Blasphemy (22 page)

After they’d gone, Russ hung up a notice that clothes day had been canceled and climbed into his pickup. He looked at the gauge: eighth of a tank, not enough gas to get up the mesa and back. Fishing out his wallet, he found three dollars. He already owed a couple hundred dollars at the filling station in Blue Gap and almost as much at Rough Rock. He’d have to pray he could make it to Piñon and fill up there, hoping they’d extend him credit. He was pretty sure they would—Navajos always let you borrow money.

It made no sense to go over to Isabella during the day—they’d see him. He would drive over after sunset, hide his pickup behind Nakai Rock, and poke around in the dark. In the meantime, he might be able to pick up some more information in Piñon about the suicide up on the mesa.

He took a deep, satisfying breath. God had finally called him. Gregory North Hazelius, that bile-spewing Christ hater, had to be stopped.

FORD, ENSCONCED IN AN OLD LEATHER chair in the corner of the rec room, watched as the rest of the team arrived from the Bunker, exhausted and demoralized. The first rays of the sun angled down from the horizon and blasted in through the building’s eastern windows, filling the room with a golden light. People sank silently down into chairs, their eyes unfocused. Hazelius was the last to enter. He went to the fireplace and lit the kindling beneath a prelaid fire. Then he, too, sank into a chair.

For a while they sat in silence, the only sound the crackling of the fire. Finally Hazelius rose slowly to his feet. All eyes turned to him. He looked from person to person, his blue eyes rimmed with the pink of fatigue, his lips white with tension. “I have a plan.”

This announcement was greeted with silence. A sap pocket burst in a log, causing everyone to jump.

“Tomorrow, at noon, we ramp up for another run,” Hazelius continued, “at one hundred percent power. Here’s the important thing:
we stick with the run until we’ve traced the slag code to its source
.”

Ken Dolby took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. “Look, Gregory, you almost wrecked my machine. I can’t let that happen again.”

Hazelius bowed his head. “Ken, I owe you an apology. I know I push too hard sometimes. I was angry and frustrated. I acted like a madman. Forgive me.” He offered his hand.

After a moment Dolby took it.

“Friends?”

“Okay, sure,” said Dolby. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m not going to allow any more runs at one hundred percent power until we fix the hacker problem.”

“And how do you propose we fix the problem without runs at one hundred percent?”

“Maybe the time has come to admit failure and report this back to Washington. Let them handle it.”

A long silence followed, until Hazelius said, “Anyone else have an opinion?”

Melissa Corcoran turned to Dolby. “Ken, if we admit failure now, we’ll be flushing our careers down the toilet. I don’t know about the rest of you, but this was the chance of a lifetime for me. No way in hell am I going to let it go.”

“Any other thoughts?” asked Hazelius.

Rae Chen stood up, her diminutive form hardly taller than those who were sitting. But the formal gesture of rising added weight. “I’ve got an opinion.”

Her black eyes circled the table.

“I grew up in the back of a Chinese restaurant in Culver City, California. My mother worked herself half to death to send me to college and graduate school. She’s proud of me because I made it in this country. And now I’m here. The whole world’s watching us.” Her voice began to break. “I’d rather die than give up. That’s what I have to say.
I’d rather die
. ”

She sat down abruptly.

Into the uncomfortable silence, Wardlaw spoke. “I know how things work at the DOE. If we report this now, we’ll be charged with a cover-up. There could be criminal charges.”

“Criminal charges?” said Innes from the back of the room. “For God’s sake, Tony, let’s not be absurd.”

“I’m quite serious.”

“That’s sheer alarmism.” Innes’s pale face belied his dismissive tone. His eyes darted around the table. “And even if it were true, I’m only the team psychologist. I had nothing to do with the decision to withhold information.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t report it either,” said Wardlaw, narrowing his eyes. “Don’t kid yourself, you’ll be in the dock with the rest of us.”

The twittering of birds came in through the silence.

“Anyone in agreement with Ken?” Hazelius asked finally. “That we throw in the towel and report the problem to Washington?”

