Cyber Rogues (64 page)

“I haven’t found a way through the Misty Room,” a voice replied from a speaker above the screen. It sounded quite human. This project evidently embodied some sophisticated language processing too. “It becomes pitch black, whichever way I go, and I lose direction. But the inscription on the wall in the cavern mentioned ‘rays that cut through the mists.’ It suggests that there might be a special kind of light, or lamp, somewhere.”

“This has got better since the last time I saw it,” Corrigan murmured.

The figure on the screen looked up and around. “Who else is speaking?” its voice asked.

Jenny touched a key and the icon vanished. “Watch for the ear,” she said. “He can hear us while it’s showing.” She brought the icon back again. “Just some friends. They don’t affect you. What’s new?”

“After some reflection on the matter, it occurred to me that the implement I found in the Burial Chamber was of just the correct shape and size for making holes in the ground. So I decided to dig around where the earth appeared to have been disturbed. And I found this.” Another screen showed a close-up of Perseus’s schematicized hands, holding an oil lamp of old, Oriental design.

Any five-year-old would have known what to do instantly. Perseus, however, seemed mystified, turning the lamp over and contemplating it. “There are no obvious buttons or switches. It seems built to contain liquid, but it is empty. Its use escapes me.”

Corrigan couldn’t bear to look, but turned his head away, muttering inaudibly, “Rub the lamp. Rub the lamp.” Jenny gave a thin smile and shrugged.

Evelyn motioned to herself, then at the screen, asking through gestures if it would be all right for her to speak. Jenny nodded and mouthed, “Sure.”

Evelyn stared with a strange, not-wanting-to-believe-this fascination for a few seconds at the figure on the screen, now returned to fumbling with the lamp.

“Perseus,” she said.

The figure stopped what it was doing. “Is this another friend?”

“Yes. . . . Can I ask you a question?”

“I assume so, since you just did.”

“I meant a different question.”

“Why should you be unable to ask a different one?”

Evelyn frowned, then saw the problem. “No, I didn’t mean ‘can’ in the sense of ‘able to.’ I meant would you mind?”

There was a pause, then, puzzled, “How should I mind?”

Jenny flipped the ear icon off for a moment. “His conceptual world is limited to exploring the physical environment. Implied permissions belong to a dimension of relationships that he can’t comprehend. Don’t project too much into the illusion.”

But that was the trouble. For Evelyn, the illusion was too convincing. She couldn’t avoid the conviction that she was listening to a real person speaking from a real place. Somehow, the sight of the visually simple, cartoonlike form, clashing as it did with the capacity for experience that she found herself perceiving, produced uncomfortable feelings that she didn’t want to think about. Yet some macabre curiosity compelled her to probe deeper.

“When we talk to you, who do you think we are?” she asked Perseus.

“Friends,” he replied.

“Are we the same as you?”

“Obviously not.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I can’t see you. You don’t appear, like all the other beings that I meet.”

“But we must exist somewhere. Isn’t that true?”

“Jenny and others have asked me this before. I assume that you must exist outside somewhere.”

Evelyn’s discomfort increased. This was now positively disturbing. “Outside of what?” she persisted.

“Here. The caves.” Perseus carried on into an explanation that must have gone back to some earlier occasion. “All things must end. Therefore, the place that I am in must end at a boundary. So beyond the boundary there must be an ‘outside.’ Perhaps my quest is to find the boundary and reach the outside. I do not know this for certain.”

“Did
he
figure that out himself?” Evelyn whispered. Jenny looked across at her and read the expression on her face.

“It’s getting to you, isn’t it,” she said understandingly. “It’s okay. Don’t worry. A lot of people are affected like that. Maybe that’s enough for the first time.” She killed the screen.

Evelyn was still not at ease. “Is he still active in there, while the screen’s off? Or does he go into a suspended state until you switch it on again?” she asked.

“It’s just an illusion,” Jenny said. She looked at Corrigan. “Shouldn’t you be getting along, anyhow? Didn’t you say something about wanting to catch Marvin before he leaves?”

