“How long do you plan on staying on Maui?” Hirshfeld asked.
“As long as we need to,” I replied.
“Let’s continue with your tour today and by tomorrow morning I’ll have a workstation and a guest account set up that you can use that will get you into all the code that I can allow you to access. Will that be acceptable?”
“That sounds great, Harold. We’re all eager to see your facility,” I answered.
That evening we sat around the table on the porch with one of the Surfaces open and inhabited by Sanci. “So what did you think about the Supercomputer Center? I asked them.
“Well, it certainly is impressive,” Sven responded. “But the funny thing is, I didn’t see that many people working there. They have this huge complex housing one of the largest computer set-ups in the world, and you could roll a bowling ball down most any hall we saw without fear of hitting anyone. What’s up with that?”
“I did some research,” said Sanci, “while you all were playing high tech tourists. The Maui High Performance Computer Center is one giant pork barrel. Senator Daniel Inoye served in the U.S. Congress from the time that Hawaii achieved statehood in 1959 until his death in in 2012. He was incredibly powerful and was the Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He personally pushed the Supercomputer Center through by cajoling and trading favors with other senators until they agreed to fund it. The military and the Defense Department didn’t want it and emphatically stated that they had no need for it but they got it all the same. Rumor is that over 70% of the available compute cycles are unused.”
“Well that would explain a lot,” I said. “Could you get any idea of the usefulness of the OS, Claire?”
“Ask me again tomorrow after I get my hands on it. Although Hirshfeld did say that it was going to be very limited access.”
“See if they’ll let you log on to the system from your Surface,” Sanci said with a mischievous expression on her face. “I’ll see how good their security really is.”
“Sanci, don’t you dare get us arrested,” I warned.
“No worries, Boss. If I can’t make a 100% safe entry into the system, I won’t even try.”
“Alright, I’m trusting you on this. I must be out of my mind.”
“Hey, don’t sweat it,” Sanci replied. “All that code was written with your tax dollars. You might as well get some use out of it cause it doesn’t look like anyone else is doing all that much with it.”
“So how long will you need to be connected to the system?” Claire asked.
“I’m not sure. Just keep busy until I tell you I’m finished,” Sanci answered.
On the way back to the condo, we stopped at Coconut’s Fish Café for a feast of fish tacos. Now Coconut’s fish tacos aren’t like anyone else’s. For one thing, they use fresh caught Ono and Mahi Mahi topped with an amazing variety of toppings that are made fresh every day. After a couple of Long Board beers and far too many tacos, I was ready to collapse on a chaise lounge and watch the sun sink into the ocean.
As I headed for the patio, Claire and Sven settled into the chairs around the dining table, Claire with her Surface as she carried on a spirited conversation with Sanci while Sven pulled out his suitcase filled with computer chips, blank boards, precision soldering irons, and all the other paraphernalia he needed to slap together a working prototype of our headset system for the girls to test their operating system. When I went to bed around 10PM they were all still at it and when I awoke a little after dawn, I emerged from my bedroom to find Sven soldering the last few connections on his test bed system. “You been at it all night?” I asked.
“Yea, hardware junkie hours. By the way, you need to pick up some Jolt Cola. You know what they say, ‘Twice the caffeine and twice the sugar keeps the Sandman away.’ Anyway, I’m going to bed. Wake me up when you all get back from the Supercomputer Center. I’ll be ready for some more fish tacos and then we can see if we can make this contraption work.”
“Sure thing,” I answered. “You think they’ll have Jolt Cola at Safeway?”
“If they’ve got programmers, they’ll have Jolt. Try the market nearest the Center.”
By the time I’d made a pot of Kona coffee and cut up a Papaya and some mangos, Claire emerged from her room dressed in a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt and sleeping shorts. “Hey, Boss, you get a good night’s sleep?” she asked, idly running her fingers through her disheveled hair.
“I slept like a baby. How long were you and Sanci at it? Sven just now turned in.”
“We talked til about midnight, strategizing our plans for the OS. Sometimes I forget I’m talking to a computer.”
“That’s because you’re not talking to a computer. You’re talking to a very smart person that happens to live in a computer. Not a day goes by that she doesn’t absolutely amaze me. I feel like I’ve known her for all of my life.”
“I know what you mean. We actually talked about slumber parties last night. She wanted to hear all about what games we played when we had them as kids. And then five minutes later she was talking about slicing and dicing code like she was a pro. It takes a while to get used to it. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I heard her snoring from the other bed.”
“You be ready to head out around 8:30?” I asked.
“Sure, I’m going to drink a couple of cups of coffee and then go for a swim before I shower. See you then.”
Working in Maui was easy to get used to. We arrived at the Supercomputer Center a little before 9AM and Claire settled into a cubicle that Harold Hirschfeld had assigned to us and she immediately got to work, signing in to her guest slot on her Surface as Sanci had requested the day before. She looked at me trying to appear busy and she said, “Why don’t you go back to the condo? I’ll call you when I’m ready to be picked up.”
“You sure you won’t need me?” I asked in my most timid voice.
“I’m sure. Go look over Sven’s shoulder instead of mine.”
