Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  “Hesketh exists, as a real, independent entity. It’s really an AI, of a sort. But the reason you couldn’t find any trace that Ungaro had ever acquired any processing gear sufficient to develop anything like an AI was because she didn’t. She didn’t base her AI on the usual hardware. .. ”

  Charis half turned to leave, and Bernal hurried on. “Her work in California involved chimps. Chimp brains. She had information from some Russian experiments on preserved brains, dog brains ... I think she extended that knowledge. I think she learned to use the actual existing circuitry of a human brain in order to run her own cognitive software.

  “I think she got the raw material for Hesketh from a cryobank called Long Voyage.” He gave Charis a quick rundown: the co-location of Hess Tech and Long Voyage, the fire, the power failure, Spillvagen, the accusation that heads had been moved.

  Yolanda. He remembered her chasing after Spillvagen that night at Near Earth Orbit. He hoped she wouldn’t exact some dangerous kind of revenge on the pudgy Spillvagen. She looked like she could be vicious, if she had to be.

  Then Bernal held his breath. Charis stared at him. She wore an embroidered shirt that shifted her apparent ethnicity in a Hispanic direction without actually getting there.

  “What are you offering me, Bernal? The ultimate propaganda tool? ‘Here are your AIs: they’re made out of human brains!’ Hell, I could work the rest of my life and not come up with better PR than that. With this in my pocket, I could bus some good citizens down to Home Depot to pick up some manure forks and tiki torches and have them storm the MIT Media Lab, looking to lynch Marvin Minsky. Rope. I’d have to make sure they picked up a decent length of line. Not that anyone knows how to tie a knot anymore.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I’m serious about what I believe.” To Bernal’s surprise, she wasn’t raging. Instead she sounded close to tears. “I didn’t choose my position lightly. I don’t expect you to sympathize with it, but I want you to understand it. I didn’t just decide that AIs were icky, or unnatural, or might lose me my job. I didn’t just consult my inherent sense of pollution or propriety. I thought about it. And after I thought about it, I decided that what we had essentially done was turn over serious societal decisions to a group of people who believe themselves to be smarter than they actually are, and we did it without any consideration of the consequences. And, sure, I did it because I got tired of those little shits shoving their damn Singularity up my ass every time I turned around and telling me that I better enjoy it because that was what I was going to be getting for the rest of my miserable, irrelevant, transcendent, incredibly connected life. So I figured, when the grandly intellectual and the truly petty coincide so neatly, I would be a fool to resist. Hence my career with Social Protection.

  “But don’t try to take advantage of my urges, or game me. Icky, gross, disgusting—those don’t ring my activist chimes. They’re there. Those parts of our mind are always there. But I resist them, because those signals are really something like phantom limb pain. And now you come and ... what made you think I would fall for this?”

  “The fact that there is a very good possibility that that is exactly what happened.” Bernal spoke carefully, because he knew he would have only one chance, and was grateful that Charis was the kind of person who could ask that last question and then stay to hear the answer. He told her the story of the Bald Chimps, the burning of Ungaro’s lab, and the Soviet dog experiments. He told about the location of Hess Tech, the cryobank fire, and the possible disappearance of some frozen heads, followed by the departure of Hess Tech and its transfer here. He pulled out the piece of gold foil that had been lying on the back shelf, the foil that matched the foil sphere in Spillvagen’s office: part of the head-protection system of the cryobank.

  She held it in her hand. “Okay. I’ll buy some of that. But it’s no picnic, maintaining cryogenic temperatures. Nothing for an amateur.”

  He showed her Ungaro’s SQUID, the thing he had been wondering about. “This thing generates something like four times the cooling needed just for this sensor here. I couldn’t figure it out. I’ve signed off on the power bills for this place and always wondered what the hell was going on. . . . Now, this may all be a combination of coincidences, misinterpretations, and lies. But how much do you need in order to want to learn more?”

  “What’s the next thing you want to learn?” Charis asked, and Bernal knew he was in.

