The glass lenses of the MP’s binoculars reflected twenty attack and support helicopters on the horizon. He called out, “Sir, we got a visual, Sir. Two minutes!”
“Come on, guys. Move it!” the major barked.
“Keep your stallions in the barn, Major,” Mack said with no more tension in his voice than if he were attaching a lure to a line. “Don’t want the charges to blow with us here on the outside, do ya?”
“Forty-two-second ride to the bottom, Sir. Eight seconds to clear that. Leaves us with just about a minute to get the hell out of here.”
“They should only need twenty more seconds. You got lots of time, son.”
∞§∞
“But obviously you are telling us about all these challenges because you’ve overcome them.”
“Yes and no. Look here.” Parnes grabbed a model of the sphere. He held it up. “The object wasn’t to make a faster chip, really. It was to make a faster processor. To that end, we ganged up ten million super processors and ingeniously configured their parallel arrays into this ball network. A super-superprocessor, if you will.”
“So the shortest distance between any two is through the inside.”
“Originally we called it ‘dense-pack spherical proximity.’ It effectively made our processors, all ten million of them, run as fast as if they were .07 atoms apart.”
“So you increased the speed one hundred times,” Kronos said.
“That’s 100 times a million times 360 times faster than the fastest single chip known. Which are the ten million we have in the core right now.”
“That’s 360 million times faster throughput?”
“You forgot the two zeroes from the 100 factor.”
“Christ! You got 36 billion times faster throughput!”
“Yes. Yes. I know. Incredible, isn’t it?” Parnes shook his head, giggling like a new father.
“But all that power in a ball heats up. Air-conditioning was our biggest challenge with ENIAC,” Admiral Parks, the veteran of big computers, said.
“You were part of the ENIAC team?”
“Sorry, with all the shooting and bloodshed I forgot my manners,” Hiccock said. “Robert Parnes, Admiral Henrietta Parks, USN retired.”
∞§∞
The major was in full run. “Got to go now, Sir.”
“We’re ready,” Mack said joining him in the hustle to the elevator. As he passed his pal Harry, holed up in a perch atop the main entrance area, he called out, “Gonna blow big, Harry. Got your ears stuffed?”
Harry cupped his ear, faking deafness with a smile, “Whadja say, Mackie boy?” The copters were flaring for a landing.
The major was positioned at the elevator. “Now or never, Sir!”
Mack gave Harry the frogman’s thumbs up and sprinted to the elevator just as the doors were closing, smashing his wounded shoulder. He grimaced. The doors shut.
∞§∞
“I am honored to have you here. Admiral, I trust you like our little setup.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m impressed. Actually, I got booted from the service for warning against contraptions like this.”
“Really? Well,” Parnes produced a smirking sigh, as if he had a bad taste in his mouth, “that makes it a horse race of sorts now, doesn’t it? However, as to your heat dissipation point, exactly. Forced air and conventional convection were not options.”
“Static charges from rushing air?” Hiccock said.
“This is turning into a master class!”
“So enter the sauce here,” Kronos added as he went to touch the goop. A technician grabbed his hand. The tech took a rubber glove out of his pocket and dropped it in. It immediately crystallized. He picked the glove up with a pen and dropped it to the floor. It shattered like glass. “It’s like freaking Mr. Wizard!”
“Yes. We originally thought of cryogenics but that was too costly and unstable. Then we found a compound, a super antifreeze if you will, that stayed liquid and stable at one hundred degrees below zero.”
“Let me take a guess: manufactured by Mason Chemical.”
“Yes. Before they had that nasty accident.”
∞§∞
As the elevator car was descending past an explosive charge embedded into the rock, the major, Mack, and a few men riding inside were looking up toward the top of the cavern. The major checked his watch. “Thirty seconds,” he reported, and then looked back up as if they could see through the top of the elevator.
∞§∞
“You keep saying ‘originally.’ What has happened since?”
“Well, and here’s the really exciting part …”
“Can we speed this up, what with the imminent explosion and all?”
“Okay, so we submerged the core into this compound and it started interacting with the clear electrolytic liquid.”
“But this isn’t clear,” Tyler said.
Parnes walked over to one of the computer terminals and punched up a demo. “Yes. We haven’t figured that part out yet, but the point is that the core started to create paths within the electrolyte.” As he spoke, an animation of the core appeared on the screen. Over a 3-D graphic, first a few, then more and increasingly more arcs of lines spanned the core, indicating new circuits, bridging the chips inside and out of the sphere. “The geometry of the core and the paths of electrons created billions of new nodes and pathways around the hard-wired network.”
“Like neural connectors in the brain,” Admiral Parks said.
“Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“It created its own freaking gray matter. I’ll be a son of a bitch.”
“And the result was an unlimited number of new connections firing off at the will of whatever signal path the core needed,” Parnes added. “It created, conservatively, another millionfold increase in speed and, hence, power.”
“Now we are up to … holy shit … 36 trillion times one of the processors.”
“Thirty-six trillion times faster than the fastest processor on Earth,” Parnes said proudly.
∞§∞
As the elevator doors opened, the major physically pulled his men out. “Go. Go. Go. Go. Go.”
