Leap - 02 (17 page)

“I figured as much.  What if I at least bring you some dinner?”

“That’s a deal.”

Alison patted him again on the shoulder and stepped through the narrow doorway, heading for the stairs.

Back in the salon, she passed behind Chris at the compact stove.  He stood stirring a pot of pasta.

Alison leaned in and sniffed.  “Smells good.”

Chris winked.  “It’s kind of hard to screw up spaghetti.  How’s Lee coming along?”

“He’s trying to find a way to separate the strings of conversation.”

Chris shook his head.  “I don’t know how he figures all that stuff out.  I pretty much give up when my email doesn’t work.”

“Or when they come from me,” Alison teased.

They both looked at the open sliding glass door as Kelly stepped in from outside.  The fading light had turned the sky behind her a dark crimson red.  “Okay, the drogue is down, so we shouldn’t drift too far tonight.  And we should have pretty good weather for the next couple days.”

“Any sign of Dirk and Sally?”

“Yeah, they’ve come by a couple times to check on us.  I think they know we’re having trouble with the translations right now.”  She cocked her head for a moment.  “At least I
think
it’s Dirk and Sally.”

Alison laughed.  “Oh well, I’m sure they could use the rest.”  She reached behind Chris and grabbed some plates.  “I’m just hoping Lee can work one of his computer miracles.”

A noise woke Alison up and she rolled over, forcing one eye open in the darkness.  It took her a moment to remember where she was and finally recognize the boat’s smooth, white fiberglass walls and ceiling.  They were only visible thanks to the soft glow coming through her door.

She cleared her mind and squinted toward the light.  She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up in her shorts and tank top.  Suspiciously, she walked softly down the tiny hallway, following the light.

She knew what she was going to find, but it didn’t make her any less irritated.  She pushed the oval door open and stepped out into the small converted cabin.  “What on earth are you still doing up?”

The sarcasm was lost on Lee, who looked at her excitedly.  “Good, you’re up!” he said, almost jumping out of his chair.  “I need to talk to you.”

Alison glared at him.  “You know the sun is going to be up in a couple hours, right?”

He couldn’t hide the brief look of guilt.  “Uh…yeah.  Sorry, I couldn’t sleep.”

A drowsy Chris came downstairs, nearing the end of his watch.  “What’s going on?”

“Someone’s been up all night.”

Chris turned to Lee, who was grinning.

“Okay, that’s true,” Lee confessed.  “But I have good news!”

Alison’s eyes opened in anticipation.  “Did you fix it?”

“I did.”

“Really?’

He shrugged innocently.  “It wasn’t that hard.  I identified several segments of Dirk and Sally’s speech and overlaid them onto the speech patterns from the other dolphins.  Then I removed the differences, which gave me a tonal signature.  I’ve now added it to the translation process, so it should filter Dirk and Sally’s speech from the others.  It will help keep IMIS from getting confused.  Unfortunately, it also means the other dolphins can’t talk directly to you.  They’ll have to talk through Dirk and Sally.  It’s the best I can do for now.”

Alison and Chris looked at each other.  “Lee, you’re amazing!”

“Tell that to my wife.”

Alison started looking away but stopped when she noticed that Lee was still smiling.  “What?”

“That’s not what I was working on all night.”

She eyed him suspiciously.  “What
were
you working on then?”

“I have something else to show you guys.”  He grabbed the chair and promptly sat back down.  He pulled up a new window on his screen that Alison had seen before in Puerto Rico.  On one side was video footage.  The other side displayed a long list of text, some of which was highlighted in red.  The video held a still frame of DeeAnn and Dulce in it.  “Recognize this?”

“Aren’t those the translation errors you’ve been trying to figure out?” 

“Yes, they are.”

Chris lifted his eyebrows.  “Did you find something out?”

Lee smiled.  “I think so.”  He turned back to the screen.  “I was working on the tonality problem when something suddenly occurred to me.  When you were underwater today, Alison, and were having problems, I was afraid we were going to find the same synchronizing errors we’ve been having with Dulce: the ones where some of the translated speech is time-stamped incorrectly.  Luckily for us, there weren’t any errors.  Instead, it was a limitation of how IMIS was instructed to process the data.”  He turned back around to them.  “But that got me thinking…what if the errors we’ve been having with Dulce weren’t really errors either?”

Now both Chris and Alison were listening intently.

“Think about this.  The one thing that was confusing the hell out of me was that I could see the errors occurring on the screen, but I couldn’t
detect
any speech related errors in the video.  And neither did DeeAnn or Dulce.  Therefore, I had to assume they were subtle and still infrequent enough that they would eventually begin to appear as translation drops.  But they never did.”

“So, are you saying the errors are not real?”