No one was in agreement.

Dolby looked around. “Think of the
risk
!” he cried. “We could wreck Isabella! We can’t just power up Isabella and run it blind!”

“That’s right, Ken,” said Hazelius. “My plan takes that into account. Would you like to hear it?”

“Hearing isn’t agreeing,” said Dolby.

“Understood. As you know, the Isabella project facilities are run by three state-of-the-art IBM p5 595 servers. You specked them out yourself, Ken. They control telecommunications, e-mail, the LAN, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s computational overkill—those servers are powerful enough to run the Pentagon. My idea is, let’s reconfigure them as a backup system to Isabella.” He turned to Rae Chen. “Possible?”

“I think so.” She glanced at Edelstein. “Alan, what do you think?”

He nodded slowly.

“Just how do you propose doing this?” Dolby asked.

“The biggest problem is the firewall,” Chen said. “We’ll have to disable all links to the outside. Including telecommunications. Our landlines and cell phones would go down. Then we gang the servers, link them directly to Isabella. It’s doable.”

“No outside communications at all?”

“None, as long as Isabella is engaged. The firewall’s unbreakable. If the software running Isabella senses any link to the outside, it shuts down for security purposes. That’s why we have to cut all communications.”

“Ken?”

Dolby drummed his fingers on the table and frowned.

Hazelius looked around the room. “Anyone else?” His eye fell on Kate Mercer, who was sitting in the back, disengaged from the discussion. “Kate? Any thoughts?”

Silence.

“Kate? Are you all right?”

Her voice was barely audible. “It
knew
.”

More silence. Then Corcoran said briskly, “Well, that may not be as amazing as it seems. Obviously we’re dealing with an Eliza-like program—anyone remember Eliza?”

“That old FORTRAN program back in the eighties, talked to you like a psychoanalyst?” said Cecchini.

“That’s the one,” said Corcoran. “The program was simple—it turned everything you said into another question. You’d type,
My mother hates me
, and Eliza would answer,
Why do you say your mother hates you
? A little programming went a long way.”

“This was no Eliza,” said Kate. “It
knew
what I was thinking.”

“It’s actually quite elementary,” said Melissa, giving her a breezy, superior look. “The hacker who created this logic bomb knows we’re a bunch of egghead scientists, right? He knows we don’t think like ordinary people. So when you said, ‘I’m thinking of a number between one and ten,’ the hacker had already anticipated someone asking a question like that. He figured you wouldn’t necessarily be thinking of a whole number or even a rational number—no, he assumed you’d be thinking of
all
the numbers between one and ten. And what’s the most interesting number between one and ten? Either pi or
e
. But of the two,
e
is the more mysterious.” She looked around brightly.

“How about the next one it got?”

“Same rule applies. What’s by
far
the weirdest frigging number between zero and one? Easy: Chaitin’s halting-probability number—Omega. Right, Alan?”

Alan Edelstein dipped his head.

Melissa turned a radiant smile on Kate. “See?”

“Bullshit.”

“Oh, so you think we’re talking to God?”

“Don’t be an ass,” Kate said irritably. “All I’m saying is, it
knew
.”

Rae Chen spoke up. “Look, I don’t want to get all woo-woo here, but I traced that output right into the center of CZero. It was
not
coming from a detector or from any hardware. It was coming out of that weird data cloud inside the tear in space-time at CZero.”

“Rae,” said Hazelius, “you
know
that can’t be true.”

“I’m telling you what I saw. That data cloud was spewing out binary code directly into the detectors. On top of that there was an energy surplus—more energy was coming out of CZero than was being pumped in. The calculation’s right here.” She pushed a folder of papers in Hazelius’s direction.

“Impossible. Can’t happen.”

“Yeah, well then
you
run the calculations.” Chen spread her hands.

“That’s why we need to do this again,” said Hazelius, “not under pressure, not under some deadline. We need to do another run that’ll give Rae all the time she needs to
really
track down that logic bomb.”

