Fool's Experiments

by Edward M. Lerner

  This morning, AJ was discovering a new rule: conservation of pleasure. Last night he had experienced sybaritic delights beyond belief; the conservation law that balanced rapture and pain was now dishing out the hangover from hell. When he dared once more to open his eyes, the black coffee in the mug by his elbow mocked him. His stomach lurched just to think of it. Still, a grin somehow forced its way out. Beverly, where have you been all my life? And can you finagle more trips to LA?

  Slam! A stack of textbooks slapped the kitchen counter behind AJ. The noise pierced his head like an ice pick. "Hi, Daddy."

  Christ, even his gums hurt. His sideburns hurt. "Good morning, Meredith."

  "How late were you out last night?"

  Slam! The refrigerator door crashing shut almost tore the scalp off his pulsating head. Only clenched jaws kept a moan inside. "I went to dinner with a colleague and then had car trouble." My pants were too tangled to find my keys. "It seemed easiest to stay downtown for the night. Didn't Charlene tell you I called?"

  "Nope." His daughter clanked a bowl onto the table, then filled it with painfully noisy cereal. Milk cascaded boisterously. Curse that Snap, Crackle, and Pop, anyway. AJ's head throbbed with every scrape of spoon against ceramic. "No comics yet?"

  The newspaper had been at the foot of the driveway when the cab dropped him off. Bending over to grab it might have killed him. "Not unless Ming fetched it." He winced as Meredith scraped her chair backward.

  Black lightning streaked through the pet door, as though Ming knew her name. Meredith squealed as the cat hopped onto the table, something brown and furry swinging from her mouth. The something plopped into Meredith's bowl, to lie amid the Rice Krispies. Rivulets of red crept through the milk. AJ's guts cramped. Only dumb male pride kept him from heaving.

  "Daddy!" Meredith leapt to her feet, her chair crashing onto its back.

  He stood gingerly. "I'll take care of it, hon. Have a good day at school." She didn't argue; taking her books, she fled the kitchen.

  He was hunting for an empty coffee can or mayonnaise jar when the phone rang. The girls had the ringer volume cranked up to max, to better hear it over their iPods. Ouch. He grabbed the phone before it could ring again. "Yeah."

  "You have got to get rid of that moron!" his caller shouted.

  AJ recognized his chief assistant's voice. "Calm down, Linda."

  "Instead of telling me to calm down, fix the problem. Fire him, AJ."

  AJ rubbed his forehead. He caught sight of the dead mouse in the cereal bowl, and his system resumed fomenting rebellion. "Whom him?"

  "Ferris. Greg's cretin little brother. Axe his sorry ass."

  "I know Jeff was a mistake, Linda, but he's harmless." AJ sighed. "Look, I've made it a point not to give him any work. A little more of this and surely boredom will make him quit."

  "You pay him to play video games, AJ. I'm pretty sure he's inoculated against boredom. And he's not harmless. I caught Jeff again yesterday with his laptop hooked into the lab network. He could ruin everything."

  AJ sipped his coffee, grimaced, and shuffled into the pantry. He kept a bottle of scotch on the top shelf. The hair of the dog that mauled him. "I'll remind Jeff about our rules," AJ ventured soothingly. "I don't want to hurt Greg."

  "Please, AJ!" The high-pitched squeal brought tears to his eyes. "You know I've accepted a job offer with a January start date. Well, it's contingent on completing my thesis. If that juvenile jerk brings a virus into the lab, I might not finish in time."

  The sudden quiet on the line was, in its own way, deafening. AJ heard the blood pounding in his brain and more ominous stirrings in his gut.

  If his head hadn't been throbbing so badly, he might have listened instead to his conscience. He might have followed the dictates of his normal, nonconfrontational nature and waffled a bit. Later on, he would wonder about that.

  "Please, AJ!"

  Greg would have to understand. "Okay, Linda. I promise I'll fix it."

  "Today?"

  AJ winced. "Today."

  The entities raced about the maze. Goal was near, they all "knew," but—incredibly—as accomplished as they all were at solving labyrinths, no path led to it.

