Blind Lake

by Robert Charles Wilson

  This final act of bloody interdiction was more than enough for the crowd. They watched the dead man, if you could call that headless bundle of exposed body parts a man, crumple to the ground. There was an absolute silence. Then screams, then sobs; then car doors slamming and kids wheeling their bikes around for a panicked trip back through the snowy dusk toward the lights of Blind Lake.

  Once the spectators had cleared out, it was easier for Shulgin to organize his security people. They weren’t trained for anything like this. They were bonded nightwatchmen, mostly, hired to keep drunks and juveniles out of delicate places. Some were retired veterans; most had no military experience. And to be honest, Ray thought, there was nothing much for them to do here, only establish a mobile cordon around the slowly-moving truck and prevent the few remaining civilians from getting in the way. But they did a presentable job of it.

  Within fifteen minutes of the events beyond the gate the black transport truck came to a stop inside the perimeter of Blind Lake.

  “It’s a delivery vehicle,” Elaine said to Chris. “It was designed to drop cargo and go home. See? The cab’s disengaging from the flat.”

  Chris watched almost indifferently. It was as if the attack on the fleeing automobile had been burned into his eyes. Out in the darkness the fire had already been reduced to smoldering embers in the wet snow. A couple of people had died here, and they had died, it seemed to Chris, in order to communicate a message to Blind Lake in the bluntest possible way. You may not pass. Your community has become a cage.

  The truck cab reversed direction, pulling itself and its sheath of armor away from the conventional aluminum cargo container shielded within. The cab kept moving, more quickly than it had arrived, back through the open gate along the road to Constance. When it reached the smoldering ruins of the automobile it pushed them out of its way, shoveled them onto the verge of the road like idle garbage.

  The gate began to swing closed.

  Smooth as silk, Chris thought. Except for the deaths.

  The cargo container remained behind. The overworked security detail hurried to surround it…not that anyone seemed anxious to get close.

  Chris and Elaine circled back for a better view. The rear of the container was held closed by a simple lever. There was some dialogue between Ray Scutter and the man Elaine had identified as the Lake’s security chief. At last the security man stepped through the cordon and pulled down the lever decisively. The container’s door swung open.

  A half-dozen of his men played flashlight over the contents. The container was stacked high with cardboard boxes. Chris was able to read some of the printing on the boxes.

  Kellogg’s. Seabury Farm. Lombardi Produce.

  “Groceries!” Elaine said.

  We’re going to be here awhile, Chris thought.

  Part Two

  Polished Mirrors of Floating Mercury

  Having an intelligence of a vastly different

  order than that of Man, the

  decapods were unable to conceive the

  fact that an Earth-man was a thinking

  entity. Possibly to them Man was no

  more than a new type of animal; his

  buildings and industry having

  impressed them no more than the community

  life of an ant impresses the average

  man—aside from his wonder at the

  analogy of that life to his own.

  —Leslie Frances Stone, “The Human

  Pets of Mars,” 1936

  Ten

  “Chris Carmody? What’d you do, walk here? Brush off that snow and come in. I’m Charlie Grogan.”

  Charlie Grogan, chief engineer at Eyeball Alley, was a big man, more robust than fat, and he put out a beefy hand for Chris to shake. Full head of hair, gone white at the temples. Confident but not aggressive. “Actually,” Chris said, “yeah, I did walk here.”

  “No car?”

  No car, and he had arrived in Blind Lake without winter clothes. Even this unlined jacket was borrowed. The snow tended to get down the collar.

  “When you work in a building without windows,” Grogan said, “you learn to pick up clues about the weather outside. Are we still this side of a blizzard?”

  “It’s coming down pretty good.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you know, December, you have to expect a little snow, this part of the country. We were lucky to get through Thanksgiving with only a couple of inches. Hang your coat over there. Take off those shoes, too. We got these little rubber slippers, grab a pair off the shelf. That thing you’re wearing, is that a voice recorder?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “So the interview’s already started?”

