A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  “Ugh,” Kelly said.

  “Ugh indeed. That’s if they’re only slightly annoyed. If they’re really annoyed, then…” He typed again and all the remaining black triangles took off and made their way toward target American cities. More pops and then ugly gray blots expanding over New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

  “Jesus.” Kelly was white.

  “Not so bad though, since they’ve only got six at the most. Six nuclear explosions on one continent would still leave the possibility of some life in the rest of the world. I think. That’s unless we retaliate, of course. We don’t know exactly who these ‘other parties’ are, so we can only retaliate in a more or less general way against countries that have irritated us in the past.” He was typing again. Blue triangles began lifting off locations around the U.S. and heading in all directions.

  “Stop…”

  Ed made the display fade to a calm, undulating pattern, giving the effect of an undersea scene. A little cartoon fish swam in from one side. Kelly backed away from the display, still ashen.

  Loren looked up from his console on the far side of the board. “Ready for Caribbean Area again, whenever you are.” Homer and Sonia came over to watch the board. “Starting.”

  They looked on in silence as the simulation played out a sequence of moves and counter moves. The U.S. actions were entered from a database of hypotheses, some proposed by Washington and others worked up by the Homer and his staff. The likely responses were computed by Simula-7. Homer watched the result, shaking his head. Body counts and capital losses and gains were summed up in separate displays on the plasma board. At the end he said, “Lucky it isn’t real.” It was what he always said. The laser printers began to print off the most recent scenario and its outcome.

  The plasma display board was not the only fabulous toy supplied by the Pentagon. There was also SHIELA, an array computer with almost limitless capacity. Simulators are notoriously compute-hungry programs, and Simula was particularly so. It would have taken hours to run a single scenario on any normal computer. It took less than a minute for SHIELA. The largest computer on earth runs at a speed of approximately a few thousand teraFLOPS, or Trillions of Floating-point Operations Per Second. SHIELA’s capacity was thousands of times greater, something more than 850 petaFLOPS. It was not the largest computer on earth because it was not on earth at all, but in space. Its supercooled circuits needed to run at temperatures below 15 degrees Kelvin, temperatures that would have been hard to maintain anywhere except in space.

  The Pentagon had spent more than $5 billion on SHIELA. It was originally funded as part of the strategic missile shield project (hence the name, short for SHIELd Array), since discontinued by an act of Congress. So virtually all 850 PetaFLOPS of its capacity were available by the time the Simula projects were begun. Homer requested use of SHIELA for his staff. Simula-6 and Simula-7 were now resident and running, some 120 miles above them in geosynchronous orbit. The local computers in Clark Hall were used only to access SHIELA and for backup and printing.

  It took another two hours to run through the rest of the Caribbean Area hypothesis sets. Kelly came back in near the end, yawning, and looked at the board. “How’s our side doing?” she asked.

  Homer put his arm around her shoulder. “Lucky it’s not real.”

  “That’s nice, anyway.” She yawned again.

  “Off to sleep with you, young lady. Go home for a change. A night in your own bed.”

  Kelly shook her head. “I’ll just go in on the couch in your office, Homer. I can sleep like a log in there. In case you need me later.”

  Loren popped up from his console. “Don’t go yet, Kelly. You have to reconfigure for us. Kick out all the low priority stuff. We’re going to need a lot more memory to run the Middle East before we go.”

  “OK, Loren.” She sat down at her own position and typed for a while, sleepily. Then she waved good night on her way back to Homer’s office.

  When the strategic simulations were done each night, the team would turn to what they now called the “Particle Wars,” the search for a breakthrough in the Peculiar Motion synthesis. Sonia and Homer had been working separately for the last few weeks in an empty classroom down the corridor. Loren and Ed stayed in the computer room by the plasma display. They had written a program to manage the display as a huge blackboard. SHIELA was idle when the simulations weren’t running, so she had plenty of capacity to display a few equations for them. It amused them to make use of a multi-billion dollar blackboard.

  The stumbling block for most of the last month was a single field equation, now displayed on the board before them. Edward was typing at his console. With a few keystrokes, he modified the display so it showed the same equation in old English script. Then he wrote a short command set to change the color of the equation’s symbols over time so that they varied through the whole spectrum of colors. The troublesome formulation glowed at them red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet and back to red. Then he made the little cartoon fish appear and swim back and forth under the equation. He was typing again, working on a further variation. Loren was not having much more success keeping his mind on the problem.

  “Why does Sonia keep talking about ‘tit-for-tat?’” he asked Edward. “What does that mean to Simula-7?” His thoughts had strayed back to the war game project.

  “It comes from The Prisoners’ Dilemma, a problem in logic.”

  “I know The Prisoners’ Dilemma. We had it in our first year Predicate Logic.”

  “Well, think how the problem goes and you’ll see the parallel. The two captured prisoners have got to decide what to do without communicating with each other. If one stays loyal while the other one betrays him, the betrayer goes free. If both betray, they both stay in jail forever. And if each is loyal to the other, they both get a relatively light sentence. On average, they are better off to cooperate, but in a given instance it is better to betray your partner if you think he will stay loyal.”

