Authors: Lincoln Child
Silver spoke quietly, but his voice carried the conviction of a preacher at a camp meeting.
“I guess, since we’re standing here atop your private skyscraper, you succeeded,” Lash replied.
Silver smiled again. “For years I was stymied. It seemed I could take machine learning only so far and no farther. It turned out I was just too impatient. The program
was
learning, only very slowly in the beginning. And I needed more horsepower than the old mainframes I could afford in those days. Suddenly, computers got cheaper. And then came the ARPAnet. That’s when her learning really accelerated.” He shook his head. “I’ll never forget watching as she made her first forays over the ’Net, searching—without any help from me—for answers to a problem set. I think she was as proud as I was.”
“Proud,” Lash repeated. “Do you mean to say that it’s conscious? Self-aware?”
“She’s definitely self-aware. Whether she’s conscious or not gets into a philosophical area I’m not prepared to address.”
“But she
is
self-aware. So what, exactly, is she aware of? She knows she’s a computer, that she’s different. Right?”
Silver shook his head. “I never added any module of code to that effect.”
“What?” Lash said in surprise.
“Why should she think she’s any different than us?”
“I just assumed—”
“Does a child, no matter how precocious, ever doubt the reality of its existence? Do
you
?”
Lash shook his head. “But we’re talking about software and hardware here. That sounds like a false syllogism to me.”
“There’s no such thing in AI. Who’s to say when programming stops and consciousness begins? A famous scientist once referred to humans as ‘meat machines.’ Are we the better for it? Besides, there’s no test you can take to prove
you’re
not a program, wandering around in cyberspace. What’s your proof?”
Silver had been speaking with a passion Lash hadn’t seen before. Suddenly he stopped. “Sorry,” he said, laughing shyly. “I guess I think about these things a lot more than I talk about them. Anyway, back to Liza’s architecture. She employs a very advanced form of a neural network—a computer architecture based on how the human brain works. Regular computers are constrained to two dimensions. But a neural net is arranged in three: rings inside rings inside rings. So you can move data in an almost infinite number of directions, not just along a single circuit.” Silver paused. “It’s a lot more complicated than that, of course. To ramp up her problem-solving capability, I employed swarm intelligence. Large functions are broken up into tiny, discrete data agents. That’s what allows her to solve such profound challenges, so quickly.”
“Does she know we’re here?”
Silver nodded toward a video monitor set high in one wall. “Yes. But her processing isn’t currently focused on us.”
“Earlier, you said you needed to access Liza directly for complicated work. Such as?”
“A variety of things. She runs scenarios, for example, that I monitor.”
“What kinds of scenarios?”
“All kinds. Problem-solving. Role-playing. Survival games. Things that stimulate creative thinking.” Silver hesitated. “I also use direct access for more difficult, personal tasks like software updates. But it would probably be easier just to show you.”
He walked across the room, slid open the Plexiglas panel, and took a seat in the sculpted chair. Lash watched as he fixed electrodes to his temples. A small keypad and stylus were set into one arm of the chair; a hat switch was mounted on the other. Reaching overhead, Silver pulled down a flat panel monitor, fixed to a telescoping arm. His left hand began moving over the keypad.
“What are you doing?” Lash asked.
“Getting her attention.” Silver’s hand fell away from the keypad and fixed the lavalier mike to his shirt collar.
Just then, Lash heard a voice.
“Richard,” it said.
It was a woman’s voice, low and without accent, and it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It was as if the room itself was speaking.
“Liza,” Silver replied. “What is your current state?”
“Ninety-eight point seven two seven percent operational. Current processes are at eighty-one point four percent of multithreaded capacity. Thank you for asking.”
The voice was calm, almost serene, with the faintest trace of digital artifacting. Lash had a strange sense of déjà vu, as if he’d heard the voice before, somewhere. Perhaps in dreams.
“Who is with you?” the voice asked. Lash noticed that the question was articulated properly, with a faint emphasis on the preposition. He thought he even detected an undercurrent of curiosity. He glanced a little uneasily up at the video camera.
“This is Christopher Lash.”