  “Unless you tell me to turn it off.”

  “No, I guess that’s what we’re here for. I was afraid you wanted to talk about the quarantine—I don’t know any more about it than anyone else. But Ari Weingart tells me you’re working on a book.”

  “A long magazine article. Maybe a book. Depending.”

  “Depending on whether we’re ever allowed outside again?”

  “That, and whether there’s still an audience to read it.”

  “It’s like playing let’s-pretend, isn’t it? Pretend we still live in a sane world. Pretend we have useful jobs to do.”

  “Call it an act of faith,” Chris said.

  “What I’m prepared to do—my act of faith, I guess—is show you around the Alley and talk about its history. That’s what you want?”

  “That’s what I want, Mr. Grogan.”

  “Call me Charlie. You already wrote a book, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that. Book about Ted Galliano, that biologist. Some people say it was character assassination.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “No, and no offense, but I don’t want to. I was introduced to Galliano at a conference on bioquantum computing. Maybe he was a genius with antivirals, but he was an asshole, too. Sometimes when people get famous they also get a little celebrity-happy. He wasn’t content unless he was talking to media or big investors.”

  “I think he needed to feel like a hero, whether he deserved it or not. But I didn’t come here to talk about Galliano.”

  “Just wanted to clear the air. I don’t hold your book against you. If Galliano decided to drive his motorcycle over that cliff, it surely wasn’t your fault.”

  “Thank you. How about that tour?”

  Eyeball Alley was a replica of the installation at Crossbank, which Chris had also visited. Structurally identical, at least. The differences were all in the details: names on doors, the color of the walls. Some halfhearted seasonal decor had lately been installed, a festoon of green and red crepe over the cafeteria entrance, a paper wreath and menorah in the staff library.

  Charlie Grogan wore a pair of glasses that showed him things Chris couldn’t see, little local datafeeds telling him who was in which office, and as they passed a door marked ENDOSTATICS Charlie had a brief conversation (by throat microphone) with the person inside. “Hey there, Ellie…keeping busy…nah, Boomer’s fine, thanks for asking…”

  “Boomer?” Chris asked.

  “My hound,” Charlie said. “Boomer’s getting on in years.”

  They took an elevator several stories down, deep into the controlled environment of the Alley’s core. “We’ll get you suited up and into the stacks,” Charlie said, but when they approached a wide door marked STERILE GEAR there was a flashing red light above it. “Unscheduled maintenance,” Charlie explained. “No tourists. Are you prepared to wait an hour or so?”

  “If we can talk.”

  Chris followed the chief engineer back to the cafeteria. Charlie had not had lunch; nor, for that matter, had Chris. The food on the steam tables was the same food they served back at the community center, the same prefabricated rice pilaf and chicken curry and wrapped sandwiches delivered by the same weekly black truck. The engineer grabbed a wedge of ham-on-rye. Chris, still
a little chilled by his walk to the Alley, went for the hot food. The air in the cafeteria was pleasantly steamy and the smell from the kitchen rich and reassuring.

  “I go a fairly long way back in this business,” Charlie said. “Not that there are any novices at the Lake, apart from the grad students we cycle through. Did Ari tell you I was at Berkeley Lab with Dr. Gupta?”

  Tommy Gupta had done pioneering work on self-evolving neural-net architectures and quantum interfaces. “You must have been an undergraduate yourself.”

  “Yup. And thank you for noticing. This was back when we were using Butov chips for logic elements. Interesting times, though nobody knew exactly how interesting it was going to get.”

  “The astronomical application,” Chris said, “you were in on that, too?”

  “A little bit. But it was all unexpected, obviously.”

