Cyber Rogues (11 page)

They emerged into the cool night air and Laura slipped an arm through his and proceeded to steer him firmly toward an empty table beneath the bordering shrubs.

“There. This is better than all that noise in there, isn’t it,” she said as they sat down. “We can be civilized with each other, even if it is only for one night of the year.” Dyer ordered drinks via the tabletop touchpad, grunted his agreement to the statement and settled back to take in their surroundings. Laura watched him in silence for a while and then asked:

“So, how has the evening been so far? You seem to be liking it.” Dyer brought his eyes back from following the progress of a brilliantly lit Lockheed sinking gently downward into Kennedy Airport on the final stage of its descent from the ionosphere.

“You won’t believe it, but better than I thought,” he said. “I expected a lot of phonies but most of the people I’ve met have been very interesting. Some of the speeches went on a bit, but I suppose that’s to be expected.”

“You see, Ray. It’s not only us who have hackneyed ideas about what scientists are like. You have them about showbiz people too. At least we’re trying to do something about it. That’s what you said we should do, isn’t it—test our ideas to see if they’re true?”

Dyer grinned suddenly. “If that’s the case, it makes you scientists,” he taunted playfully. “So the question doesn’t arise. All you have to do now is learn to accept what the tests tell you, You see, we’re really very nice people but your preconceived notions won’t allow you to believe it. If I don’t wear odd shoes on my feet or grow cabbages that eat people, I must be the exception.”

“You’re back at work again,” she replied. “Tonight I’m not working. Talk about something else.”

“Women,” he offered without hesitation.

“Oh dear. I should have guessed.”

“No,” he told her smugly. “You’ve got it wrong. Jumping to conclusions again. What I meant was all this stuff you’re always saying to Betty about . . . the crusade. How come you’re so hung up about it?”

“What makes you want to know that?” Laura asked in surprise.

“Oh . . . I don’t know. Just curious.”

Laura made a slight shrug and thought to herself for a moment.

“No single big thing . . . I guess I’ve always thought that way. And I still do,” she added pointedly. “That’s okay by you, isn’t it?”

“Sure.” Dyer made a throwing-away motion with his hand. “That’s what I thought. I figured it had to come from way back somewhere. You don’t strike me as the kind of person who’d let her opinions be moulded much by people today . . . know what I mean? I can’t think it’s something that somebody told you about yesterday.” He nodded to himself as if she had just confirmed something. “I bet your mother was that way too. Right?”

“Yes, she was, as a matter of fact . . . a lot that way. She had good reason, too. My father was a slob . . . couldn’t make his job work out and couldn’t make his marriage work out so he messed around all the time and tried to live it up in a fantasy world because he never grew up enough to accept things. I left Detroit when I was sixteen because I couldn’t stand it anymore . . . Always—” Laura broke off and looked at Dyer accusingly. “Hey, what are you trying to do—psychoanalyze me or something?”

“No. I told you—I was just curious.”

Laura narrowed her eyes and regarded him suspiciously.

“You used to be a shrink or something before you got into computers, didn’t you? Didn’t you say something about Harvard Med School once?”

“I was a neurological researcher,” Dyer told her. “That’s not quite the same thing.”

“It still has to do with heads though.”

“And that’s about as far as it goes,” he said. “I was concerned with finding out more about how brains work, not with fixing them after they’ve started blowing fuses. A lot of things that were learned in that field were later applied to designing smarter computers, so it made sense for me to move on the way I did.” He was about to say more but frowned and checked himself. “But that’s work again, and you said we’re not working.”

The drinks appeared in the dispenser hatch. Dyer removed them, passed one to Laura and lapsed into silence while he tasted his own.

“So, what made you take up medicine?” Laura asked after a few seconds.

“Oh, it was in the family I guess. My father was a doctor . . . space medicine.”

“Was? Isn’t he around anymore?”

“Oh sure. Retired. Lives on the West Coast with my mother. They’re okay.”

“What kind of space medicine did he do?” Laura inquired, intrigued. “Was he with ISA? Did he go on any space missions or anything exciting like that?”