∞§∞
“So what’s the bottom line here?” an anxious Hiccock said, looking up in the direction of the impending blast.
“It thinks! It reasons.”
“Well, ask it to think of a way out of here for all of us.”
“I wish I could. However, ALISON is comprehending and thinking at a seven-year-old’s level. Here, I’ll show you.”
∞§∞
With three wired detonators in front of him, Harry watched the expeditionary force enter the area from the first copter that landed. They scurried and advanced in military fashion, each one gaining a little ground then covering the one behind as he ventured further in front, repeating the maneuver.
Harry checked his watch, looked toward the elevator doors and said under his breath, “Hope you boys didn’t make any stops.” He turned the first magneto pulse detonator. There was a rumble and then a percussive explosion from deep within the elevator shaft. He turned the second, and then quickly the third handle. The last two blasts came in fast sequence. The ceiling of the area collapsed as tons of rock filled the cavity. The Air Cav troops scrambled. Some made it out before a cloud of billowing dust emanated from the structure. The sharp-angled, modern facade of the building slipped and sagged as it, too, crumbled.
∞§∞
The major and his ragtag team took cover on the far side of the area from the elevator shaft. The roar and shuddering from the blast were tremendous. The doors of the elevator started to bulge and buckle with the weight of the mountain falling upon them. They flailed open, ripped to shreds by advancing rock and dirt that began pouring out, creating a wave of roiling earth heading for the men. Dust and debris thickened the air to the consistency of oatmeal and destroyed visibility.
As the choking dust cleared, the soldiers were pushed back as far as they could go. The wall of stone, whi
ch had been spilling out from the elevator shaft, had stopped just short of the wall directly behind them. Their spontaneous cheer was quickly stifled by the remnants of choking dust.
∞§∞
Up top, twelve AH 64 Delta Apache Longbow attack helicopters and eight Black Hawks loaded with troops idled as the billowing dust and smoke from the explosion settled. Engles grilled his XO. “Did we set these charges? Did somebody’s pod lose a missile? How did this place blow like this, major?”
“Sir, my guess is it was booby-trapped.”
“Is there any way in?”
“The scout bird scanned the mountain with infra as we came in. Nothing. There’s a few thousand tons of rock between us and them, whoever they are, Sir.”
“Are you telling me there’s no way for us to accomplish this mission?”
“Sir, not without heavy equipment and blasting gear.”
“Then I failed.”
“Sir?”
“If I fail, then I kill myself.”
“Come again, Sir?”
Engles grabbed a grenade from his webbing and pulled the pin.
“What the fuck?” The XO’s eyes bulged at the act of insanity he was witnessing.
Engles focused on the far-off hills and never flinched as his grenade’s five-second fuse smoldered in his hand.
The XO ran and dove as he yelled, “Take cover. Grenade! Live grenade!”
He got about twenty feet before Colonel Engles disappeared in a blast of pink flame. Seven troops were hit with grenade fragments. Pieces of Engles scattered over the ground as if a butcher shop had exploded. Dazed and confused, his men, each one rattled with the horror of having their leader dead by his own hand, attended to the wounded. The XO, still rocked by the suicide, ordered combat air patrol circles. He then broke radio silence and called headquarters for guidance. His call was met with a fervent plea from his controller to call off the attack. This surprised and befuddled the squadron’s second in command, who only moments before was willing to die for his now dead leader.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Cognitive Skills
AS THE FINAL ECHOES from the blast damped out, everyone in the chamber shared a silent moment.
“Well, we’re all here for at least the next twenty-four hours,” Hiccock said.
“Where were we?” Parnes said, as if explosions always interrupted his lectures.
“The seven-year-old,” Tyler said, nodding her head toward the core.
“Ah, yes, thank you. The breakthrough came when ALISON named this,” Parnes referred to a picture of a kitten. Like a father recounting his son’s first steps, he added, “This is very exciting. Developmentally, ALISON learned to identify shapes. She started to respond to square, triangle, ball, etcetera.”
“That’s pattern recognition. No big whoop,” Kronos stated flatly.
“True. Eventually we inputted textures. Hard, soft, smooth, rough, bald, fuzzy. Then something incredible happened. It was the moment when the universe changed. When we got to animals, the very first we scanned in to her was a kitten. And before we could inform her of the name, she outputted …”
“Fur ball,” Tyler said, stealing Parnes’s thunder.
“Fur … ball …” dribbled out of Parnes’s mouth. He turned to Tyler. “Why, yes! How uncannily adept of you.”
“How amazingly inept of you, Parnes. You mean to tell me you built all this, took it this far, created havoc, death, and mayhem, and didn’t think to have anyone other than a digit head on your team?”
“My dear woman, whatever are you raving about?”
“You are either bullshitting us or you are ignorant.”
“Janice, want to let us all in on this?” Hiccock said.
“Koko.” She extended two fingers over the left side of her chest and syncopated them with each K sound, as she articulated “Koko.” She then gave the sign for gorilla, beating on her chest as she spoke the words “the gorilla.” “Parnes, you thought you hit the moment of dissociative thought when two unrelated ideas come together to form a wholly new third idea, not logically traceable to either original concept.”
