In the Courts of the Sun (8 page)

[4]

T
he Barracuda had a new live windshield, and on the drive up to Orlando I checked out Taro’s new sponsor, the Warren Group. It turned out the chairman and CEO was Lindsay Warren, this big developer and philanthropist in Salt Lake City who’d built the stadia for the Winter Olympics in 2002. I used to go to hospitals named after him. He’d probably been funding Taro’s work since back in the FARMS days. “The Warren Family of Companies” was definitely one of the fastest-growing conglomerates in the U.S. Four years ago, though, they’d been close to bankruptcy, and from what I could find it wasn’t clear exactly what had bailed them out. Maybe they’d gotten huge so fast by using the Game.
Warren had its tentacles in all sorts of fields, from the esoteric to the stiflingly mundane. They made sports equipment and memorabilia. They developed motivational tools, human resource management systems, “beliefspace software,” and interactive entertainment, anything and everything for a whole new centuryful of consumers with a whole lot of free time. Right now they were pushing this thing they called “Sleekers,” which seemed to be some kind of low-friction wheelless shoe/skate that glided on specially treated asphalt. They also did aerospace and research contracting. In ’08 one of their commercial labs had made headlines with the announcement that they had created a so-called desktop wormhole. The trendiest thing they mentioned was something called Consciousness Transfer Protocol, which people said was going to be bigger than the Human Genome Project but which was at least a decade off. Still, in their last annual report it looked as though their cash cow was entertainment construction—halls of fame, the eXtreme ParX franchise, and what they called socioimagineering. “The Warren Group is the leading developer of Intentional Communities (‘ICs’),” their site said. Apparently the division had started out on the reenactments circuit, people endlessly fighting the Civil War, and then they produced a lot of those Renaissance fair things, and then they got the contract to build the year-round
Star Trek
community, and now just a decade later they’d just reached 95 percent occupancy (or “communityship”) on a ten-square-mile development called Erewhynn, about fifty miles north of Orlando. It was supposed to be like an eighteenth-century Cotswolds village. The citizens went to classes on handcrafts and Scottish dialects, and they put on Michaelmas and Maying festivals and the whole shitterie. Then there was another big IC called Blue Lagoon Reef, on its own island in the Bahamas. There was a new feudal Japan spread in northern California. And there were big plans brewing in Latin America and the Far East. A site called Warren Sucks said that the company wanted to develop boutique countries with their own currencies and constitutions, that it was piggybacking on the retribalization movement to get into politics and indoctritainment and rewire our brains, and that, basically, it sucked.
The lab was on the UCF campus in a new hacienda-style nerd ghetto. You could still see the grid lines in the new St. Augustine grass sod. Even though it was the day after Christmas, everybody seemed to be working. There were private security primates all over. They kept talking to each other, and eventually to Taro, over those Bluetooth ear thingies that make people look like processed livestock. Well, here I am, crawling back, I thought. Was he still mad at me? Maybe just ask him. Hey, are you still mad at me? No, don’t. Don’t embarrass him. Or yourself. He probably figures you’ve seen the error of your ways. Maybe he’s right. I knew I’d decided Taro was just another mercenary, and I’d felt pretty disgusted, but now I didn’t remember why exactly I’d felt that way.
Taro met me at the third door in. He didn’t so much look older, but I’d been remembering him as a jovial Hotei sort of character, and now he was more of a Hsun Tzu, drier and grave. Like all Japanese people he only looked half-Japanese. He still wore his old powder-blue Tokyo University lab coat.
“It is nice to see you,” he said. He held my hand for a second. For him it was like licking my face. His hand was smooth, dry, brittle, and delicately ridged, like the shell of a paper nautilus.
“It is nice to see you,” I said. He seemed like it was actually nice to see me. Well, he’s a guileless sort, I thought. If he said it was nice, it was nice. There was hug potential, but instead I shook his dry hand. Neither of us was a very demonstrative type. I’m not Latino in that way. I’m an Injun. Like, Chief Stone Face him no show any heap big emotions.
“Thanks for having me over,” I mumbled. “You know, I feel kind of bad showing up after all this, whatever.”
