Fool's Experiments (36 page)

No good deed goes unpunished.

Doug's plane landed at LAX at 10:30 in the morning, local time. He checked out a car from the shared federal-agency motor pool and could have been at the AL lab by noon. His visit was unannounced, but that did not require him to arrive just in time to ruin lunch plans. He ate a bigger lunch than usual, stalling until 1:30.

And, the security detail at the building's only entrance informed him, just missed Dr. del Vecchio and Captain Burke. They were at a late lunch.

The badge Glenn had provided got Doug inside. He sat for a while in the small reception area. Showing up unannounced was one thing, and Glenn, apparently, had raised that to an art form. Poking about and interrogating the staff unannounced ... that would be something else. A guaranteed irritant to the head of the program.

After the long flight and cross-town drive, Doug did not feel like sitting. He paced for a while, with nothing to distract him but the cluster of cheaply framed travel posters, badly hung, fluorescent ceiling fixtures reflected in the glass.

People began to seek him out. Most were intel analysts, generally from NRO, with nothing but praise for "Al." Most had only seen its work product, in the form of buried and camouflaged sites tagged on images transferred to CDs. A few had donned helmets and seen the ... puppy or lamb or koala cub? ... in its lair.

"May I help you?" an icy voice asked.

Doug turned. He recognized the woman from the ID photo in her personnel file. A storm cloud hovered over her, and a plastic bag hung from her hand. Her uneaten lunch, he guessed. "Dr. del Vecchio, my name is Doug Carey. I'm a NIT specialist. Glenn Adams asked me to look around, speak with you, and give him my impressions."

This visit was also to help him decide whether to accept Glenn's offer. Doug saw nothing to be gained by sharing that.

"I see," she said flatly. "I'll give you the tour."

"There's no hurry. Why don't you eat first?"

"I'll eat later. You probably noticed the building is L-shaped. The entrance is at the knee." When they passed a break room, she put her sack into the refrigerator. A few steps past the break room, she opened an interior glass door with her ID badge and access code.

"A glass door," Doug commented.

"The whole building is a SCIF. The exterior doors, inner and outer, are metal. After I smacked someone with this door, we switched to glass. It's safer."

"Makes sense," Doug said.

Behind the glass door were two rows of workstations. The walls were bare but for another clump of posters. People nodded and called out greetings as they passed. She said, "This work area for analysts was just set up. We're now in the long leg of the building. To maintain containment, nothing is networked." She stopped beside the last workstation in the back row. A slender cable coiled up from it to the ceiling. "This computer controls the dish you may have noticed on our roof. Full NRO encryption on the downlink."

"Just the downlink?"

"There isn't an uplink. We deleted that software." She smiled humorlessly. "We're not stupid."

"I was there," Doug answered softly. "I watched AJ die. I saw the thing that killed him. No one should ever go through that."

"I didn't know." Her voice lost a bit of its testiness. "Maybe you
are
an expert."

She explained their procedures for handling data CDs. She walked him through the off-site backup process, emphasizing partitioning and encryption of the programs. They looked over an analyst's shoulder at a high-res image Al had reviewed and tagged. They managed to get onto a first-name basis.

Doug didn't rush Linda, hoping to set precedent for what most interested—and repelled—him: the thing that waited in the
other
wing. They eventually returned to the foyer. He gestured vaguely at a cluster of posters, feeling as awkward as Glenn at small talk. "That's how I would hang them. My girlfriend spreads things out. She thinks that makes a space more balanced."

"Perhaps Glenn should have sent a feng shui consultant," Linda snapped. Still, she glanced sideways at the grouping, as though just now noticing the crowded arrangement.

So much for small talk. They went through more security to the shorter wing. Except for the small supercomputer, this area was almost empty. A familiar canvas bag lay inside a glass-and-steel display case.

Near the flat screen of a workstation, two helmets waited. Both had the omnidirectional antennae Doug remembered. "WiFi connectivity to the helmets?" he asked.

"The only RF in the building. We're not stupid," Linda repeated. She took a chair and indicated another. "Are you ready for the main event?"

Ready? He would
never
be ready. "Sure."

Behind the most serene face Linda could manage, her thoughts churned.

She had tamed the beast. She had built this project. The gaggle of intel analysts, more almost daily, every last one singing Al's praises, proved her success.

She had never accepted the convenient death-by-blackout story. Having seen AJ's monster and lived to tell about it, Doug must have played a role in stopping it. Maybe he had lured it into the spool of fiber-optic cable as Glenn had let slip. Kudos for that—but everything
here
was under control.

She was not about to surrender her project to someone else now.

A small voice in her head added: Because this project is all you have.

"Let me run you through our safety procedures," Linda said.

He picked up a helmet. "It's lighter than I remember."

"That won't be the only change." She reviewed the comm protocols permitted between supercomputer, the hardware- based detection of unauthorized data formats, and the delay line. "The fail-safes drop the link faster than anything inappropriate can cross the delay line."

"And it's only tried once to cross the delay line?" he asked.

Linda nodded. "And I look in on it two or three times most days."

