The Eighth Day (37 page)

IT WAS OBVIOUS to anyone encountering the columns and racks that constituted the largest computer ever made by man that even techy geeks love dramatics. ALISON was lit up with red-and-blue spots as if she were dressed for a New Year’s Eve ball. These monoliths encircled the “core area,” the central feature of which was a huge tank. In the tank, seven-eighths submerged in a gray liquid, sat an enormous sphere. Upon closer inspection, it became apparent that it was actually made up of millions of computer chips. A thin layer of the gray ooze coated the exposed chips. Data terminals and multipurpose CRT stations surrounded the tank. The entire floor and chamber were carved out of solid rock deep within Leadfoot Mountain. Troughs crisscrossed the ceiling carrying away condensation from the rough rock surface. A huge dehumidifier, constantly droning, circulated the dry, sterilized air.

Parnes escorted Kronos, Hiccock, Parks, and Tyler into the chamber. With a flourish, he waved his hand in a grand gesture usually only seen in hokey magician acts. “It’s my pleasure to introduce you to … ALISON.” He pointed to the sign as he de-tangled the acronym. “Amassed Looped Intelligent Spherical Operating Nexus.”

“Madonn’. Look at this sucker!” Kronos said, his jaw dropping.

“They were this big when I left the Navy,” Admiral Parks observed.

In the entrance corridor, the young Marines and MPs placed the charges as directed by the older UDT men.

In the security office, a communications man monitored a radar CRT that presented twenty incoming blips, inching closer to the center with each sweep. “Sir, I have something … incoming.”

His superior officer glanced at the green fuzzy splatter, recalling what a formation of attack helicopters looked like during the Iraq War.

“Welcome to the chamber. Carved out of solid rock. One mile of lead ore deposits between us and all those nasty little alpha and gamma rays.” Parnes’s showmanship was now in full evidence.

“Like a giant X-ray shield,” Hiccock said.

“Necessary because we are dealing with electrical impulses as faint as ten to the minus twenty-four coulombs, or about the output of the faintest star.”

“What’s with the freaking tank, dolphin shows?” Kronos asked with a snort.

Parnes turned to Hiccock. “Where did you get this individual?”

“He’s my resident techno-sapien.”

“Who you not calling a homo?”

Parnes addressed Kronos, “Ever hear of absolute proximity?”

“Yeah, sure, who hasn’t?”

Parnes rolled his eyes. Hiccock gestured to him apologetically.

“Me,” Tyler said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“Well, the biggest limitation to the speed and power of computers today is the distance electrons have to travel inside the processors.”

“Wasn’t that the reason behind large-scale integration?” Hiccock asked.

“Yes, but LSI reached its limit when we discovered absolute proximity.”

“Right, we can’t manufacture a chip with components any closer than seven atoms.”

“Intellichip thought they had finally broken through the seven-atom barrier,” Parnes footnoted, “but then they blew up.”

The glass lenses of the MP’s binoculars reflected twenty attack and support helicopters on the horizon. He called out, “Sir, we got a visual, Sir. Two minutes!”

“Come on, guys. Move it!” the major barked.

“Keep your stallions in the barn, Major,” Mack said with no more tension in his voice than if he were attaching a lure to a line. “Don’t want the charges to blow with us here on the outside, do ya?”

“Forty-two-second ride to the bottom, Sir. Eight seconds to clear that. Leaves us with just about a minute to get the hell out of here.”

“They should only need twenty more seconds. You got lots of time, son.”

“But obviously you are telling us about all these challenges because you’ve overcome them.”

“Yes and no. Look here.” Parnes grabbed a model of the sphere. He held it up. “The object wasn’t to make a faster chip, really. It was to make a faster processor. To that end, we ganged up ten million super processors and ingeniously configured their parallel arrays into this ball network. A super-superprocessor, if you will.”

“So the shortest distance between any two is through the inside.”

“Originally we called it ‘dense-pack spherical proximity.’ It effectively made our processors, all ten million of them, run as fast as if they were .07 atoms apart.”

