The Media Candidate (16 page)

“Your parents got divorced when you were eleven,
and you blamed your mother for not supporting your father’s
dreams.”

“He was quite ambitious,” Sherwood said.

“Ambitious?”

Sherwood made no response.

“He patented some pretty neat inventions,
though,” she continued. “The best was that Christmas tree stand
with the little pop-up flag to tell when it needs water. Your
family almost went belly-up on that one—and would have if your
mother hadn’t worked two jobs. Did he ever have a job for more than
a month?”

“Extraordinary people sometimes have difficulty
finding their niche.”

“Have you found yours?” she asked.

Sherwood stood and walked toward the bedroom
door. “I have some leftover pizza.”

Jenner followed him toward the kitchen. Sherwood
stood at the counter eating a piece of pizza, drinking a glass of
milk, and staring out the window. She took a piece of pizza and
overpowered the point. Opening the refrigerator, she mumbled, “No
beer, huh? I guess I’m drinking milk, too.” She picked up the milk
carton and dropped the empty container into the trash with disgust.
“Well, I guess I’m not drinking milk either. What the hell else you
got?” She rummaged through the refrigerator and found a half bottle
of flat Dr. Pepper from which she took a swig. “What is this
crap?”

By the time she settled down with her pizza and
Dr. Pepper, Sherwood was eating the last piece and still staring
out the window, occasionally stealing a secret reflection at the
soliloquy behind him. He finished his pizza, gulped down the rest
of his milk, and set the glass down hard in the sink. Jenner looked
up and stopped chewing momentarily. A long pause followed.

“How is your hacking going?” he startled the
silence.

“Okay. … Why?”

“You told me the system manager is a computer,”
he added.

“Seems really odd to me.”

“Yes … very odd. Have you ever heard of such a
thing?” Sherwood asked.

“No. Have you?”

“You said it seems to be building an empire,”
Sherwood continued. “How could a computer be so motivated? Could it
simply be mistaken about its requirements and just marching toward
an error?”

“No. It’s creating fictitious requirements to
justify its expansion. It’s like it’s constructing barriers to keep
anyone from addressing its critical parts. I think it’s duplicating
these parts and stashing them all over the place. It’s as if … .
No, that’s stupid.”

“What!”

“Suppose you could make duplicate hearts and
livers and lungs and everything else, and then store them away
where no one but you could find them, and have them as spares, just
in case.”

“Just in case what?” Sherwood turned and looked
at her for the first time.

“I don’t know. … Just in case.”

The search was simple. Jenner had merely entered
a file named INSTITUTE, found another file within that named
LEADERSHIP, and then located a single document called 2048 BALLOT.
As she expected, the file was write-protected for everyone except
the system manager, so Jenner was able to browse and modify
anything. The document itself was nothing more than a spreadsheet
with the names of about fifty students ordered down the first
column and the names of the nine professors across the top row.

Apparently, each professor could select a
maximum of ten students for Leadership Training. The students’
names were ordered by the total number of votes each had received.
The top two students were R. Galvez and T. C. Washington with five
votes each. J. C. Nero and J. A. M. Dirac each had four votes. Six
students each had three votes; nine had two votes; and twenty-five
had one vote. The last six students on the list hadn’t received any
votes.

Jenner scanned down the list. The farther down
the list she went, the more her eyes twinkled and her mouth turned
up. Finally she stopped at Sherwood. “Ha!” she guffawed. “I knew
I’d find you here, you miserable son-of-a-bitch!” Her eyes had come
to rest at the second line from the bottom. “Let’s see, maybe I
should give you ten votes. I’d like to see you talk your way out of
that one!”

She selected all the cells on Sherwood’s line
and put a one in each. The spreadsheet immediately reorganized
itself, moving Sherwood to the top of the list. Jenner looked at
the new order and grinned, wondering if anyone might believe it.
Okay, I wonder if anybody could believe Sherwood getting three
votes. Probably not, but I guess that’s what it’ll take
. The
spreadsheet reorganized itself again showing seven students with
three votes each.
Well, R. A. Dake, let’s see what happens to
you if I take one of your votes away
. The name R. A. Dake
shifted from line seven and three votes to line fifteen and two
votes.
Well, Dake, you didn’t want to take that course anyway,
did you. Sherwood, on the other hand, is so much more worthy,
wouldn’t you say? Okay, enough screwing around now, let’s get to
some serious hacking. There’s got to be more to this Planck suicide
than what was in the paper.

With two months of help from Sherwood, Monocle
had progressed dramatically, but Jenner was still behind schedule
when he left the program for Leadership Training. She now had less
time for hacking, so her abbreviated sessions ran later and later
as her workweek expanded. On one of these early morning ventures,
she snooped through some Planck files.

After Dr. Planck’s death, there was some debate
at COPE about the dependence on the computer that had grown over
the last few years. Some felt it was not the mission of COPE to
develop revolutionary computer technology. The majority in upper
management, on the other hand, felt that COPE’s mission was unique
and too critical to the heritage of America to rely on standard
technology. This concept dominated in the areas of robot
development and data fusion and analysis. It was the politically
correct view at COPE.

To satisfy both groups, the candidates chosen
for interviews were split between those who would continue the
basic development of computer science and those whose background
was operational management of large, but orthodox, computer
systems. Five candidates were chosen for final interviews, three of
them strong in developing advanced-computing concepts. Dr. Herbert
Bethe had emerged as the leading candidate because of his fruitful
R&D background and conservative approach to artificial-life
development. COPE’s top managers had interviewed him, and he was
the preferred choice of three of them.

Jenner read the following memo from the
executive director of operations:

I recommend Dr. Herbert Bethe to be the next AD for
Data Services.

