Fool's Experiments

by Edward M. Lerner

  An Alert box suddenly filled the middle of the laptop's screen. Behind the pop-up, Tetris pieces piled up relentlessly. Nervously, Jeff clicked the Accept button.

  Another window, this one text filled, appeared. Jeff swallowed hard as he read: "Mr. Ferris, please see me in my campus office sometime Thursday afternoon."

  Busted.

  CHAPTER 3

  Cheryl's gut lurched ominously as she walked into the BSC lobby. As long as it only rumbles, she thought. Trapped in the women's room wouldn't be a good first-day impression.

  She didn't exactly understand her misgivings. Both interviews had gone well, and Doug had extended the job offer quickly enough. She certainly seemed to hit it off with her new boss. Maybe that was the problem. She didn't want to hit it off too well. She knew how her looks affected men. On the job, it irked her. Off the job, she never found the time for it to matter.

  Replaying the interviews in her mind, she decided that neither Doug nor his all-male staff had seriously questioned her. Everyone had concentrated on selling BioSciCorp. Why were they so eager to hire her? Not that she didn't need the job...

  Doug stood when she knocked on the jamb of his open office door. He towered over her. Six foot two, she guessed, and maybe 195 pounds. His black hair was thick and a bit unruly, with a touch of gray at the temples. He had nice eyes, she thought. Gray or very pale blue? She couldn't decide. A warm smile.

  And I'm questioning his reasons for hiring me?

  Well into the welcome-aboard orientation, Cheryl worked up the nerve to ask him about the softball interview questions. Doug took a bulging folder from a stack on his desk. He flipped through it, theatrically plopping several thick papers onto the blotter. They were dog-eared from use and thickly annotated with highlighting marker and scribbles in the margins.

  Clearly, he wasn't going to explain. Cheryl took a paper, a reprint from the Proceedings in Neural Computing, from the top of the stack; she had written it. She checked all the articles he had selected. She had authored or coauthored every one. Doug, it seemed, had pored over every one of her professional articles and papers. Their well-worn condition made clear an interest in her work long predating her recent job feeler. So much for a good first-day impression. "You're right, of course," she said. "These say everything you need to know about my capabilities. I apologize for being so touchy."

  Doug studied her frankly, a twinkle in his eye. "I can say with absolute conviction that I admire you solely for your mind."

  It annoyed her that in some unliberated recess of her mind she took umbrage at his jest.

  Like noontime most weekdays, the condominium was largely empty. The first moans that drifted through the stairwells and down the hallways went unremarked. The moaning grew gradually louder, more insistent, and began making its presence known throughout the building. A mother blushed for her totally oblivious three-year-old, and turned up her TV. The mail carrier in the foyer smiled at the same imagined lust. Len Robertson, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service who was working the second shift that week, pulled his out-and-about wife's pillow over his head, hoping to fall back asleep.

  The moans grew louder and somehow unhappy. There was a hint of wildness, and then of pain, under the inarticulate whimpering. Embarrassed, the mother swept up her son and carried him, screaming in protest, on a suddenly urgent errand. Robertson threw off the blanket in disgust and donned his robe. He met the equally puzzled postal worker in the hall.

  Robertson was about to suggest calling the police when the ambiguous moaning became an anguished scream. His memory coughed up a name. Jeffrey Dahmer: the cannibal killer in Milwaukee who tortured and murdered people in his apartment. Was it too late for the police? Robertson ran to his apartment for the handgun in his nightstand. "Call nine-one-one," he shouted, not waiting to see whether the letter carrier obeyed.

  "No, no, noooo!!" Screaming filled the hall. But from which floor? Robertson burst through a fire door into the stairwell, where noise reverberated confusingly. Were the screams coming from upstairs? Heart pounding, he tried to distinguish new shouts from the echoes. "Go away! Go away! Get out!" As he crept warily into the third-floor hallway, the words dissolved into inarticulate shrieking. The bellowing was coming from apartment 322—Mr. Cherner's unit.