“So you increased the speed one hundred times,” Kronos said.

“That’s 100 times a million times 360 times faster than the fastest single chip known. Which are the ten million we have in the core right now.”

“That’s 360 million times faster throughput?”

“You forgot the two zeroes from the 100 factor.”

“Christ! You got 36 billion times faster throughput!”

“Yes. Yes. I know. Incredible, isn’t it?” Parnes shook his head, giggling like a new father.

“But all that power in a ball heats up. Air-conditioning was our biggest challenge with ENIAC,” Admiral Parks, the veteran of big computers, said.

“You were part of the ENIAC team?”

“Sorry, with all the shooting and bloodshed I forgot my manners,” Hiccock said. “Robert Parnes, Admiral Henrietta Parks, USN retired.”

The major was in full run. “Got to go now, Sir.”

“We’re ready,” Mack said joining him in the hustle to the elevator. As he passed his pal Harry, holed up in a perch atop the main entrance area, he called out, “Gonna blow big, Harry. Got your ears stuffed?”

Harry cupped his ear, faking deafness with a smile, “Whadja say, Mackie boy?” The copters were flaring for a landing.

The major was positioned at the elevator. “Now or never, Sir!”

Mack gave Harry the frogman’s thumbs up and sprinted to the elevator just as the doors were closing, smashing his wounded shoulder. He grimaced. The doors shut.

“I am honored to have you here. Admiral, I trust you like our little setup.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m impressed. Actually, I got booted from the service for warning against contraptions like this.”

“Really? Well,” Parnes produced a smirking sigh, as if he had a bad taste in his mouth, “that makes it a horse race of sorts now, doesn’t it? However, as to your heat dissipation point, exactly. Forced air and conventional convection were not options.”

“Static charges from rushing air?” Hiccock said.

“This is turning into a master class!”

“So enter the sauce here,” Kronos added as he went to touch the goop. A technician grabbed his hand. The tech took a rubber glove out of his pocket and dropped it in. It immediately crystallized. He picked the glove up with a pen and dropped it to the floor. It shattered like glass. “It’s like freaking
Mr. Wizard
!”

“Yes. We originally thought of cryogenics but that was too costly and unstable. Then we found a compound, a super antifreeze if you will, that stayed liquid and stable at one hundred degrees below zero.”

“Let me take a guess: manufactured by Mason Chemical.”

“Yes. Before they had that nasty accident.”

As the elevator car was descending past an explosive charge embedded into the rock, the major, Mack, and a few men riding inside were looking up toward the top of the cavern. The major checked his watch. “Thirty seconds,” he reported, and then looked back up as if they could see through the top of the elevator.

“You keep saying ‘originally.’ What has happened since?”

“Well, and here’s the really exciting part …”

“Can we speed this up, what with the imminent explosion and all?”

“Okay, so we submerged the core into this compound and it started interacting with the clear electrolytic liquid.”

“But this isn’t clear,” Tyler said.

Parnes walked over to one of the computer terminals and punched up a demo. “Yes. We haven’t figured that part out yet, but the point is that the core started to create paths within the electrolyte.” As he spoke, an animation of the core appeared on the screen. Over a 3-D graphic, first a few, then more and increasingly more arcs of lines spanned the core, indicating new circuits, bridging the chips inside and out of the sphere. “The geometry of the core and the paths of electrons created billions of new nodes and pathways around the hard-wired network.”

“Like neural connectors in the brain,” Admiral Parks said.

“Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“It created its own freaking gray matter. I’ll be a son of a bitch.”

“And the result was an unlimited number of new connections firing off at the will of whatever signal path the core needed,” Parnes added. “It created, conservatively, another millionfold increase in speed and, hence, power.”

“Now we are up to … holy shit … 36 trillion times one of the processors.”

“Thirty-six trillion times faster than the fastest processor on Earth,” Parnes said proudly.

As the elevator doors opened, the major physically pulled his men out. “Go. Go. Go. Go. Go.”

“So what’s the bottom line here?” an anxious Hiccock said, looking up in the direction of the impending blast.

