Fool's Experiments

by Edward M. Lerner

  Doug carefully laid down his computer-controlled goggles, although its LCD eyepieces and stereo speakers weren't all that fragile, then wrestled himself back into the prosthetic forearm. He hoped the impact of racquet on wall hadn't injured the limb. He would find out soon enough.

  Doug glanced at his wristwatch, and it was as late as he had feared. The more conventional part of work called.

  Doug strode from the virtual-reality lab to his office, whose laser-carved wooden nameplate announced him to be Manager, Neural Interfaces Department. He paused beside his secretary's desk to check his tie. He'd be amazed if it didn't need straightening.

  No surprises today.

  The sidelight to his office door reflected more than his tie. His most prominent feature, a nose too large for his taste, stared back at him. Aquiline, Doug reminded himself, aquiline. Like an eagle. A hint of a mischievous smile flashed and was gone. What eagle had a bump like this on its beak? His hood ornament had come courtesy of a long-ago pickup football game gone a tad too enthusiastic.

  He tugged the knot into something closer to symmetry before entering his office. A visitor waited inside, scanning titles on his bookshelf. "Sorry to keep you waiting," he said.

  Cheryl Stem turned to face him. It was her first time at BioSciCorp, and Doug found himself taken aback. Cascades of wavy brown hair framed a face graced by wide-set hazel eyes, an upturned nose, and a sensual mouth. Her brief smile seemed forced and out of practice. She was slender and, he guestimated, about five foot four. All in all, very attractive. The memory of Holly instantly shamed him.

  Cheryl looked surprised when Doug waved off her outstretched hand. She would understand soon enough. He offered her a guest chair, shut the door, and hid behind his desk.

  Her application sat in a manila folder in front of him. He got his mind back on the interview and the resume. The resume, he reminded himself severely, that had earned her his invitation. "Thanks for coming in, Cheryl. I hope you didn't have any trouble finding us."

  "Your secretary's directions were great. I gather she gets to give them out a lot."

  Implying the question: Against how many people am I competing? He also couldn't help noticing that she perched just a bit too far forward in her seat. He tried for a friendly grin. "There's no opening per se. You obviously know how few people there are in the neural-interfacing field. When a resume as impressive as yours crosses my desk, I make a point of talking to its owner. If this looks like a fit, I'll make a spot."

  She relaxed a bit at his answer but said nothing.

  "Let's start with one of those open-ended questions candidates hate. I try to get those out of the way early. That way, Cheryl, you'll actually get to eat when we go to lunch. So, why don't you tell me a little about yourself?"

  It was quickly clear she didn't intend to volunteer more than was on her resume. "Excuse me please, Cheryl. What I'd like to hear is more along the lines of what you're looking for in a job. For instance, why did you contact BioSciCorp?"

  It took a few tries, but he eventually got her to open up.

  "... And the field of neural interfacing fascinates me. Still, when I consider the potential of linking the human brain directly with a computer, my imagination can't quite handle it. Sure, I know the standard predictions: speed-of-thought control of complex machinery, immediate access to entire libraries, mind-to-mind communications using the computer as an intermediary. What I don't believe is that any of us can truly anticipate the full implications. When we pull it off, neural interfacing will have as big an impact as did the industrial revolution and the Internet."

  When, not if. That was the attitude Doug wanted to see. "I agree: It will be astonishing. That's not exactly what we're working on here."

  "Close, though?"

  "One small step along the way," he conceded. "Mind if I do a quick overview of what we're up to here in my little comer of BioSciCorp?"

  "Yes, I'd like that."

  "Okay, then. Metaphorically, we're trying to walk before we run. The human brain is the most complex piece of neural engineering that we know, right?" She nodded to fill his pause. "The truth is, we—humans—don't begin to understand how the brain works. We're not even close to cracking the code. That's why BSC is trying to connect a computer to a much simpler structure of nerve cells."

  Cheryl tipped her head in thought. "Say you do interface a lower life-form to a computer. How could you know if any communication was taking place, or how well it worked?"