  “I know all that.”

  “The prisoners are like the power groups in our war game, where ‘betrayal’ is replaced with aggression, and ‘loyalty’ by non-aggression. If one party is aggressive while the other is being peaceful, advantage to the aggressor. That was the Japanese and the Americans in 1941. Only, the game isn’t over after one play; there are many rounds of decisions, many opportunities to betray. Mutual cooperation is best on the average, but what do you do to make sure the other side doesn’t take advantage of you when you’re being the good guy?”

  “I give up.”

  “When Axelrod at the University of Michigan simulated the multiple-round Prisoners problem back in the eighties, he found there is a simple strategy to train your adversary to cooperate. Each time an adversary betrays you, you punish him by betraying him the next time, that’s ‘tit-for-tat.’ You establish the pattern. If there is a whole sequence of decisions, you will come out ahead in the long run by punishing each betrayal immediately and rewarding cooperation. You do on the next round whatever your adversary did on the last round. There is no better strategy of all the ones Axelrod tried.”

  “And Sonia thinks the Cubans are training us by playing ‘tit-for-tat?’”

  “Not quite. It’s Simula-7 that thinks that. It has observed past interactions and formed an abstraction which it entered into its patterns database, Pattern 118. Sonia has given it the name, ‘tit-for-tat.’ The Cubans can’t confront us directly because they are too weak, but they’re establishing a pattern that each time we ‘betray’ them, each time we do something they don’t like, we get punished. They get one of their proxy groups to do it for them, Gloria Verde or one of the others.”

  “But how do we know that’s what they’re doing? It seems preposterous that they would be ‘training’ us like that.”

  “Of course we don’t know it for sure. But it’s a hypothesis that explains the actions they have actually taken. Simula-7 has tuned itself by forming abstractions from observed ac
tions. It has detected a pattern of use of proxy terrorists linked to actions by our side. That was a new abstraction for its database. Sonia just gave it a name. But it was Simula-7 that came up with it.”

  They had all observed the tuning process over the last six months as the simulation digested past patterns and formulated its own abstractions, now stored in the SHIELA memory banks. But as the simulation ‘matured,’ their own abilities to explain what was happening had fallen behind. The theory behind its abstraction-forming process was clear to them, but the specific abstractions it had formed were sometimes incomprehensible. The only proof that they were correct was that the simulation did indeed predict events and responses as they subsequently happened.

  Loren was shaking his head. “The amazing thing is that you and I and Sonia and Homer built this thing, and we didn’t know that the Cubans were acting out the Prisoners’ Dilemma. But Simula-7 did. How come it understood what the four of us, its creators, had missed?”

  “Who knows? We used to be smart enough to explain everything the simulation did. But it never stops maturing. It’s passing us by, Loren. We’ve created a Frankenstein.”

  “No way. SHIELA is too dumb. As big and powerful as she is, she still hasn’t got a thousandth the intellect of a common rabbit. She hasn’t got sufficient memory to be inexplicable to us.”

  “Rabbits use up most of their brain power trying to find food and make baby rabbits. SHIELA doesn’t ever get side-tracked like that. She may have less total brainpower, but it’s all focused on one thing. When she’s running Simula-7, it’s focused on learning what makes the strategic powers tick, how they think. And she’s fast. Her logic cycle is trillions of times faster than human brain activity. We certainly have enough intellect to understand any one of her abstractions, but not all of them. And we’re losing ground, she’s forming them so fast.”

  Sonia was just coming back in from her session with Homer. She looked at the display, at the fish moving back and forth under the equation. “I see you guys are having a productive session.”

  Edward looked up. “Thinking great philosophical thoughts, Sonia. Anyway, I guess it must be breakfast time. You can always tell it is when the B-team breaks up.”

  “Homer’s gone already. He’s fairly blue. Said we should eat without him.”

  She went over to the daybook and clipped a page of notes into it. Loren and Ed had nothing at all to insert. They got their coats on and waited for her. Their routine was to stop for breakfast at the cafeteria in Willard Straight Hall and bring each other up to date on what they had accomplished during the last few hours. Ed turned out the lights and they started down the stairs. “Oh shit,” said Loren. “I forgot to wake up Kelly. You go ahead, I’ll catch up.”

  He ran back up the stairs. Homer’s office was down the corridor past his own. There was a little anteroom to the office with a couch in it that each of them had used at one time or another to catch some sleep. Kelly was sprawled on the couch. He stopped for a moment before approaching. Her face was relaxed, smiling slightly. One hand was tucked under her cheek. Her skirt had ridden up while she slept so that her thighs were uncovered, silver colored in the filtered light from the hall. He leaned down to pull the garment back into place so she wouldn’t be embarrassed when he woke her.

  “Kelly. Come on Kelly.” Loren squeezed her hand. “Kelly.”

  “Mm.” She turned over, taking his hand in both of hers. Then she opened her eyes and sat up groggily. “Oh. I must have been deep asleep.”

  “You were.” Loren sat down on the side of the couch. She was a slow waker. If he left her now, he knew, she would drift back to sleep and still be here till noon. She had to be home to make breakfast for her little brother, Curtis. Kelly was his only family.