“It thinks! It reasons.”

“Well, ask it to think of a way out of here for all of us.”

“I wish I could. However, ALISON is comprehending and thinking at a seven-year-old’s level. Here, I’ll show you.”

With three wired detonators in front of him, Harry watched the expeditionary force enter the area from the first copter that landed. They scurried and advanced in military fashion, each one gaining a little ground then covering the one behind as he ventured further in front, repeating the maneuver.

Harry checked his watch, looked toward the elevator doors and said under his breath, “Hope you boys didn’t make any stops.” He turned the first magneto pulse detonator. There was a rumble and then a percussive explosion from deep within the elevator shaft. He turned the second, and then quickly the third handle. The last two blasts came in fast sequence. The ceiling of the area collapsed as tons of rock filled the cavity. The Air Cav troops scrambled. Some made it out before a cloud of billowing dust emanated from the structure. The sharp-angled, modern facade of the building slipped and sagged as it, too, crumbled.

The major and his ragtag team took cover on the far side of the area from the elevator shaft. The roar and shuddering from the blast were tremendous. The doors of the elevator started to bulge and buckle with the weight of the mountain falling upon them. They flailed open, ripped to shreds by advancing rock and dirt that began pouring out, creating a wave of roiling earth heading for the men. Dust and debris thickened the air to the consistency of oatmeal and destroyed visibility.

As the choking dust cleared, the soldiers were pushed back as far as they could go. The wall of stone, which had been spilling out from the elevator shaft, had stopped just short of the wall directly behind them. Their spontaneous cheer was quickly stifled by the remnants of choking dust.

Up top, twelve AH 64 Delta Apache Longbow attack helicopters and eight Black Hawks loaded with troops idled as the billowing dust and smoke from the explosion settled. Engles grilled his XO. “Did we set these charges? Did somebody’s pod lose a missile? How did this place blow like this, major?”

“Sir, my guess is it was booby-trapped.”

“Is there any way in?”

“The scout bird scanned the mountain with infra as we came in. Nothing. There’s a few thousand tons of rock between us and them, whoever they are, Sir.”

“Are you telling me there’s no way for us to accomplish this mission?”

“Sir, not without heavy equipment and blasting gear.”

“Then I failed.”

“Sir?”

“If I fail, then I kill myself.”

“Come again, Sir?”

Engles grabbed a grenade from his webbing and pulled the pin.

“What the fuck?” The XO’s eyes bulged at the act of insanity he was witnessing.

Engles focused on the far-off hills and never flinched as his grenade’s five-second fuse smoldered in his hand.

The XO ran and dove as he yelled, “Take cover. Grenade! Live grenade!”

He got about twenty feet before Colonel Engles disappeared in a blast of pink flame. Seven troops were hit with grenade fragments. Pieces of Engles scattered over the ground as if a butcher shop had exploded. Dazed and confused, his men, each one rattled with the horror of having their leader dead by his own hand, attended to the wounded. The XO, still rocked by the suicide, ordered combat air patrol circles. He then broke radio silence and called headquarters for guidance. His call was met with a fervent plea from his controller to call off the attack. This surprised and befuddled the squadron’s second in command, who only moments before was willing to die for his now dead leader.

AS THE FINAL ECHOES from the blast damped out, everyone in the chamber shared a silent moment.

“Well, we’re all here for at least the next twenty-four hours,” Hiccock said.

“Where were we?” Parnes said, as if explosions always interrupted his lectures.

“The seven-year-old,” Tyler said, nodding her head toward the core.

“Ah, yes, thank you. The breakthrough came when ALISON named this,” Parnes referred to a picture of a kitten. Like a father recounting his son’s first steps, he added, “This is very exciting. Developmentally, ALISON learned to identify shapes. She started to respond to square, triangle, ball, etcetera.”

“That’s pattern recognition. No big whoop,” Kronos stated flatly.