  In truth, Chris didn’t need this playback. The story was familiar and every general astronomy and pop-science journalist of the last several years had recounted some version of it. Really, he thought, it was only the latest chapter of mankind’s long ambition to see the unseeable, embellished with twenty-first-century technology. It had begun when NASA’s first generation of spaceborne planet-spotting observatories, the so-called Terrestrial Planet Finders, identified three arguably earthlike planets orbiting nearby sunlike stars. The TPFs begat the High Definition Interferometers, which begat the greatest of all the optical interferometer projects, the Galileo Array, six small but complex automated spacecraft all operating beyond the orbit of Jupiter, linked to create one virtual telescope of immense resolving power. The Galileo Array, it was said at the time, could map the shapes of continents on worlds hundreds of light years away.

  And it had worked. For a while. Then the telemetry from the Array began to deteriorate.

  The signal faded slowly but relentlessly over a period of months. After an intensive review NASA pinpointed the source of the failure as a few lines of bad code so deeply embedded in the onboard Galileo architecture that they couldn’t be overwritten. This was a risk NASA had assumed from the beginning. The Array was both complex and radically inaccessible. It couldn’t be repaired in place. A technological triumph was on the way to becoming an insanely expensive joke.

  “NASA didn’t have an O/BEC processor back then,” Charlie said, “but Gencorp offered them time on their unit.”

  “You worked at Gencorp?”

  “I baby-sat their hardware, yeah. Gencorp was getting good results doing proteinomics. You could do the same stuff with a standard quantum array, of course. Engineers used to think of the O/BECs as unnecessarily complicated and unpredictable, a fancy kludge—like a vacuum cleaner with an appendix, people used to say. But you can’t argue with results. Gencorp got faster results with a O/BEC machine than MIT could coax out of a standard BEC device. Spooky ones, too.”

  “Spooky?”

  “Unexpected. Counterintuitive. Anybody who works with adaptive self-programming will tell you it’s not like running raw BECs, and BECs can be pretty strange all by themselves. What I can’t really say, because I’m supposed to be a level-headed and factually oriented kind of guy, is that an O/BEC just plain thinks strange. But that’s as good an explanation as any, because nobody really knows why a BEC processor with an open-ended organic architecture can outthink a BEC processor alone. It’s the fucking ghost in the machine, pardon my French. And what we do in the pit, it isn’t just amps and volts. We’re tending something that’s very nearly alive. It has its good days and its bad days…”

  Charlie trailed off, as if he realized he’d overstepped the bounds of engineering propriety. He doesn’t want me quoting this, Chris thought. “So you went to NASA with the O/BEC processor?”

  “NASA ended up buying a few platens from Gencorp. I was part of the package. But that’s another story. See, basically, the problem was this: as the Galileo Array’s output got fainter, it was increasingly harder to separate the signal from the noise. Our job was to extract that signal, hunt it down, subtract it from all the rest of the random radio garbage the universe belches out. People ask me, ‘So how’d you do it?’ And I have to tell them, we didn’t do it, nobody did it, we just posed the problem to the O/BECs and let them generate tentative answers and bred them for success…hundreds of thousands of generations per second, like this big invisible Darwinian evolutionary race, survival of the fittest, where the definition of ‘fittest’ is success at extracting a signal from a noisy input. Code writing code writing code, and code withering and dying. More generations than all the people who ever lived on the earth, almost more generations than life on the earth. Numbers complexifying themselves like DNA. The beauty is the unpredictability of it, you understand?”

  “I think so,” Chris said. He liked Charlie’s eloquence. He always liked it when an interviewee showed signs of passion.

  “I mean, we made something that was beautiful and mysterious. Very beautiful. Very mysterious.”

  “And it worked,” Chris said. “Signals out of noise.”

  “Whole world knows it worked. Of course, we weren’t sure of that ourselves, not while it was happening. We had a few what we called threshold events. We’d almost lose everything. We’d have a good clean image, then we’d start to lose it, almost pixel by pixel. That was the noise winning out. Loss of intelligibility. But each time, the O/BECs pulled it back. Without our intervention, you understand. It drove the math guys nuts, because there’s obviously a level where you just can’t extract a meaningful signal, when there’s just too much lost, but the machines kept on pulling it out, rabbit out of a hat, presto. Until one day…”

  “Until one day?”

