Stanley?”

“I couldn't have said it better myself,” replied Dr. Remov. The freckle-faced scientist turned back to Hap and Rachel. “Now, let me share something else with you. I've been doing a little digging on my own. Haven't come up with much—I'm too busy with the computer. But I have decided that there is something funny about Bridget McGrory. I can't put my finger on it; certainly I'm in no position to make an accusation of any kind. But you might want to keep an eye on her.”

“You know, Ray's been saying the same thing,” said Rachel. “I wonder what's going on there.”

“But Bridget McGrory is just a secretary!” protested Hap.

Dr. Remov shook his head. “A bit of advice, my young friend. Never say ‘just a secretary.' As you get older, you'll learn that secretaries really control the world.”

“You don't think she could be building a back door, do you, Stanley?” asked Dr. Mercury.

Hap looked puzzled. “What does a back door have to do with anything?”

Dr. Remov steepled his fingers in front of his face. “A back door is a sneaky way to get into a computer's command structure. Designed well enough, it could even let someone put in commands that would normally be blocked by previous programming.”

“Like what?”

Dr. Remov shrugged. “Oh, a command that would lock out all the other researchers.”

Hap's eyes widened. “Is that possible?”

Dr. Mercury set aside his pipe and his bowl. “Well, ADAM is fairly well protected against things like that; we embedded instructions to prevent it from accepting such input very deep in its architecture. But the truth is, no system is so secure it can't be cracked. Someone who is sneaky enough, patient enough, and smart enough might be able to get around those commands by constructing a completely new entrance to the computer. Not a physical door you could walk through, but the electronic equivalent: a back door.”

Rachel felt a shiver. Growing up with a computer scientist for a father, she had often heard about back doors. But she had never thought about one in connection with Project Alpha.

“That couldn't really happen here, could it?” she asked nervously.

Dr. Mercury shrugged. “In this business, nothing is certain except uncertainty.”

 

Computer Games

“Okay, Wendy,” said Ray when the gang had gathered in their headquarters the next morning. “I've waited long enough. I know you studied the printout. So tell me; how did Sherlock break the code and locate that transmitter?”

The Wonderchild smiled. “I'm not sure I
should
tell you. When you find out how simple it was, you'll just want to kill yourself because the computer figured it out first. Then the rest of us will have to talk you out of it, which is really boring, and—”

Roger cut her off. “Wendy, if you don't tell him soon, I think it's more likely we're going to have to talk him out of killing
you
. Besides, I want to know, too.”

“Oh, all right,” said the Wonderchild, rolling her eyes. “C'mere, I'll show you.”

She led Ray to one of the several keyboards scattered about the room. The others followed.

“Here's the coded message,” she said. Her fingers seemed to fly as she pressed down the shift key and then typed in:

!A@ @% ## )!$ #& @(

Everyone studied the monitor as the computer reprinted the message.

“It still looks like comic-book cursing to me,” said Hap.

“Probably because it is,” said Wendy. “That is, it's done the same way as comic-book cursing, by typing the symbols that you get if you hit the shift key before typing on the keyboard's numeral row. Now, my dear Raymond, release the shift key and hit the same symbols.”

Ray did as he was instructed.

“Do those numbers look familiar?” asked Wendy, pointing to the string of digits that had appeared on the screen.

162 25 33 014 37 29

“Yeah,” said Ray. “A one, a six, a two… I use 'em almost every day. What do you mean, do they look familiar?”

“It's the number
configuration
she's talking about,” said Roger. “The pattern of three digits, two digits, two digits, then repeated. And it does look familiar. Where have I seen it before?” He studied the screen for an instant longer, then groaned. “Oh, geez… they're latitude and longitude! Three digits for degrees, two digits for minutes, and two for seconds.”

“And those digits are familiar, too,” said Rachel, the memory expect. “That's where Sherlock told us to look for the transmitter yesterday!”

“You got it,” said Wendy. “As for solving it, Sherlock worked in several steps. First, it guessed we were dealing with numerals. That three-two-two, three-two-two symbol pattern would be pretty uncommon for a verbal message. Not impossible, certainly. But less likely.”

“Now, starting with the assumption—correct, in this case—that the answer was numerical, our brilliant program proceeded to do a pattern search, a hunt for things that might display the same arrangement of symbols. A five-four pattern, a set of five digits followed by four digits, might have indicated a ZIP code. Three-three-four would most likely be a telephone number, and three-two-four would be an old-fashioned Social Security number. A three-two-two, three-two-two pattern like we had isn't that common. So Sherlock glommed onto the right guess almost immediately: geographic coordinates.”

“But how did it know which numerals to substitute?” asked Hap. “There would be all kinds of possibilities.”

“That's a tribute to our good programming,” said Trip smugly. “Mind if I take it from here, Wendy? I want to see if I've figured this out correctly.”

“Be my guest.”

“To begin with,” said Trip, “you're right about the possible combinations. But one of the thinking tactics we've programmed into Sherlock is the use of Occam's razor.”

“Which was a really sharp idea,” said Paracelsus, dragging up one of the new stock of puns Roger had recently inserted into its programming.

“Ignore him,” said Rachel. “He's suffering the electronic equivalent of brain damage.”

“Such hostility!” cried Paracelsus.

“What the heck is Occam's razor?” asked Hap plaintively, trying to keep the line of reasoning straight in his head.