  He was careful not to sigh with relief. “I want to see if I can figure out what Hesketh was up to on the night Muriel disappeared.”

  _______

  “So,” Bernal said. “You were out watching Hesketh that night.”

  “At Muriel’s request. Handy for her, right? Having a devoted activist on tap for when your AI project goes rogue on you? Nice and deniable. I was a chump.”

  “But you went.”

  “ Yes, smartass, I went. She was .. . Muriel was scared. I could hear it in her voice. She said she was thinking that maybe she shouldn’t have chased me off, that if she’d let me keep nosing around I might have spotted some of the stuff she’d only lately discovered. I asked her what she’d discovered. She said she didn’t want to prejudice me, and would I please take a look at Hesketh and tell her if I thought it was actually intelligent. She sent me a series of maps, Hesketh’s planned test runs for the month. Muneer was off in California the whole week, trying to sell those equipment casings his company makes, and there wasn’t anything good on TV, so I went. And damn if I didn’t figure she’d screwed me over good. Hesketh didn’t show up. I mean, I sat out there in some bushes, and nothing whatsoever happened. I mean nothing. I’m good at stakeouts, have an ability to sit motionless for hours. No one saw me, I was undetectable, the thing never showed up.

  “Come morning, I unkinked myself to come on over here to see what the hell was going on.”

  “To find me.” Bernal remembered the mud on her boots.

  “Yeah. An open lab, a bunch of tossed-around crap, and a smarty-pants green-eyeshade type who got all snotty and talked lease arrangements.”

  “I’m not an accountant,” Bernal said.

  “Sure, fine. You’re not an accountant. Nothing to be ashamed of. Honest work.”

  Bernal thought about what she had just told him. “Muriel sent you more than one route map?”

  “Yep. You got it. So, that next night, I have no idea why, I decided to go out and check the route again.”

  “And take control of Hesketh?” Bernal said. “Wasn’t that a little more than Muriel had asked you to do?”

  “Look, Bernal.” To his surprise, she looked nervous, even a little embarrassed. “I sit in my office there, you’ve seen it, waiting for something to come up. These guys, assholes every one of them, they keep promising ... stuff. Things going on. Great advances. Constantly increasing speed, infinite power, all knowledge and cognition sliding down into an expanding Singularity that will suck everything up and remake the universe. And what do I actually get? The ability to learn the uninformed opinions of everyone in the world through round-cornered communications devices my fat fingers are too big to use.

  “So, when I learned that there might be some kind of real thing out there, something significant, I got ... excited. I teach myself not to, and I always end up fooling myself again. That’s why I got so pissed off when you called me this morning. Because you were pulling me back into it. Feeding my addiction.

  “Plus, Muriel was gone. She’d told me stuff wasn’t going well, and there was Ungaro’s office, looking like it had been tossed by some search-and-snatch team, and she was out of the picture, and there was no sign of the stupid gadget. So, yeah, I got a bit out of hand and tried to do a little catch-and-release on the space bug when I saw it. With results that you saw.”

  “Show me,” Bernal said.

  “What?”

  “The map. The map of Hesketh’s route on Sunday night, the first time you were supposed to try to assess it. Do you have it?”

  Wit
hout another word, Charis pulled out a thumb drive and walked over to Madeline Ungaro’s computer. A few clicks, and an image of a map replaced the lake view on the screen. Bernal could see a few roads, a river, some scribbled streets marking built-up areas. A red line squiggled in a rough circle around the map. Spots along it were marked with symbols: triangles, circles, dots, each marked with one to five exclamation points.

  She fiddled and called up an overlay menu. When she put road names up, he recognized what he was looking at: the land just west of Cheriton, a landscape of hills, abandoned farms, new subdivisions, industrial zones, and old mills perched on sloping layers of rock. It was a forgotten part of Massachusetts, belonging neither to the greater Boston metropolitan area nor to the more tourist-friendly hills west of the Connecticut River, which culminated in the Berkshires.