  Where were the police?

  Robertson didn't stop to think. He charged into the flimsy door with his left shoulder. The wood gave way with a splintery, crunching sound. He pointed the gun with a two-handed grip. "Stop!"

  But the screeching didn't stop. Robertson watched in horror as Cherner, all alone, forced yet another inhuman scream from his throat. Bloody channels of flesh were tom from his face. Cherner's eyes, round and impossibly wide, focused on nothing.

  "It's okay," Robertson managed to say. "It's all right now. You're safe." The oncoming sirens should even have offered some confidence that he was right.

  But the gore dripping silently to the mg from Cherner's own blood-soaked hands denied even that modest hope.

  SEPTEMBER

  CHAPTER 4

  Jeff Ferris stooped before his reflection in the glass door of a fire-extinguisher cabinet. He smoothed windblown hair into place and straightened his properly striped, old- school tie. He was presentable, by his own standards anyway. And by Dr. Rosenberg's standards? There could be no predicting the tastes of the man who wore those horn-rimmed spectacles. What decade did AJ think this was?

  Get a grip, Jeff—this isn't about fashion. Rosenberg had obviously caught him playing video games in lecture; it was time to face the music. You call yourself a salesman, Jeffie boy? Sell your way out of this mess.

  He paused outside Rosenberg's office. As Jeff raised his fist to knock, a friendly voice said, "He's not there."

  Jeff recognized the voice, but its warmth surprised him. The tone was so ... sincere. He had invested too many hours practicing sincerity to accept it at face value from others. The boom was about to drop, all right. He turned reluctantly. "Sir?"

  His professor leaned against the jamb of a lab door, hands slid casually into the pockets of wrinkled slacks. "Relax, son, and call me AJ. Everyone who works for me does."

  Generations passed, and life—as is ever its wont—grew steadily in sophistication. The simple entities of the earliest experiment had been succeeded by beings of far greater capabilities.

  The creatures blundered about in a universe that consisted of wall and no wall. No, that wasn't exactly correct: Somewhere in the universe there also was goal, the finding of which was the sole purpose of existence.

  One of the beings had developed the ability to automatically save a map that indicated which of its motions had brought it into contact with wall or no wall. Whatever the being encountered it now remembered. The formless void that had thwarted the traveler's myriad ancestors began to lift. The maze-universe began to be known.

  And, once more, the Power from beyond the universe designated winners.

  Professor and student studied each other across the dimly lit hallway. Good grief, AJ thought. The boy is nervous. Scared of me?

  Well, he's only a freshman. AJ took a hand from a pocket to gesture Ferris over. "Relax, son. I won't bite."

  "You said something about working for you, sir?"

  "I'm getting coffee. Why don't you join me?" He turned toward the lab, assuming Ferris would follow. AJ flipped up the lid over the cipherlock keypad, and tapped in the combination that unlocked the door.

  AJ truly noticed the lab only when bringing someone in for the first time. What was today called the Artificial Life Sciences Building had been constructed, in an era long before computers, for the power-engineering department. Those original occupants eventually surrendered custody of the first floor to the growing-like-a-weed computer-science department.

  He and his team had inherited one of the double-height equipment bays. Thus, unlike the hallway they had just exited, the lab had seventeen-foot ceilings with crown moldings and ornate, late-1800s detailing. Desks and workb
enches clustered around massive support pillars, with each piece of furniture supporting at least one high-end workstation. Great loops of fiber-optic cable emerged from the computers, spiraling up the columns to the backbone cable tacked messily to the ceiling. (An anachronism, the wired network was far less hackable than its modem and more aesthetic wireless equivalent would have been. That was important.) Posters offered the only splashes of color, with enlargements of electronics and gaming ads outnumbering rock stars. The background music, scarcely audible over the friendly bickering of AJ's student assistants, was a reissued Beatles album.

  AJ filled two mugs from the mismatched collection beside the coffee urn and handed one to his guest. "How is Greg? You two look so much alike, you have got to be brothers. I imagine he recommended my class to you."