They met Minsky in a staff cafeteria on the second floor, where he was grabbing coffee and a sandwich before dashing off to keep an appointment elsewhere on the campus. Tall, smooth-domed, continually observing the world through thick-rimmed spectacles but never quite able to take it seriously in its entirety, he was one of the lab’s original founders. Corrigan had known him sporadically in his time at MIT and was pleased that their schedules had enabled a meeting during this quick visit.

Minsky, it turned out, had returned from Ireland himself recently, where he had been partly vacationing and partly checking the state of contemporary computing developments at Trinity and University colleges. His experiences from a drive north to Ulster, where trouble was still going on with the British administration, had left him less than impressed, however.

“Why are they still fighting each other up there?” he grumbled to Corrigan. “Why don’t they study mathematics, or something else that would give them better things to do?”

“Oh, that’s nothing to do with us,” Corrigan replied. “It’s another country up there. I’m from the Republic, remember.”

Minsky pulled a face. “I’m not sure I noticed much of a difference. Down there, if you’re an American and don’t know the price of anything, you’re fair game.”

“The lads have to make a living,” Corrigan said unapologetically, refusing to be provoked.

“You mean it isn’t true, what the song says?” Evelyn put in. “‘When Irish eyes are smiling . . .’?”

“You’ve probably been ripped off,” Minsky completed with a snort. Corrigan laughed. Minsky glanced at his watch. “Anyway, I have to dash in a few minutes. So I gather you’ve been to see Jenny Leddel.”

“Perseus is coming along nicely,” Corrigan said. “Evelyn got a bit spooked, though.”

“There was something eerie about it.” She shivered and shook her head.

Minsky smiled. “Yes. It gets a lot of people like that. It makes them wonder if we’re inside someone else’s AI experiment in the same kind of way.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Evelyn said, astonished. Minsky’s smile widened.

“The approach seems to be working,” Corrigan observed. He glanced at Evelyn. “Setting it up with the. potential to learn, and then letting it interact with an environment.”

“Jenny should have let Perseus start out as more of an infant,” Minsky commented. “There are still too many defined attributes. Instead of telling him what a sword is for, let him wave one about and hit things with it, and find out for himself. That way, he might even discover things that programmers never think to include—such as, that they make good back-scratchers.”

Corrigan related the episode of Perseus and the lamp. Minsky nodded emphatically.

“Which makes my point. He should have been allowed to read picture books and fairy tales. Then he would have been familiar with genies and known what to do.”

Evelyn was about to ask if he meant literally exposing a computer to the processes that a child goes through, say, by equipping it with appendages of some kind to manipulate things, but Minsky preempted her. Corrigan was used to his sometimes disorienting habit of getting people out of step in a conversation by answering questions before they were asked.

“Computers aren’t very good at interfacing with the real world and extracting the information they need. We have the advantage of this enormous knowledge-base that we call ‘common sense,’ which enables us to make subtle, context-based connections. That’s what makes people so good at things like comprehending metaphors: we’re wired to see quickly what matters and what doesn’t. Recognizing faces is another good example.” He waved a hand as he collected together the paper plate, coffee cup, and remains of his sandwich. “Computers are better at tasks that don’t require any deep familiarity with what’s out there—ones that can be dealt with in relative isolation, algorithmically.”

“Computers interact better with other computers,” Evelyn said.

“Yes. Quite.” Minsky nodded. “So what you do is plug your infant into another computer that’s pretending to be a world. But getting a virtual world to be real enough is another matter.”

Corrigan clapped his hands as if that was a cue that he had been waiting for. “And that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing at CLC in the meantime,” he told Evelyn. “Learning how to make better virtual worlds. So now you can see where the work you’ll be doing fits in. Believe me, it’s going to be a lot of fun.”

“Promise?” she said teasingly.

Corrigan spread his hands in appeal and turned toward Minsky. “Look. Aren’t the Irish eyes smiling?”

“You’re going to be ripped off,” Minsky said to Evelyn, shrugging.

But Eric Shipley was in a far-from-fun mood when Corrigan got back to Pittsburgh the next day. “Pinder has been having visitors from California and D.C.” he told Corrigan. “Space Defense Command, and DOD. High-level stuff. Something’s in the wind. I don’t like the feel of it.”

Corrigan remained unperturbed. “Politics and science are inseparable these days, Eric. You’ve got to move with the times. This could be an impending moment of opportunity.”