  The red line of Hesketh’s planned test route squiggled its way across the landscape. It was a loop that stayed away from roads as much as possible, running along an abandoned railroad right-of-way that had not yet been turned into a rail trail, through what had once been a lumberyard, along the one shore of Shining Lake that was too unstable, as yet, for housing construction, through a gravel pit, and along a power line right-of-way. Then past some sewage settling ponds, through a state wildlife management area, some conservation land, over Double Hill, into another gravel pit, through the extensive grounds of the regional high school, along the wall of a development, along the rocky bed of Middle Brook, up a gas pipeline right-of-way, past the Department of Correction Pre-Release Center, past a highway rest stop, then actually along a road so that it could dodge through an underpass under Route 2, then back to the railway right-of-way.

  “Where does this path start?” Bernal said.

  “Want a clue?” Charis moved the focus in on a road that led to one of the gravel pits. “A pickup truck registered to Madeline Ungaro is, right now, standing in the woods just off this road. It has not been marked as abandoned yet, and it’s not in anyone’s way, but someone at the department is keeping an eye on it. My old department may have a lot of problems, but they’re right up on vehicle abandonments. It’s an environmental issue, I hear.”

  “So she drove out there and released Hesketh for its run,” Bernal said. “Just as planned.”

  For a moment, he imagined Ungaro sitting alone in her truck, at night, wondering where her device had gone. She heard a noise, like someone coming up, but couldn’t see anything. Someone who had reason to hate her had set a trap for her, a trap that had finally sprung... .

  That was ridiculous. Muriel had not spent all this time setting up Madeline’s murder.

  But where were they both?

  “But it did not come back,” Charis said. “Somewhere along the way here, it deviated. Who the hell knows where it went after that.”

  “I think we know where it went.”

  “Where?”

  “It came back here. Let me show you.” Bernal led her through the lab to the rear door. He undid the new lock he had installed and threw it open. The black trail torn at an angle up the grassy berm was still clearly visible. “And that is the way that it came. If we track back, we have a good chance of figuring out where it deviated from its route, and why.”

  20

  There were a few weeds underneath the scrub oaks, but mostly bare earth. A washing machine, two sofas, and the battered cylinder of a hot-water heater lay at the bottom of the slope, no doubt tossed from the road above. Old clothes had burst from black garbage bags and were strewn across the ground, including some colorful hospital scrubs. The Black River flowed a short distance away. On its other side were thicker woods and the bulk of Mt. Marty.

  Hesketh’s backtrail had led, finally, here. Bernal couldn’t have done it on his own, but Charis had been able to spot scrapes, depressions in lawns, broken branches on rhododendrons, and kept them moving.

  And a car, an old Peugeot, with a boxy roof. The once-red paint had long ago chalked into dusty pink and cracked like drying mud. A fast-growing sapling had pushed in the driver’s side door. The windows were gone, the upholstery split. Some kids had plastered brightly colored “Doom of Humanity” stickers all over the inside. Stylized images of the animals that were to witness the human race’s extinction grinned at him.

  “That was its planned route.” Charis pointed. “Middle Brook is just up that way. But instead of turning to head up the gas pipe right-of-way, toward where I was waiting for it, like it was supposed to, it must have turned back to the lab. What, was it homesick? Tired of being made to run pointless loops in the middle of the night by someone who didn’t seem to have any bigger ambitions for it? Ungaro must have been sitting in her truck, waiting for it, getting increasingly pissed off. But pleased, I suppose, if she thought about it. Slacking off is an undeniable sign of intelligence. It’s only the non-self-aware devices that uncomplainingly do everything you tell them to. What, Bernal?”

  He was staring at the Peugeot, remembering something the Enigmatic Ascent folks had said to him. “Hesketh . . . those guys, the ones I was with the other night. They’ve been tracking Hesketh too. They were out and about that night.”

  “Damn crowded out here,” Charis grunted. “I had no idea.”

  “They saw it leave its prescribed route, come down to the river and ... do something to a car. This one, I think.”

