Magic, Machines and the Awakening of Danny Searle

by John McWilliams

  “What time is it?” I rubbed my eyes.

  “Two fifty-four.”

  “Two fifty-four?” I had been sitting there a lot longer than I’d thought. I looked through the observation window at Danny.

  “She’ll be fine,” my father said. He walked me into the hall.

  “But we didn’t find anything. That’s pretty bad news, isn’t it?”

  “We’ve got some new ideas we’re going to try out in the morning.”

  “Okay…” Feeling defeated, I staggered toward my room.

  “And, Tyler?”

  I looked back.

  “Yuri’s wrong about those numbers.”

  I nodded.

  18

  Three days later: nothing.

  No matter which way my father and Yuri configured the Bourilkov Feedback System, all we got in return were orange blips.

  During those three days:

  Susan, having another urgent matter to attend to, and certain she wouldn’t be much help until Danny had awoken anyway, left.

  My mother and the twins visited, stayed a night, and then they left too.

  Each day Mohamed, the present guardian angel of Stewart and Prometheus, traveling back and forth between Long Island and Brooklyn, called in.

  Every day I called José and Jenny.

  Every day I had nothing to report.

  Every day I woke, showered, ate, and helped read to Danny. And every day I checked on my father’s and Yuri’s progress and stared at the raw data screen in hopes of finding something Yuri’s machine hadn’t.

  And every day I spent at least an hour up on the seventh-floor skywalk, lamenting how absolutely powerless I was.

  19

  But enough lamenting. Danny is slipping away. That, according to my father, according to the Bourilkov System’s aggregate activity monitor, is a fact. But I don’t need anyone to tell me that: I can see it in my father’s eyes. His and David’s.

  I sit down and lean against the glass wall.

  Danny, I don’t care how you came to be—if you really did just appear one day like some kind of illusion. The world is magic and you’ve proved that.

  I just want you back.

  I need you back.

  The sunlight flickers, and I, looking into it, watch as the past eighteen months with Danny flash before my eyes.

  I see her standing there by the electronics rack on the day we first met, an orange feather in her hair. My heart melts, recalling her smile.

  I see her on the beach at Montauk Point, brushing her hair out of her eyes, showing off an ordinary rock to me as if it were a diamond.

  I recall all the jealousy and heartbreak I endured while working on Prometheus, and then that day all the stars seemed to align for our motorcycle trip to Mystic. Such a perfect night.

  In my mind, I sense the warmth of her skin, the taste of her lips—then run my hand down the arch of her back, giving her goose bumps.

  I smile.

  And as I let these sensations wash over me, breaking my heart, something else keeps appearing before me: the raw data screen’s numbers. I can’t seem to avoid them. They stream past my closed eyelids, taunting me, teasing me, then doing what they always do, abruptly changing—like a mad musician who keeps suddenly, nonsensically, switching melodies.

  I focus on the next set of numbers.

  But, hold on…

  Is this how the world actually works? In discrete components?

  This is just the way Yuri built this thing. I need to think the way my father trained me to think.

  Each region contains a dataset that, while mostly noise, tends to have its own personality, tendency, rhythm.

  In my mind’s eye, I imagine several of the most active regions as separate blocks of data floating before me. I slide down the wall a few inches, keeping my eyes closed.

  Puzzle pieces. Puzzle pieces that don’t seem to fit the puzzle. Or do they?

  I begin moving them around.

  If I can just find the right…

  I stop, hearing Yuri’s voice in my head: “You will not get anything out of numbers that machine does not. Brain is clever, computer is faster.”

  Yuri, you are wrong. I’ve already sensed it. I already know there’s an answer. It just hasn’t—

  I sit bolt upright.

  I study the odd-shaped assemblage of blocks before me.

  Holy shit! There it is.

  Each region contains notes that are part of a larger melody.

  Yuri’s machine isn’t processing cross-regional patterns. And no wonder: huge chunks of data are missing from between each one.

  I close my eyes and listen to the faint, beautiful music whispering to me in the wind.

  Danny, I hear you!

  ****

  Less than a minute later, I charge into the unoccupied control room, having sprinted the entire way. I take Yuri’s chair behind the Bourilkov Neurofeedback System’s control monitors and begin hunting for its data archives.

  “That is not toy!” I hear Yuri’s voice from behind me.

  “Tyler, what are you doing?” my father asks.

  “I need to find the data archives.”

  “You cannot just hit buttons—”

  “Yuri, I know a thing or two about computers.” I’m annoyed, but not with him. With myself. How did I let three days pass without learning everything I could about this machine? I swivel around to face them. David is also present. “There are patterns in the data,” I inform them.

  They look at me, confused. I turn back to the screens. “Is there a way to have this thing scan more than one region at a time?”

  “This thing?” Yuri retorts.

  “Hold on.” My father pulls a chair up next to me. “Patterns? Are you sure?”

  “No doubt.”

  “Is impossible,” Yuri interrupts. “Bourilkov System analyzes data millions of times per second.”

  I look at my father. “Can we scan more than one region at a time?”

