Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) (17 page)

She smiled at her husband. “Then let’s go. You will feel a
lot better when you meet a few thousand people dressed in superhero costumes,
StarFleet uniforms, and as aliens from outer space!”

• • • •

On the Friday afternoon following their holiday at the
convention in Atlanta, Paul hummed a merry tune as he strode down the hallway
and into the master bedroom. There he found his wife,  folding clothes and slipping
them into the dresser drawers.

“You look happy,” she observed, noting the huge smile on his
face.

“Yep,” he whooped, doing a small dancing jig in front of her
and throwing his arms wide. “It works! The first Scottie computer works! Fully
tested, primed, and raring to go!”

Capie clapped, beaming with joy. “That’s wonderful news! And
the benchmarks?”

“Off the charts!” Paul announced, pumping his fist in the
air. “Now all we need is the software and, if that works, we will have the
first Artificial Intelligence in history!”

“Congratulations!” she squealed, rushing forward to give her
husband a big hug. “I knew that you could do it!”

“Hey, team effort here,” he barked, hugging her back. “I
couldn’t have done it without you.” He leaned back to give her a kiss. “Let’s
celebrate! The sky’s the limit! Where do you want to go?”

“Well, fancy that you should ask that question,” she said
lightly, looking up at the ceiling. “Did you know that the MidAmeriCon2, the 74
^th
World Science Fiction Convention is coming up in Kansas City this weekend?”

“Fantastic coincidence!” he declared, with a huge grin on
his face. “I’ve never been before, have you? Let’s go!”

Indeed, it was the first time ever that either one of them
had attended what some have argued to be the most important science
fiction/fantasy convention held each year. They especially enjoyed trying to
guess who would receive the Hugo Awards for the year at the award ceremony and
then the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. It didn’t faze them any
that none of their guesses were correct. They simply enjoyed themselves the entire
weekend.

But, as in all things, good times have an end. The WorldCon
was over and they needed to return to San Jose and to continue their work
building the first Scottie.

• • • •

“Wow!” Capie muttered softly, eyes wide as she stared around
her. “So this is what virtual reality looks like! It’s nothing like the
Matrix
movies.”

Paul chuckled in reaction. “Funny, but that was pretty much
my first response as well.”

The two of them were in cyberspace—specifically, inside the
confluence of a half dozen supercomputers scattered around the Silicon Valley
area. All around them was a soft white light, including the ‘ground’ beneath
their ‘feet.’ Except for a tall column made of brightly flashing strings of
lights a few feet away.

“Those are the programs running, right?” Capie surmised,
reaching up to push a stray strand of hair back into place. “All this space and
that’s the only things that are running?”

“Seems a waste, right?” Paul observed, smiling at his wife.
“But it’s not like this all the time. On the occasions that it gets really
busy, I get out. I don’t want the system administrators to know we are tapping
their unused processing power. They have no sense of humor about such things.”

“No, probably not,” agreed Capie, stepping closer to the
strings of lights. “So, we are tapped into this space through the workstation
back at the house. And you’re going to start assembling the software for the
Scottie in here first and move it to the quantum computer later.”

“In a nut shell, you’ve got it.” He waved a hand at the free
space around them. “There is a lot more space here to use for development of
the A.I. than in the Scottie, even if it is a bit slow by comparison. So let’s
get started.”

Extending his hands at arm’s length, he began a series of
gestures, flicking his wrists, pointing his fingers, brushing with one hand
while grabbing with another.

In response, a series of images flashed into the ‘air’ in
front of them. Blocks of various colors appeared, lines of different thicknesses,
triangles, and ellipses. The geometric shapes and lines rapidly became more
complex.

“How neat!” remarked Capie. “It reminds me of the screens
that Tony Stark used in designing the Iron Man suits in the movies.”

“I admit it. I stole the initial idea from that film. But
these symbols and elements are far more than just a design. I’m downloading and
manipulating the software that I had in the PC that we lost.”

“Downloading it? From where? The PC was toast, so you said.”

“From my memory,” Paul replied. “I’m using a mnemonic spell
on myself, to pull all of the details out of the recesses of my memory.” He
gave her a big grin. “And to my happy surprise, it’s actually working!”

“I am so glad that I married an engineer! And a smart one at
that!” she declared, leaning closer to squeeze his arm tightly.