  “‘Do something’? That’s pretty coy, Bernal.”

  “Okay, they said it looked like it was mating with it. Got all up on top of it, and for a while. Then it took off, and they followed and lost it. We’ve just been over the route.” Both he and Charis were muddy to the knees. “The ground was even wetter that night, and Hesketh outpaced them in the underbrush.”

  “This car, eh? Well, let’s see what made it so interesting.” She popped the trunk with the screwdriver on a multitool. The lid creaked up painfully.

  Someone had taken the spare, unless Peugeots usually kept it somewhere else. Something had creased and bent the trunk, and it sloped downward. Anything you would have wanted to keep in there would inevitably have slid somewhere into the depths of the car. “The Easter Bunny . . .”

  “Where did you hear about that?” Charis said sharply.

  “Why, have you heard of it?”

  “Never mind. I’m interested in how you heard about it.”

  He wasn’t ready to tell her that Muriel was communicating with him through stuffed animals. That seemed to undercut the credibility of the information. “Muriel talked with this guy Jord a few days before she disappeared. He was willing to talk with me, too.”

  Charis shook her head. “Muriel. Everyone gets seduced by her. Yeah, I’ve heard the stories. And remember that Jord is not necessarily reliable. He has his own goals. But I don’t see anything in here. Not now.”

  But there was another connection. . .. He looked at the scattered clothes. The bags hadn’t just burst when they were thrown down here. Someone had methodically gone through the clothing. The guy with the shopping cart, Spak. He’d scored himself some nice hospital scrubs. The ones remaining hadn’t passed muster somehow. Spak had been here too.

  Charis walked around and did the same to the hood. The engine was all there, though its hoses sagged and its belts dangled shreds. “You know, I’d like to figure out the cause of death. The car’s, I mean. Why it’s been abandoned. What the final, irrevocable failure was. Unclear here. Can’t figure it out.” The window washing fluid reservoir was empty. She yanked at the rear of the engine compartment. Nothing behind the firewall.

  She checked under the seats. Cubes of shattered glass covered the rear seat. After a moment’s hesitation, she popped off the rear side panel. The panel was stuck on its clips and came off in rough chunks. Behind it were nothing but a couple of electrical wires bundled with cable ties, and a dangling electric window motor.

  She got a good grip on the next panel and pulled. It popped right off its rusty clips. Something tumbled out onto the seat.

  “Jesus!” Bernal said.r />
  She looked at it. “Friend of yours?”

  “Funny. How long do you suppose it’s been here?”

  Sharp teeth stuck out from between the dried lips of the mummified cat. All that was left was fur stretched over bones. They both stood and looked at it as if it were going to tell them something else.

  “Who the hell put it in there?” Bernal asked.

  She shrugged. “Somebody. Teenagers. Who knows? Just a joke. This isn’t what Hesketh was after, is it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She sighed, then got on her back and slid herself underneath the car. Pretty soon all he could see was her boots.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  “Can you find a stick, maybe three feet long?”

  “A—sure.”

  “As straight as possible.”

  A moment later, he had one. “Careful. It’s muddy on one end.”

  “That’s okay. Go over to the other side of the car.”

  He did so and was startled to see a flap open on the fender, a big one, maybe eight inches square. It had been hidden by what he had taken to be checked paint. Charis stopped pushing with the stick, and it. clicked shut again.

  She climbed back out from under the car. He helped her brush dirt from her back.

  “What’s under there?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Okay, so—”

  “But it looks like there used to be something. Not sure, but... there are some scratches and a couple of places that look like an attachment was removed. Mud smeared in there to hide it—and that’s what attracted my attention. Attempts to conceal often end up revealing.”

  “Does that flap connect up—”

  “You know it does, right up against it.”

  “Where Hesketh must have . . . done whatever it did.” Bernal looked up at Mt. Marty, a big pile of rocks left by the glaciers that made the Black River detour around it. The river grumbled in annoyance at the obstacle. The ground around it was still damp from its recent floods.