Magic, Machines and the Awakening of Danny Searle

by John McWilliams

  “That’s kind of the point,” my father said. “It’s an office for daydreaming.”

  “How’d the tour go?” Danny asked.

  “Fascinating.” David looked through the telescope. “Reminded me of the engineering labs at Princeton.”

  “An Ivy League man?” my father asked.

  “For a couple of years, anyway.” David scanned the bay. “Most of my education took place overseas. Now, all I want to know”—he turned from the telescope—“is how do I invest?”

  “Danny, you never told me how anxious David was to part with his money.”

  “I didn’t know that myself.” Danny looked at David curiously.

  “By the way,” David said, “I know it’s early, but is anyone interested in lunch? I’m famished.”

  “How about we grab a quick meal,” my father suggested, “and I take you and Danny on a tour of Cobalt National Laboratory? Tyler, you should come along, too.” He pulled his sleeve back to check the time. “Good, it’s still there.”

  The instant the morning sun reflected off of his gold watch, I knew how the illusion had been done.

  David had told us to consider what we believed about the watch each time it appeared. What had we believed? We believed the watch he showed us was my father’s. That was our mistake.

  David must have bought a watch like my father’s—a duplicate—with information provided by Danny. Then, today, she must have lifted my father’s real watch before David asked him for the time.

  After David showed us the duplicate on his wrist—which we all assumed was my father’s—and made it disappear, Danny must have slipped the real watch back onto my father’s wrist. And so, when David asked him again for the time, the watch had “magically” reappeared.

  Basically, it was no more than two simple tricks: Danny’s pickpocketing and David’s sleight of hand. But placed within the context of David’s narrative, it had become a pretty impressive illusion.

  I glanced at Danny, imagining how she and David must have conspired to create this magic act, honing their narrative, Danny obtaining the watch’s model number, David making the duplicate watch’s purchase. They really had to be good friends. I only hoped that was it.

  My father ushered us toward the stairs. Ishana went first, and Danny and David followed.

  “You flew in on a corporate jet?” my father asked David.

  “A Cessna Citation. My company leases it from one of my parents’ companies.”

  “Next time you visit, I’ll take you up in my Citabria.”

  That’ll teach him, I thought.

  “Acrobatics,” David said, halfway down the stairs. “Sounds like fun. I also noticed you have a couple of Hobie Cats down by the water. Maybe we could do a little sailing.”

  Great, now they’re pals.

  “How about next weekend?” my father suggested.

  “Next weekend might be difficult, but—huh?” Danny interrupted him. I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  “What are you doing?” I pulled my father away from the stairs.

  “Trust me,” he said. “Keeping those two apart will only drive them back together.”

  “So your plan is to make them sick of each other?”

  “You saw how upset Danny got when he started showing off those pictures. Something’s up with that.”

  “And the fact that he’s filthy rich has nothing to do with it?”

  “Well.” He smiled. “That’s just a perk.”

  “So, did you figure out the watch trick yet?” I asked bitterly.

  “Did you?” he retorted.

  “Actually, I did.”

  He returned to the stairs, slapping his hand on the railing.

  “Well?” I asked. “Did you?”

  He looked at me with his steely gray eyes, scratched his cheek thoughtfully. “A duplicate watch?”

  He laughed as he stomped down the stairs.

  7

  Following David’s tour of Cobalt—a wonderland of computers, robots and lab-coated scientists—we returned to my father’s house.

  David and Danny, waiting for David’s limo to arrive, strolled around the back yard while I watched over them from the Turret.

  Finally, a long black car pulled into the driveway and, after an agonizingly long goodbye—a lot of talk, an awkward hug, a couple of kisses on the cheek—David left.

  That was Tuesday.

  Wednesday, my father, Danny, Peter, Ishana, Mohamed, Stewart and I went to a meeting with Paul Johnston and his team at MIT. We met with them to discuss their work on several of Prometheus’s peripheral control systems.