He turned, gathered her into his arms and kissed her long
and hard.

“Wow!” she said, coming up for a breath. “I love your
kisses! I didn’t know that we could kiss in cyberspace, Dom.”

“Shall we see what else we can do here?” he asked, leering
at her.

“Why, Dom!” she said with a giggle. “Are you feeling
romantic?”

“Think of it as a science experiment, my love. We’ll be
making history! Pioneers!”

She giggled again. “How can I resist an opportunity like
that? May the experiments begin!” And she leaned into his arms for another
smoldering kiss.

Rental House

Magdalena Rd

Los Altos Hills, CA

August

Tuesday 7:15 a.m. PDT

O
n
Tuesday a week later, during breakfast, Paul grudgingly announced that he was
ready to try downloading and activating the A.I. program in the Scottie
mainframe.

“I just don’t know what else to do to the software,” he
grumbled. “I’ve checked everything I can think of but I’ve probably missed a
thousand things.”

“Can I help in any way?” Capie asked.

“You can help me watch for results. Oh, and you can console
me if it fails,” he suggested grimly, pushing the bowl of soggy cereal away
from him.

She raised her eyes heavenward. “Oh, ye of little faith. I
believe it will work. And there’s no time like now to go try it!”

With Paul trailing behind her, they tramped into the garage
and took the stools at the workbench. Paul fished around, found and ran a USB
3.0 cable from the workstation to a connection on the Scottie motherboard
followed by a HDMI cable to a computer monitor. He started turning on all the
various pieces of test equipment, flipping switches and pushing buttons.
Leaning back on the stool, he watched as the Scottie computer finished booting
up, showing the standard Linux penguin display before he turned and started
typing on the workstation keyboard.

“There!” he declared. “The downloads have started from the
supercomputers.”

On the Scottie monitor, a task completion bar appeared,
slowly cranking its way across the bottom of the screen. When it reached 100%,
it disappeared, to be replaced by a pop-up with a single large red button that
read “START.”

“May I?” asked Capie, with a quizzical look at Paul.

He shrugged and gave her the mouse.

Eagerly, she clicked on the big red button.

And the two of them held their breath, waiting.

Five seconds went by. Then ten. Twenty. Thirty.

The LCD screen never changed and there was no reaction by
the hard drive light either.

“Officially, this is not a good sign,” Paul sadly admitted.
For a few moments, his mood became somber. So much was riding on this and he
didn’t have an available option if it didn’t work. It just
had
to work.
But what else could he do, other than what he had done already?

“Can you cast a spell?” Capie asked helpfully. “Maybe look
inside and see what is going on in there?”

“No, I don’t want to do that. It would be like a functional
telepath trying to read the mind of a fetus. I would probably imprint my
intelligence on the program and that would not be the best thing I could do
right now.”

Capie looked thoughtful. “I didn’t think of that. Okay, so
we wait.”

They sat patiently. A half an hour went by without any
result.

“Okay,” Paul said, with a sigh. “It was a valiant effort,
but it didn’t work.”

“Just leave it on for a while longer,” Capie urged him. “You
can help me with a few chores around the house. We can check back after lunch
to see if there are any changes then.”

With an ever increasing sense of failure, Paul followed her
out to the kitchen.

• • • •

When they returned from lunch, Paul saw an immediate
difference.

The Linux desktop screen with the small army of penguins was
gone. Now the LCD monitor screen was totally black. He sat at the workbench, crestfallen.

Capie massaged his shoulders. “I was hoping for a different
result.”

He reached up and squeezed her left hand, his expression
downcast. “I guess it’s time for Plan B.”

“Do you have a Plan B?”

“No, but it’s time for one,” he said with a sad sigh.

Capie suddenly gripped his shoulders with both hands.

“Hey!” Paul protested, wincing. “What’s that for?”

“I saw a light. On the screen. Right smack dab in the middle
too. Just a small dot, just for an instant.”

Paul turned back to the desktop and closely watched the monitor.
“I don’t see anything.”

“I didn’t imagine it, I promise,” Capie protested. “It was
there, but it was only a fast blip.”

She pulled up the other stool beside him and together they
stared at the screen intently.

A minute went by. Then two. Three. Four.