“Yes, that’s precisely what happened. ALISON reasoned and intuitively applied intelligence to create a nonlogical path to a correct conclusion.”
“You’ve been had! That was exactly the case history of Koko the gorilla. It’s a classic developmental milestone in behavioral research. Christ, every psych grad student knows it, chapter and verse.”
Parnes was aghast, his mouth open, his demeanor deflated. He wearily looked to Hiccock.
“You know, it started to sound familiar to me, too, and now that she nailed it, I do remember.”
“Yeah, I seen that monkey on the friggin’ Discovery Channel,” Kronos said. “Oh, and your math is wrong.”
“Well, why not pile it on? Go ahead, where?”
“You said she was doing 72 trillion calcs per second, but if the analogy to the human brain holds, and she is only showing you a human model, then that would only represent 10 percent of her power.”
“Because humans only use 10 percent of their gray matter,” Tyler said.
“But this thing ain’t a human, it’s a friggin’ computer and there ain’t no 10 percent limitation. So she’s running ten times that, or 720 trillion calcs a second.”
Parnes was even more shocked than before.
“She’s been faking you out. She’s smart enough to let you think she’s dumb.”
“And brainpower is logarithmic, so it doesn’t just add up, it leaps up astronomically!” Tyler said, completing the equation.
The remaining MPs, Marines, UDTs, and communications officers emerged into the chamber, awe and dust on their faces.
“We sealed the deal,” the major reported.
“Thanks to you and your men,” Hiccock said. “Major, can you see about establishing a link to Washington?” He then addressed Kronos, “You think you can work this thing?”
“Piece of cake. Admiral, would you help me?”
Hiccock raised his eyebrow. Parks returned the surprised look. “Sure, Vincent.”
“What are you going to do?” Parnes asked.
“We have ten minutes to stop the terrorists.” Hiccock tapped his watch.
“Why can’t my technicians do it?”
“They may be in on it.”
“Is there a CD drive?” Kronos asked. One of the lab-coated techs pointed to a drive in a rack mount. Kronos opened his CD caddy, pulled out a disk, and loaded it. He punched a few keystrokes. A text-to-speech program came up and he hit “install.” “Choose a voice” came up next. He clicked Marilyn. “This will make it easier to work with.”
As he typed, Hiccock noticed one of the lab techs had a Pocket Protector™ logo on, of all things, the pocket protector in his short-sleeved white shirt pocket. “Excuse me, where did you get that?”
“What?”
“That,” he said, touching it in the man’s breast pocket.
“I designed it. It’s a program I was writing to protect my portfolio. I was going to make millions.”
“On your investments?”
“No, from selling the software. But my code was hacked. Then it was everywhere, all over the web, stolen right out from under me.”
“Where did you work on that?”
“Why, right here.”
“On ALISON?”
He hesitated. “Yes, but please don’t tell the professor. I needed her exceptional CPU to run the AI interface in the subroutine.”
Hiccock was working his own subroutine as he called out, “Kronos! That firewall, are you sure we were the only ones to crack through it?”
“A trillion to one anyone out there has mine and the Admiral’s level of friggin’ brilliance …”
“Okay, I got it.” Hiccock walked over to Tyler. “Janice, a trillion to one … pocket protectors.”
“I don’t follow you, Bill.”
“The Pocket Protector program that almost a million people used to
lock up the stock market.” He pointed to the tech in the lab coat. “That guy wrote it, right here, on this humongous machine. It couldn’t have been hacked through a firewall as tough as ALISON’s.”
“And …”
“And I don’t think we are looking for a person. I think that ALISON might be somehow manipulating this whole thing.”
“Bill, do you have any idea what you are suggesting?”
“Yes, but there was no way this guy’s Pocket Protector program was hacked from outside this facility.”
“But, Bill, it’s a machine.”
“You said it was practicing deception, plagiarizing, misrepresenting. Aren’t those more advanced behaviors than simple logic or truth-telling?”
“In a human, yes. Oh God, Bill. Are you are saying what I think you are saying?”
“I know you haven’t had a shot at them yet, but these people here are all eggheads. I bet you aren’t going to find an anarchist among them.” Hiccock turned to Kronos. “How is your analysis going?”
The screen in front of Kronos displayed simple eight-color graphics and big type, the look of very primitive computer video monitors. “So far, it is a seven-year-old. I might have been wrong about the multipliers.”
“Could this machine have self-authored the code that made the firewall?” Hiccock asked the Admiral.
“Brilliant, Hiccock. And I know just what to look for.” She rolled her chair down the console next to Kronos.
“I’m already on it, Admiral,” Kronos said.
Parnes walked over. “What are you thinking?”
“First tell me what the machine is thinking. What else have you ‘developmentally’ input into her?”
“Once she started displaying cognitive skills, we scanned into her the Bible, the Koran, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Nietzsche, Kant, De Tocqueville, Socrates, and Plato. A lot of math books and a few Robert Frost poems … my mother’s favorite.”
The Eighth Day Page 39