  On our way home, pulling away from the New London dock aboard the Cross Sound Ferry, Danny, heavy jacket on, wind rustling her hair, asked my father, “What is temporal quantum bias?”

  “Temporal quantum bias has to do with the way we normally look at the world,” my father said, peering across the deck as the ship turned and the setting sun came into view. Behind him, the windows of an old factory building had become a lustrous treasure of yellow and gold; the trees along the water’s edge, an autumn blaze of orange and red.

  “You know the saying, ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’?” he asked. “Well, that’s an example of temporal quantum bias. It’s our misconception about reality. That last straw has no more significance than the one that preceded it. No single object unilaterally causes anything.”

  Danny stared at him, her inquisitive eyes a clear signal for him to continue.

  “All right…” He smiled, only too happy to explain one of his favorite Humian lessons to his newest, favorite student. “Imagine you could selectively remove any number of atoms from the heel of someone’s shoe. Presumably there must be that magical number at which enough atoms are removed to cause the person to topple over, right? So, one might say that that last atom is the one that causes the fall. But in reality, removing that last atom would have done nothing if not for each of the previous atoms you removed. And, if you think about it, even the ones you didn’t remove. After all, reposition any of those and perhaps that last atom could be removed without incident. So even the remaining atoms contribute. Not to mention every single atom that composes the Earth. Without those, the gravity required to make the person topple wouldn’t exist in the first place. You see, just as our perception of objects is an illusion, so are the attributes of causation we assign to them.”

  “Causation is an illusion,” Danny muttered under her breath.

  “Yes, but remember, just because a fish discovers he lives in a fish tank, doesn’t mean he no longer has to swim.”

  “Meaning, you can’t go around thinking that way,” Peter said.

  “Yes, I got that,” Danny said good-naturedly. “But why did Dr. Johnston bring it up in regard to Prometheus?”

  “Paul was referring to temporal quantum bias as it pertains to design.” My father shielded his eyes as the sun broke through the clouds along the horizon. “In our example of the shoe, there are other causational factors to consider besides the position of heel atoms. Not least of which is the shoe’s design. Is the shoe wide, tall, narrow? Is it a dress shoe, a high heel, a boot? Its design, you see, matters as to whether the person falls or not. And, consequently, whether the shoe’s atoms fall or not. So design, something that emerges out of the shoe’s atoms, has the ability to loop back and affect those very atoms. This may seem like a strange concept, but consider: we have no problem imagining that we, as biological designs, affect our own atoms.”

  “We’re basically like shoes,” I said facetiously.

  “We basically are,” my father said. “But to answer your question, Danny, Paul was just concerned about the level of complexity involved in Prometheus’s inherent design loops. That, and why the programming hasn’t started yet.”

  “Are you kidding?” I glared at him. “You’re the one who keeps dragging me off to these dumb meetings.”

  “Anyway—”

  My father went on with some story about
when he and Paul Johnston used to work for Peter’s grandfather, Nate Landenberg—about a hundred years ago.

  I moved down the railing as the ship crept toward the Long Island Sound. In the Navy’s shipyard, a lone welder on the back of a partly submerged submarine sent off a shower of sparks. A moment later, the ferry picked up speed.

  “What did Dr. Johnston mean when he said Prometheus is going to require four tiers?” I turned. Danny stood beside me, brushing her hair out of her eyes. Apparently, my sulking had paid off.

  “He meant we’re going to need a team of Vulcans.”

  She smiled.

  “It just means Prometheus is going to need four design levels. And, since all those levels affect each other, things can get really messy, really fast.”

  “In other words, you have your work cut out for you.”

  “Nothing new there,” I said sourly.

  For a long moment, we said nothing, just leaned into the wind and stared out at the blue-gray sea. I had no desire to talk about Prometheus or its potential design levels. I wanted to talk about her. She was still such a mystery to me. I needed to steer this conversation toward—

  “Your dad says you have a motorcycle,” she said.