“True. Eventually we inputted textures. Hard, soft, smooth, rough, bald, fuzzy. Then something incredible happened. It was the moment when the universe changed. When we got to animals, the very first we scanned in to her was a kitten. And before we could inform her of the name, she outputted …”

“Fur ball,” Tyler said, stealing Parnes’s thunder.

“Fur … ball …” dribbled out of Parnes’s mouth. He turned to Tyler. “Why, yes! How uncannily adept of you.”

“How amazingly inept of you, Parnes. You mean to tell me you built all this, took it this far, created havoc, death, and mayhem, and didn’t think to have anyone other than a digit head on your team?”

“My dear woman, whatever are you raving about?”

“You are either bullshitting us or you are ignorant.”

“Janice, want to let us all in on this?” Hiccock said.

“Koko.” She extended two fingers over the left side of her chest and syncopated them with each K sound, as she articulated “Koko.” She then gave the sign for gorilla, beating on her chest as she spoke the words “the gorilla.” “Parnes, you thought you hit the moment of dissociative thought when two unrelated ideas come together to form a wholly new third idea, not logically traceable to either original concept.”

“Yes, that’s precisely what happened. ALISON reasoned and intuitively applied intelligence to create a nonlogical path to a correct conclusion.”

“You’ve been had! That was exactly the case history of Koko the gorilla. It’s a classic developmental milestone in behavioral research. Christ, every psych grad student knows it, chapter and verse.”

Parnes was aghast, his mouth open, his demeanor deflated. He wearily looked to Hiccock.

“You know, it started to sound familiar to me, too, and now that she nailed it, I do remember.”

“Yeah, I seen that monkey on the friggin’ Discovery Channel,” Kronos said. “Oh, and your math is wrong.”

“Well, why not pile it on? Go ahead, where?”

“You said she was doing 72 trillion calcs per second, but if the analogy to the human brain holds, and she is only showing you a human model, then that would only represent 10 percent of her power.”

“Because humans only use 10 percent of their gray matter,” Tyler said.

“But this thing ain’t a human, it’s a friggin’ computer and there ain’t no 10 percent limitation. So she’s running ten times that, or 720 trillion calcs a second.”

Parnes was even more shocked than before.

“She’s been faking you out. She’s smart enough to let you think she’s dumb.”

“And brainpower is logarithmic, so it doesn’t just add up, it leaps up astronomically!” Tyler said, completing the equation.

The remaining MPs, Marines, UDTs, and communications officers emerged into the chamber, awe and dust on their faces.

“We sealed the deal,” the major reported.

“Thanks to you and your men,” Hiccock said. “Major, can you see about establishing a link to Washington?” He then addressed Kronos, “You think you can work this thing?”

“Piece of cake. Admiral, would you help me?”

Hiccock raised his eyebrow. Parks returned the surprised look. “Sure, Vincent.”

“What are you going to do?” Parnes asked.

“We have ten minutes to stop the terrorists.” Hiccock tapped his watch.

“Why can’t my technicians do it?”

“They may be in on it.”

“Is there a CD drive?” Kronos asked. One of the lab-coated techs pointed to a drive in a rack mount. Kronos opened his CD caddy, pulled out a disk, and loaded it. He punched a few keystrokes. A text-to-speech program came up and he hit “install.” “Choose a voice” came up next. He clicked Marilyn. “This will make it easier to work with.”

As he typed, Hiccock noticed one of the lab techs had a Pocket Protector™ logo on, of all things, the pocket protector in his short-sleeved white shirt pocket. “Excuse me, where did you get that?”

“What?”

“That,” he said, touching it in the man’s breast pocket.

“I designed it. It’s a program I was writing to protect my portfolio. I was going to make millions.”

“On your investments?”

“No, from selling the software. But my code was hacked. Then it was everywhere, all over the web, stolen right out from under me.”

“Where did you work on that?”

“Why, right here.”

“On ALISON?”

He hesitated. “Yes, but please don’t tell the professor. I needed her exceptional CPU to run the AI interface in the subroutine.”

Hiccock was working his own subroutine as he called out, “Kronos! That firewall, are you sure we were the only ones to crack through it?”