“Well, we’ll find out soon enough,” Shipley replied. “Pinder has called a major meeting to review progress and plans for the whole Pinocchio program. Tomorrow morning in town, nine o’clock sharp.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jason Pinder opened the meeting, which was held in one of the conference rooms in the corporate headquarters building on First Avenue. He was slight and wiry in build, and with his short, straight, sandy hair, clipped mustache, and invariable habit of dressing in conventional suits of gray, tan, or brown, had always put Corrigan in mind of a retired British army officer or a schoolmaster. But the mild gray eyes turned out to be a deceptive front for a mind as compulsively restless as a computer’s registers, ceaselessly analyzing, shuffling, and sorting in search of better options. Not that this came as any great surprise. Anyone who had made it to the upper ranks of a leading-edge company like CLC could be assumed to possess the requisite qualities.

Next to him, crisp and businesslike in a black suit and snowy shirt, was the swarthy, curly-haired figure of John Velucci, executive director of CLC’s Legal Department. “Tell me why he’s here,” Shipley muttered to Corrigan as they sat down. “Want to know what I think? Whatever this is all about has already been decided. The meeting is to tell us the way it is.”

“You’re too suspicious, you know, Eric,” Corrigan answered. But the words were automatic. For once, even Corrigan’s manner was curious and restrained.

Also present from CLC were Pinder’s deputy, Peter Quell; Tom Hatcher, Corrigan’s software supervisor on the Pinocchio program; and a hardware wizard called Barry Neinst. Neinst was described on the organizational charts as responsible for “Advanced Processing,” and appeared on the bar of loosely affiliated names, connecting vertically to Pinder’s, that was tagged collectively “Direct Neural Coupling.” What this really meant was obscure, and in practice he led a somewhat nomadic existence, wandering between Shipley’s DINS section, the MIMIC/Pinocchio group headed by Corrigan, and a collection of graphics specialists known as “Interactive Imagery.” This latter group was represented by Ivy Dupale, a short, bouncy, frizzy-haired brunette who had been put in charge as a temporary measure eighteen months previously, and the situation was never regularized or revised.

There were four people from the Space Defense Command’s Operations Training & Simulator Center at Inglewood: Henry Wernheim, solid, craggy, with silver, wavy hair and steely eyes, the director; Frank Tyron, lean, tanned, and bespectacled, project manager of the VIV program (
VI
sion &
V
oice head-mounted assembly); and two of his technical support people: Joan Sutton and Harry Morgen.

After making the introductions, Pinder opened, addressing himself principally to the side of the table where the CLC people were sitting.

“I don’t have to tell you that the field we’re in is an exciting one, and one that is crucial to some of the most important developments going on in the world today. That includes the public and private space programs that are currently coming together here, across in Europe, and in Japan.” He paused, allowing a suitably serious note to assert itself. “Hence, we can expect a lot of competition worldwide, both in terms of the funding being made available, and of the caliber of talent that we’ll be up against. And, indeed, we see a lot of that happening already. What it means is that we’re going to have to work extra hard and move fast just to stay in the same relative place. What it means even more is that we at CLC are going to need, and will appreciate, all the help we can get.” He glanced along the other side of the table to indicate the visitors. “I am pleased to be able to inform you that, as a result of recent negotiations, we now have an opportunity to benefit from some very substantial help indeed, from a solid, trustworthy direction.”

“Here it comes,” Shipley murmured by Corrigan’s side. “That was the sugarcoating.”

To the debt “But he could be right.”

On Corrigan’s other side, Tom Hatcher and Ivy Dupale exchanged what-do-you-think looks. Just at that moment, neither of them seemed to be especially thinking anything. Beyond them Barry Neinst remained semi-oblivious in a world of his own, probably involving parallel arrays and pipeline architectures.

Pinder continued, “Over the last few weeks, Ken Endelmyer has had us going through some hard numbers, reviewing the progress and future prospects for Pinocchio. As you all know, the tentative plan has been to proceed to Pinocchio Two, or ‘Son of Pinocchio,’ as it has come to be known informally: extension of DNC into the pons, plus the addition of speech and acoustics.” Shipley nudged Corrigan softly with his elbow. The word “tentative” had never been used previously. For the past year at least, Pinocchio Two had been firm.