Laura's nerves were jangled and her heart still pounded, but she forced herself to join Griffith at the foot of the beast.
"The Model Sevens, as you've seen, aren't limited to flat ground."
Griffith returned to his matter-of-fact tone, which in itself helped calm Laura down. But she couldn't feel completely at ease around the alien technology. She had no idea what to expect from it.
"They've got four legs, and they can climb up uneven objects like stairs or… or stacks of tires, I guess. Down here at the bottom," Griffith said as he knelt, and the beam of the foreman's flashlight dropped to the robot's feet, "it has wheels. When it walks like a spider, it just locks the wheels' brakes for traction. Then, when it's on flat ground like out on the roadbeds or the assembly building's main floor, it uses drives housed in these fairings to power the wheels. Motoring around is a whole lot more energy-efficient than walking."
Griffith rose with a grunt, his joints popping. "I need some oil," he joked to the foreman, straightening his back with great effort. Griffith rested his hand flat against the robot's midsection, and the foreman's flashlight lit an array of equipment that ringed the robot's waist. "This is the tool belt. If you'll look at the end [unclear] you'll see that it's got a gripper attached." He pointed at the two hands wrapped firmly around the tire. "To change tools, all it does is stick the gripper into its special holster on the belt, twist, and off it comes. Then, it can just snap on any of these other tools."
Griffith indicated the numerous attachments protruding from their "holsters" on the belt. "It's got drills, sanders, saws, tongs, riveters, et cetera, and it can strap on external tanks and carry acetylene torches and paint sprayers and things like that."
Griffith stepped back to stand beside Laura and point higher on the "torso," which was wider than it was thick and rounded. "The mini-net is in its chest," Griffith continued. The flashlight glinted off the greenish-gray expanse of metal — the shadow of the large tire held by the robot obscuring most of its body. "Its net has about a hundred times the processing power of the Model Sixes', so the Sevens are a lot more autonomous. The Sevens could just barely scrape by as free roamers, meaning they could function without access to the main computer's world model, but at a vastly reduced level of performance. The Sixes, on the other hand, are 'tethered.' They don't have the mental horsepower to build and maintain a [garbled] world using only their own senses and computational capacity."
The flashlight's beam rose again to the robot's face, and again there was a barely, noticeable flinch from the otherwise stoic machine.
"Up top the Sevens have retinal chips for ordinary light plus combination infrared-high-def imagers for low light. Both sensors are stereoscopic and provide excellent depth perception. We put 'ears' on the sides of the 'head' just like ours are, and then there's an all-purpose air sampler for a nose. The sampler can give us standard atmospheric conditions, but it can also detect a variety of telltale molecular matches for things like smoke or hazardous chemicals."
"We dropped the ultrasonic anti-collision sensors that the Threes and Sixes have," the foreman added. "The Sevens maintain such a complete world model in their head they're not likely to run into anything stationary. And they've got good enough senses that if anything's moving, they know it."
"Dr. Griffith, Dr. Aldridge," a loudspeaker blared, "please report to the computer center." Griffith looked at his watch.
"Almost time for our meeting, I guess. Let's catch a car."
Griffith turned to leave, but Laura's gaze lingered on the Model Seven. The spider-like robot rolled noiselessly away atop the stable platform of its four locked legs. "Hey," she said to halt Griffith. "How did that robot know to stand there while you showed it off, and then to leave when you were through?" The robot was gone — disappearing into the dark gorges and ravines of the side yard's scrap.
Griffith looked after his departed pride and joy, shrugging yet again. "It just did. Those Sevens are pretty damn smart."
"Wait till we start turning out the next generation," the foreman laughed, smiling Griffith's way. "I might be out of a job."
Griffith ignored the man. "We'd better get going," he said — just a little too quickly and too abruptly, Laura thought.
14
"It'll never, ever happen!" Filatov argued.
Margaret was undeterred. "Give me three hours, tops."
