Atomic Swarm

by Unknown

  Jackson glanced at the other students as they filed in and took a seat. His experience of student life at MIT was nothing like his school life in Peckham. The students here, most of them five or six years his senior, were some of the world’s most exceptionally gifted young people. They came from all over the world – India, China, Australia and, of course, the USA – and they were rarely, if ever, late. Unlike his fellow pupils back in Peckham, they didn’t chat during lectures or ask questions designed to undermine the teacher. And, based on the complexity of the answers they gave when prompted, they had always read up on the subject they’d come to hear about.

  As part of his arrangement with J.P., Jackson was required to attend several lectures to qualify for his MIT degree. The rest of his course was taken care of by the work he did with Brooke’s robots. So far he had attended a bunch of lectures on: number theory, which he loved because they included his favourite topic, prime numbers; three classes on quantum cryptography, which covered the making and breaking of secret codes; and a couple of advanced probability theory lectures – Jackson loved these because they suggested it was possible to predict the outcome of things in the future, using just the power of maths.

  Shame the theory didn’t stretch to predicting who his real father might be, Jackson thought. But before he could sink back into depression over his parentage, Jackson’s train of thought was interrupted abruptly by Professor Singer suddenly throwing down his book and striding to the front of the stage.

  ‘Robots are going to take over the world!’ he declared. Smiles and raised eyebrows appeared on many of the faces in the audience at this opening statement. The professor carried on. ‘But not until they learn to think better! Thinking robots are, of course, already a part of most of our lives. This robot is a thinker,’ he said, patting the covered object.

  Jackson looked at the object. Its outline was a little robot-like – a small rectangular head atop a large boxy body.

  The professor stooped over a laptop on his desk and pressed a few keys. Several lines of numbers and symbols, which made up the computer code, streamed down the centre of a large projector screen behind him. ‘And here’s the code for my thinking robot – see if you can work out what kind of robot it is, before I reveal it!’

  A good proportion of the room leaned forward and squinted at the code, trying to decipher it.

  ‘Any ideas?’ asked the professor.

  ‘Some kind of unmanned military vehicle?’ said a guy on the front row confidently.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ asked the professor.

  ‘Well, if that’s just a box under that cover, it looks about the right size to contain a UAV. And that code seems to be encrypted.’

  The professor smiled. ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘A surgery robot?’ suggested a girl who was sitting a few rows in front of Jackson.

  ‘Interesting,’ the professor observed.

  He ambled over to the object. ‘Say hello to Soapy, everyone!’ And with a flourish, he pulled the black material away.

  Jackson was surprised to see a washing machine, with a box of washing detergent on top of it.

  The room erupted into laughter.

  J.P. was right, thought Jackson. He is an oddball.

  ‘The humble washing machine answers most common definitions of what a robot is: it has sensors; it has a brain; it can do the work of a man or a woman; it can move. At least mine can… all around the kitchen when it’s on full spin!’ More polite laughter. ‘But can it think? Well, sort of. The standard code of this machine, straight out of the factory, which is what you can see behind me, is designed to help the robot perform some simple reactive behaviours – like check that you’ve added washing powder or that it’s not overheating.’

  The professor punched another key and a new batch of code loaded on the screen. This time it began to scroll down and continued as Professor Singer carried on speaking.

  ‘But this new AI code, which has taken me and my MIT team over a year to write, has taken Soapy to the next level. Now, rather than reacting to stimuli with stodgy, predetermined responses, Soapy can apply his own logic. He can think for himself.’

  The professor walked to his desk and typed a sentence into his laptop, which came up on the screen.

  Hello, Soapy.

  After a few seconds a text reply materialized on the screen:

  Hi there!

  ‘Soapy’s AI program is available on the MIT Intranet along with other artificial intelligence codes – and I’m happy for those of you taking this module to download and play with it.’

  Everyone except Jackson applauded. It was impressive, but he wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. Jackson’s attention began to drift elsewhere. The robotics of a washing machine weren’t enough to keep him sufficiently distracted. He gazed around the auditorium and found himself wondering if anyone else here didn’t know their father.

  A dark cloud hung over him. His dad’s visit had left him with so many unanswered questions. What did his real dad look like? Did he even know he had a son? Was he still alive?

  Jackson fired up the browser on his mobile phone and entered his mum’s name into the search window. Perhaps there might be some answers among the thousands of algorithmically indexed search results.

  Tens of Bernice Margaret Farleys covered one side of the plastic phone. He was able to spot the irrelevant ones almost immediately: his mother had never been on Face-book and she certainly wasn’t chairlady of the Kentucky Women’s Medieval Reenactment Society.

  He fingered through page after page of nonsensical links by touching his phone’s surface, and was about to give up when a headline caught his eye. It was a link to the ‘Death Notices’ section of the Peckham News. Jackson knew the newspaper, which was delivered free to hundreds of homes in his area. The link featured the words ‘In remembrance of Bernice Farley of Peckham’.