“He sure did.”

“Wow! I’ve always wanted to go up and never had the chance. Tell me about it. I’m interested.” Laura sat forward to lean on the table and stared at him expectantly. Dyer smiled and shook his head.

“It was nothing wildly spectacular. He was in it a long time . . . joined in 1985 after he left the Navy, when it was still NASA . . . did a few tours in orbital stations over the years . . . spent a lot of 1992 up at one of the lunar bases . . . moved to Europe when ESA was set up, and then came back to the States when they all got merged into ISA. He had plenty of variety to keep him from getting bored I guess.”

“So where did you appear on the scene?” Laura asked. “Here or in Europe?”

“I was two years old when they moved to Europe,” Dyer told her; “If I told you where I was born, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Try me.”

“Ever hear of Gilbert and Sullivan?”

“Of course.” Laura looked puzzled. “They wrote songs.”

“Not
that
Gilbert and Sullivan. The ones who came later, in 1994.”

Astonishment flowed into Laura’s face.

“You don’t mean the two experimental space colonies they put up before they started building the big ones?”

“Uh huh.”

“Really? You were born in one of those? That’s fantastic!” She frowned as another thought occurred to her. “Say, that makes you something of a rare animal, doesn’t it? No offense, but I thought they didn’t go in much for that kind of thing that long ago. You must have been special or something.”

Dyer laughed. “I was—a special kind of accident. Pa was the Chief Medical Officer on Gilbert, which meant he was up there for a long time at a stretch, so it was normal for wives to go along too. But because of regulations, when they found out that I was on the way, they couldn’t ship mother down again. Normally she’d never have got away with it, but being the Chief M.O.’s wife . . . Well, if Pa didn’t say anything about it, there was no reason for anybody else to think anything.”

“You mean he let it go deliberately?” Laura sounded incredulous, but at the same time delighted.

“He always said he didn’t, but I don’t see how he couldn’t have known. But if you knew him, you’d know it’s him all over.”

“He sounds the kind of guy that does things his way and to hell with what you or I or the world thinks,” Laura commented.

“You’ve about got it,” Dyer nodded.

“It shows,” Laura declared with a trace of satisfaction. “
That’s
what makes you so pigheaded. There—now you’ve been shrunk. And I didn’t even have to go to Harvard to figure it out.”

“I’m not pigheaded,” Dyer protested. “I just happen to have firm opinions on what my job’s all about. I know what works and what doesn’t if you’re trying to separate truth from garbage. That’s what science is. I get irritated when people insist on misinterpreting it.”

“And you’re also touchy,” Laura told him sweetly. She drank from her glass while Dyer calmed down again. “Anyway,” she said, “It’s the same thing.”

“What is?”

“Being firm and being pigheaded,” she replied.

“Of course it isn’t. What are you talking about?”

“The form of the verb varies according to its subject,” she said. “
I
am firm;
you
are obstinate;
he
is pigheaded.” Dyer collapsed back in his chair and shook his head in capitulation. Laura leaned forward and patted him fondly on the back of his hand. “You’ve forgotten I used to write scripts,” she said, laughing. “You see, I know what my job’s all about too.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The next morning Dyer and Richter met as arranged, boarded an autocab and specified the Department of Communications and Information Management Headquarters, Washington, D.C., as their destination. The cab navigated Manhattan and was pipelined across to New Jersey along one of a battery of ten monorails suspended in a single span four hundred feet above the Hudson. There it turned south and merged with forty-nine other cabs to form a train which accelerated as one unit into the New York-Washington tube, through which it hurtled in vacuum, riding on magnetic suspension at speeds touching 800 mph for most of the way. At the far end the train broke up to become independent cabs once again, which dispersed into the Washington local system. Twenty minutes after leaving New York, Dyer and Richter were in an elevator ascending from the autocab terminal located below the CIM HQ building.

The meeting was chaired by Dr. Irwin Schroder, the U.S. Secretary for CIM. Attendees included Fritz Muller, vice chairman of the Advisory Committee on Information Technology to the Supreme Council of World Governments, which managed jointly the global operation of TITAN as one of their functions. A group of Muller’s Committee advisers representing several national interests, a selection of individuals from various academic and commercial institutions and a small delegation from CIM completed the gathering.