  Generation after generation after generation failed to solve this problem. Change after change after change was experimented with, those changes accumulating in endless combinations and permutations. Most of the mutations led nowhere, the entities defined by the much-altered code quickly racing forward to a common obstacle, and then stopping—entirely stymied.

  And then one entity, at the apex of thousands of generations of blind and seemingly futile experimentation, to the applause of unseen observers, beings whose entire context was utterly beyond the entity's ability to conceptualize, took its first step in a new direction....

  Upward.

  Bubbles fizzed in cheap champagne glasses. AJ had purchased the plastic stemware more than a week ago in anticipation of today's milestone. After thousands of generations in two-dimensional mazes, a maze runner had discovered a third dimension.

  Events moved faster in the lab's supercomputer than in the lab itself. While most celebrants still sipped their first glasses of bubbly, new cheers rang out. The next step in the master plan, preprogrammed into the experiment's supervisory software, had been a maze that could only be solved by traversing a simulated fourth dimension. Evolution cracked that barrier in—AJ checked his watch—scarcely thirteen minutes.

  That glance also reminded AJ of the lateness of the hour. He had put off the day's unpleasantness as long as possible. He took young Ferris by the elbow and led him behind a pillar. In this moment of triumph, no one would pay them any attention. They could talk discreetly. "I'm afraid, Jeff, that we have to let you go."

  "Is it a funding problem, AJ?"

  A week earlier, AJ could have answered "yes" with a clean conscience. A private research group backed by secretive venture capitalists had just approached him with an offer of serious support. Exactly who wanted to be his benefactor was a bit murky, but all they required was weekly reports. They had evidently read about his work in the Hartford Courant article.

  AJ was about to go with the white lie when Linda appeared. Do not gloat, woman, he thought. He apparently failed to think loudly enough.

  "It's not a money problem, you weasel," she gloated. "It's a brain problem. If you ever had one, your idiotic video games fried it long ago. You'll have lots more time for them now, but you'll have to play them off of my network."

  Ferris ignored her. "Is this true, AJ? Is firing me Linda's idea?"

  The chattering of AJ's assistants suddenly muted. People were again clustered around the lab's main display. He had to see what was going on. He had to.

  "I'm very sorry, Jeff. That's the way it's got to be." AJ began sidling around the pillar. "Of course you'll get two weeks' severance pay, but I would appreciate it if your things are out of the lab tonight."

  The room was hushed by the time AJ finished delivering the bad news. Peeking at the screen revealed why. A runner was about to solve yet another problem. The image no longer portrayed a maze. How could it, when mere mortals couldn't think in or visualize five dimensions, even if there had been a way to represent a five-dimensional maze on the flat screen. The irony amused him: Now that the mazes were so complex, their representation had devolved into a simple progress bar. A PBS pledge-drive thermometer.

  At least one runner was very close to reaching its latest goal. AJ checked his watch. Four minutes to generalize from four dimensions to five. Astonishing.

  He scarcely noticed Jeff Ferris slipping from the lab. It's better this way, AJ thought. No one is paying attention to him. AJ's own attention turned to the glass in his hand, which was, as though by magic, once again brimming.

  AJ had just made two serious mistakes.

  Had he set out intentionally to make an enemy, a purpose totally at odds with his nature, he could not have done it better. Casual dismissal was as galling a treatment as the self-absorbe
d young man could imagine. That was AJ's first error.

  The ongoing champagne was his second mistake, or at least the alcohol led to that second blunder. There was something pressing he should do, some follow-up to Ferris' departure. Increasingly buzzed, AJ couldn't quite put his finger on it. After a few more glassfuls, even the nagging sense of urgency dissipated.

  What AJ had forgotten was the cipherlock that guarded the lab door. He did not distrust Jeff Ferris, but it was policy to change the combination whenever someone left the team.

  All misgivings disappeared as the crowd behind AJ began chanting, "Go, go, go," to the unseen runner about to generalize yet again, and race through a six-dimensional maze.

  CHAPTER 23

  Doug had no need to encounter a remembered scent or pass familiar surroundings for raven-haired, soulfuleyed Holly to come vividly to mind. He carried a reminder with him every day, although his arm was a paltry loss compared to hers. That the crash was in no way his fault meant nothing.