  He had seen this before. His dad kept a copy of it in a red box-file in their sitting room, along with other Mum-related memorabilia, like her diaries and letters his parents had written to each other.

  Jackson had looked in the box once or twice, but he’d never been able to bring himself to read his mother’s obituary.

  He took a deep breath and clicked on the link.

  Bernice Farley of Peckham, south-east London, 38, died Saturday 16 June, in St Thomas’s Hospital where she was taken after a hit and run accident. Services will be Friday at 10 a.m. at Sacred Heart Church with Pastor Delroy Croyde officiating.

  Mrs Farley, whose maiden name was Lloyd, was born in Lewisham, London. She graduated from Oxford with a Masters Degree before marrying Mr James Farley.

  She is survived by her husband and son, Jackson Farley.

  Jackson had a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach like he always did when something took him back to his mother’s accident, but he tried his best to ignore it; there was too much in front of him that he was curious about. His mother’s maiden name for starters – it hadn’t occurred to him to use that. Now it was in front of him, it seemed so obvious. What he needed to be searching for was information about his mother’s life before she met his dad – before she was a Farley.

  Jackson entered ‘Bernice Lloyd’ into Google. There were several references to Bernice Lloyd on various social networks, but little that looked like it related to his mum.

  Jackson flipped his handset over in his hand, so the phone’s all-over screen showed previously viewed pages in a series of small boxes. He touched a small square and the obituary enlarged. His attention was drawn to the mention of Oxford University. His mum had often talked to him about her student days reading Applied Mathematics at Jesus College. He tried another search: Bernice Lloyd + Oxford University. This time the third entry down offered up something that jarred his memory: ‘Oxford University’s official Alumni remember maths team members past and present.’

  The link revealed a page with a royal blue insignia at the top of it and the words UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD MATHS TEAMS emblazoned
below it.

  There was a picture, featuring a group of four geeky-looking students, which Jackson took to be the current maths team. To its left was an arrow leading to the maths teams of previous years. Jackson wasn’t entirely sure when his mother had attended the university, but he certainly remembered her talking about being on the Oxford maths team.

  By continually clicking the arrow, he was able to move, in reverse chronological order, through a slideshow of maths team members.

  After several pages filled with the proud faces of mostly bespectacled brainboxes, he eventually came across a page that was slightly different from the others; it featured the year of the team and, on a gold rosette, the words WINNERS OF THE SPECIAL MATHS OLYMPIAD. Above the rosette, in between her fellow teammates, Jackson spotted his mum. It was a younger face than he remembered and the kind of big hair he’d have never let her forget if he’d been given the chance, but that broad, warm smile was unmistakable.

  His mum had talked with pride about how her team had been the first group of Oxford students for several years to win the coveted Mathematics Olympiad. She’d even kept the competition questions. Jackson remembered he had struggled with the transformational geometry part of the question paper and that his mother was quicker, initially, at the workings out for Fermat’s and Euler’s theorems, but by his seventh birthday he could finish the paper in half the time it took his mum.

  Jackson shot a quick glance down at the stage as he sensed a shift in the audience’s attention. Flanked by the projector screen, Professor Singer was talking about teaming up different types of intelligent robots to help each other complete tasks. Beside him on the projector screen were two cartoon drawings of washing machines – one with a smiling face and one with a sad face. Above them it read: COMPLEMENTARY PERSONALITIES: HOW TO MAKE MACHINES WORK TOGETHER.

  Jackson’s attention was caught.

  ‘As some of you may know, for many years I have run a famous final-term AI competition.’ The professor looked intently at the audience of students. ‘This year I’d like entrants to experiment with some of my ideas about complementary personalities. I want to know how you would team up different types of intelligent robots so that each might help the other complete tasks. There’s no prize, just the prestige associated with winning. But I will allow the winner to let Soapy do a load of their washing – I know how grubby you students are!’ There was a ripple of laughter from the auditorium. ‘You can use any of the AI code I’ve uploaded as a starting point. You have two weeks to email me a copy of your finished code.’

  It was definitely an interesting thought, but Jackson had bigger things on his mind right now. When Singer moved on to his next subject, Jackson looked back down at his handset.

  Peering closely at his mum’s photograph, he examined the faces of the other three students who stood beside his mother in the photograph. Below each was a name: B. Lloyd for his mum, then Lumpy, D. Alexander and Mr Pope.

  Jackson looked more carefully at the three young men who stood in a huddle around his mother. Lumpy was a squat man with a thick ginger beard and an implausibly large and scruffy jumper that reached his knees. Next to him was D. Alexander, a tall, scrawny young man whose most distinguishing feature was the smoker’s pipe between his teeth – it was the kind of curly black pipe you might expect an old fisherman to have, rather than a university student in his early twenties. And the third team member wore a baseball cap with large dark sunglasses, which did nothing to hide a profusion of red spots on his face that they were obviously intended to disguise.

  Jackson shook his head in frustration as he realized he’d been examining each of the maths team members for fatherhood potential, mentally ticking them off based on features such as the ginger gene and bad acne.

  This is ridiculous, he told himself. I’m auditioning dads!