Proceedings began with introductions and a résumé of the incident at Maskelyne. After that, Schroder took some time to summarize the main question of concern that the meeting had been called to consider. If TITAN had developed the ability to act independently to this degree after only one year, what might it do later and what should be done about it? One choice, of course, was to downgrade TITAN by de-HESPERing it; then it wouldn’t be able to do anything. Opposition to this move came mainly from the academics, who favored the policy that Richter had already advocated privately to Dyer—pushing ahead to replace HESPER with a perfected development of FISE as quickly as possible. They pointed to the vast improvements in living standards and general affluence that had been realized within the last fifty years and attributed most of it to the effects of TITAN. Even this was just a beginning, they declared, and would pale into insignificance compared to what the next century held in store. It would be tragic if all that were to be thrown away because of nothing more definite than a few what-ifs. To defend their case they presented elaborate contrasts between the evolutionary processes governing the growth of organic and inorganic systems, and argued that it was ludicrous to suggest that a machine would parallel human motivations and ambitions. In this they were echoing the orthodox line that Dyer had given his visitors from Princeton two days before. They finished by reiterating Richter’s insistence that problems were nothing new in life and were there to be solved not evaded. If problems did develop to an intolerable degree for some reason, the option to pull the plug would always be there as a last resort.

Dyer then summarized his progress with FISE and endorsed the view that though a supercomplex the size of TITAN, equipped with processors that were superior to FISE, might well evolve behavior that would have to be classed as intelligent, the supposition that it might come to think and feel like a human being was too farfetched to be worth considering. A mumbled chorus of assent from the academic fraternity greeted his words. By his side Richter began breathing more easily.

At that point Schroder sat forward to sum up his interpretation of what Dyer had said. “I take it then, Dr. Dyer, that you are adding your support to the recommendation that we heard earlier. We should press ahead with FISE with the aim of upgrading the net at the earliest opportunity. Whatever risks are entailed by living with HESPER in the meantime would not justify the cost of going backward to EARTHCOM.”

“We’ve got ’em hooked,” Richter whispered jubilantly. “They’re coming around.”

“Yes and no, Mr. Chairman,” Dyer responded. “FISE research has to be pursued vigorously. There can be no question about that. But I think the question of upgrading the net should be thought of as something that belongs in the indefinite future . . . if we ever do it at all.”

Mutterings of surprise broke out around the room. Richter brought his hands up to cover his face.

“Don’t say any more,” he said from the corner of his mouth. “You’ll blow the whole damn thing. Just get ’em to give the okay on FISE now. We can leave the arguing about it going into the net until some other time.” But it was too late; Schroder wanted to take the point further.

“I thought the problem with HESPER was that it’s only half smart,” Schroder said, looking surprised. “If FISE would fix that and there’s not likely to be any problem of it trying to take over the world, why shouldn’t we use it?”

“I only agreed that it wouldn’t
think
like a human being,” Dyer replied. “I didn’t say it mightn’t act like one.”

Jan Van der Waarde from Cape Town University shook his head perplexedly. “I don’t understand. What is the difference? Why should it act like it doesn’t think?”

“The problem is that an intelligence that is totally alien but totally rational could emulate certain types of human behavioral traits but for completely different reasons,” Dyer replied. “It could act in ways that we would see amounting to rivalry with Man, but not for the same reasons as a human would act that way. In fact the very concepts of rivalry and Man would almost certainly mean nothing to it.”

“You mean it could wind up setting itself against us without even knowing it,” Paul Fierney, a technical adviser with CIM, looked dubious. “How would it do that?”

“You’d agree that the things that would worry us would be if it ever began to exhibit tendencies which in human terms we’d describe as anger, resentment, aggression, feelings of superiority or any of that kind of thing,” Dyer said.

“Okay,” Fierney agreed. “But I thought we’d all agreed that a machine wouldn’t feel things like that.”