Sven was already asleep so I gave up and went snorkeling. The instant my head was in the water, I could hear the whale song of the humpbacks swimming in the channel. The unusual squeaks and whistles were mesmerizing and these songs surrounded me as I spent hours drifting among the corals and observing the huge variety of colorful wrasse and blue damsels as they fed on minute pieces of plankton drifting in the water. There were bright yellow Butterfly fish and more than a few large Parrot fish feeding on the reef. I saw a moray eel slither across the sand and into a hole where he remained with his head jutting out, his mouth opening and closing as if in a threatening manner. At one point I spied a small octopus which I pried from the rocks. He proceeded to climb up my arm, finally perching on my shoulder and watching the reef with evident delight as I glided through the warm Hawaiian waters, constantly serenaded by the nearby humpbacks. It was a magical day and I swam for hours until I realized that my back and the backs of my legs were undoubtedly sunburned.
Regretfully, I took my leave from the water and when I got back to the condo, there was a message on my phone from Claire telling me to come pick her up. When I arrived at the parking lot, Claire was waiting for me and when she saw I was wearing a bathing suit and my hair was still wet she commented, “I see you’ve been working hard.”
“Yea, I went out and got sunburned. Somebody had to do it so I volunteered. You think you got what you needed?”
“We did. To tell you the truth, mostly I just sat there and looked busy while Sanci searched the registers for the files she needed. She’ll tell you all about it when we get back while I go get my swim in.”
I settled into a rattan easy chair with my Surface placed on the coffee table. Sanci appeared on the screen dressed in a trench coat and brimmed hat with sunglasses and a bushy mustache adorning her face. “How do you like my spy outfit?” she asked with a sly grin on her face.
“You look great Darlin. Now tell me about your sojourn at the Supercomputer Center. Were you able to get a good peak at the operating syste
m code?”
“Oh, I had all that code in the first minute I was logged on. Their security isn’t really very good. I was able to roam all over the system without a problem.”
“I hope you were careful,” I cautioned.
“I was totally stealthy. I cruised most of the research projects going on here, even the DOD research, though there’s not very much of that.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well,” the spy on the screen responded, “Riptide is capable of handling more than 250 TerraFLOPS. That’s 10 to the twelfth power floating point operations a second and that’s a lot of compute cycles. I was surprised at how low their usage of those cycles really was. Today, less than 5% of the available cycles were used. I thought maybe today was a slow day so I checked past usage. The only times they have used more than 10% of the system capacity has been when they were testing performance. Mostly that massive parallel computer sits idle. Maybe it’s contemplating its navel but it sure as hell isn’t getting any work done.”
“Actually, that doesn’t surprise me that much. Fincher said they practically begged him to sign up for some cycles. He told me that he could probably get all that we could want.”
“Well, don’t bother. I did him one better. I placed a self-generating copy of myself within their system. We can use any available cycles without leaving any record that we did so.”
“Are you sure that’s safe?” I asked, more than a little alarmed. “Aren’t they likely to notice?”
“No. I told you. My use is completely invisible. And it will never get in anyone’s way. If an approved user runs an app, I simply give up however much power he happens to need. I’ve already set up a dozen applications that are running as we speak. You know all that video we’ve been gathering with your headset? I’m automatically converting it to 3D data and mapping it with the images. Where ever you or anyone else wearing one of our headsets go will be automatically added to the database. I’m also running facial recognition software on that same video just to see how well it works.”
“And how is that working?”
“It works really well. But I did notice something pretty odd. One guy keeps showing up in the background. It’s like he’s part of your entourage but he’s not. He was there at least six different times. I think maybe he’s watching you.”
“What does he look like?” I asked, curious and a little bit alarmed.
Sanci brought a good clear shot of an oriental face in a crowd in the Waterfront Restaurant in San Francisco. That’s the best shot I have of him but here’s a bunch more.” Immediately more pictures of the same man appeared.
“You know Fincher told me that he was worried about some Chinese guy his sources had heard was snooping on us. I wonder if that’s the guy. Send a copy of the picture to Bob and another to his security guy. Let’s see if they recognize him.”
“Ok, will do,” Sanci answered. “I’ll start checking the US government databases as well.”
“You have access to those?” I asked incredulously.
“Silly, I have access to everything. When I find him, do you want me to see what I can find out about him?”
“Yes, please do. Are you monitoring my video feeds in real time?”
“I am.”
“Then please, if you see him again, let me know right away.”
“You got it Boss.”
Chapter 10
I was sitting at my desk on a Monday afternoon, two weeks after we returned from Maui. Just as Claire walked into my office, Sanci popped up on my Surface screen. “Uh oh, it looks like you two are ganging up on me. What do you want me to do now?”
Claire had a grin that seemed to dominate her whole face as she said, “We just finished testing the operating system with the new headsets. I think we’re good to go.”
I looked at Sanci and asked, “You’ve finished and debugged the OS already?”
“I finished it a couple of days ago. Claire and I have been jamming on this ever since we got back. I wanted to have it done before I lost my tan!”