  “Time to go home, Kelly.”

  “I dreamed… Oh, Loren, I had the nicest dream. I dreamed that we all went away somewhere together. There was you and Homer and me and Sonia and Edward, of course. And Curtis. And instead of all these grim projects about war and everything, we were building something. Together. I don’t know what it was. Maybe a city.”

  He stayed by her side as she talked herself awake. He was listening to her, but only distractedly, wondering instead, as usual, what it was he found so disturbing about Kelly. He looked down at her lips as she spoke, passed his eyes over her long yellow hair. She was pretty, but it wasn’t prettiness alone that moved him. Perhaps it was sympathy. She was a brave little thing, struggling to be provider and parent to Curtis and keep herself afloat. Maybe it was that. He was starting to think of her as a new little sister.

  “I’d love to build something, Loren, wouldn’t you? A tangible structure, something lovely to look at. A creation that said, Kelly was here. Kelly and her friends made this castle or library or whatever…and the world is a better place because of it.”

  Back down the stairs and through the underpass to Baker Hall, hurrying to catch up with the others. It was raining again, it seemed always to be raining in the Ithaca springtime. Of course he had forgotten his umbrella. Loren cut through the arts quadrangle on the way to Willard Straight Hall, sticking to the north walkways because they had more tree cover. Up to the wide cafeteria on the second floor. He found Sonia and Ed at their usual table under the west windows. They had been joined there by Claymore Layton. Clay was dressed in hip boots, a camouflage vest with dozens of pockets and a cotton hat decorated with tied flies.

  “Hi, Claymore. Looks like you’ve been fishing.”

  “Nope.”

  “Going fishing?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh.”

  Claymore had brought his own breakfast from home, a bag of dried apricots and a thermos of tea. He munched and slurped contentedly, seeming oblivious to the others. Loren put his tray down at the end of the table and seated himself next to Sonia.

  “Edward’s telling Armitage stories,” she said. Loren frowned, trying to place the name.

  “My old boss at Johns Hopkins,” Edward filled him in. “Lamar Armitage.”

  “Special Attractor Theory, that Armitage?”

  “The very one. Head of the physics department at Johns Hopkins. Part big league physicist, part politician, part rascal.”

  “Edward worked for him before he came to Cornell.”

  “I was hired on at Johns Hopkins as ‘the nucleus of a major research effort in particle physics.’ That was the spiel. I swallowed it whole. He described our research project on the day of my interview in glorious terms. Then I was there for two years and we never talked about particle physics again. Too busy ‘turning tricks’ for the DoD.”

  “So it’s not only at Cornell?” Loren had a depressing image of researchers throughout the country detouring from their normal work to earn DoD funds.

  “Oh no, not only at Cornell. But Johns Hopkins was worse. Homer has accepted part-time defense work to get the Peculiar Motion project funded. Only here, at least we get to spend half our energy doing what we’re trained to do. Under Lamar it was different. He was building an empire. He measured his success by the number of bright young physicists he could hire for his department. He wasn’t bothered by the fact that those bright young physicists were spending all their time writing Missile Defense software. He would go ferreting around the corridors of the Pentagon, looking for more work so he could hire more talented researchers. On paper, we had the most exciting physics department ever assembled. Only we were all turning out programs instead of research. Two years of my life, down the drain.”

  “Not entirely. You got to write the SHIELA operating system. And it must have been a thrill to work with Armitage. What a mind.” Loren had been following Armitage’s work ever since his first year at Salamanca. “What was he like, Edward?”

  “A fraud. A lovely man in many ways, but an total fraud.” Edward’s expression as he spoke was less than severe, as though he retained a certain affection for his old mentor. “But he was so persuasive that you would find yourself buying on to one of his craz
y notions and never even realizing that it was outlandish. He was more of a salesman than a physicist. That was great when he was trying to get the Pentagon to cough up money for something we needed to do. But he wasn’t only a salesman when he was at the Pentagon, he was always a salesman. And he was so good at it that he would convince us and even convince himself sometimes. The truth was just raw material to him, something to be molded into a pleasing shape.”

  “A handy talent.”

  “His great hero was deBono…”

  Sonia looked up from her plate of fruit. “DeBono, who wrote Lateral Thinking?”

  “Right. And all those other books about mind games and creativity. Whenever we’d get stuck, Lamar would call us all together and read to us out of deBono. The thing that charmed him most was deBono’s concept of Po.”

  Sonia was nodding. “Po, the opposite of No,” she said. “I remember that.”

  Loren looked blank so Edward filled him in. “When some problem has you totally buffaloed, you just say ‘Po that.’ You wish the problem away; you sidestep it. And sometimes it helps because you pretend that it isn’t a problem or that you had some perfectly usable solution to it, and that lets you go on to explore ideas that lie beyond it, things that you would never have inquired into while you were stopped.”

  “Po the damn field equation,” Loren said, feeling again the frustration of the last few weeks.

  “Exactly.”

  Claymore was staring off into space, not obviously paying attention, but he did mutter, “Po.”