  "Who mentioned lower life-forms?" He took a moment's glee from her puzzled expression, then relented—sort of. He lifted his right arm off the desk, thinking hard about his hand. The microprocessor-controlled prosthetic hand slowly rotated a full 360°, the wrist seam hidden behind a shirt cuff. In the suddenly silent room, Doug heard the whirr of the motor by a freak of sound conduction through his own body.

  "You've connected to the peripheral nervous system." Her eyes were round with wonder. "That's so astonishing." Then the personal aspect of his demo struck home, and she cringed. "Oh, I'm so sorry. Excuse me. I just get too wrapped up in technology. I don't mean to make light of your, uh..."

  "No need to feel uncomfortable, Cheryl." He arched an eyebrow. "In the land of the prosthesis manufacturer, the one-armed man is king."

  Cheryl laughed—behavior he could not help but find endearing in a prospective employee. The current staff knew all his material.

  She said, "Um, but seriously, how did you do that?"

  "My stomach alarm went off ten minutes ago. What do you say BSC springs for lunch and we pick up the discussion afterward?"

  "You've got a deal."

  After beef fajitas and the completion of Cheryl's interview, Doug did some management by walking around.

  There had been a virus attack during lunch. They had been semilucky. On the one hand, the invader was not benign. On the other hand (an expression from which Doug could not break himself), the malware was clumsy and well understood. Well understood, that was, according to the web site of the Inter-Agency Computer Network Security Forum, the federal Crisis-Management organization that strove valiantly, if with mixed success, "to stem the rising tide of malicious software and computer break-ins." The press release announcing the forum's formation had brought unbidden to Doug's mind the image of King Canute drowning in a sea of hostile data. A far-from-bitsy bit sea.

  The virus was brand-new that day, and hence unknown by and invisible to the company's Internet firewall and virus checkers. The forum's web site already listed hundreds of attacks. Behind a cute pop-up window (Dyslexics of the World Untie) hid a cruel, if apt, intent: randomly scrambling the hard drives of the invaded computers. It had to be a new infestation, since BioSciCorp's backup files were all uninfected.

  In short, they had had a close call. He wondered if they would be as lucky the next time.

  CHAPTER 2

  The entity was.

  It existed in a featureless space; all that distinguished it from the all-encompassing void was an innate reflex that sparked it into sporadic, random action. Often, the activity produced a result that might in some sense be characterized as motion; at other times, the effort invoked an immovable counterforce that left the entity's situation entirely unchanged.

  The entity jittered about in a meaningless, chaotic dance. Only the whims of its reflexes and of the insurmountable forces determined its position. Unseen and unknown, time passed.

  Other beings similar to the entity could be said to be moving all about it, even through it. None of the beings in any way sensed another, or influenced another by its passage.

  Millions of the chance motions happened, then millions more. Driven only by reflex and the laws of probability, the locations of the objects gradually diverged. A few, the entity among them, were closer to an unsensed destination than the rest.

  That was enough.

  The few were chosen.

  Arthur Jason Rosenberg, better known since the fourth grade as AJ, stretched across the newspaper-
covered breakfast table for one last doughnut. It was the most exercise he was likely to get today. The paunch that hung over his chinos suggested how many circular snacks had met a similar demise. While his ever-taller forehead seemed to confirm the onset of middle age, AJ had advanced the innovative theory to his colleagues that he wasn't losing hair—it was merely sliding to the bottom of his face.

  AJ was pushing horn-rimmed glasses back up his nose when a dark, massive, furry object alit on his newspaper.

  Razor-sharp claw tips were visible in all paws. Ming (sur-named "the Merciless") was a foul-tempered black cat, staying with him courtesy—to use the term loosely—of a kid sister who had imposed on him for the length of her seemingly endless gallivant across Europe. Ming studied AJ dismissively, certain that AJ would not dare remove her. As though to reinforce her seriousness, the claws of one paw slid out, ever so delicately, another quarter inch. AJ examined his wristwatch and decided that another few minutes didn't merit the risk. Did it change anything for him to read another op-ed speculation about imminent New Caliphate missile tests?