“Yes!  That’s exactly what I’m saying!”  The excitement in Lee’s voice was growing.  “At least in a sense.  After all, how can you have a problem with a cause, but no effect?”  He looked back and forth between them.  “The answer is…you don’t!  It’s because the effect
is
the problem!  In other words, if you can’t observe the effect, there is no problem.”

Chris furrowed his brow.  “I think you just lost me.”

“What I’m saying, is that I was trying to find a cause to something that wasn’t really a problem.”

“But,” Alison cut in, looking back at Lee’s monitor.  “I thought the computer errors were the problem?”

“That’s what I thought,” Lee nodded.  “But then I asked myself, what if the computer was wrong?  What if it was confused, like it was today with the vest?”

“So you’re saying there’s no problem?”

Lee was smiling widely now.  “Right.”

“And the log entries in the computer are wrong.” Chris continued.

Lee suddenly held up his finger at what Chris said.  “Actually, no!”

“No?”  Chris looked back to Alison, confused.  “I’m lost again.”

“This is the exciting part,” Lee replied.  “My point is that there is no translation problem, and the entries in the log
are
valid!”

Chris squinted at Lee.  “How can that be?”

“Because,” Alison said, thinking through it.  “Those log entries mean something else.”

“Exactly!” cried Lee.

“So what do they mean?”

Lee’s grin grew even wider.  “For this, you two might want to sit down.”

34

Alison and Chris both turned around, then shot Lee a sarcastic look.

“Sit down where?”

Lee looked past them at the small empty hallway.  “Oh, sorry.  Never mind.”  After a chuckle, he whirled around in his chair and restarted his video of DeeAnn and Dulce.  “Like I said, I couldn’t find any noticeable discrepancies in the translations.  Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re not present, but if these were true errors, the frequency alone means we should have seen several hiccups.  Words being wrong or maybe a little out of context.  But so far, nada.  If anything, IMIS is getting faster, which is exactly how it worked with Dirk and Sally on the old system.”

Alison watched the video while she listened.  “Okay, so they aren’t errors, but we still don’t know what they are?”

Lee smiled slyly.  “Or maybe we do.”  He slowed the video down dramatically then zoomed in on DeeAnn and Dulce in the middle of the frame.  Their slow motion images became clear enough to see their facial expressions.  They watched DeeAnn ask Dulce a question.

“They look like they’re trapped in molasses,” Chris joked.

After an unusually long wait due to the slow motion, Alison and Chris could see the translated text appear up on Lee’s screen.

“Would…you…like…to…play…another….game?” she asked.

The three watched while the sound emanated from DeeAnn’s old vest.  They could barely see Dulce’s expression start to change or her mouth move when the red letters abruptly appeared in the computer logs.

“There!” cried Lee, stopping the video.  “Right there!  There’s one!”  He pointed at the red lettering on the screen.  “From here, you see that it takes almost three seconds for Dulce to speak.  Yet as far as IMIS is concerned, the translation already happened.  We’ve never seen this with Dirk and Sally before.”

Alison and Chris remained fixed on his screen.

“And Dulce’s translations have never been wrong?” Alison asked.

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“Maybe the camera’s audio and video are out of sync.”

“Good guess,” Lee offered to Chris.  “But they’re not, I checked.  Remember, we have multiple cameras surrounding her habitat.”

“Well, if the translations are happening early, and they’re correct, then IMIS must be
anticipating
the words to be translated.”

Lee pointed to her.  “I thought the same thing.  But our algorithms can’t actively predict behavior.  At least not yet.  Which leaves only one more possibility.  IMIS is picking up on something
else
.”

“Something else?  Like what?”

“Okay, remember what DeeAnn told us…that gorillas are quiet communicators.  That they’re calm and thoughtful.  I remember that because she told me about a thousand times while I was helping code the new software to study primates.  Calm and thoughtful.  Which means nonverbal, something else DeeAnn says all the time, ‘most of their communications are
non
-verbal.’”

“Oh, my gosh,” mumbled Alison, as Lee’s words began to dawn on her.

“You see,” Lee continued, “the system was never broken.  It was just the opposite.  If anything, IMIS was working
too
well.  So well in fact, that I think IMIS has begun translating a language with Dulce on a level that
humans can’t even detect!
”

Alison and Chris stared at Lee before finally turning to each other.  They wore the same look on their faces.

“Did you say an undetectable language?”

“Yes!”  Lee was so excited that he had to force himself to keep his voice down for Kelly, who miraculously was still sleeping.  “It’s the only thing that fits.  Dulce is able to communicate on a level, a primate level, which only IMIS is able to pick up on.  And it’s fast!”

Alison took a deep breath.  “Wow.”

Lee eagerly looked back and forth between them.  “And
that
is why I haven’t slept all night.”