  No, he didn't require an external reminder, but sometimes one came anyway. This morning it was her favorite Beatles tune, once again retro, wafting through the open doors of an elevator. All he could do at such times was strive even harder to give after-the-fact purpose to the tragedy. Since the madness with no-nukes and the suspension of his research, even that consolation eluded him. Until the viral threat to neural interfaces was countered and the solution stamped with the forum's imprimatur, BSC would not dare—no American company would—to manufacture the limb to which he had devoted his life and Holly's memory.

  The elevator doors closed behind him. He strode, his thoughts roiling, to his office.

  "Settled in yet?"

  Doug glanced up from his battered gray metal desk. His prosthetic arm sat loose on the blotter, immobilized between two fat reference manuals while he made one-handed adjustments.

  If Glenn Adams, leaning against the bookcase, felt queasy about Doug's bare stump, he hid it well. The veteran of two

  Iraqi wars had probably seen far worse. He waited for an answer.

  "I'm getting there, Glenn." Week One on any new job is like drinking from a fire hose. Wisdom lay in knowing that. "Thanks for asking."

  "Glad to hear it," Glenn said.

  Doug prodded a sticking linkage, his screwdriver entering the prosthesis through a jagged rip in the plastiskin. Four weeks after belly-flopping into the BioSciCorp parking lot, he hadn't made time to tend to the tear. Wearing long sleeves, who was to know? Maybe when spring rolled around...

  It was hard to move past the colonel's original cool reception, despite the invitation to work here. Doug told himself things changed: Adams now seemed as eager as he to find a defense against viruses for neural interfaces.

  "How is the arm? Can you continue your work?"

  How about, Doug thought, how is your arm? Or even better, are you okay? "It wasn't designed for crashing into the asphalt." Nor was I, but only that desperate diving lunge for Sheila Brunner's remote control had prevented disaster.

  Doug rotated a screw a quarter turn, stretched a piece of Scotch tape over the rip, and began struggling back into his prosthesis. "Ralph Pittman and I have been brainstorming the problem. What makes 'no-nukes' and its look-alikes so dangerous is their adaptability. We're talking about an interface modified to proactively shut itself down. The trigger would be too much activity, or suspicious patterns of activity, from the nonbiological side. The approach may mean dumbing down the interface, but it should be a lot safer."

  "Sounds plausible." Adams stroked his chin contemplatively. "As you well know, this is important. You and Ralph should check it out thoroughly."

  "Uh-huh." The remounted prosthesis felt somehow awkward. Doug guessed it was a subtle balance issue: The latest alteration had added a few ounces in the form of a palmtop computer. The palmtop connected, via a cable plugged into its expansion slot, to the arm's neural net. Palmtop ... he suppressed a snort. Yes, the cranny inside his forearm was, unless he stood on his head, atop his palm. He would acclimate soon enough to the change in balance, and although it seemed improbable that arm nerves or the spinal cord could transmit a computer virus, the watchdog module was only prudent.

  Routine maintenance on the arm was more than mechanical. Every so often, he had to download the minutiae of sensor readings, nerve impulses, and prosthetic motions. It still took a decent-sized—and potentially infected—computer to ferret out of that ocean of data what motion algorithms worked best. Cheryl had not been given the time to synthesize generalized rules of motion.

  Adams sighed. "Fine, we're not best friends. While I'm being candid, a few more things. I was too slow to believe you. I was a jerk about Cheryl. And I admit I coerced you into coming to the forum. Does that cover my many sins?

  "Either way, you and I want the same thing: a way to make neural interfaces safe. What do you say you work with me?"

  Doug looked up. "I want to help people with missing limbs and damaged nervous systems. I sincerely thank you for just maybe making it possible to restart that research someday. Somehow I doubt it's what motivates you." He had not forgotten being told Sheila Brunner had been designing thought-controlled weapons.

  Why her prototype had been Internet accessible remained a mystery to Doug.

  CHAPTER 24

  Three cities in four days do not a happy camper make. Today was the Bay Area. So far Doug had given the forum's canned "Computer security is important" spiel in San Jose, to a breakfast bunch of Silicon Valley types, to a lunch gathering at San Francisco City Hall, and at a bankers convention in Oakland. He told himself: Just one more for the day. Seattle tomorrow, and then home.