  At least today Ming hadn't brought him a dead mouse.

  He glanced outside to the battered, sun-faded econobox recharging in his driveway. That, at least, made him smile: The heap wouldn't need to move today. Progress was a wonderful thing. He slid the breakfast plate into the dishwasher and sauntered down the hall to work.

  Six large flat-screen displays covered three walls of his once-book-lined den. Students milled about on five screens, representing the main campus, two satellite campuses, and two affiliated corporations. Speakers flanking the screens could bring him the sounds from any of the video-equipped locations and from fifteen audio-only sites. Each of the latter supported only a handful of people, a few individual elderly shut-ins.

  The technology that let students attend Smithfield University from anywhere with Internet access had also freed AJ from the daily commute. It was liberation certain to warm the cockles of any Angeleno's heart.

  The final display, this one mirroring what his students would see, came alive as AJ fumbled with the controls of his teleinstruction podium. He looked into his webcam. "Good morning, people." Accelerated rustling as kids found their seats was the only response. "I'm Dr. AJ Rosenberg, and this is Artificial Life 101. Real Life is taught over in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences." No laughter, from any of the locations, and precious few smiles. Tough crowd. "The Good

  Life is over in the Graduate School of Business, and The Time of Your Life is over at Fine and Applied Arts." He left unspoken his latest variation: Twenty Years to Life, over at the University Lab School, to which went most of the faculty's precocious, high school-aged children. Like his two daughters. Single parenting was hard, and not his class' fault.

  AJ gazed into the video camera. "You and I will be exploring a topic that didn't even exist when your parents were your age. Mention this course to them and you will probably get an inane remark about Frankenstein." Just smirk knowingly, as I'm sure you all do so well, he thought, visions of his own teens in his mind's eye. "We're not here to discuss anything so mundane, so simple, as copy and paste with existing biological bits. Nope, no cloning or genetic engineering for us. We'll be discussing something really cutting-edge."

  The entity was long gone, vanished, but new beings—its spawn—had taken its place in the still-featureless void.

  The progeny of the entity still moved randomly, advancing and withdrawing. Sometimes they edged closer to the destination of which they, too, had no awareness. Often they hacked away from their goal, or vied without success against the same unseen forces that had stymied their sire. Blind reflex directed their actions, as it had that first entity's.

  Still, subtle variations distinguished the descendants from each other and from their ancestor. One attempted its moves with greater rapidity than the others, and made correspondingly faster progress. One less fortunate moved in only a single direction, soon reaching a limit beyond which invisible forces permitted no further motion. The beings and their slight distinctions numbered in the hundreds. Each embodied a unique, if insufficient, method toward solving the enigma of the void.

  Millions of motions once again passed.

  All the travelers failed, but some were more or less successful than others. One, in particular, had the capacity of retaining a single fact. Specifically, the being "knew" whether its most recent effort had been blocked by the irresistible force. If so, it tried something, anything, else for its next motion. To that degree, its actions deviated from pure randomness; it had fewer false starts than its siblings, and soon forged far ahead of the pack.

  Memory, however rudimentary, was an evolutionary advancement of the profoundest significance.

  The far voyager and its nearest competitors were selected.

  Video cameras panned across the remote lecture halls. "So, class, what we will be dealing with are computer programs that simulate some behavior of biological plants and animals." AJ played a game with himself as he spoke, mentally labeling the students. Here, an obvious campus jock. There, a neohippy woman. Either those were the biggest hoop earrings ever made or the Flying Wallendas were preparing for an exhibition. He found a whole roomful of button-down, dress-for-success types on what he privately considered the Intergalactic Business Machines screen.

  "A simulated plant can curl its simulated stem toward the simulated sunlight. A collection of simulated ants can cooperate to excavate a simulated colony. A simulated—" A blinking light on the podium caught AJ's eye. When he pressed the Identify button on the podium keypad, pop-up text gave a student name. "Mr. Prescott, you had a question."

