Fool's Experiments (16 page)

Bev wasn't easy to deflect. "What if an unencrypted data file is removed?"

"Can't happen," he repeated stubbornly.

Bev brushed wisps of auburn bangs from her eyes. "But what if?"

"You know the best way to read fortunes? They sound better when you tack on the phrase 'between the sheets.' " It certainly worked well for
his
fortune.

"You're changing the subject, AJ."

"Yes, I am," he said. "Please join me."

"But what if?" she persisted.

He
so
wanted to read his fortune to her. "We're covered. There are two defenses besides the gateway. First, the maze runners are sterile—they can't reproduce without the supervisory program. If one gets out,
only
one gets out.

"Second, an escapee, were I to concede the possibility, won't survive long. The supervisor appends a fail-safe timer
after
each cycle of mutation. If that timer ever reaches ten minutes, which can only happen in an escapee, that safety code overwrites the critter."
Hasta la vista,
baby. "Are you convinced?"

"Yes," she allowed, sheepishly. Brightening, she added, "Now what's that fortune you're obviously dying to read to me?"

He unwound the slip of paper that he had nervously rolled into a tight coil. " 'All you need to find great happiness is a good friend.' " To himself, he added, Between the sheets.

Bev had apparently done the same. "Hmm, that does work." Then, grinning, she pretended to read, " 'The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.' "

Her actual fortune wasn't any fun; it didn't work at all with AJ's adult-rated editing scheme. Her note read: "What we dare not face we choose to dismiss."

Would they ever be called, Cheryl wondered, scanning the surrounding crowd one more time. Damn. She was surrounded by newcomers who looked more pathetic than the ashen little girl at her side. Mere diarrhea didn't rate in the HMO's emergency-care waiting room—not on weekends, anyway. She sneaked a glance at her niece.

The poor kid had been stuck here for two hours, although the composition book on her lap gave scant evidence of that fact. Only nine years old, Carla had yet to master the concept of sympathy. She misunderstood it to mean that her condition must be serious, so Cheryl offered none. Such stoicism took willpower: The little girl was the spitting image of Cheryl's sister at that age. God, Cheryl missed Tanya. "How is the writing coming?"

"I don't want to do my homework," Carla wailed.

"And why would you?"

Cheryl looked up. Doug Carey stood at a nearby counter, handling paperwork, having evidently just emerged from the depths of the clinic. When she was lent out to a non-NIT project at BioSciCorp and he had taken leave, planning to get smart about cybersecurity, she had hoped the workplace separation would simplify their budding relationship. Budding, as in: Your guess was as good as mine whether they had one.

Weeks later, she was still guessing.

Doug took her puzzled look as an invitation and ambled over. He would have towered over her even if she had been standing. "Oil change and a tune-up," he answered her unvoiced question, glancing at his right arm. Soft revving noises emanated from the prosthesis. "Are you lovely ladies okay?"

She patted Carla's head. "This sweetie had the runs most of the night."

"And you make her do homework? That's cruel and unusual punishment. It's unconstipational."

Carla smiled uncertainly, but Cheryl had no problem translating: Homework was a shitty thing to do to a sick kid. "Hush, you. It eeps-kay er-hay ind-may istracted-day."

He plunked himself onto the floor, sitting tailor-style and bringing his face closer to Carla's level. "What have you got there, munchkin?"

"Essay questions." Carla jabbed a finger into her mouth and made gagging sounds.

He canted his head thoughtfully. "Life's an essay question, you know."

"When you visited Aunt Cheryl's apartment, you told me that life was a word problem."

"It is. First you write down the word problem—that's the essay part. Then you solve it."

Carla's face took on an ill-defined expression between confusion and delight. What is it about this man? Cheryl wondered. He had the same effect on her. She hoped she hid it better.

"What
else
is life?" Carla asked.

"Hold that thought." He turned to Cheryl. "Dinner and virtual racquetball next weekend if she's feeling better?" Racquetball by itself was ambiguous. He had never suggested dinner before. Dinner was a date.

Sensing him studying her, Cheryl felt herself nod. "Call me tonight."

Doug grinned toothily at the little girl. "Life," he allowed, "is sometimes a ten-point extra-credit question."