“It's a rule that says in any given situation the simplest solution is usually the best,” answered Trip. “So Sherlock would have immediately seized on the simple one-for-one substitution of the shift characters as a likely explanation.”

“But it wouldn't have stopped there,” said Roger proudly. “Once it had guessed that the symbols were really numerical coordinates and come up with a possible translation of digits to make it work, it would have begun checking to see if that translation made sense.”

“After all, there could have been several more steps to cracking the code,” said Rachel.

“Of course,” said Hap, who was beginning to feel like a caveman trying to make sense out of an automobile.

“But once it discovered that its translation had located a spot close to the island, it would have reasoned that this was probably correct. Then it was a matter of comparing new ideas with Black Glove's previous actions. Combining those with bits and pieces of information we've gathered over the last weeks, it came up with the hypothesis of a transmitter at that particular location.”

“Why do I suddenly feel stupid?” asked Hap morosely.

“You shouldn't,” said Rachel. “To begin with, despite what Trip might say, it was an accurate guess, not an infallible prediction. Second, it would have been a lot more useful if Sherlock had also predicted we were walking into a trap!”

“Of course, we could have thought of that, too,” put in Ray.

“Absolutely,” said Rachel. “But we let our emotions run away with us. Sherlock is supposed to think
without
emotion.”

“Really?” asked Hap. “So what happens if we succeed in making the program self-aware. Will it have emotions then?”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the room.

“That remains to be seen,” said Roger at last. “The most important thing to understand right now, Hap, is that it wasn't doing anything you couldn't do, if you had had the time and the patience. It was just doing it faster. The machine operates at five TRIPS, after all.”

“TRIPS?”

“Trillion Instructions Per Second,” translated their own personal Trip. “Fastest computer in the world at the moment. But it only reached that speed a week and a half ago. My mother and Dr. Fontana have been collaborating on that aspect of things. It's all very hush-hush. Mom hardly talks about it at all.”

“Of course, we're not supposed to know that it's operating at that speed,” put in Ray. “It's just that some of us have an inside track to what's going on with the main computer.”

Wendy took the moment to huff a breath onto her fingernails. Polishing them against her grubby sweatshirt, she added cheerfully, “Once we—or our parents, if they beat us to it—are successful at bringing the computer to consciousness, then it
will
do things you could never do. Heck, it'll do things
I
could never do. Things I would never even dream of!”

“That's
what scares me,” muttered Hap.

After supper that night Trip sat in his room, staring at his tutor-computer. He hadn't booted it up since it hit him with that secret message the previous morning, and he was wondering—a little nervously—what he might find when he turned it on this time.

He was also wondering what Wendy had up her sleeve as far as
her
tutor went. She had been acting rather mysterious when she left headquarters early that afternoon, refusing to say anything other than “I have to go home and beat up on that electronic creep the government saddled me with.”

Trip shrugged as he opened the rack attached to the machine. In a war between Wendy and one of these computers, he would bet on the Wonderchild every time.

He selected the tube marked “History,” inserted it into the machine, and waited for the menu to appear.

When it did, he opted for the top choice: Ancient Civilizations.

“Hello. My name is Julius Caesar.”

Trip stared at the monitor in astonishment. When he had chosen the history tube, he had expected to find no more than what his mother referred to, with great disdain, as an “electronic workbook”—the typical textbook-transferred-to-computer lessons where you were asked to read some material and then answer a few questions, and the only reason for doing it on a computer was because that was the current trend, not because the person who wrote the program had tried to take advantage of even a tenth of what the technology made possible.

That was what he had expected.

What he was seeing, and hearing, was a beautifully animated, highly accurate figure of Julius Caesar, explaining one of his adventures in the ancient world.

“Now, this is where we traveled during the First Gallic Campaign…”

Calling up a map of ancient France, the great general pointed out the area he would be moving his troops into, and explained the various dangers they were already aware of.

Several large spots on the map were marked “Terra Incognita.”

Trip scanned the commands at the top of the screen, then pulled up a help function. Following the directions it displayed, he asked the computer to explain the strange phrase.

Immediately Caesar reappeared.
“Terra Incognita
means unknown lands—areas where we have no idea what to expect. They're exciting, but potentially quite dangerous. Now, would you like to participate in this expedition?”

Trip switched on the voice recognition program, then replied, “Yes.”

“Good. Before we go on, you will need to make several decisions about how your expedition will be organized. Here are some of your choices…”

Caesar started by giving Trip a list of the available lieutenants and their character traits, then asking him to decide which men would best fit which assignments. Next he supplied the limits on what the men and animals could carry, then lists of the food and equipment Trip could choose to fill their packs.

“After you have made your selections, the priests will run a simulation of your campaign. This will allow you to compare your strategies to those Caesar himself would have selected.”

Trip noticed with amusement that this animated Caesar referred to himself in the third person, as a royal figure should.

“How many men will you lose?” continued Caesar. “How much territory will you gain? Soon the priests will tell us. May the gods be with you!”

Caesar gave Trip a wink, then disappeared from the screen.

He was replaced by a series of icons representing the choices Trip had to make: lieutenants, weapons, supplies, and so on. It was confusing at first. Included in the information on the available lieutenants was a list of the important people they were allied with in Rome. (Trip recognized many of the names, but only in the vague sense that they were historical figures he had heard of at one time or another.) And the troops and animals were all organized in units with Roman names. The help function came to his rescue several times here.