  “The system’s not designed for that. It scans in ultra-high resolution, but the tradeoff is in its spatial range.”

  “All right then, what about the switching times between regions. How short can we make that?”

  “Well, each time we change regions the probes need to be recalibrated. Two to three seconds.”

  “Two to three seconds? It might as well be a week.”

  “I suppose we could bypass the calibration subroutines.” My father looks at Yuri. “The probes are offline at this point anyway. What would that do for us?”

  “That would reduce switching time to less than five milliseconds.” Yuri rests his hands on his belly contemplatively, staring at the floor. “Perhaps even as low as four.”

  “Given the rate at which these patterns propagate,” I say, “that should work.”

  “You know, it might help,” my father says, “if you could show us what you’re seeing. You think you could plot this out for us?”

  “Well, I had hoped I could with the archived data, but not with two-second gaps. I knew they were huge, but that’s too much.” I look at each of them. “You won’t see it.”

  “Then how do you see it?” David asks. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen you do some incredible things, but you’ve found a pattern we can’t even see?”

  “I must agree.” Yuri folds his arms. “Tyler, you may be new kind of wunderkind, but this is far over the top.”

  “What Tyler means is you won’t recognize it,” my father explains.

  David and Yuri appear unconvinced.

  “Okay… real quick.” My father urges me out of the way. He opens a text document on the screen and types:

  “What do you see?” he asks David when he finishes.

  “Two rows of numbers.”

  “And…”

  “The top row has even numbers that go up in value from left to right and the bottom row has even numbers that go down in value from left to right.”

  “So how did you do that? Did you identify
the value of each numerical symbol and compare it to all the rest? Did you go through each row, number by number, in order to identify the upward and downward trends? And what made you think to check each number to see if they were all even?”

  “You can just see those things.”

  “You mean you can just recognize those things. It’s no different than hearing a song. If you hear a melody, do you think about the notes? No. Your subconscious delivers to you the upper-level pattern, the melody, and you simply ‘feel’ that you recognize it. And that’s how Tyler sees the patterns in the data.”

  “Only, I suppose, he’s like Mozart and the rest of us are still working on our scales.”

  “Basically, yes.”

  “Anyway,” I interject. “Yuri, besides bypassing the calibration subroutines, the scanning sequence needs to be changed. We need to scan regions 4, 3, 26, 18, and then 17.”

  “Cingulate gyrus to visual cortex?” Yuri waves a hand dismissively. “Is unrelated regions. This is becoming wild bird chase.”

  “The numbers he’s referring to aren’t the Brodmann numbers on your brain map,” my father tells him. “He’s referring to the data table IDs.”

  Yuri considers this a moment, presumably cross-referencing the data table IDs to his brain map. He nods.

  “Okay, Tyler,” my father says. “We’ll rescan with the calibration subroutines bypassed and in the order you’ve specified—then what?”

  “Then I’ll write a program that joins the regions and plots them out graphically.”

  “But even if miracle happens and some type of pattern emerges,” Yuri says, “information is useless. For feedback to work, information must be in real-time.”

  “But at least we’ll know Danny is still with us.” My father indicates for me to relinquish Yuri’s chair. “Yuri, just bypass those subroutines and let’s pray for that miracle.” My father turns to me. “You can set up across the hall. There’s a workstation already in there. And listen: just show us these patterns and by God we’ll figure out some way to make this work.”

  ****

  Eight hours later, in the mostly empty lab, room 514, I finish my data analysis program. Anxious to see the results, Yuri, my father and David are hovering behind me.

  “Nichego—I see nothing,” Yuri says. “Bourilkov System can already generate region-based scatterplots.”

  “That’s why I started here. I wanted this to be easy to follow.” Hopefully that doesn’t sound too condescending. Yuri seems aggravated enough.

  I tap on the F9 key and five three-dimensional scatterplots align themselves vertically, forming a tall, single block. That single block then rotates ninety degrees, so that it’s lying down.

  “Nice animation,” David says.

  “Just some macros,” I mutter.

  “I still see nothing,” Yuri complains.

  “That’s because I haven’t aligned them spatially yet. When I do that…” I tap the F10 key and the five plots shift, two up and three down. “Then, when I set them in motion.” I tap the F11 key and a five-second loop begins.

  On the screen, red, green and blue lines highlight the patterns propagating through the data. And there are several of them.

  “See?” I watch the squiggly lines dance across the screen.

  No one says a word.

  I glance to my left, then to my right. Do they not see this?

  I give it a few more seconds, then swivel around in my chair.

  Yuri is transfixed. My father is as well.

  David pats me on the shoulder and stumbles away. For a second, I thought he might collapse.

  “Tyler…” My father clears his throat. “I think you just saved Danny’s life.”

  20

  “So how do we use this information?” my father asks, minutes later, pacing the floor.

  On the screen, my animation continues to run: red, green and blue zigzags, proclaiming that Danny is still here.

  “Is not real-time,” Yuri says. “Is encouraging, yes, but we cannot target what has already happened.”

  “Is there any way to—no, no, never mind.” My father continues to pace, rubbing his chin.