“No, not to worry,” he said. He didn’t have an accent—I mean, he had a bit of an Oxbridge accent but no Japanese one—but he spoke in that precise way that tells you an East Asian language is still lurking in there. “I understand that things sometimes are difficult.” Despite myself I got a floodlet of that warm ’n’ fuzzy feeling like you’re a scoop of ice cream and somebody’s pouring hot butterscotch over you. I hate it when that happens. Teacher/pupil has got to be one of the weirdest possible relationships. Well, maybe he’d guessed I might contact him as soon as I saw that
Time
article.
“Let us check in on the patient,” he said.
“Great,” I said. Come down to the lab, I thought. And see what’s on the suh-luh-
AAAB
!
We went through another two sets of doors and into a keyed elevator. Brrr. Freezing in here. We went down three floors to the sub-subbasement. Taro’s cold room was at the end of a long hall. I got the sense the complex was mainly industrial R&D. There were doors with lab names like HAPTIC feedBACK and LOW-FRICTION MATERIALS. Taro held his hand over a scanner and a door hissed open.
The room looked like it was about forty-one and a half feet square with an eighteen-foot ceiling, all done in your basic morgue white with bone accents and a hundred thousand lumens of shadowless fluorescent lighting. Its only remarkable feature was the computer in the center of the room: a clear Lucite tank about the size of a Ford Explorer van stood on its end. LEON, which they said stood for Learning Engine 1.9, was suspended inside the tank, a black thing like a big grandfather clock. Skeins and ratkings of cords and hoses curled out from the bottom of the tank and stretched across the white epoxied floor to a mound of chillers and Eheim pumps and Acer 6000 storage drives, all pushed against one of the windowless cinder-block walls. Four genderless perpetual graduate students huddled at workstations in the corners of the room, tapping and mumbling to themselves in HLASM.
“We replaced most of the silicon chips with doped germanium,” Taro was saying. “But the thermal dissipation is still nearly three hundred watts. So for now we are refrigerating him like an antique Cray. The coolant is the same type of plasma they use for synthetic blood transfusions.”
He led me over to the tank like I was a tourist at the Big Chunk of Rock National Monument. I squinted into it. Up close you could see that the black thing wasn’t solid, but rather a tall stack of paper-thin black circuit boards, each about three feet square and a quarter-inch apart. Whorls of heat distortion spewed out of different layers through the clear liquid like diffraction waves over a summer highway.
“Huh. Nifty,” I said.
Demonio,
this really was a cold room. About sixty f-ing degrees. I’m going to need a damn baby blanket, I thought. Or like, two shots of Tres Años. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
“Of course this is just the CPU,” he said. “The drives are in another building. And the storage is . . . well, I do not know where all the storage is. Much of it is in Korea.”
“How fast is it?” I asked.
“Right now he is close to six petaflops.”
“Wow.” Sounds expensive, I thought.
“At the moment LEON is running two hundred and fifty-six simulated worlds about ten minutes ahead of the real one. And for each of those he is playing through more than five million branches of the Sacrifice Game tree simultaneously. Each one is a three-stone game.”
“How many simulated trades do you run?” I asked.
“Around twenty thousand a day,” he said. “I don’t know about the actual trades.”
“Huh,” I said. That’s one of the great things about Taro, I thought. Most other people would have gotten all cagey and said something like “Where’d you hear we were running any trades?” But he just didn’t have it in him.
“Would you like to play a game against him?” Taro asked.
I said I’d love to.
“Have you played with three stones?”
I said I had. As I think I said, this means that you use three runners, that is, the stone that represents what actually happens and that runs away from the hunting stones, which represent different potentials. The thing is, it wasn’t three times harder than playing with one stone. It was 3
³
times, that is, twenty-seven times harder. It’s sort of like how a mate-in-three chess problem is many, many times harder than a mate-in-two. So anyway, usually I used two stones. But I’d been working on playing with three. I figured I could handle it, against a machine, anyway. Really, computers still can’t play the Game for shit.
Taro got a wobbly shop stool and I sat down in front of an old NEC 3-D monitor. He hoisted himself onto the Formica work surface and started tapping on a touchpad.
“You know how the average human brain runs about two billion operations per second?” he said, over the tappitty-tap-tap-taps.
“Well, it takes a lot of work to be average,” I said.
“And then after that we should budget in another six or eight billion of our own operations just to compile out the parallelism.” I nodded, as though I could easily have worked that out myself. “Then we must double that for record keeping and fail-safe. And then we have got about twenty billion ops per second. So as long as it goes through at normal speed and we do not have to store anything in LEON himself, that should be just enough.”