  “I do.” I faced her, determined not to let this opportunity slip away. “You want to go for a ride this weekend?”

  “You mean with me on the back, right? I don’t think I could drive the thing.”

  “But it could get cold,” I warned her.

  “I have warm clothes.”

  “Saturday then? I’ll call you in the morning?” Over her shoulder, I could see my father approaching. The others must have gone inside the cabin.

  “I can almost see the cartoon hearts over your heads,” he said, his hair tossing about wildly in the wind. “You might want to come inside. We’re almost out of the harbor.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Danny folded her arms, hiding her hands for warmth. “Where’d the idea for Complexity Programming Language come from?”

  “CPL’s based on a number of other agent-based languages. We just took things a little further. We came up with new ways of working with processor arrays—that’s why Tyler gets those expensive machines. And we, of course, came up with the environmental component.”

  “No, I meant, what motivated you to develop it in the first place?”

  “Oh. Greed.” He chuckled. “But not in the way you’re thinking. I wanted to make a robot that was greedy—one that not only could pick up coins, but actually wanted to pick up coins.

  “Unfortunately, greed requires a brain. And a brain, as anyone will tell you, is something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. So—how do you build a machine that’s greater than the sum of its parts? You can’t—right? But, I figured, at least I was asking the right question.

  “Anyway, a few years later—after I returned to the States from Oxford—I stumbled across the answer simply by chance. I was working with a friend, overhauling his Cessna 150’s Lycoming engine, when it suddenly dawned on me. I stopped and looked around at all the parts spread out on the hangar floor. An airplane is a machine that’s greater than the sum of its parts. It can fly. Yet spread its components out, and just try to find ‘flight’ in any of them.

  “So, I asked myself, how do these parts, once assembled, suddenly attain this wonderful power?”

  “It emerges?” Danny said. “Like the way a shoe’s design emerges out of its atoms?”

  “Design is emergent, yes, but there’s more to it than that. A shoe might be designed to offer its wearer stability and traction, but do these qualities simply emerge from the shoe? Would a shoe still possess these qualities in outer space? Would a plane still possess the power of flight on the moon?”

  “The environment,” Danny said.

  “Precisely. You see, an airplane’s parts don’t suddenly gain the power of flight once they’re assembled. They gain the power of flight once they’re speeding down the runway. That’s when the last component of flight is added to the system: the environment.”

  “And that led to the development of Complexity Programming Language?”

  “Well, yes. I realized that if I wanted to simulate the brain, I couldn’t just focus on synaptic firing. Merely duplicating synaptic firing would be like building a fleet of airplanes and releasing them into space. So, with Paul Johnston and others, we created a much more dimensional platform for emulating both the neurons and their environment.”

  My father’s cellphone rang—barely audibly above the wind.

  “By the way, that friend with the Cessna 150 was Nate Landenberg. Hello?” He ducked his head and walked off toward the ship’s cabin. He glanced back at us, and I knew it wasn’t good news.

  “That was David,” he said when he returned. “He wanted to know if we were interested in sailing this weekend. You two up for it?” His enthusiasm meant it wasn’t a question.

  “What about our motorcycle ride?” Danny asked me.

  “Go tomorrow,” my father suggested. “Take the day off—a paid holiday.”

  “Seriously?” Danny said. She turned to me.

  “Sure. That works for me,” I said, trying to sound indifferent.

  Another day without programming? My father must have really wanted Danny and me to get together, or really wanted us to be on board with David’s visit. I was fairly certain it was the latter.

  I told them that I’d be along in a minute as they started for the cabin.

  A blast of salty, wet air hit me as we officially plowed into the Long Island Sound. The sky had grown darker and, as I stared off at the frothy white crests, I thought about tomorrow, imagining Danny and me traveling the open roads.