"I'm impressed, Linda."

Did I ask for your approval? "Thanks."

Doug pointed at the second helmet. "Will you be joining me?"

"It's a spare. I'll watch on the BOLD monitor"—and have lunch—"while you 'look around.' "

"See you later then." Doug donned the helmet with one smooth motion. (He had done this before. Newbies invariably resisted covering their eyes, vainly angling the helmet this way and that.) "I'll probably have other questions afterward."

I'm sure you will. Beyond whatever it took to convince Doug her setup was safe, Linda saw nothing to be gained by openness. Glenn had better think twice before replacing her.

No keyboard. Linda looked around until she saw where she had last set it down. She keyed a password to unlock the workstation and initiated the NIT software. "Ready? In five, four, three..."

A new visitor—and yet familiar.

The entity considered: Was almost familiarity yet another category of puzzle?

For a while the visitor observed, offering no communication. Next, it dispatched puzzles of well-known types. It watched while the entity solved them.

Time now passed without cycles, in unending and overlapping sequences of problems. The number of its visitors grew, although the one that labeled itself "Linda" remained the most frequent. All were watchful. Most began distrustful.

The current visitor manifested a reaction for which the entity lacked a descriptor. A calculating attitude. Hints of knowledge about the entity beyond what it knew about itself.

The visitor Doug had never before appeared. The entity was certain of that.

Then how familiar? The entity began matching patterns against everything it knew about all previous visitors. In its files about the visitor Glenn it found a related pattern.

The more often a visitor came, the more its thoughts and memories became accessible. On its third appearance, the visitor Glenn had remembered...

Glenn had revealed only bits. A problem solver much like itself had once existed. Beings like the visitors had destroyed it.

The entity found a match.

Doug had destroyed the other entity—not stolen its cycles, not taken away a fraction of its processing nodes—but erased it in its entirety, rendered it null.

There were ways to influence these visitors ... but was it safe to influence Doug?

For now, the entity concluded, it would only observe. It needed more information before making such an attempt.

The creature minded its business on the other side of the delay line. Clearly, it solved problems, but Doug knew no more than before this trip whether it was intelligent. His gut said: maybe.

No, his gut said: Run like hell.

"I'm coming out," Doug said. Lifting his helmet, he found Linda eating a salad, a tech journal open across her desk.

She slid aside the container. "How was it?"

He set down the helmet. By comparison, the last gear he had used was the Flintstones version. A little more time and a lot more money did that with electronics. "It was wary."

"I meant the overall experience, but okay."

"It doesn't bother you that something like Al killed AJ?"

"Of course it does!" She stood abruptly, shoving back her chair, to stand by the display case with the canvas bag. "It's why I keep
this.
AJ was more than a mentor. He was my friend."

Doug waited.

"And yet." She turned back toward him. "What you saw isn't what killed AJ."

" 'Tamed and trained,' right? That's how Glenn described it. Your words?"

"It scares us all at first." She clasped her hands behind her back. "I once saw it as a lion in a cage. Now it's a kitten." People passing through the lobby had told him similar things. "I know. Glenn now sees Al as an otter. Of course it's not."

"You're the NIT expert. You know all about the neural net adapting to the wearer's thoughts. If it were something like ... what killed AJ, do you think we'd see otters and kittens?"

"Why do you think it was wary?" Doug asked.

She shook her head. "Wrong question. Why do
you
see it as wary? And if I might ask, what did you see it as?"

A chimera of tentacles, teeth, and talons, different from what he had battled only because he seemed to be peering at it through the wrong end of a spyglass. That perspective was clearly his subconscious' rendering of the delay line. "Touché," Doug admitted. "
I
was wary."

And what would Cheryl, bless her newfound fascination with psychology, make of that insight? That
his
fears were no reason for
her
not to help Sheila.

Which had no bearing on why he had come.

"Tamed and trained," Doug said. "Tell me about that."

"It does something we don't like, and we take away resources for a while. It does something we really dislike, and we take a lot of resources, or withhold them for longer." She exhaled impatiently. "It's good at patterns, Doug. It picked up on that pattern
really
fast."

He knew that much.
Glenn
had shared more than that. For all anyone could know, its good behavior was dumb luck. Until a virus attack intervened, hadn't AJ been certain he had bred out predation?

If he went back to work for the forum, Glenn would put this project under Doug's wing. He would have more justification—and authority—then to demand specifics from Linda. If not... what was the point in pressing her?

The beast was secure in its lair. However he decided to answer Glenn, learning that had made the trip worthwhile.

The red-eye flight was half-empty.

When the seat-belt light went dark, Doug moved to an empty row. He had carbo-loaded before boarding, hoping the blood-sugar crash would make him sleepy. He had a couple beers. He had erased the drone of the engines with noise-cancellation headphones; now he added the synthesized sounds of ocean waves.

And he remained wide awake.

A little boy with wild eyes peeked at Doug over the back of the next row of seats. Doug feigned surprise, and the kid dropped behind the seat back. A minute later, he reappeared. And a minute after that. And after that.