The windshield of Doug's car had a fresh layer of frost on it. He scraped it haphazardly, his mind elsewhere. He likewise ignored the chill air spewing forth from the Toyota's climate- control vents as he exited the HMO's packed parking lot.

Yes, he finally had a real date with Cheryl. Yes, physical therapy had gone well.

What he had seen no reason to volunteer was that his blood pressure, usually borderline high, had made a breakthrough.

Medication notwithstanding, it was now well north of the border.

Slap, slap, slap.

"I need to get me one of those," Ralph Pittman announced. Shaking a handful of coins, he wound his way between tables to the break room's candy machine.

Slap, slap, slap. Doug's focus remained on the back-and-forth motion of a red orb. "A paddle ball?" Between whaps he could faintly hear the twanging of the elastic band.

"I
have
a paddle ball. Colonel Bogus gets pissed whenever I use it. Strap on a new arm, though, and suddenly playing paddle ball becomes work."

Chuckling made Doug miss a return. He hadn't held a paddle ball since he'd been a boy, which made the toy a far better test tool than the VR racquetball he preferred. At least intuition told him any effects would manifest more quickly without months of prior neural-net training.

The ball whacked him in the chest. How was the arm? Normal, as far as he could tell. "Where is Fearless Leader?"

"At... an off-site meeting."

That hesitation was uncharacteristic. Classified work, Doug guessed. Rebel that Ralph was, he toed the line when it came to national-security matters. Doug was avoiding all things classified, to make certain his solution could be brought back to BioSciCorp. But when the hell would that happen? "Will Glenn be back in the office today? I've been trying to synch up with him for a while."

"Beats me." Pittman smacked as he finished his chocolate bar. More hesitation. "Still waiting for the official blessing to test?"

Doug needed two tries to get the ball bouncing again. His arm still felt the same. Slap, slap, slap. Carrying on a conversation as he mastered a new manual skill was encouraging. He wondered what Ralph's second hesitation had meant.

"Yeah," Doug said. "Abstractly I even see the advantage of an independent verification." Slap, slap, slap. "The problem is, the only meaningful way to check out neural- interface defenses is to
use
them. It's a person-in-the-loop system, and there's no getting around it."

Ralph crumpled his now-empty candy wrapper. Its arc to the wastebasket fell short. "What can you do? You gotta wait."

Slap, slap, slap. "Waiting was never my strong suit." Patience neighbored respect for authority in Doug's personal list of overrated virtues.

The copy of Frankenfools he had uploaded into his upgraded prosthesis was proof of that.

Glenn held the helmet, scarier than a live grenade, at arm's length. "It's less bulky than the helmets in the reports."

"That's electronics for you," Aaron McDougal said. He was wiry and intense, with close-set eyes and ever-moving eyebrows. "Stuff only gets smaller and better."

McDougal was CIA, and one of the senior engineers still developing NIT. One of the senior survivors, anyway. He had partnered with Sheila Brunner. "Turn it over," he said.

Glenn did, and found a mosaic of tiny tiles lining the inner surface. "Better accuracy?"

"A new feature." McDougal took back the helmet. "We've integrated Blood Oxygen Level Detection, BOLD for short.

"The new sensor array measures tiny variations in the local magnetic field. It turns out oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin molecules have slightly different magnetic moments. Now we can monitor blood flow throughout the brain in real time." With his free hand, McDougal indicated a nearby display. "Software color-codes the differences— active brain regions in red, idle regions in green, and average regions in yellow—and presents it here. A neurologist watching it can tell you if the person in the helmet is angry or scared or whatever."

"Or brain-invaded wacko?" Glenn asked. "Fast enough to save the wearer?"

"Well, that's the theory."

"Meaning no one wants to try it."

"Not going beyond the confines of this building." McDougal shivered. "Would you?"

So why is the CIA still working on it? Still: Glenn's job was to make it possible. He said, "And the other defenses? The idea the forum came up with?"

"The automatic cutoff if too much data tries to gush in from the network side?" McDougal nodded. "Yeah, that's in. We're playing with some enhancements, too."