  "Greg's working for a small company out east ... AJ. A start-up. He seems to like it."

  AJ took a sip, grimaced, then scooped powdered creamer into his mug. Lumps of partially dissolved goo, possibly sugar, clung to his spoon. "Greg was, hands down, the best undergrad assistant I ever had, Jeffrey. Are you as smart?"

  "I prefer 'Jeff.' " The young man relaxed for the first time since AJ had called across the hall to him. "Greg and I have competed since I was born. I've always held my own."

  AJ pointed to a chair. "Okay, Jeff. Let's talk."

  From expecting to be kicked out of class to being offered a job within seconds. Life was funny, sometimes, even— Jeff grinned inwardly at his own wit—artificial life. And all thanks to his supercilious big brother.

  Greg had long ago made clear that he found Jeff stupid and superficial; Jeff considered his older brother an overbearing, impractical nerd. They were barely on speaking terms. Recommended AJ's class? Hah! Fat chance Fathead would advise him to do anything. Anything anatomically probable, anyway.

  To give credit where it was due, Greg was the first to see through Jeff's obsequious-to-adults act. Jeff excelled at wheedling favors, begging treats, and negotiating waivers from family rules. So what? Nothing stopped Greg from doing the same.

  Jeff had had Greg's teachers most of the way through school, and the experience to date had been uniformly wonderful. Ever so kind of Greg to leave behind halos for Jeff to assume. Greg had. worked his butt off to earn straight As; Jeff had coasted along after him, doing next to nothing, and getting at least Bs. Then Greg's alumnus status at Smith- field had given Jeff an assured admission.

  Now, despite the size of the university, Jeff had stumbled upon another halo in his first semester: Old AJ here really liked Greg. That looked to be good for some mad money, at least, if not a fairly automatic A.

  Time, then, to turn up the charm. "AJ, sir, what can I do for you?"

  CHAPTER 5

  Stern's Law posited that work expands to fill every available horizontal surface. Then again, Cheryl thought, maybe it's just my work.

  Papers covered her new desk, table, and much of the floor: electronic, mechanical, and electromechanical diagrams of the prosthetic arm; spec sheets for its embedded microprocessors; higher-level design descriptions; programming reference manuals. An open medical tome on the human nervous system teetered on the rim of her wastebasket.

  The mess obscured, besides most flat surfaces, the considerable progress that she had made. In her first week here she felt she had learned a lot. Doug and his team had performed a truly elegant bit of engineering.

  State-of-the-art arm prostheses worked with shoulder or upper-arm nerves grafted to chest muscles. Electrodes in the bionic arm interpreted muscular twitches (after months of painstaking training) as signals for embedded motors. An advanced model could handle four or so different hand and arm motions—compared to twenty-two for a human arm.

  Doug's prototype was to a current prosthetic as a Ferrari was to a stagecoach.

  An array of ultraminiature sensors in the socket end of Doug's prosthesis intercepted incoming impulses from the truncated efferent nerve branches in the stump. An electronics module sorted out the individual impulses directed to specific—and now-missing—forearm, hand, and finger muscles. Next, the electronics dynamically translated the "muscle" commands into computer directives that controlled the overall motion of the motorized prosthesis. Finally, mechanical linkages converted the rotation of the various computer- controlled electric motors into bending motion in the metal joints. In short: nerve impulses in; prosthesis motions out.

  But brain-directed electromechanical motion was only half the achievement. Other sensors scattered throughout the prosthesis detected pressure on and relative position of faux skin and bones. The data flooded into a second electronics module, which converted the torrent into concise useful information. Electronic transducers then modulated, amplified, and narrowcast this status information into the stump. The projected electrical fields impinged on afferent nerves, tricking the truncated branches into "thinking" that they were once again whole and connected to biological tissues. The upstream central nervous system components of spine and motor cortex couldn't tell that the sensations were artificially stimulated. Tactile data in; nerve impulses out.