Chris smirked, with the look of shock still on his face.  “Well, that’s about the best excuse I’ve ever heard.”

Alison stood silently, thinking, with the back of her hand covering her mouth.  “So, what kind of language is it?” she asked out loud.

Lee shook his head.  “I have no idea.”

Alison blinked out of her trance and looked down at Lee, who was still seated.  “Well, I guess we can be happy the software isn’t broken.”

“Uh, yeah,” he chuckled in agreement.  Just moments later, he became serious again.  “This is huge guys.  I mean really HUGE.”

“I agree.  And it means we need to get a hold of DeeAnn for a couple of reasons,” Alison said, reading her watch.

Chris eyed her curiously.  “What’s the second?”

She turned to both of them.  “Well, we’re going to need her help trying to validate what Lee just found.  And secondly, I’m guessing she’ll want to know that there may not be anything wrong with that new vest of hers after all.”

35

The sun’s first rays of the new morning broke over the distant blue horizon and raced across the surface of the earth, illuminating the coast of South America.  The trees lit up in a bright green hue, reflecting the lushness of the mysterious jungle laden continent. 

The early twilight splashed over everything close to the water, including Alves’ preserve and Dulce, who was huddled into the corner of her fenced area.  She was hiding with her small black head tucked down, from a fear that was now causing her fingers to shake.  She was beginning to feel nervous and more than a little irritable.  She wanted to help and make DeeAnn happy but deep down, more than anything, she wanted to go home.

She’d been awake most of the night and a growing wisp of exhaustion was beginning to take its toll on her.  She was waiting quietly for her mother.

The sound from a nearby group of black-goggled tanagers filled the air as the jungle awakened to the cool, humid morning.  Other birds began to join in, adding their own morning calls.  But it was a different noise that caught Dulce’s attention.  It was a very peculiar sound.

Dulce silently raised her head and looked around behind her, scanning the nearby building less than thirty yards away.  She kept watching and listening until she heard it again, this time louder.

She turned her attention to a small area of the building where the lower wall overlapped with the next structure, providing a darkly shaded corner section of the roof.  It was there that Dulce continued to stare until she saw it.  A small gray head appeared from the shadow and glanced around.  When the small capuchin monkey spotted Dulce observing from the ground, he quickly ducked back into the shadows.

Dulce’s eyes opened wide and she wrapped her fingers eagerly through the chain link fence.  She continued watching the hidden area for several minutes before the gray head appeared again.  This time, it was staring curiously at Dulce.  After a moment, he tipped his head as if trying to figure her out.

Thirty minutes later, DeeAnn was surprised when she opened the outside door and found Dulce standing attentively at the fence.  She followed Dulce’s gaze up to the roof but couldn’t see what she was looking at.  Her curiosity grew when she approached the caged area to find that Dulce was still ignoring her.

DeeAnn gingerly unlocked the gate and stepped inside, still observing the young gorilla.  She began to close the gate when she suddenly froze.  Up along the first roofline, she could see something protruding out from the shadows.  She eased her breath out slowly.  It was the small gray head of Dexter, the capuchin monkey they had spent the last two days searching for.  The monkey had never left!

DeeAnn rolled her eyes. 
Of course!  Why didn’t she realize? 
With as much time as Luke spent with him, Dexter could just as easily have become comfortable at Luke’s home, especially since his own was so far away.  In fact, Dexter probably wouldn’t have left a familiar environment for the unknown unless he was being chased.  Instead, frightened from the attack, he found what he considered the safest and closest place to hide. 
How could she not have thought of that?

DeeAnn turned as the exterior door to the building opened again, and Juan stepped out.  She immediately put her finger over her lips and signaled him to come quickly.

It took Juan just a few minutes to locate a ladder near a nearby utility shed.  It wasn’t quite tall enough to reach the lower roof, but it was enough to allow Dulce to get within eight feet of the monkey.  DeeAnn kept her distance and remained further down the ladder, just within reach of Dulce’s dangling leash.  Juan stood immediately behind her, securing the bottom of the aluminum ladder.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t understand what Dulce was saying to Dexter at the top of the ladder.  DeeAnn could not point the vest upward at the correct angle, and Dulce was facing away from her, making a translation impossible.  But speak, she did.  Dulce stood poised at the top, carefully studying Dexter and exchanging an unending series of sounds and gestures. 

Dexter’s sounds were higher pitched, sounding less like an exchange and more like a screaming match; but step by step, his head and body gradually emerged into the morning sunlight.  When he reached the edge of the roof, DeeAnn slowly shook her head in wonder.  The full significance of the event would have been lost on anyone else, but to DeeAnn, what she had just witnessed was nothing short of earth shattering.