The Footprints of God (9 page)

"That bastard," said Corelli. "He was always playing games with us."

Geli nodded. Around Trinity, Fielding had acted like an absentminded professor, but he was the sharpest son of a bitch in the place.

"They've probably left the house," Geli said. "Fielding and Tennant did that twice before. Walking Fielding's dog. I'm going to put a team in the woods."

"Nein,
" said Ritter. “ Tennant will hear them."

''You have a better idea?"

"I'll go alone."

"Okay, but I'm setting up a perimeter. Tennant could be trying to run."

"I don't think so. It's a stupid way to run. And Tennant's not stupid."

"Why stupid?"

"When you run, you don't take women with you. You move fast and light."

Geli smiled to herself. "Tennant's not like you,
Liebchen."

Ritter laughed. "He's a man, isn't he?"

"He's American and he was raised in the South. I knew guys like him in the army. Born heroes. They have this romantic streak. It gets a lot of them killed."

"Like the English?" Ritter asked.

Geli thought of Andrew Fielding. "Sort of. Now get going. Tell Corelli to cover the front."

.”

Geli got out of her chair and began to pace the narrow alley between the racks of electronic gear. She thought of calling John Skow again, but Skow didn't want to be bothered. Fine, She'd call him when Tennant bolted, then see what the smug bastard had to say about not keeping the leash too tight.

CHAPTER 
8

I moved silently through the dark trees. Rachel sounded like a blind bear blundering along behind me. On a Manhattan street she probably maneuvered like a pro halfback, but the woods were alien to her. I slowed until she caught up, then told her to hold on to the back of my belt. She did.

When we were fifty yards away from the house, I said, "Do you believe me about Fielding now?"

"I believe you worked with him," Rachel said. "I'm not sure he was murdered. I don't think you are either."

I stepped over a fallen log, then helped her over. "I know he was murdered. Only two people at Project Trinity opposed what was being done there. Fielding was one, and now he's dead. I'm the other."

"Are you going to tell me about Trinity now?"

"If you're willing to listen. I think you understand now that it could be dangerous for you."

She sucked in her breath as briers raked her arm. "Go on."

"When you came to my house today, I was making a videotape to give to my lawyer. He was to open it if something happened to me. I never finished it. And the truth is, I'm worried about seeing tomorrow morning alive."

Rachel stopped in the overgrown track. "Why don't you just call the police? Lu Li clearly shares your suspicions, and I think there's enough circumstantial evidence to—"

"City police can't investigate the NSA. And that's who oversees Trinity."

"Call the FBI then."

"That's like calling the FBI to investigate the CIA. There's so much ill will between those agencies that it would take weeks to get anything done. If you really want to help, become my videotape. Listen to what I have to tell you, then go home and keep it to yourself."

"And if something happens to you?"

"Call CNN and
The New York Times
and tell them everything you know. The sooner you tell it, the safer you'll be."

"Why don't
you
do that? Tonight?"

"Because I can't be sure I'm right. Because the president could be trying to reach me as we speak. And because, as juvenile as it may sound, this is a national security matter."

Holding Lu Li's whimpering bichon in my left arm, I put my gun in my pocket and pulled Rachel forward. Forty yards on, I saw a deeper darkness ahead. The trees gave way like thinning ranks of soldiers, and then a man-made wall stopped me in my tracks. When my eyes adjusted, I saw the door I had known was there. I opened it with my free hand and led Rachel through. We emerged into a moonlit bowl, lined with cut stone.

"My God," she said.

The amphitheater looked as though it had magically been transported to the Carolina woods from Greece. To our right was the elevated stage, to our left a stone stairway leading up through the seats to the top row. Not far above that lay Country Club Road. The view down from the road was almost completely blocked by pines and hardwoods, but I could see the broken beams of headlights passing high above us.

I took Rachel's hand, stepped onto the stone floor, and led her to the edge of the stage. There I tied Maya's leash around a low light stanchion. While the dog sniffed an invisible scent trail, I set the tape recorder on the edge of the stage and depressed RECORD. "This is David Tennant, M.D.," I said. "I'm speaking to Dr. Rachel Weiss of the Duke University Medical School."