  He switched off the browser of his phone and looked up to see the professor in mid-flow. The lecture had moved on and the screen behind the professor now read SWARM AND MODULAR ROBOTICS. Below the headline were some more cartoon-like illustrations of tiny cube-shaped machines joined up in different formations – a snake, a square and a ring.

  ‘The reconfiguration of various modules enables the modular robot to assume almost any shape imaginable.’ Professor Singer walked up and down in front of the screen. ‘While in distinctly different categories of robotics, robotic swarms and modular robot designs both get their strength from their numbers. For the swarm, it’s about large numbers of small simple machines working together and sharing a single insect-like swarm intelligence in order to perform tasks they couldn’t do individually.’

  Jackson had read about these kinds of robots in Professor Singer’s book and found it really interesting.

  ‘Several large corporations have been developing swarm and modular robot technology.’ A slide appeared behind the professor containing some company logos and he talked briefly about each company’s robot projects. Jackson took notes until the professor said something that caused him to drop his pen with a clatter on the floor. Lear Corporation, Devlin Lear’s company.

  Jackson scrabbled down by his feet for his pen, completely flustered now. He looked at the slide again, staring intently at each of the logos on the screen. He should have looked properly the first time. One of them really was Devlin Lear’s corporation logo.

  The professor continued his summary of the company’s history. ‘Of course, following the tragic death of Lear, Lear Corp has been disbanded.’

  Tragic death? thought Jackson. The only tragedy, as far as Jackson was concerned, was that Lear had got away with his criminal deeds and had affected the lives of so many innocent people before he’d drowned.

  ‘The organization funded several projects aimed at advancing the design and testing of swarm and modular robotics. They were subjects Lear was extremely passionate about. The man really was a hero of modern computing and he’ll be sorely missed.’

  The professor was obviously completely blinded by Lear’s scientific credentials and didn’t appear to be concerned by the reports that the world had heard about his criminal past. Hearing Lear talked about in such respected terms sickened Jackson to the pit of his stomach. If, like Jackson, Brooke and the Kojima twins, the professor had been tricked by Lear into taking part in criminal acts that had led to at least one death that Jackson knew of, then Lear wouldn’t seem heroic at all.

  Disgusted, Jackson decided that coming to Singer’s lecture hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

  Jackson rose to his feet and moved out towards the exit.

  ‘Leaving so soon, young man?’

  Jackson ignored the sarcastic address from the professor and walked out of the door – he had nothing to say to him.

  *

  The steps outside the lecture theatre led to a wide lawn with a soaring pine tree in the centre. Jackson let his gaze drift to the crest of the tree, silhouetted behind a sparkling sun. He breathed in deeply, the soothing concoction of fresh air and tranquillity allowing the frustrations of the lecture theatre to slowly ebb away.

  As he walked across the grass, Jackson activated the email application on his phone – there was something he felt ready to do now. So he began to write.

  Dear Dad,

  I’m sorry for the way I reacted last week. I was really angry. I still am! But you kind of turned my entire life upside down with the whole ‘I’m not your dad’ speech! I was so angry I could have punched someone. I could have punched you! (I’m glad I didn’t, by the way.)

  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since you left.

  I think you should have told me before, but what I’m saying is that I forgive you – because I can see that having me to deal with after Mum died must have made it really hard – and because I know you’ll be feeling rubbish right now.

  Now DON’T GET ANNOYED but I want you to do something for me – in return for me not ignoring you for the rest of my life. I want to find out more about Mum. I miss her and I want to know as much about
her as you do.

  So, if I promise to give it back, could you send me that stash of her stuff you keep under the sofa?

  Thanks, Dad.

  C U soon,

  Jackson x

  PS If you see anyone from school, tell them to tell Mr Willard, my history teacher, that Boston is v. cool and that I think they’ve forgiven us for the whole Tea Party fiasco.

  CHAPTER 9

  The next morning Jackson felt a little better. Writing to his dad had helped him get some of the things he was feeling off his chest. It wasn’t just about discovering more about his mum – and maybe even his real father. It was the feeling that without his dad, he didn’t really have anyone any more. And, besides, he’d missed him.

  Despite this, though, Jackson’s heart was still heavy – after all, his mum had kept things from him too. And that hurt.

  With these feelings and Professor Singer’s lecture about Lear weighing heavy on his mind, Jackson had decided he needed to get out of his room and force himself to follow Atticus79 to chess club. He didn’t really want to go, but he knew it was good for him.

  As they walked from the dorm building to the lawn in the centre of campus where the chess club regularly met, Atticus79’s virtually unbroken stream of consciousness about ‘mineral properties’ was proving the ideal antidote to Jackson’s state of mind. The young geologist’s passionate description of anthracite mining methods and the magnetic qualities of magnetite didn’t leave much room for Jackson to ponder his own problems too deeply.

  When they reached the chess club’s meeting place, below MIT’s Great Dome, Jackson noticed that several of the club members weren’t there, but had joined a small crowd of students who were all staring up at the top of the building.