"You'll never, ever, ever get enough capacity freed up to load the phase two that way!" Filatov said, shaking his head to blot out the offending sound of Margaret's voice. "The space has to be contiguous. Your plan will leave the unused racks fragmented all over the place!"
"We'll defragment and compress the racks in the main pool. That'll leave us eight percent of contiguous space free over in the annex."
Filatov was already shaking his head. "It'll never work. Not in this lifetime! Not in this universe!"
The conference room fell silent. Filatov waited, ready to pounce on Margaret again, but she'd finished making her proposal.
There were light bings from stage right, and heads turned in unison to Dorothy. "That would be just enough to load the phase two," she said, looking up from her little computer. "If Margaret's calculations are right."
"Sheer fantasy," Filatov mumbled, obviously feeling obligated to say something on mention of Margaret's plan.
Gray held his hands out to invite final comments. Laura felt out of place at the long table. She was the only one there with no progress to report. "All right," Gray said, "start off-loading as soon as we break up and load the phase two as soon as you have the capacity."
"There have been some… some more errors," Dorothy said tentatively, raising her pen pad as if everyone could read its small screen. "Three unexplained door malfunctions, a bunch of small account discrepancies in a pay-per-view movie order, and seventeen minutes of black during a French documentary."
"That seems like a lot of door problems to me," Hoblenz said, leaning forward and eyeing Gray. "Could be we've got visitors."
"Oh, come on!" Filatov jumped in. "And there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll, too, I suppose!" He shook his head in utter disbelief. "It's a bug! A virus. Dorothy's phase-two ought to kill it."
"Yes, but how much code will it tear up in the process?" Margaret asked.
"Hardly any!" Dorothy objected in a reedy pitch. "We might lose, like, the connections in the racks that are infested, but it shouldn't do system-wide damage. If the new version of the phase-two finds a malevolent virus, it'll isolate it, not chase it all over the system. I've fixed a lot of things since the last outbreak!"
In the silence from around the table, the skepticism of the group was obvious.
Laura waited for what seemed like ages, and when no one else spoke up she asked, "What was the pay-per-view movie and the documentary?"
At first she thought they would humiliate her by ignoring the question. Few heads turned her way, but Gray's, she noted, was among those that did.
Dorothy's gaze only slowly left the doubting looks of her colleagues.
She tapped at her palmtop then said, "The movie was A Room with a View. There was a credit issued for all the orders that came in over the weekend."
Laura tried to hide her astonishment. She had placed two of those orders herself — twice on Friday, then again on Saturday. "Do you mean that everyone who ordered that movie last weekend got it for free?" she asked.
Dorothy frowned and nodded.
A Room with a View was Laura's favorite movie of all time.
She'd stumbled across the re-released high-definition version among the growing number of films that, with the tap of a button, could be downloaded from Gray's system in seconds. When Laura had placed the first order on Friday night, she'd been alone and unhappy over the grad-student "profile." The purchase the next night had been spur-of-the-moment — a halfhearted attempt to escape sheer boredom.
"That's one of the sappiest movies ever made," Margaret said with a sneer on her face.
"Yo
u have no taste!" Filatov shot back.
"Do you like it?" Margaret challenged.
"I've never seen it. But that doesn't change the fact you have no taste!"
There were more pinging sounds from the end of the table. Everyone looked at Dorothy, who cringed as she stared at the palmtop. "The blacked-out documentary was called Faces of Death V."
Her mouth was misshapen by the disgust that was also evident in her tone. "Yucch! Actual footage of real deaths by suicide, disaster, and crime. We air this shit?" she asked, looking up.
"Watch yer language young lady!" Hoblenz snapped.
"Why are we calling that a computer malfunction?" Filatov challenged in his combative manner, this time directed at Dorothy. "The trouble could've been anywhere along the line!"