  Doug sat in his rental car, parked outside an architectural monstrosity. It was a classic of the Late Internet Hysteria Period, when far too many such bunkers had been built. But nothing grows forever. Long after the bubble burst, many places like this one remained vacant. They offered everything one could possibly want for a server farm—fat power lines and big backup generators, huge chillers for air-conditioning, redundantly routed fiber-optic cables for Internet connectivity, shielded walls to prevent electronic eavesdropping—and nothing for people. People liked windows and individual offices, to start.

  Whoever owned this building had lucked out. A modest sign declared this the Northern California State Technology Incubator. More than cavernous computer bunkers had gone out of vogue with the bursting of the bubble; so had easy venture capital and taking public every harebrained idea. Cost control again mattered to start-ups. Here the state offered entrepreneurs low rent and subsidized access to very costly infrastructure.

  The reception area was unattended. "Hello?" Nothing. The inner door was locked. Doug knocked. No response. Well done, Glenn. A great use of my time. He knocked harder.

  "Be there in a second." Considerably later than that, the door opened. A burly man came out, dressed in chinos and a polo shirt. "Sorry. Can I help you?"

  "Doug Carey. I'm from the Inter-Agency Computer Network Security Forum, here to give a security pitch."

  "Right, that's today. My name is Roy, by the way. Roy Philips. I'm with the state; I watch over things here. Take the tour?"

  Somehow, it didn't sound optional. "Sure."

  Movable partitions and chain-link enclosures subdivided the vast, echoing space. Philips did lead Doug up and down the aisles, but it was less a tour than an opportunity for Philips to remind everyone about the four o'clock presentation. If there was an organizing principle behind the range of businesses, Doug missed it. Gene-sequencing lab. An online dating service. A print-on-demand publisher. Outside a telecom-gear-testing boutique, Philips patted an enormous spool of cable. The logo on the spool read: Global Internetworking Corporation. "This, Doug, is the longest fiber-optic cable in the world. Call it eight thousand miles. After testing, it goes straight aboard a cable-laying ship. San Diego to Brisbane, with no repeaters—that's how optically pure the fiber is. Cool stuff."

  The spool sat in the hall near one of t
he building's few permanent-seeming areas. Doug peered through glass walls at row after row of electronics cabinets on a raised floor. The sturdy door carried a warning sticker for halon fire suppression. Something finally clicked. That was a serious supercomputer, and this was a logical building to host it. The need for computing power, and lots of it, was the unifying theme for all these start-ups. "Nice."

  "You have a good eye," Philips said. "That's our pride and joy. Massively parallel, cryogenically cooled, and fast. A gift a couple years ago from the Governator."

  "And you can keep it busy?" Doug couldn't imagine how. Philips laughed. "UC Berkeley is down the road. Don't ask me why, but particle physicists cannot get enough processing time. They happily use whatever capacity we have to spare. For the near future, though, we will manage to keep it busy.

  "Cable is cheap. Laying cable on the ocean floor, or repairing it once it's been laid—now that's expensive. If you can test for a possible problem ahead of time—you do. It takes a supercomputer to simulate the expected combined voice and data traffic volumes between Southern California and Australia."

  They worked their way forward to the auditorium, passing more new ventures on the way. Design shops for specialty integrated circuits. An animation-centric ad agency. Various software companies, including a VR gaming outfit. That might have been interesting; of course the programmers would not give Doug even a peek at the game they were developing.

  The auditorium turned out to be an unoccupied area with folding chairs. A small table held a laptop and overhead projector. A bare wall served as the screen. Maybe thirty people waited, looking unhappy. While Philips quieted everyone and got them into their seats, Doug plugged in his thumb drive and called up his PowerPoint presentation. "Good afternoon, everyone. I'm"—with the government and I'm here to help—"Doug Carey, from the Inter-Agency Computer Network Security Forum." He pulled up Glenn's favorite color-coded bar chart of virus attacks. "This is what we're up against. I'm here to impress on you the importance ..."