A few miles away, Doug would be toiling on the third or fourth iteration of a test procedure for his approach. What was it he kept harping on in his weeklies? Right: It's person-in-the-loop. That's the only way to test it. "You don't seem convinced," Glenn said.

"You didn't know Sheila... before. She was a genius. She was my friend. Now she's a potted plant.

"So yes, I'll keep working on this. It's what I'm paid for. Just don't expect me to ever
wear
it."

"Talk faster," Bev whispered. An interview had brought her as far as San Francisco; she had not tacked on the weekend side trip to LA for some grad student's farewell party.

AJ ignored her hint. "Doctor." Everyone laughed good- naturedly at the several seconds it took Linda to react—and her deep, deep blush. "You need to get used to that, Doctor."

The guest of honor had enjoyed more than a few celebratory toasts. Fair enough: She had successfully defended her dissertation the previous Tuesday after it was clear predation had been purged. The sheepskin would catch up soon enough.

From a shopping bag AJ removed a garishly decorated package. Bev guessed he'd had the wrapping paper custom- made. It was odd, patterned in stylized fish composed of ones and zeroes. She scrunched her face in concentration. In ASCII characters, the six columns of bits comprising each fish read: D-A-R-W-I-N.

"We all chipped in for some souvenirs. We don't want you to forget your old friends at your new job."

Linda raised the box to her ear and shook it; it rattled and thumped encouragingly. The tightly tied ribbons stymied her, so she returned the package to the table to have at them with a borrowed Swiss Army knife. The ribbons parted to cheers. She ripped the wrapping paper to reveal a family-sized Cheerios box, which yielded a Rubik's Cube, three connect-the-dot books, a Chinese finger trap, a jigsaw puzzle, and a reasonable approximation of the Gordian knot. Near the bottom, lest she miss the point, was a CD-ROM labeled, in big, block letters: UNIVERSAL PROBLEM SOLVER.

"Don't let your new boss know the beastie does all the work," a grad student yelled.

As Linda stammered, red faced, through a farewell speech of sorts, Bev prodded AJ in the ribs. "There isn't
really
one of your critters on that CD, is there?"

He poked her back. "Why not? Soon everybody will have one. It will be the rare algebra student who won't pay good money for one—at least, until it gets Napsterized."

"Don't tease me." She considered that reply entirely una- musing.

AJ got uncharacteristically serious. "Relax, hon. Of course we're not distributing maze runners. We still have a lot of work left."

"Is it a good idea? I mean ever releasing them?" A horrifying thought occurred to Bev. "Is there a copy of a beast in the publication of Linda's thesis?"

Someone stuffed quarters into the hangout's jukebox, and most of AJ's kids got up to dance. He shouted over the music, "No, the beasts don't appear in the dissertation—they're all safely behind simulated bars. Linda's research was into the process, about
how
problem solvers can be evolved.

"But that's now. Remember why we're doing this. The whole point is to evolve general-purpose problem solvers. A program that races in seconds through thirty-dimensional mazes can work backward from concentrations of chemical species to determine what reactions are thinning the ozone layer and driving global warming. It can improve weather forecasts. It can model how proteins fold. It can reroute planes with near-instantaneous reaction time around storms, congestion, and emergencies. It can—"

"It can eat every scrap of software we already depend on," Bev interrupted.

"That trait has been bred out," AJ insisted.

"How bright are they now, really? Is one as smart as a dog or a monkey?" Or even smarter? That possibility was too frightening to express aloud.

AJ hoisted his empty glass. A student left the conga line— whatever had brought
that
on?—to fetch a fresh pitcher of margaritas. AJ poured as he spoke. "No way. Look, the biggest human-coded program is less complex than a bug or a slug. My beasties need not approach the apex of creation, you'll pardon the expression, to run rings around what the brightest team of software engineers can do. I'm probably Mattering myself, but maybe we have achieved a reptile. Yeah, Bev, if you must think negative thoughts, consider that we have a cobra of the data plane."

"That's in no way comforting." Bev waved off the pitcher now hovering above her glass. "You like your biological analogies, but I know very well neither you nor any of your assistants is a biologist. I interview biologists all the time. Have you ever seen a cobra? They're
scary''