Edelstein spoke. “I was tied up at Console Three during the exchange. Does anyone have a transcript? I’d like to read what the malware actually out-putted.”

“What does it matter?” Hazelius said.

Edelstein shrugged. “Just curious.”

Hazelius looked around. “Anyone keep a record?”

“I’ve got it somewhere,” said Chen. “It printed out with the data dump.” She shuffled through some papers, pulled one out. Hazelius took it.

“Read it out loud,” said St. Vincent. “I didn’t catch most of it either.”

“Me neither,” said Thibodeaux. The others concurred.

Hazelius cleared his throat and read in a matter-of-fact tone:

Greetings

Greetings to you, too
.

I am glad to be speaking to you
.

Glad to be speaking to you, too. Who are you?

For lack of a better word, I am God
.

Here Hazelius paused. “When I get my hands on the son of a bitch who dropped this logic bomb into the system, I’m going to rip his nuts off.”

Thibodeaux laughed nervously.

“How do you know it wasn’t a woman?” asked Corcoran.

After a moment, Hazelius continued.

If you’re really God, then prove it
.

We don’t have much time for proofs
.

I’m thinking of a number between one and ten. What is it?

You are thinking of the transcendental numbere
.

Now I’m thinking of a number between zero and one
.

Chaitin’s number: Omega
.

If you’re God, then what’s the purpose of existence?

I don’t know the ultimate purpose
.

That’s a fine thing, a god who doesn’t know the purpose of existence.

If I knew, existence would be pointless
.

How so?

If the end of the universe was present in its beginning—if we are merely in the middle of the deterministic unfolding of a set of initial conditions—then the universe would be a pointless exercise
.

Explain
.

If you’re at your destination, why make the journey? If you know the answer, why ask the question? That is why the future is—and must be—profoundly hidden, even from God. Otherwise, life would have no meaning
.

That’s a metaphysical argument, not a physical argument
.

The physical argument is that no part of the universe can calculate things faster than the universe itself. The universe is “predicting the future” as fast as it can
.

What is the universe? Who are we? What are we doing here?

The universe is one vast, irreducible, ongoing computation, which is working toward a state that I do not and cannot know. The purpose of existence is to reach that final state. But that final state is a mystery to me, as it must be, for if I knew the answer, what would be the point of it all?

What do you mean by computation? We’re all inside a computer?

By computation I mean thinking. All of existence, everything that happens—a falling leaf, a wave upon the beach, the collapse of a star—it is all just me, thinking
.

What are you thinking?

Hazelius lowered the paper. “And that’s all she wrote.”

Edelstein murmured, “That is truly extraordinary.”

“It strikes me as being a lot of New Age claptrap,” said Innes. “
It is all just me, thinking
. I find the sentiments to be puerile. They are just what you might expect from a socially underdeveloped computer hacker.”

“You think so?” Edelstein said.

“I certainly do.”

“Then may I point out that this malware has—at least so far—passed the Turing test?”

“The Turing test?”

Edelstein squinted at him. “Surely you’re aware of it.”

“I apologize for being a mere psychologist.”

“The seminal paper on the Turing test was published in the psychological journal
Mind
.”

Innes’s face shifted into professional blandness. “Perhaps you should consider, Alan, why it is that you feel such a strong need for self-validation.”

“Turing,” said Edelstein, “was one of the great geniuses of the twentieth century. He invented the idea of the computer back in the thirties. During World War Two he cracked Germany’s Enigma code. After the war, he was horribly mistreated for being a homosexual and committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple.”

Innes frowned. “A seriously unstable individual.”

“You’re saying homosexuals are unstable?”

“No, not at all, of course not,” Innes said hastily. “I was referring to his method of suicide.”

“Turing saved England from the Nazis—the British would have lost the war otherwise—and England thanked him with ruthless persecution. Under the circumstances, I should think suicide would not be . . .
illogical
. As for his method, it was clean, efficient, and eloquent in its symbolism.”

Innes’s face flushed. “I’m sure we would all appreciate it, Alan, if you would get to the point.”