Dr. Bethe’s experience closely parallels that of Dr.
Planck. In addition, Dr. Planck utilized Dr. Bethe frequently as a
consultant during the computer development process over the last
few years. Thus, Dr. Bethe would be able to hit the ground running
and continue the excellent work of Dr. Planck. Dr. Bethe made it
clear that he would not, however, simply accept the current status
of the computer as his starting point. He would, instead, initially
test the current system for flaws and analyzing it to determine its
capability and the appropriateness of its evolution to date. He
would make his findings known to a computer review committee that
he would form to insure oversight. He believes that Dr. Planck
functioned too secretly considering the enormous power with which
he was working and that the evolution he created may become
dangerously uncontrollable in the future if not scrutinized closely
now.

Dr. Natasha Winger is an excellent candidate for a
computer system operations manager. She is a very efficient and
highly motivated manager of people and computers but has little
interest or knowledge of advanced concepts such as artificial life
or cellular automata. The COPE computer, however, is significantly
more complex and dynamic than anything she has ever worked with
before. There are two dangers in applying her to the task at hand.
First, she might greatly underutilize the computer’s capabilities
since the documentation created by Dr. Planck is quite sketchy. The
greater danger, however, is that she might use the computer
inappropriately, not fully appreciating the degree of complexity
that has been built into it or has evolved by means of Dr. Planck’s
pioneering approaches. This computer is a highly dynamic system and
might be a threat to the laminar operations of COPE’s highly
interactive operations environment.

COPE used a system for management selection that
was forced on it by the Federal Government as a result of an Act of
Congress that had been lobbied heavily by the Federal Employees
Union. In order to assure absolute fairness in the selection
process, the selection committee must make its recommendations
directly to an impartial “elector” who then announces the results.
COPE went a step further and replaced the elector with the most
impartial entity of all, a computer. The Congressional Act forbade
the selection committee members from discussing the selection among
themselves or with outsiders. This Employee Selection Fairness Act
of 2022 was patterned after the Procurement Integrity Act of 1989,
which had the effect then of insuring that Government procurements
would henceforth deliver the least effective product for the
highest possible price in a pseudo free-market environment. A
similar effect was realized in the selection of civil service
management personnel as a result of the 2022 law.

Jenner breached the wall of secrecy around the
ballot committee and compared the recommendations in the memos
accompanying the votes with the summary vote tabulation released by
the ballot committee. According to her tabulation, Herbert Bethe
had been the winner, yet Natasha Winger had been selected.

“Holy shit! Somebody threw the election for the
new AD.” Jenner sat before the terminal, dumbfounded.
But who
could have done it?
she thought.
Who had that kind of
access? … Not Planck, he was dead. … Hmm … a suicide. Is all this
possible?

She reached for the phone on her desk, pushed a
single button, and waited.

“… Yes,” came the weak salutation.

“You won’t believe this. Things are starting to
fit together, Sherwood.”

“Have you forgotten that I do not stay up all
night waiting for your calls?”

“This is more important than a damn time zone.
This computer is acting like a tyrant. It threw the selection of
the data services AD last year.”

“Could this be a trick it learned from you,
Jenner?”

“This is no joke. The interviewers picked this
really powerful computer-science guy who was going to do some
detailed tests of the computer and make sure it wasn’t getting too
smart. The computer then falsified the ballot records to choose
Winger. She had extensive experience managing big systems, but she
was clearly not going to challenge the COPE system. She represented
the least threatening alternative to the status quo of the
computer. Can you believe that, Sherwood?”

“Where are you, Jenner?”

“In my office.”

“How could you be so stupid? Never call me
again, Jenner! Do you understand? Never!”

Jenner stood outside the open door of the ASP’s
office studying the floor. She shifted the optical memory disk to
her left hand and worked it like a puzzle piece before knocking.
She heard, “Welcome,” from around the corner, and she joined him at
his desk.

“Good morning, Jenner. We haven’t talked for
some time. I was so glad you called this morning. I read your most
recent update on Monocle, and you seem to be making fine progress
there.”

“Yes, Sir. I think the optical ASICs might give
us the combination of speed and flexibility we need to survive the
high-bandwidth snap. We can’t afford to let the spider go
tunnel-vision in the end-game.”

“That’s right,” he said. “I think you’re moving
in the right direction.”

“But that’s not the reason I wanted to see you
this morning. I thought maybe … we could use your classified
conference room.”

The Asp studied Jenner for a moment and then
pushed a pair of buttons on his desk. “Of course. I don’t think
we’ll be bothered there.” They entered and he ushered her to a seat
near one end of the oval table while he secured the room.

When he returned to his seat across from her,
she handed him a hand-written note she’d prepared earlier: “It is
very important that there be no way that the central computer or
any of its slaves can overhear or observe our conversation in any
way.”

He looked up at her in a long exchange. He sat
back, retrieved his favorite pipe from the rack, reached for the
gold lighter in the little recess atop the rack, and proceeded with
his lighting ceremony. Jenner sat in silence, studying the battle
line between two adjacent pieces of swirling walnut in the
tabletop. After a couple clouds of smoke began to obscure the air
between them, he set the gold lighter on the table directly between
himself and Jenner.

The Asp examined the computer terminal built
into the table and then at the multi-media center at the end of the
room and drew another puff. He worked a verbal menu and then said,
“Shut down for maintenance.” Nothing seemed to happen except for a
green light on the console turning red and then going out. He then
said, “Bring the number one projector up.” The projector did not
respond. He looked at Jenner with raised eyebrows.

“I know this seems a bit odd, but …”

“What I know, Jenner, is that I have come to
trust your judgment completely. Now, what is this all about?”