“Great,” I said. Enough for what? I wondered. To create a new master race of all-knowing nonorganic superbeings? Well, at least then I’ll have someone to talk to. Yep, in the final showdown between man and machine, I know which side
I’ll
be on—
“But I do not think it will ever surpass a human player,” he said. “Even if LEON becomes as large, computationally, as a human brain—even if he becomes as smart as a human brain—this does not mean he will be as intuitive as a human brain.”
The Sacrifice Game was like Go, and unlike chess, in that people could still play it much better than computers. A low-intermediate human player can still beat the world’s best Go program. And Go’s a very describable game, close to what programmers call a clean environment. The Sacrifice Game’s a lot more anecdotal, more connected to the world, so it’s at least a few million times messier.
“Well, don’t sell yourself short,” I said, “at least, not to any grant committees—”
“They guess that already,” he said. “That is why we have so . . . gone corporate. At any rate, at this stage LEON is primarily of value as an assistant.” He led me over to a bank of OLED monitors. “It helps improve the performance of novice adders. Like advanced chess.” That is, what chess players call it when they play in consultation with two computers. I nodded.
He sat. I sat.
“We are working with five student players,” he said. “Two of them learned the Game in Maya communities, and the others have trained here. One of them is very promising. He was not an adder before, though.” I waited for him to say “Still, he cannot hold a candle to you, you ace,” but he didn’t. Instead he showed me some charts and pointed out where the spikes were on what, for want of an elegant term, we’d called the “worldwide event space.” Basically, it confirmed that the Game did best at guessing what groups of people will do in crisis situations. “This is, of course, still very useful,” Taro said, “and over time it could be immensely profitable.” But it wasn’t the sort of prediction his backers wanted. For instance, it didn’t do a good job of predicting the markets per se, but just what people will do in the markets. You’d think this would be the same thing, because markets depend on psychology. But in fact there are still all these nonhuman factors going on in market fluctuations, too, industrial lag, capital flow, weather, and on and on, and getting that stuff together with the psychology requires interpretation. It’s one of those things that is very hard, or maybe impossible, to teach a computer.
So Taro was having roughly the same problems I was . . . but still, I thought . . . hmm. Suppose their simulated trades average, say, 0.02 percent over industry standard, then that’s still enough for a company that size to make a few million a minute. These days, even less of an edge could turn whoever had it into a market-devouring monster. The Warren Group could be on their way to being the richest company in the world. Although you’d think they’d be bigger already. Maybe they’re just spending a lot more than they’re reporting. Which might also explain why they’re being so secretive about the Game thing. They’d be bragging about their investment results all over the place unless there were some specific reason not to. People don’t dismiss game studies out of hand anymore. If anything, they’re all trying to get a piece of it. Everybody wants to hire the next Johnny von Neumann.
Or maybe they don’t want to manage other people’s money, they want to grow their own. Maybe Lindsay Warren and some of the board members want to buy back the public shares before any word gets out. Or maybe they’re afraid that if the government finds out they have something militarily interesting, they’ll take them over. Maybe that’s even something to be a little uneasy about, isn’t it? Suppose Warren or somebody else does take the Game to the next level, then what? Maybe they’re going to end up owning everything and just take over the world? It’s like if Taro’d been running the Manhattan Project, except instead of working for the War Department he was sponsored by Marvel.
Maybe I should just post whatever I know about the Game. Maybe even later today. I’d been thinking about doing it for a while and I had most of it written up. Then at least everybody’d have it. I’d kept putting it off because—well, a few reasons. I felt like I hadn’t figured it all out yet. It was still tough to learn and harder to master. Also, I had a few things I wanted to take care of with it myself before I attracted any attention. Well, frankly—I wasn’t going to mention this, but maybe I should level with you, now that we know each other a little better—the truth is I was saving up to sponsor a blind-contract hit on García-Torres. It’s not an easy thing to do these days, since the people you hire tend to turn you in even if they actually do the job. Still, I thought . . . but still, the other thing was, it wasn’t even clear that putting the Game out in the world would be the best thing. Maybe it would be like with nukes; it’s bad enough that some crook politicians have them, but it’s still better than giving one to every nut on the planet. Hmm, mmm, mmm . . .