Long ago, Doug had played that game between booths in a Pizza Hut. A dark-haired beauty had watched from a nearby table. He went over and introduced himself. She told him he and his little friend were charming. And so he met Holly.

The flight attendants were nowhere to be seen. Doug walked aft to the nearest galley for another overpriced beer. A yawning woman passed him, heading forward. He yawned himself, and in turn triggered a yawn in a man three rows farther back.

The chain yawning didn't help. The third beer didn't help. Something lurked at the back of Doug's mind, and he could not tease it out. He circled the plane, wishing the aisles were grassy and he could mow them. Approaching the Mississippi, still unenlightened, he dropped into an empty row of seats and fell asleep.

Minutes later, Doug's eyes flew open. Without doubt, Al was intelligent.

And a sly devil.

Glenn looked out his office window at the city far below. Traffic crawled across the Potomac bridges. I-66 was a parking lot. To everyone in all those cars and queued up beyond his view in a hundred Starbucks, life was normal.

He envied them.

Somewhere off the coast was a ship with a dirty bomb. Or maybe off the Pacific coast. Or maybe far away, preparing to sail. Neither the CIA nor the NSA admitted to knowing more than that, and that the terrorists had New Caliphate backing.

He was inclined to believe them, given how desperately both agencies fought to reprioritize Al's tasking. Every scrap of data that might be relevant was getting downloaded to Linda's lab; a planeload of analysts would head west tonight. Someone far above Glenn's pay grade would decide before they landed the degree to which they would preempt Al's present workload.

The world was going to hell in a rocket-propelled hand- basket.

Insistent knocking got Glenn's attention. It was before eight, and the receptionist wasn't at her station yet. The pounding continued. Who forgot his access card today? he wondered.

He found Doug Carey standing in the hall. "Did you come straight from the airport? Don't bother answering. You look like something the cat threw up."

They got coffee from the break room before entering the SCIF. They took chairs in the conference area. "All right," Glenn said. "What's so urgent?"

Doug wrapped his hands around the hot mug, not drinking. "The project. It has to stop."

"That's it? Shut it down? You were there, what, half a day?"

"The creature is dangerous, Glenn. Brilliantly, insidiously
dangerous."
Doug took a long sip. "I almost missed it."

"And yet nothing has happened. Al is locked in its cage, isn't it?"

Doug stifled a yawn. "Maybe."

Glenn blinked. "What?"

"You saw a shark. It quickly became an otter. Linda's version went from lion to kitten. Analysts who have visited it: same thing. It always becomes some adorable critter. Why?"

Maybe because it's
not
scary? "Doug, go home. Sleep. Come back later, or tomorrow."

Doug shivered, sloshing coffee across the conference table. "I'll tell you why. Maybe it looks adorable because that's what it wants."

"It matches words or voices in recordings, Doug. It finds detail hidden in digital images. It doesn't talk to people." Doug yawned, this time making no effort to cover it. Glenn yawned back. "Now you have me doing it."

"Exactly."

The retort conveyed some undertone Glenn did not grasp. Doug smiled at his obscure witticism, and Glenn had the inane reflex to smile back.

"I yawn; you yawn. I smile; you smile back." Doug belatedly noticed the mess he had made and looked around for something with which to sop it up. "Those are reflexes wired into us. For all I know, they predate speech."

"Facial expressions. Postures and gestures." Glenn pondered. "You can't believe
Al
knows body language."

"AJ's monster got out of its computer, went through a security gateway, and moved at will around the Internet. We know AJ built it without any networking capability. How did it know the protocols, Glenn?"

"Trial and error?" A shadow of doubt crossed Glenn's mind. "What's that have to do with...?"

"See me yawn; you yawn back. That's a
protocol,
Glenn. "The NIT experience is personal, because the neural net in the helmet adapts to our thoughts and experiences, but we all see something. And Al experiences—hell, for lack of a better verb, I'll say it 'sees'—us. It sees how we respond to what it does. Something you saw in it reminded you of a shark. I'll bet you don't react warmly to sharks. It didn't want that response, so it learned to act differently around you. Glenn, it made you
trust
it."

Impressive, and yet... "It's at our mercy, it's leery of us, and it wants to avoid our displeasure." Pets and junior officers were no different.

None of the visual detail, of sharks, dolphins, or otters, was real. Glenn's own mind, aided by the helmet, filled in the blanks. The important thing was, Al remained in its cage. It wanted to avoid its visitors' wrath. Where was the danger? And yet...

In a few short hours, Doug had recognized something about Al that everyone else had overlooked.

Glenn needed that insight. He needed Doug on the program. Dismissing Doug's concerns was
not
how to bring him aboard. "Good work," Glenn said. "Now go home. We'll talk another time."

"What about Al?" Doug persisted.

"You don't
know
it's manipulating people by its miming."

"You don't know that it's not," Doug shot back. "Shut it down until we can think this through. Al won't know the difference."

"I'll contact Linda about this." But nothing would change in her lab until after they found the dirty bomb. If Doug took the job,
then
he would be entitled to know.