“It’s time for a full scale test,” Claire said. “You ready for some new holes in your head?”
“In my head? You’re ready to sink electrodes into my brain? I’m not sure I’m ready for this and I wasn’t aware the headset was finished.”
“It’s finished,” Claire said. “And Fincher found us a neurologist here at Stanford that he says we can read into the full program. Her name is Dr. Lee Martin and she gets a lot of her funding from Fincher. I sent you her contact information already. You sure you want to go first? I’ll be happy to be the guinea pig.”
Giving in to the inevitable I answered, “No, that’s my job. I’ll get it set up. I’ll call her now.”
I retrieved Dr. Martin’s number from my email and dialed it. She answered on the first ring. It was almost as if she was waiting for my call. “Dr. Martin, this is Colin Anderson. Bob Fincher suggested I call you.”
“Of course, Dr. Anderson, what can I do for you? Bob mentioned I might hear from you.”
“Well, I’d like to get you involved in a research project we have going here at the Center for Advanced Computing and Bioscience Research. It’s a bit complicated to go into over the phone. Is there any chance you could come by my office so we can chat? I think I have a few things to show you that might surprise you.”
“That’s intriguing. I like surprises and Bob tells me that you are working on something that will change the world. So sure, when would you like to get together? My schedule’s pretty open.”
“Any chance we could do it now? I’m only a block or so away from you.”
“Sure, why not? Fincher tells me you are costing him vastly more than I do so I’m interested in seeing your black hole where so much of his money is going. I know the building. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes or so. I assume you’ll have a mountain of non-disclosures?”
“You can count on that. Bob is a stickler on getting them signed before we tell anyone our real names. See you soon.”
As soon as I hung up, Sanci asked “Why don’t you let me greet her on the elevator? I can chat her up a bit before she knows who I am.”
“Sure, why not?” I answered.
Jun picked up the secure satellite phone and when Tai Quiang answered he said, “I may have a break in the Fincher surveillance.”
“It’s about time you did,” his superior answered. “What have you learned?”
“For some time Fincher has been funding research by a neurologist named Lee Martin and we have been monitoring her calls. She does not use the same encryption and security that Fincher and Anderson have employed. And she just got a call from Colin Anderson. He wants her to assist him in his project.”
“Have you learned what he is working on?” Quiang asked in a peevish voice.
“Only that it involves artificial intelligence.”
“Everything Fincher does involves artificial intelligence in one way or another. So what’s this Martin woman going to do for him?”
“I don’t know, but they are meeting in Anderson’s office in fifteen minutes,” Jun answered.
“Find out. I need to see some progress from you, Jun. Sooner rather than later.”
“While she is at Anderson’s office, I am going to slip in and put a bug in her office. She could be our way into this project that Fincher is spending so much money on.”
“Just get me results, not excuses,” Quiang said and then he abruptly ended the call.
When Lee Martin entered the elevator at the Center for Advanced Computing, she was surprised to be greeted by name by a lovely young woman over a teleconferencing system through a small high definition screen at eye level on the wall of the elevator. “Hello Dr. Martin, I’m Dr. Anderson’s assistant, Sanci. We are all very excited to meet you. Dr. Fincher has told us a lot about your work.”
Lee smiled and said, “I wish he had told me more about your work. To tell you the truth, I have no idea what I can do to assist you. I do
n’t even know the general direction of your research, only that Bob Fincher considers it very important.”
“Well, you’re about to learn all about it. We’re arriving at our lab floor now. Before you exit the elevator, please place your palm on the scanner to the side of this screen. I’ll record your palm print and create an access pass for you for your future visits.”
Lee did as she was asked and then the elevator door opened. “Nice to meet you Sanci. Will I see you in the meeting?”
“Oh, you’ll be seeing lots of me. I hope we can become good friends. I don’t have that many women friends. This is Claire,” Sanci added indicating the cute redhead standing at the door. “She will take you to the conference room.”
“Hello Dr. Martin,” Claire said as she extended her hand. “I’m Claire Ross. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
A few minutes later they were seated in a conference room at a huge tabletop made of a single slab of polished hardwood some 5 inches thick and still in its natural form with undulating edges defining what had once been the exterior trunk of the massive tree. “Colin will be here in a moment. Can I get you an expresso or cappuccino?”
As Lee was about to answer she was surprised to see Sanci appear on the large flat screen on the wall. “Hi again,” Sanci greeted her. It took Lee a moment to realize what startled her about the young woman’s appearance. In the elevator Sanci had been dressed in a pretty flowered silk dress and now she was wearing tan slacks and a white silk blouse with a wide collar. Lee didn’t see how she had had time to change her clothes.
“Hi, Sanci,” Lee said, her puzzlement evident. “Are you going to be joining us?”
“Yes, but only electronically. Did you want that cappuccino?”
“Yes please, that would be lovely.”
Claire and Lee chatted amiably for three or four minutes as Lee reviewed and signed a hefty non-disclosure form and then I walked in, carrying a tray with three steaming cups of cappuccino. I set the tray down and introduced myself. “Good afternoon Dr. Martin, I’m Colin Anderson.”
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