“Christopher,” the voice repeated, as if tasting the name.
“Liza, I have a special process I would like you to run.” Lash noticed that when Silver addressed the computer, he spoke slowly and with careful enunciation, without contractions of any kind.
“Very well, Richard.”
“Do you remember the data interrogatory I asked you to run forty-eight hours ago?”
“If you mean the statistical deviance interrogatory, my dataset has not been corrupted.”
Silver covered the mike and turned to Lash. “She misinterpreted ‘do you remember.’ Even now, I sometimes forget how literal-minded she is.”
He turned back. “I need you to run a similar interrogatory against external agents. The arguments are the same: data crossover with the four subjects.”
“Subject Schwartz, Subject Thorpe, Subject Torvald, Subject Wilner.”
“That is correct.”
“What is the scope of the interrogatory?”
“United States citizens, ages fifteen to seventy, with access to both target locations on the stated dates.”
“The data-gathering parameters?”
“All available sources.”
“And the priority of this process?”
“Highest priority, except for criticals. It is vital we find the solution.”
“Very well, Richard.”
“Can you give me an estimated processing window?”
“To within eleven-percent accuracy. Seventy-four hours, fifty-three minutes, nine seconds. Approximately eight hundred trillion five hundred billion machine cycles.”
“Thank you, Liza.”
“Is there anything else?”
“No.”
“I will begin the expanded interrogatory now. Thank you for speaking with me, Richard.”
As Silver removed the microphone and reached again for the keypad, the disembodied voice spoke again. “It was nice meeting you, Christopher Lash.”
“A pleasure,” Lash murmured. Hearing this voice speak to him, watching the interaction between Silver and his computer, was both fascinating and a little unsettling.
Silver plucked the electrodes from his temples, put them aside, and got out of the chair. “You said you’d go to the police if you thought it would help. I’ve just done something better. I’ve instructed Liza to search the entire country for a possible suspect match.”
“The entire
country
? Is that possible?”
“For Eden, it’s possible.” Silver swayed, recovered. “Sorry. Sessions with Liza, even brief ones, can be a little draining.”
“How so?”
Silver smiled. “In movies people talk to computers, and they talk glibly back. Maybe it will be that way in another decade. Right now, it’s hard work. As much a mental exercise as a verbal one.”
“Those electroencephalogram sensors you wore?”
“Think of biofeedback. The frequency and amplitude of beta or theta waves can speak a lot more distinctly than words. Early on, when I was having troubles with her language comprehension, I used the EEG as a shortcut. It required a great deal of concentration, but there was no confusion over dual meanings, homophones, nuances of intent. Now, it’s too deeply buried in her legacy code to change easily.”
“So only you can communicate with her directly?”
“It’s theoretically possible for others to do so, too, with the proper concentration and training. There’s just been no need.”
“Perhaps not,” Lash said. “If I’d built something this marvelous, I’d want to share it with others. Like-minded scientists who could build on what you pioneered.”
“That will come. So many other enhancements seem to occupy my time. And it’s a non-trivial task. We can discuss the details some other time, if you’re interested.”
He stepped forward, put a hand on Lash’s shoulder. “I know how hard it’s been on you. It hasn’t been easy for me, either. But we’ve come this far, done this much. I need you to stick with it just a little longer. Maybe it
is
just a freakish tragedy after all, two double suicides. Maybe we’ll have a quiet weekend. I realize it’s hell not knowing. But we have to trust Liza now. Okay?”
Lash remained silent a moment. “That match Eden found for me. It’s on the level? No mistakes?”
“The only mistake was sending your avatar to the Tank in the first place. The matching process itself would work for you as it does for everybody else. The woman would be perfectly suited to you in every way.”
The dim light, the whispered hum of machinery, gave the room a dreamlike, almost spectral air. Half a dozen images flitted through Lash’s head. The look on his ex-wife’s face, that day in the blind at the Audubon Center when they separated. Tara Stapleton’s expression at the bar in Grand Central when she told him of her own dilemma. The face of Lewis Thorpe, staring at him out of the Flagstaff television screen.