  “I’m pretty sure I have a solution,” I say.

  My father stops. The three of them stare at me.

  “I could write a CPL program that predicts the behavior of these patterns based on real-time markers. It could be trained with archived data obtained like this.” I point at the screen. “And then that could guide the system’s feedback probes.”

  “Ah, is not so easy.” Yuri shakes his head. “Processing time would be prohibitive. Bourilkov System calculates its targeting coordinates right at detector ring—is connected right inside housing. What you are talking about is remote computer and much, much more complex processing.”

  “That’s true,” my father says.

  “And calibration subroutines will need to be reactivated.”

  “Yes, yes,” my father agrees. “Although I’m pretty certain we could streamline those. But all the same…” He looks at me. “I’m just not sure your program could forecast out far enough.”

  “Not with the processing power we have here.” I stare at him.

  “Prometheus?”

  “But—” David furrows his brow. “I thought Prometheus was incredibly slow.”

  “Your Cray XT5 isn’t.”

  “You have supercomputer?” Yuri begins to smile.

  “We do.” My father leans his head back and stares at the ceiling. “You know, this might actually work. The Cray could be set up in here, and we could run a fiber-optic cable straight to the detector ring.”

  “How fast can you get supercomputer here?” Yuri asks.

  “It’s ten o’clock now. I’d say by five or six in the morning. We’ll need an air-ride truck.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” David says, heading for the door.

  “Shouldn’t I go, too?” I push out of my chair, feeling I should be there in Prometheus’s final hours.

  “No, you stay here with Danny.” My father plants a hand on my shoulder. “And you need to get started; you’ve got a hell of a lot of programming ahead of you.”

  No more than ten minutes later, I walk my father and David across the marble floor of Brook Howard’s lobby, our reflections confronting us as we approach the doors.

  “Take good care of Danny,” David says as the wintry air whirs inside.

  “I will. And have a safe trip.” I take a deep breath of the night air. “And don’t forget to tell Prometheus I said goodbye.”

  21

  With my father and David now off braving the Long Island Expressway, I sit down next to Danny, with a laptop borrowed from Yuri, and start coding. As my fingers automatically generate the CPL header and agent instantiation lines, I think about the long days and nights ahead. This will be no small task: thousands of lines of code, and all written while knowing that, according to Yuri, every hour that passes reduces Danny’s chances of recovery.

  I glance over my laptop at her. I need to stay focused.

  I dive back into my work:

  “What do you call her?” Yuri asks. He’s in the doorway to the control room.

  “Who?” I respond, not looking up.

  “Program.” Yuri walks over to the other side of Danny’s bed and studies one of the monitors.

  “I’m not really worried about a name,” I tell him evenly, trying to remain polite.

  “But all projects must have name.”

  “I’m pretty sure everything I’ve ever worked on was already named for me.”

  “Ah, then this is big opportunity. Scientist must be good at naming things. Big Mac is not called Big Cow Meat Sandwich for reason.”

  “A scientist named the Big Mac?” I glance up from my screen. “Actually, that makes sense.”

  “Is no joke. Would we be here if Bourilkov Neurofeedback System was named Bourilkov Brain-Jiggling Machine?”

  “I guess not.” I resume typing.

 
“Ah!” Yuri holds up an index finger. “I have perfect name for new program: Bourilkov Neurofeedback System Brain State Emulator Module.”

  “Kind of long, isn’t it?”

  “But is good, is it not?” He raises his wiry eyebrows.

  “It’s good, yes,” I tell him, “but not exactly accurate. This thing won’t exactly be emulating brain states.” I continue to type for a moment. “What about Brain Activity Forecasting Module?”

  “No, no. Name must sell sizzle.”

  “All right, all right, the Bourilkov Neurofeedback System Brain State Emulator Module is perfect.” I type the name into the program’s header. “Now it’s official.”

  “Is good name.”

  “Well, it sizzles—I guess.”

  I return to my programming and Yuri continues to linger.

  “So, what is your plan after big success here, career-wise?” He opens one of the detector housing caps on the halo ring above Danny’s head.

  “School probably,” I say absently. “I’ll have to get a degree in something in order to get my mother and father off my back.”

  “University of Arizona is good choice—warm, dry climate and excellent academics. I could get you into accelerated program.”

  “Thanks, but I’m pretty sure my dad wants me to go to MIT.”

  “MIT is good choice, too. Assuming you must always do what you are told. But is none of my business.”

  I can sense his eyes on me as he waits for a response, but I continue to stare at my screen. He then closes the detector cap and walks quietly to the door. “I will be working in kitchen, so I do not disturb you.”

  ****

  I work until my father and David return the next morning, sleep a few hours while they install the Cray and its cooling tower, and then head back to work.

  For the next eight hours, alongside the Cray in its tall, smoked-glass cabinet, its green LEDs blinking excitedly at me, I work productively until my father and David begin running a fiber-optic cable between my workroom and Danny’s room. I take my laptop up to the seventh-floor skywalk.

  The sun is already beginning to set and, as usual, not a soul has come out here.