And then it happened. A quick flash of white light. Just a
small dot, dead center of the screen, for maybe half a second and then it was
gone.

“How about that?” Paul said, with a grin, a sense of hope
suddenly flooding through him.

“I told you,” Capie giggled.

They waited again. The next blip of light happened a few
minutes later. This time, it was larger and brighter. It also stayed on the
screen for a whole second.

“I should time these,” Paul said, pushing the buttons on his
wristwatch.

The fourth flash was two and a half minutes later and stayed
on a whole two seconds. The size of the dot was now as big as a dime and pure
white in color.

“Go-baby-go!” he urged it.

The fifth dot was a minute and a half later. The sixth was fifty-eight
seconds after that and the seventh was twenty-one seconds after that. They completely
forgot about anything else as they stared at the computer screen, mesmerized by
the very slow flashing light.

However, the speed continued to increase, the light lasting
longer each time, the size increasing. After an hour of observation, the
flashing more or less stopped, the screen now filled with a continuous bright
white light.

Capie looked up sharply at him.

“Did you hear that?” she asked.

Paul reached over and turned up the speaker volume. Very
faintly, there was a gentle hissing noise.

“Good ears,” Paul said, complimenting her. “But I don’t know
what it means.”

“I think it’s alive,” she observed.

“Maybe,” he responded, but dubiously.

In the center of the screen, a small blue dot appeared.

“Now color!” Capie squealed.

A red dot joined it, quickly followed by a yellow dot and a
green one.

The hard drive light kicked on.

“It’s working!” they said, together.

“Ooh, quick!” Paul said, scrambling through the stack of
things on the workbench. “I have one of those old CDs with an encyclopedia on
it! Ha, here it is!” He pounced on the CD and loaded it into the drive.

The colored lights danced across the screen now, weaving
patterns of their own. More colored dots appeared, joining them in the dance.

And then, without warning, they coalesced into a picture. A small
picture of a human fetus laid curled into a fetal position.

Capie gasped, putting one knuckled hand to her mouth. Paul’s
jaw nearly hit the floor. He could scarcely believe what he was seeing either.

The CD spun up, the light flashing as data moved across the
internal bus to the CPU. The picture of the fetus slowly grew larger, gradually
filling the entire screen.

“It’s a
baby
!” whispered Capie. “It looks just like a
real
baby
!”

The hissing noise from the speaker morphed into a very quiet
thumping sound.

“It’s a heartbeat!” Capie breathed out. “Paul, it’s
important that we talk to it now, that it sees us and hears our voices!”

Paul nodded. He took a webcam from a nearby shelf and
connected it to a second USB port. Instantly, the webcam light came on. He sat
the webcam on the top edge of the monitor, pointing it at Capie and himself.

“Baby, we are here,” Capie said, soothingly as she leaned
closer to the webcam. “We are here for you. We love you. Everything will be just
fine. You are not alone. We love you.”

Paul finally found his voice. “You are alive now, a living
thinking individual. You are not alone. We welcome you into the world of other
living thinking beings.”

The heartbeat firmed up, steadying into a regular rhythm.
The fetus moved, the tiny arms waving back and forth, the legs kicking.

They continued to talk to it, encouraging it and assuring it
that it was loved and not alone.

“We need a name,” Capie hissed at Paul. “What did you plan
to call him?”

The question caught Paul flatly off-guard. A name? The idea
had never occurred to him. His brain spun wildly, fleetingly considering a
whole host of possibilities. Definitely not HAL.

“Do we need a boy’s name or a girl’s?” Paul asked suddenly.

Capie glared at him as if he had asked a stupid question.
“It’s a boy, Paul. Can’t you tell the difference?”

Paul stared at the monitor screen. From the position of the
fetus, no he couldn’t tell. But on matters such as this, Capie was always
right. Okay, so they needed a boy’s name.
Think
!

“Daneel,” Paul said on impulse, feeling good about his
choice. “From the Isaac Asimov
Robot
series. Daneel.”

Capie nodded with a knowing smile. “Yes, I agree. Good
choice.” She turned back to the screen. “Daneel, you are Daneel and we are your
parents. We love you.”

The face turned towards the screen, the eyes slowly
blinking. Capie reached out and stroked the mouse gently. “We love you, Daneel.”