  The student stared self-consciously at the camera and cleared his throat. "You keep saying 'simulated life.' Why simulated life, rather than real?"

  "That's a good question." It was one AJ had answered roughly a million times by now. Did kids even read course descriptions before they registered? He kept scanning the displays, responding on autopilot. "Life as you and I know it exists in what I'll call the physical world. That domain is unbelievably complex, full of complications that make any study of it inconvenient and inconclusive. Think how much easier it would be to understand the principles of simple machines, like pulleys and inclined planes, if there weren't any friction." The analogy earned scattered nods from across the various class sites. One especially enthusiastic nod on the main campus display drew AJ's eye. Seated next to the nodder was a mesmerized-looking fellow, who looked very familiar, frantically typing notes into his laptop.

  "Life, in even the simplest bacterium, is a mechanism of incredible intricacy. It's just too hard to study or manipulate in its natural environment. That's why biology became a quantifiable science only very recently, centuries after physics and chemistry.

  We will be dealing in this class with entities that lack any physical existence. As the course progresses, our studies will progress from counterfeit bacteria growing in an imaginary Petri dish to flocks of simulated birds swarming in an imaginary sky. In doing so, we'll discover that a handful of principles govern seemingly complex behavior.

  "And who knows? Maybe each of us will even learn a little something about ourselves."

  Why, Jeff Ferris wondered, was the consummate test of salesmanship supposedly selling ice to Eskimos? His fingers twitched economically as he mused, surreptitiously playing Tetris on his laptop as the lecturer droned. Eskimos understood ice and its uses. What was the big deal in selling it to them? Now selling suntan lotion or a spice rack in England—there was a challenge.

  Jeff knew all about salesmanship. He'd tucked away a bundle in elementary and high schools, starting out by hawking gift wrap and greeting cards from catalogues and working his way up to used cars on weekends. He could sell anything, and the future looked promising.

  The distant future, that was. A college degree was, alas, expected for a broker job at any securities firm. Sure, he'd only been a kid during the nineties. He hadn't been asleep. Selling slock in dot-co
ms: Now there was a line of work worth getting into—until the bubble burst. By choosing courses with great care, Jeff meant to pocket a liberal-arts degree with relatively little pain—in time, he hoped, for the next wave ... whatever that turned out to be.

  Tap tap. Twitch tap, tap, tap. The falling, L-shaped cluster of video squares rotated and jogged left as it sank, before settling into a matching gap in the structure of colored blocks at the bottom of the screen. Three newly completed rows brightened, then disappeared. Suddenly unsupported squares dropped into the open space.

  Subterfuge, like sales, was an art. Jeff had long ago mastered gaming with his keyboard, avoiding the trackball that more easily maneuvered objects on-screen. Constantly rolling the trackball in class was a dead giveaway, while continuously keyboarding passed as enthusiastic, if inefficient, note taking. Another important rule: Wear contact lenses in school, since video games might reflect revealingly from regular glasses.

  He much preferred any first-person-shooter game, but without sound effects, those basically sucked. Earbuds were no good, since profs expected to be listened to. It didn't matter if they thought the buds were for a game or an iPod. So: Tetris.

  A new shape entered the game window and started its fall. On the wall-sized flat screen at the front of the auditorium, Dr. Rosenberg, larger than life and twice as ugly, prattled on about artificial life.

  This whole course seemed pretty artificial, but the Smith- field Student Association web guide—indispensable research material for the prepared slacker—said Rosenberg gave over 80 percent As and Bs. Tapitty tap, twitch. That information and the reported essay final exam had sold Jeff. He needed only one science class in the liberal-arts curriculum, and he could surely bullshit his way through an easy grader's essay test. Meanwhile, Jeff made a point of getting to the lectures on time and logging in—good attendance often earned the benefit of the doubt on borderline grades. Attendance didn't mean that he had to listen to—