  “Until one day a man in a suit came into the lab and said, ‘Boys, we got confirmation from upstairs, the Array just stopped broadcasting altogether, shut down entirely, you can get ready to close up shop and go home.’ And my boss at the time—that was Kelly Fletcher, she’s at Crossbank now—she turned away from her monitor and said, ‘Well, that may be, but the fact is, we’re still making data.’”

  Charlie finished his sandwich, wiped his mouth, pushed his chair away from the table. “We can probably get into the stacks now.”

  Back at Crossbank, Chris had toured the O/BECs from the gallery level. He hadn’t been invited into the works.

  The sterile suit was comfortable as such things went—cool air piped in, a wide and transparent visor—but Chris still felt a little claustrophobic inside it. Charlie led him through an access door into the eerily quiet O/BEC chamber. The platens were white enameled cylinders each the size of a small truck. They were suspended on isolation platforms that would filter out any groundborne vibration short of a major earthquake. Strange, delicate machines. “It could end at any time,” Chris murmured.

  “What’s that?”

  “Something an engineer at Crossbank told me. He said he liked the rush, working with a process that could end at any time.”

  “That’s part of it, for sure. These are technologies of a whole new order.” He stepped over a bundle of Teflon-insulated wires. “These machines are looking at planets, but ten years after that first NASA connection we still don’t know how they’re doing it.”

  Or if they’re doing it, Chris thought. There was a fringe of hard-core skeptics who believed there was no real data behind the images: that the O/BECs were simply…well, dreaming.

  “So,” Charlie said, “we really have two research projects going on at once: guys at the Plaza trying to sort out the data, and people here trying to figure out how we get the data. But we can’t look too closely. We can’t take the O/BECs apart or dose them with X-rays or anything invasive like that. You measure it, you break it. Blind Lake didn’t just duplicate the Crossbank installation; we had to walk our machines through the same development process, except we used the old high-def interferometers instead of the Galileo Array, deliberately stepping down the signal strength until the machines learned the trick, whatever that trick is. There are only two installa
tions like this in the world, and efforts to create a third have been consistently unsuccessful. We’re balanced on the head of a pin. That’s what your guy at Crossbank was talking about. Something absolutely strange and wonderful is happening here, and we don’t understand it. All we can do is nurse it along and hope it doesn’t get tired and turn itself off. It could end at any time. Sure it could. And for any reason.”

  He led Chris past the last of the O/BEC platens, through a series of chambers to a room where they stripped off their sterile suits.

  “What you have to remember,” Charlie said, “is that we didn’t design these machines to do what they do. There’s no linear process, no A then B then C. We just set them in motion. We defined the goals and we set them in motion, and what happened after that was an act of God.” He folded the sterile suit crisply and left it on a rack for cleaning.

  Charlie walked him through the busiest sector of the Alley, two huge chambers wallpapered with video surfaces, rooms full of attentive men and women hovering over mutable desktops. Chris was reminded of the old NASA facilities at Houston. “Looks like Mission Control.”

  “For good reason,” Charlie said. “NASA used to control the Galileo Array with interfaces like these. When the problems got unmanageably bad they routed this stuff through the O/BECs. This is where we talk to the platens about alignment, depth of field, magnification factors, things like that.”

  Down to the finest detail. A monitor on the far wall showed raw video. Lobsterville. Except Elaine was right. It was a ridiculous misnomer. The aboriginals didn’t look remotely like lobsters, except perhaps for their roughly textured skin. In fact Chris had often thought there was something bovine about them, something about their slow-moving indifference, those big blank cueball eyes.

  Subject was in a food conclave, deep inside a dimly lit food well. Mossy growth and vegetable husks everywhere, and grub-like things crawled through the moist refuse. Watching these guys eat, Chris thought, was a great appetite killer. He turned back to Charlie Grogan.