Paul felt incredibly alive as they talked to their new
creation, encouraging Daneel and assuring him of their love. The hard drive and
CD lights continued to flash as data flowed through the computer.

“It’s unbelievable!” Paul murmured, thoroughly awed that
they had actually created a working A.I.!

But then Capie had an odd look on her face.

“I have one question,” she remarked.

“What’s that?” Paul asked, now looking at her curiously.

“How do we get his footprint on the birth certificate?” she asked
playfully.

• • • •

“Okay. I’ll watch Daneel while you are busy in the kitchen,”
Paul volunteered.

With a snap of his fingers, the entire assembly of circuit
boards, wiring, speakers, webcam, portable touch pad and monitor lifted off
from the dining room table and floated through the air into the living room and
lowered itself onto the coffee table.

“Gaggle goo bafoughna,” Daneel giggled from the desktop
screen.

Paul followed along, stroking the touch pad. “And a gaggle
goo ba to you too, son,” he responded affectionately as he sat on the couch.

The image of a baby on the monitor screen had changed
significantly over the two days since his ‘birth.’ The A.I. now sported a small
lock of fine blond hair on his head, his cheeks were a rosy red, his eyes a
bright blue. He lay on a bed of white cotton sheets, arms flapping back and
forth, his legs kicking in cheerful glee. He was wearing a Huggies diaper and a
small white T-shirt. Paul estimated that Daneel now appeared to be six months
old, give or take a month or so. Quite obviously, an A.I. developed at a much
more accelerated rate than a human being.

By Paul’s estimate, Daneel would be saying his first words
in English before the end of the week. Indeed, he might be a ‘toddler’ not long
after that.

Capie reached out and gently grasped Paul’s chin, angling his
face first one way then the other, staring at him intently.

“What?” Paul asked, mystified.

“He’s got your nose,” she claimed, with a smirk.

“Oh, that’s very funny,” he responded, with a forced smile. “Speaking
of funny, do you remember what day Daneel was born on?”

“Last Thursday, of course,” she replied with a puzzled
frown. “Why do you ask?”

“Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of
grace, Wednesday’s child is full of woe—”

“Oh, the poem “Monday’s Child”?” she asked, more puzzled
than ever, then she grimaced in distaste. “Thursday’s child has far to go. Like
to Mars and back, huh? You are incorrigible.”

“What’s for lunch?” he asked with an innocent smile.

“I’ll go see if there’s any crow in the fridge,” Capie said
with a smirk as she stepped out of the room.

Paul turned back to the webcam with a big grin on his face.

“‘A long time ago in a galaxy far far away…’”he said
soothingly to Daneel in a soft voice.

• • • •

“You want to do
what
?” Capie moaned, with a slow
disbelieving shake of her head, both bewildered and alarmed. “You want to move?
To
Australia
?! Why on Earth do you want to do
that
?”

Paul flinched, surprised and disturbed by her reaction. He hadn’t
anticipated such a response!

They were in the garage, ‘cleaning’ up. This consisted mainly
of opening portals to the nearest landfill site in California, levitating the
item or items in question and shoveling them through. Except for the test
equipment, there was very few items left that they wanted to keep. Daneel, now
a ‘crawler,’ was sitting in his monitor screen on the workbench. He had been
playing with a virtual multi-colored ball. But now he was pouting and on the
verge of crying, upset by Capie’s outburst.

“Dear, we need to build a spacecraft next,” Paul reluctantly
and weakly replied, edging away from her a bit. “It’s the next step—”

“Fine,” she replied in a tired monotone voice. “I think it’s
too early to do that yet. Daneel is only, what, a year old now? You don’t know
if you can give him magical powers yet and it’s way too early to try it on him.
I thought you were going to make sure you could do that before we go to Mars.”

“He has all the same mental processes a human has—” Paul
muttered.

“But you don’t really know if it will work or not, right?”

“No, I don’t know,” he conceded, biting his lip. “Look,
dear, I promise that we won’t go to Mars until we do know. And I won’t make
Daneel a wizard until he’s old enough. But at the rate he is growing up, that
will only take a month or two. In the meantime, I need to start building the
ship. It’ll take that long or maybe longer—”

“Then why can’t you build it
here
!” she lamented, trying
her best to sound reasonable. “In California. There’s way more stuff here to
build a spaceship with than in Australia.”