  My reverie was broken, however, when a man with a Yankees baseball cap in one hand and a small boy in the other propped himself up against the railing next to me. Fifty feet below, black, angry sea slammed against the hull. The kid stretched himself out to see, his pudgy hands slipping on the railing.

  “Careful you don’t lose your hat,” I said to the man.

  He glared back at me, yanking the kid off the rail before storming down the portside stairwell.

  You’re welcome, kid.

  I turned back to the sea. At that kid’s age I had been a guinea pig in my father’s brain plasticity experiments. I suppose things could have been worse.

  My mother always claimed I was born at just the right time, in just the right place. But what did that really mean? If I succeeded it was due to luck. If I failed—well, that was all on me.

  I turned to go inside.

  “‘Let him that would move the world, first move himself.’” My father handed me a steamy Styrofoam cup.

  “Socrates?” I asked.

  “No.” He furrowed his brow. “Hot chocolate.”

  8

  “¿Que tiempo más bueno?” I greeted José as the rattling chain and sprocket system hauled the bay door open. It was the next morning and Danny and I had planned to meet here at Zak’s Garage for our motorcycle ride.

  “Sixty-five degrees in December,” José said. “And sunny! You lucky bastard.” He dug a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. “It’s not too late; I can still call Jenny and let her know we need to save our friend from a big disas… ter…” José’s voice trailed off as Danny’s white Camry pulled in next to my van, a cloud of dust settling around her tires.

  “Madre de—whoa! Your mom sure called this one. She is hot.” José wiped his hands on a rag and tossed it aside as he strutted over. “Good morning.” He opened her door.

  “Why, thank you, kind sir.” Danny was wearing a leather jacket, a blue knit sweater and jeans. She looked absolutely angelic.

  “Now I can see why Tyler can’t get any work done.” José escorted her over.

  “Thank you, José.” Danny glanced at me. “But Tyler did warn me about your charm.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I told her you were full of it.”

  While those two chatted, I went inside and rem
oved the tarp from my CBR 600. As I rocked the bike off its center stand, the gas tank felt like a block of ice, the handgrips felt stiff and foreign, and no doubt every inch of this thing now reeked of cigarettes, gas, and grease.

  Nothing a little airing out wouldn’t cure.

  “Wow, nice bike,” Danny said as I rolled my silver and blue machine out into the sun.

  “You were probably expecting an old Triumph or something,” José said. “Something to match the old white beast.” He nodded in the direction of my van.

  I checked the bike’s oil and fuel levels while they discussed which classes she was taking at Suffolk Community College and how she felt about her new job at Quantum Bay.

  “José thinks my father’s out to destroy the world,” I interjected, handing Danny a silver and blue full-face helmet.

  “Not intentionally,” José said, “but, a rose by any other name might smell as sweet, unless some scientist comes along and turns it into a bunch of chemicals.”

  “You’d prefer to go back to the Stone Age?”

  “Not the Stone Age, man. Just back to when a rose was a rose and a woman was a woman.”

  “And some women were burned as witches,” I retorted.

  “Now, hold on,” Danny said. “I get what he’s saying. Science does tend to break things down into unromantic pieces. But José, Dr. Cipriani taught me something about this the other day. He explained that a rose and the atoms that make up that rose are two entirely different things. They’re like a rainstorm and its raindrops. Why should the experience of one take away from the experience of the other?”

  “Okay,” José said, thinking a moment. “But then what about the moon?”

  “What about it?”

  “He’s upset that it’s not made of cheese.” I started the bike and revved the engine. Danny climbed aboard, placing her hands tentatively on my hips. I felt a surge of excitement, anticipating just how tightly she’d be holding me in a moment.

  “How can it ever be the same now that we’ve walked on it?”

  “Because of the footprints?” I glanced up at the chalky blue sky, searching for the moon but not finding it. I breathed in the gasoline-rich exhaust. “I bet you don’t mind those footprints when you’re listening to your satellite radio.”