Playback gave me a staticky facsimile of my words. I looked at my watch. "We need to do this in less than ten minutes."

Rachel shrugged, her eyes full of curiosity.

"For the past two years, I've been working on a special project for the National Security Agency. It's known as Project Trinity, and it's based in a building in the Research Triangle Park, ten miles from here. Trinity is a massive government-funded effort to build a supercomputer capable of artificial intelligence. A computer that can think."

She looked unimpressed. "Don't we already have computers that can do that?"

This common misconception surprised me now, but when I went to work at Trinity, I hadn't known much better myself. For fifty years, science fiction writers and filmmakers had been creating portrayals of "giant electronic brains" taking over the world. HAL, the speaking computer of
2001: A Space Odyssey,
had entered pop consciousness in 1968 and remained firmly embedded there ever since. In the subsequent thirty-five years, we had witnessed such a revolution in digital computing that the average person believed that a "computer that can think" was just around the corner, if not already within our capabilities. But the reality was far different. I had no time to go into the complexities of neural networks or strong AI; Rachel needed a simple primer and the facts about Trinity.

"Have you heard of a man named Alan Turing?" I asked. "He's one of the men who broke the Germans' Enigma code during World War Two."

"Turing?" Rachel looked preoccupied. "I think I've heard of something called the Turing Test."

"That's the classic test of artificial intelligence. Turing said machine intelligence would be achieved when a human being could sit on one side of a wall and type questions into a keyboard, then read the answers coming onto his screen from the other side and be certain that those answers were being typed by another human being. Turing predicted that would happen by the end of the twentieth century, but no computer has
ever
come close to passing that test. Using conventional technology, it's still probably fifty years off."

"Didn't that IBM computer finally beat Garry Kasparov at chess? I know I read that somewhere."

"Deep Blue?" I laughed, the sound strangely brittle in the amphitheater. "Yes. But it won by using what computer scientists call brute force. Its memory contains every known chess game ever played, and it processes millions of probabilities every time it makes a move. It plays very good chess, but it doesn't
understand
what it's doing. As a human being, Garry Kasparov never has to consider the billions of possibilities—many of them ridiculously simple—that the computer does. Kasparov's acquired knowledge allows him to make intuitive leaps, and to learn permanently every time he does. He plays by instinct. And no one really understands what that means."

Rachel sat on the edge of the stage. "So, what are you telling me?"

"That computers don't think like human beings. In fact, they don't think at all. They simply carry out instructions. All those TV commercials you hear about 'software that thinks'? They're bullshit. Serious AI researchers are afraid to even use the term
artificial inteligence
anymore."

"Okay. So what's Project Trinity?"

"The holy grail."

"What do you mean?"

"Everyone wants to build a computer that works like the human brain, but we don't understand how the brain works. Everyone concedes that. Well . . . two years ago, one man realized this didn't have to be the obstacle everyone thought it was. That we might be able to
copy
the brain without actually understanding what we were doing. Using existing technology."

"Who was this man?"

"Peter Godin. The billionaire."

"Godin Supercomputing?"

Now she'd surprised me. "That's right."

"They have a Godin Four supercomputer in a basement at TUNL, the Duke high-energy lab."

"Well, Godin is the man who conceived Project Trinity."

Rachel looked as though the accumulating details were starting to persuade her. "What kind of existing technology can copy the brain?"

"MRI."

"Magnetic resonance imaging?"

"Yes. You order MRI scans every week, right?"

"Of course."

"There's a lot of information on those scans, isn't there?"

"More than I can interpret sometimes."

"Rachel, I've seen MRI scans that contain a hundred thousand times the information of the ones you see every day. A hundred thousand times the resolution."

She blinked. "But how can that be? How much more can you see?"

"I've seen reactions between individual nerve synapses, frozen in time. I've seen the human brain working at the molecular level."