"I checked it, Georgi!" Dorothy squealed. "There were four separate satellite passes. The satellites received the uplink, but the computer didn't blip the transmission code and so the switches didn't throw!"
A strained quiet descended on the room.
"When did the transmission resume?" Laura asked, and again there was a delay in Dorothy's response. They weren't accustomed to the new voice in their midst.
"Straight up on the hour."
"As soon as that Faces of Death thing was over?" Laura asked.
Slowly, Dorothy nodded — growing more and more interested, it appeared, in what Laura would say next.
"All right," Gray interrupted abruptly and pushed his chair back from the table. "Let's get the phase-two loaded."
With the meeting ended, debates resumed as everyone rose and headed for the door.
"Laura!" Dorothy called out. She was standing beside her chair, and Laura joined her at the end of the table. The smiling girl whispered, "So, did Griffith talk your ear off?" Her chin was dipped to her chest, and her green eyes were wide-open and sparkled mischievously as she looked up at the taller Laura. "He's notorious for lecturing people about anything and everything. I told Mr. Gray I'd give you the real dirt but he just blew me off, like always. Did Griffith talk about the light pipes?" she asked, now grinning.
Her good humor was infectious. Laura smiled and nodded.
"U-u-u-g-g-h," Dorothy rolled her eyes, her shoulders heaving with the effort. "He's been trying to talk Mr. Gray into putting those things everywhere! That's just, like… great! You can practically count every pore on your face under those lights, ya know?"
Laura nodded, but she really didn't have a clue what Dorothy was objecting to.
"What do you think about Filatov and Margaret?" came next from the girl, spoken with the pent-up energy of someone starved for conversation.
Laura drew a deep breath, contemplating her answer. "They don't seem to like each other very much."
"Did you know they're doing it?"
Laura cocked and then shook her head. "Doing what?" she asked.
"You know — the nasty. Like, all the way?" Laura was at a complete loss now, and she made a face simply to avoid having to respond. "I know!" Dorothy said. "Isn't it disgusting? I can't even, like, begin to picture it." A strong quake shook Dorothy's upper body and she loosed a moan of disgust. "Oh-o!" the frenetic girl said suddenly, then whispered out of the corner of her mouth, "Here comes the thought police."
Laura turned to see Gray reentering the room.
"Catch you later," Dorothy whispered, heading for the door.
Gray walked up to Laura. "Are you ready?" he asked.
Something in his tone caused Laura to reflect on his question before answering. "Ready for what?" she replied.
"To meet the computer."
They stood facing each other for a moment before Laura finally shrugged and nodded. She followed Gray to the door. "I still don't understand what I'm supposed to do," Laura said to his back.
Gray didn't break stride, and the door slid into the wall uneventfully. "I mean, if it's a virus or an intruder, what am I doing here?"
Filatov and Margaret were talking in low tones in the hallway, and they fell in behind Laura as the group headed for the control room.
"We're looking into every possibility," Gray responded.
"And that includes human psychological disorders?" Laura asked, allowing her skepticism to creep into her voice. She eyed her two "colleagues" now trailing quietly behind. Their faces revealed nothing, but they were listening. "I mean, to be depressed the computer would have to be, you know…" The word stuck in her throat.
"It would have to maintain higher-order goals and ambitions." Gray nodded.
"Are you telling me the computer is sentient?" Laura asked.
"That it has an intelligence comparable to a human being's?" Gray spun to face her, stopping the small entourage at the edge of the busy control room. "No," he said. "I'm asking you to tell me."
"She can use this office," Filatov said, walking up to a closed door in a quiet corner of the control room. He lowered his glasses and stared into a black peephole, sending the door smoothly into the wall with a barely audible whoosh. Laura followed Margaret and Gray into the windowless underground office, but Filatov left without saying a word to the others. Margaret glanced over her shoulder a moment too late, catching Laura's eye instead of Filatov's and turning away.
So, Laura thought, Dorothy was right about Margaret and Filatov.