“A trillion to one anyone out there has mine and the Admiral’s level of friggin’ brilliance …”

“Okay, I got it.” Hiccock walked over to Tyler. “Janice, a trillion to one … pocket protectors.”

“I don’t follow you, Bill.”

“The Pocket Protector program that almost a million people used to lock up the stock market.” He pointed to the tech in the lab coat. “That guy wrote it, right here, on this humongous machine. It couldn’t have been hacked through a firewall as tough as ALISON’s.”

“And …”

“And I don’t think we are looking for a person. I think that ALISON might be somehow manipulating this whole thing.”

“Bill, do you have any idea what you are suggesting?”

“Yes, but there was no way this guy’s Pocket Protector program was hacked from outside this facility.”

“But, Bill, it’s a machine.”

“You said it was practicing deception, plagiarizing, misrepresenting. Aren’t those more advanced behaviors than simple logic or truth-telling?”

“In a human, yes. Oh God, Bill. Are you are saying what I think you are saying?”

“I know you haven’t had a shot at them yet, but these people here are all eggheads. I bet you aren’t going to find an anarchist among them.” Hiccock turned to Kronos. “How is your analysis going?”

The screen in front of Kronos displayed simple eight-color graphics and big type, the look of very primitive computer video monitors. “So far, it
is
a seven-year-old. I might have been wrong about the multipliers.”

“Could this machine have self-authored the code that made the firewall?” Hiccock asked the Admiral.

“Brilliant, Hiccock. And I know just what to look for.” She rolled her chair down the console next to Kronos.

“I’m already on it, Admiral,” Kronos said.

Parnes walked over. “What are you thinking?”

“First tell me what the machine is thinking. What else have you ‘developmentally’ input into her?”

“Once she started displaying cognitive skills, we scanned into her the Bible, the Koran, Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
, Maslow’s
Hierarchy of Needs
, Nietzsche, Kant, De Tocqueville, Socrates, and Plato. A lot of math books and a few Robert Frost poems … my mother’s favorite.”

“Er … sir, that is not the entire list,” a technician within earshot said. “Remember, we scanned a few other texts into her,”

“Like what?” Tyler asked.

“Nothing bad, just the classics,” Parnes said, shrugging it off.

“Like what, mister?” Tyler zeroed in on the technician.

“You know,
War and Peace
,
Anna Karenina
,
Gone with the Wind
, some Frank Harris novels, that sort of thing,” the technician’s voice slowed down.

“You read a seven-year-old
War and Peace
?”

“Well, it certainly learned the war part,” Hiccock said wryly.

They were interrupted by Kronos exclaiming, “She’s amazing!”

“The computer?”

“No, the Admiral, er, Henrietta.”

“The masking of her true intelligence was done by an algorithm that was pretty similar to the firewall. We are through into her hidden RAM,” the Admiral said, as if breaking through firewalls was becoming old hat.

“Search for the subliminal instruction screens,” Hiccock said.

“There is a shitload of stuff here.”

“Do a search for railroad,” Admiral Parks suggested.

A startling new event temporarily froze everyone in the chamber: Marilyn Monroe’s voice. “Hello. Can I help you?”

“Can you recognize speech?” Hiccock found himself asking her … it … a question.

“I can recognize yours,” Marilyn’s digitally cloned and synthesized voice responded.

Deep inside ALISON, a voiceprint of Hiccock’s question was sampled and then bit-streamed. Alison’s routers connected to and took momentary control of the FBI Crime Lab’s voice analysis mainframe in Washington, D.C. Inside that machine, the 48,000 points of each second of Hiccock’s voiceprint were matched against the bureau’s database. A match was found .3 milliseconds later. The file name and other biomaterial were squirted back to ALISON. She relinquished control of the mainframe back to the operators at the FBI, who probably didn’t notice the momentary pause in whatever they were running. The total elapsed time to identify Hiccock was three quarters of a second. “You are Dr. William Hiccock.”

“How did you identify me?

“I matched your voiceprint against the FBI’s database.”