"Bullshit."

Any doctor would have said the same. "No. The machine exists. It's sitting in a room ten miles away from us right now. Only nobody knows it."

She was shaking her head. "That makes no sense. Why would a company keep something like that secret?"

"Because they're legally bound to by the government."

"But an MRI like that would make whoever developed it hundreds of millions of dollars. It could detect malignant cells long before they even become tumor masses."

"You're right. That's been my main problem with this project. It's unethical to keep that machine from cancer patients. But for now, just accept that there's an MRI machine that can produce three-D models of the brain, with resolution to the molecular level."

"Molecular snapshots of the brain."

"Basically, yes. Ravi Nara calls them 'neuromodels.'"

"Neuromodels. Okay."

"Rachel, do you realize what one of those neuromodels is?"

"I know that a single one of them would revolutionize neuroscience. But I get the feeling that's not what this is about."

"A neuromodel is the person it was taken from. Literally. His thoughts, memories, fears—everything."

"But... it's just a scan, right? A high-resolution map of the brain."

"No. It's a coded facsimile of every molecule in the brain, in perfect spatial and electrochemical relation. Which means that—"

"Hold on. Are you about to tell me they can load one of these neuromodels into a computer?"

"No. But that's what they've been working around the clock for two years to achieve. Godin predicted it would take fifteen to twenty years, but they got halfway there in
nineteen months.
I've never seen anything like it. The only historical precedent is the Manhattan Project during World War Two."

Rachel started to speak, but I held up my hand. High above us, a pair of headlights was cruising past at less than half the speed of the other cars. They slowed still more, then sped up and disappeared.

"We need to hurry."

"If Trinity is everything you say it is," she said, "then why in God's name would it be based in North Carolina?"

This I hadn't expected. "Aren't you the top Jungian analyst in the world?"

"Well. . .one of them."

"Why are
you
based in North Carolina?"

She frowned. "Because Duke University is here. That's different."

"Not so different. Peter Godin wanted Trinity based at his R and D lab in Mountain View, California. The NSA is footing the bill, and they wanted it based at Fort Meade, Maryland. Research Triangle Park was the ultimate compromise. High-tech, but out of the way."

"What's the end point, here? What does the NSA want to do with Trinity?"

"Our government sees most scientific revolutions in terms of weapons potential. If such a machine can be built, our government wants to be the first to do it."

"What kind of weapon can this computer be?"

"Think Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq. Everything's computerized in modern war. Code-breaking, nuclear weapons testing, information warfare, battlefield systems. But a Trinity wouldn't be merely an advance. It would make today's supercomputers as obsolete as Model Ts. And if Fielding was right about it having quantum capabilities . . . then present-day encryption is
gone.
That's why the NSA has spent close to a billion dollars on Trinity."

Rachel processed what I'd said. "But this isn't just a faster supercomputer. We're talking about a computer that thinks like a person."

I shook my head. "We can't build a computer that thinks
like
a person. We're talking about copying an individual human brain. Creating a digital entity that for all practical purposes
is
a person. With his or her cognitive functions, memories, hopes, dreams . . . everything except a body. Only it would run at the speed of a digital computer. One million times faster than biological circuitry."

She spoke almost to herself. "This is why Andrew Fielding and Ravi Nara would be working together."

"Exactly. Nobel laureates in quantum physics and neuroscience. Peter Godin brought them together." I checked to see that the spools on the recorder were still turning. "But I've only told you part of Trinity's potential. Once your neuromodel is loaded into the computer as Rachel Weiss, speed isn't the only advantage it will have over you—the original."

"What do you mean?"

"Say I decide to learn to play the piano. It takes me three years of intensive study. You're impressed by that. You want to learn to play the piano too. It's going to take you three years as well, give or take. That's the disadvantage of the human brain. Each one has approximately the same learning curve. But the computer model of your brain doesn't have that problem. The sum total of music theory can be digitized and downloaded into its memory—
your
memory—in about three seconds. There's no learning curve at all."