The office contained a desk, a chair, and a credenza — all barren of the usual clutter of supplies. On the lustrous black top of the ultramodern desk sat an oversized computer monitor and a keyboard. The black leather chair was thickly padded. Like everything else in Gray's kingdom all was fresh and new and expensive.
"Let's get you logged on," Margaret said, flicking a switch built right into the shiny black desktop. A whirring sound rose from deep inside the large desk. "Mr. Gray," Margaret said, "this will require your authorization."
Gray sat in the chair and waited as the terminal powered up. "We have controlled access to the core functions," Margaret said to Laura. "You'll get a 'King-level' password — the same as all the department heads have."
Margaret glanced down at Gray as if to give him a chance to rethink the decision, but he ignored her.
"Is that the highest level?" Laura asked.
"Yes," Gray replied before Margaret got her answer out.
Then why does my logging on require your authorization? Laura wondered. After a beep, Gray stared into the tip of a flexible wand that rose like a microphone from beside the keyboard. The computer beeped again, and Gray looked from the wand to the screen. Both he and Bickham sniffled.
"Poor thing," Margaret said, reading the words that scrolled down the monitor. Gray began to type, and Margaret watched over his shoulder, her smile growing sad. After Gray's brief interchange, Margaret said, "Okay, Dr. Aldridge." She waved Laura over to the terminal.
Gray rose and held the chair for Laura to sit. "Look into the lens," Margaret directed, pointing at the tip of the wand. "Try, not to blink." Laura sat down and stared into the dark hole. "It identifies the user by the pattern of blood vessels on the retinal wall at the back of your eye. It's better than fingerprints. The pattern is impossible to alter, and every human's is unique." There was a brief flash of light from the hole, and Laura blinked.
"Sorry," she said, but the computer beeped.
"It's okay," Margaret said. "He got the print."
Laura turned to the monitor.
"All right, then," Gray said as he and Margaret headed for the door. "Let Georgi know if you need anything. We've got a breakfast meeting at the house tomorrow at nine. It's your first night, so I wouldn't stay too late."
"Wait!" Laura blurted out, and Gray and Margaret turned to her from the open doorway. "Just what am I supposed to do?" As soon as she asked the question, Laura felt a wave of disappointment in herself.
Was it her? Was she too slow for Gray's army of geniuses?
But Gray showed no
impatience. "Dr. Aldridge, you're an expert in cognition — in matters of human consciousness. I have built an advanced neural network whose main task is to facilitate the interaction between humans and computers. I modeled its architecture on the human brain to try to bridge the gap that separates our two worlds."
The deep concern etched on Gray's face was mirrored on Margaret's as she waited — her gaze falling to the floor.
"Along the way," Gray continued, his voice now distant, "the computer began exhibiting increasingly anthropomorphic, 'human' behavior. It didn't settle into that middle ground between humans and computers that I thought it would. It became more human than computer. At first, I was convinced the phenomenon was purely imitative. But as its domain of human knowledge expanded, its behavior grew more and more sophisticated."
"And that's when the problems began?" Laura guessed.
Gray nodded slowly, almost imperceptibly, but Margaret quickly voiced her disagreement. "There was a coincidence in the timing, yes, but…" Margaret began, then fell silent. Laura remain focused on the troubled Gray. "You see," Margaret finally continued, "this system is unique. There has never been anything even remotely like it in history. We've spent years expanding its knowledge domain, which is absolutely the state of the art. It's priceless, so we've got to explore every possibility no matter how… remote," Margaret concluded in an apologetic tone.
Laura willed herself to remain silent — to hold back the flood of questions that threatened to reveal her congenital ineptitude.
Margaret and Gray headed out, Gray's eyes lingering on Laura until the door closed behind him.
All was quiet then save the whirring under her desk. Laura stared at the closed door — then at the black eyeball on the wall beside it.
Society of the Mind Page 13