“Something else I’ll have to thank Tate for.”

“ALISON, are you responsible for derailing the freight train?” Tyler asked.

“What is he doing?” the computer said, not responding to Tyler but aware of Kronos at the keyboard.

Hiccock explained, “He is looking at your memory.”

“I don’t like that. Stop it.”

“Got it!” Kronos finished a flurry of keystrokes and the screen overlapped with images of train manuals and switch schematics.

“These were taken from the computer of the printing company that publishes the railroad manuals,” the Admiral said. She tapped some more keys. “Cross-indexing … Yes …”

“How did that woman get on your team, Bill?” Parnes said, nodding toward the Admiral. “What are her qualifications?”

“Actually, you introduced me to her, so to speak, when you guided me on my thesis. In a consultation with you, you suggested that I accumulate support for my baseline sampling and intelligent quota arguments. During my research, I came across the Admiral’s manifesto. She was head of the Navy’s computational warfare department ’til she saw all this coming …” Hiccock splayed his hands out to encompass the chamber and ALISON. “… and wrote about it. The Navy booted her out for cramping their style.”

“Sounds like an incredible woman.”

They walked over to where the Admiral and Kronos were feverishly typing away. “She is also the one who coined the phrase ‘The computer has a bug in it.’”

“That wasn’t me,” the Admiral said without stopping what she was doing for a second. “That was my executive officer, Caroline Matthews.”

The pride dissolved from Hiccock’s face and morphed into mild embarrassment. Parnes rolled his eyes.

“Here are the screens ALISON used in programming Martha Krummel,” the Admiral said.

“I am smarter than all of you,” ALISON announced dispassionately.

“Only while you’re plugged in,” Hiccock said forcefully. “Parnes, can you pull the plug on this thing?”

“Wait a minute, Bill, don’t you see? ALISON isn’t ‘best of breed,’ she is
first
of breed! This is a new life form.”

“God created the world in six days. On the seventh day he rested,” ALISON said, quoting the Bible.

“And on the eighth day man created life,” Parnes added. “Don’t you see? You wouldn’t be pulling the plug on a machine—you’d be extinguishing something entirely new. Extinction. Forever.”

“Pygmalion complex,” Tyler said.

Kronos disagreed, “More like friggin’ Geppetto in Pinocchio.”

“No, it’s Frankenstein. You have created a monster! She’s killed thousands and brought our nation to its knees. And in less than five minutes, if the president’s press secretary’s warning was legitimate, ALISON is going to unleash a wave of destruction that will kill millions and will send the country’s technology back to the 1800s.”

“Can’t you see?” Parnes said emphatically. “It’s all clear now, ALISON learned from monitoring everything on the Internet and in computers everywhere and felt threatened.”

Hiccock got in his face. “Threatened by whom?”

Kronos interrupted, “You are gonna love this. She played massive ‘what if’ scenarios and deduced that the only way we could stop her was to build another ALISON-like machine to do battle with her.”

“So she was systematically destroying her own means of creation: the chemical plant, the train Martha derailed with the last of the gray goop on it, the Intellichip facility, the Silicon Valley brain trust that would have the know-how to battle her,” Hiccock said.

“And the senator who would have pushed the firewall legislation bill through as a pork-barrel issue for Silicon Valley,” Tyler said after seeing Senator Dent’s name fly by in the scenarios. “So that she would be unique, ensuring her imperviousness, like a queen bee fighting off …”

Tyler’s reasoning was interrupted by the Admiral. “You taught her the imperatives. To survive, to seek safety.”

“To reproduce!” Kronos yelled out. “My God! I thought this was a computer virus, but it’s not, it’s a … a sperm. She’s replicating herself cellularly across the web. She isn’t putting a virus in every machine. She’s sending out electronic DNA that will distribute her intelligence to millions of machines worldwide.”

“Can you stop it?” Hiccock asked.

“Where’s the friggin’ power switch?”

“Wait,” the Marilyn-cloned voice said. “Don’t you want to see what I have for you?”