He sighed. “Very well. I’ll stay on a few more days. On one condition.”
“Name it.”
“That you don’t cancel my dinner with Diana Mirren.”
Silver pressed Lash’s shoulder for a moment. “Good man.” He smiled again, briefly; but when the smile faded, he looked just as tired as Lash felt.
TWENTY-NINE
S
eventy-five hours,” Tara said. “That means Liza won’t have an answer until Monday afternoon.”
Lash nodded. He’d summarized his talk with Silver, described in detail how the man communicated with Liza. Throughout, Tara was fascinated—until she heard how long the extended search would take.
“So what are we supposed to do until then?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“I do. We wait.” Tara raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Shit.”
Lash looked around the room. In size, Tara Stapleton’s thirty-fifth-floor office wasn’t that different from his own temporary space. It had the same conference table, same desk, same shelving. There were a few distinctly feminine touches: half a dozen leafy plants that appeared to thrive on the artificial light, a paisley sachet of potpourri hanging from the desk lamp by a red ribbon. Three identical computer workstations were lined up behind the desk. But the most distinctive feature of the office was a large fiberglass surfboard leaning against a far wall, badly scored and pitted, the stripe along its length faded by salt and sun. Bumper stickers with legends like “Live to surf, surf to live” and “Hang ten off a log!” were fixed on the wall behind it. Postcards from famous surfing beaches—Lennox Head, Australia; Pipeline, Hawaii; Potovil Point, Sri Lanka—were taped in a row along the upper edge of the bookshelf.
“Must have had a hell of a time getting that in here,” Lash said, nodding at the surfboard.
Tara flashed one of her rare smiles. “I spent my first couple of months outside the Wall, auditing security procedures. I brought in my old board to remind me there was a world out there beyond New York City. So I wouldn’t forget what I’d rather be doing. Audit finished, I got promoted, transferred inside. They wouldn’t let me take the board. I was ripshit.” She shook her head at the memory. “Then it appeared in my office doorway one day. Happy first anniversary, courtesy of Edwin Mauchly and Eden.”
“Knowing Mauchly, after having been scanned, probed, and analyzed six ways from Sunday.”
“Probably.”
Lash glanced at the clutch of emerald-green postcards. A question had formed in his mind—a question Tara could probably answer better than anybody.
He leaned toward the desk. “Tara, listen. Remember that drink we had at Sebastian’s? What you told me about your getting the nod?”
Immediately, he felt her grow more reserved.
“I need to know something. Is there any chance that an Eden candidate who gets turned down after testing might end up getting processed anyway? Go through data-gathering, surveillance—the works—and ultimately end up in the Tank? Getting matched?”
“You mean, like a mistake? Obsoletes somehow making their way through? Impossible.”
“Why?”
“There are redundant checks. It’s like everything else with the system. We don’t take any chance that a client, even a would-be client, could suffer embarrassment from sloppy data handling.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s never happened.”
“It happened yesterday.” And in response to Tara’s disbelieving look, he handed her the letter he’d found waiting outside his front door.
She read it, paling visibly. “Tavern on the Green.”
“I was rejected as an applicant. And pretty definitively. So how could this have happened?”
“I have no idea.”
“Could somebody within Eden have doctored my forms, guiding them through instead of shunting them toward the discard pile?”
“Nobody here does anything without half a dozen others seeing it.”
“Nobody?”
Hearing the tone of his voice, Tara looked at him closely. “It would have to be somebody very highly placed, somebody with world-class access. Me, for example. Or a grunt like Handerling who’d somehow hacked the system.” She paused. “But why would anybody do such a thing?”
“That was my next question.”
There was a silence. Tara folded the letter and handed it back across the table.
“I don’t know how this happened. But I’m very, very sorry, Dr. Lash. We’ll investigate immediately, of course.”
“You’re sorry. Silver’s sorry. Why is everybody so sorry?”
Tara looked astonished. “You mean—?”
“That’s right. Tomorrow night, I’m stepping out.”
“But I don’t understand—” The flow of words stopped.
I know you don’t
, Lash thought.