  Together, the two parts of the system provided brain- directed control of the arm, with near-instantaneous feedback. Cheryl marveled that so much technology fit somehow into an apparatus that so closely resembled a human forearm. How long will it be before I fully understand this?

  "I asked if you could use a hand."

  Cheryl looked up from her paper-strewn desk, faintly aware of the furrow of concentration creasing her forehead. Doug stood in her doorway. She had apparently missed his original question but couldn't help noticing the phrasing. It was her job, in every possible sense of the expression, to give him a hand. Was his irony intentional?

  "One hand won't make much of a difference. Have you got a forklift?" It was evidently an acceptable response. He had a nice laugh, she thought.

  "I know the look of someone left wallowing too long in the documentation. Maybe I could come in and ... No, that's hardly practical. Maybe you could accompany me to my office and we could discuss the project."

  "Sounds like a plan," she said.

  The walk down the hall gave her time to formulate a question. "Look, I understand the arm in general. Honest, I do. It's the details that are holding me up." She took his grunt as a go-ahead. "Here's what I don't get: How did you ever develop the software? It must be amazingly complex."

  They reached Doug's office and he gestured her inside. They took opposite sides of the conference table. "I imagine the code is pretty hairy, but I'm not sure. It'll be your job to figure that out."

  She could only stare in disbelief.

  Doug's desk was behind him. Over the desk, row after row of tiny characters filled the PC display. As Cheryl watched, the display blanked and the screen saver kicked in. Large words began to float about: "Eschew obfuscation." (Later that day she looked up both terms. The phrase meant: "Don't be obscure." Right.)

  Insight struck. She said, "The prosthesis isn't programmed. It's trained

  "Uh-huh." Doug lobbed the staple remover with which he had been fidgeting. "Heads up." She extended her right arm to nab it. "Okay, now toss it back." The prosthesis trembled as the hand positioned itself for the catch. He resumed fidgeting. "Did you notice a difference?"

  Ah, the Socratic method. Cheryl had had college professors who favored the technique—leading the student to truth through questions. She hated it. She understood why the Athenians made Socrates take poison.

  What had she just seen? "The wavering in your arm. It was a midcourse correction, wasn't it? The arm must remember which commands worked right the first time in a certain situation and which needed corrective impulses. The more commands the arm saves and categorizes, the better it directs arm motion."

  Doug nodded. "Until its memory chokes or it has too many options to sift."

  A nasty complication occurred to her. "There are lots of possible motions for most purposes. When you threw that staple remover, I could have leaned tow
ard or away from it to make my reach more convenient. I might have caught it at the top of its arc, or near the floor, or anywhere in between. I might have jumped from my chair and leaned over the table to catch it. Heck, how many slightly different but completely acceptable ways were there to position and move my fingers for the final grab?"

  "Go on."

  He was enjoying this; she could tell. Maybe his mischievous grin was infectious, or maybe it was only his enthusiasm, but she found herself enjoying the battle of wits. She'd figure it all out. "You dissembled a bit. You didn't train it, not directly. It trains itself. The arm saves, at least briefly, every nerve impulse—every command—that you send it, the instantaneous position of every joint, every motion that each motor makes. If a motion is smooth, if it's not immediately followed by a midcourse correction, the attempted solution is good. If there is a midcourse correction, the attempted solution is bad. In an inefficient but persistent way, the arm consistently fine-tunes its own programming.

  "Okay. You challenged me to deduce how the software was developed. I'll hazard a guess that the arm can dump a file of its attempted motions to a PC. You want me to review the arm's 'lessons learned' file and synthesize an equivalent, but more efficient, set of rules."

  She'd worked before with adaptive neural interfaces—she wouldn't be here otherwise—but their learning operated within a long list of preprogrammed rules. This more data- driven approach was just ... wow. Did she have this right?

  A double thumbs-up indicated that she did. Since Doug was now flipping a pencil end over end between the fingers of his right hand, the right thumb was quite an accomplishment. "Now I understand why you fidget all the time. You're always in training."