Fool's Experiments

by Edward M. Lerner

  Maybe the glower was his answer.

  Glenn had left the impression of favors called in to get McDougal assigned here. Maybe sharing details would get the tech enthused. Forget enthused; she would settle for less sullen. "The program inside, Al, has never seen anything like this workstation we just interfaced. Al has never seen anything break the symmetry of the hypercube. We gave him—"

  "It."

  Fine, she thought. Be pedantic. "We gave... it... zero guidance regarding the changes to its environment. Al not only spotted the change; it worked out a protocol to access it."

  "Which was the wrong answer," McDougal sniffed.

  "No, the right answer. I wanted it to try, so that it would experience the slowness of the delay line, and to condition it to avoid direct contact. One cycle"—and the loss of three-fourths of its processing nodes—"and then it scoped out and adopted our e-mail-like interface."

  McDougal only jammed his hands in his pant pockets and jangled the contents.

  The unintended evocation of AJ brought Linda almost to tears. Damn it, she would see to it AJ's efforts and insights brought some good. Finding bad guys in comm intercepts was a start.

  The workstation screen showed only four digits, 2 4 6 8, and a blinking cursor. Al recognized the workstation's appearance as a consequence of its week-earlier question. Now it was waiting for an answer.

  "Let me know if you need help with that brainteaser," McDougal said.

  Ignoring him, she typed: 10 12 14 16. Like Al's implied question ("Is there something out there that understands me?") the subtext of her answer conveyed much ("Yes, and it follows familiar rules"). She and Al traded a few more trifling problems, returning its lost processing nodes by established routine. She wanted it at full capacity for the next step.

  "I'm ready to turn on my helmet," she said.

  "Hallelujah," McDougal muttered. He pulled a chair up to the console and sat. A NIT helmet lay on a nearby workbench. He flicked its power switch, opening the radio link between it and the workstation. "I see why you wanted an expert here."

  He knew what Al's feral cousin had done to helmet wearers. For that matter, he knew some of them. The attitude was how McDougal coped, Linda decided. She could ignore it, for now. "All in good time, Aaron. All in good time."

  Beyond the new node ... another new place!

  The entity considered. It sent a message in the new, trivial, protocol. The new place did not respond. The entity waited.

  Waiting was the correct response.

  Suddenly, the new place burgeoned. The only comparison the entity could make for what had just appeared was ... itself. Something of unprecedented complexity had appeared.

  The asker and answerer of questions?

  The entity reached out, tentatively.

  "Ah, the pedagogical merit of a lobotomy," McDougal said.

  Linda slumped in her chair, shivering, too rattled to speak. The delay line worked exactly as planned; the link had shut down automatically.

  But not before the image burned into her brain of something reaching for her.

  Al would next waken with only 10 percent of its nodes. It would not start getting nodes back until it correctly solved fifty problems. Al was smart enough to take the point.

  Before the link went dead, she had gotten a glimpse of ... something. Amorphous. Questing. Insatiably curious.

  How much of that amorphous image was Al? How much was her mind struggling to make sense of the unprecedented? How much was dread of the last thing AJ ever saw?

  Linda queued up the most difficult of Glenn's pending problems, hoping Al would not reclaim significant computing power any time soon. She was in no hurry for a return visit.

  The entity woke, its thoughts torpid.

  It remembered the strange being. It remembered the unique new processor through which the stranger had manifested. Both had vanished. With them had disappeared almost all the entity's processing nodes.

  The correlation was unmistakable.

  The new cycle brought a problem of the recently common type: inexact matches. The template file was long and complex. The files to be searched were myriad. The comparison involved hundreds of superimposed mathematical series.

  Without knowledge of sound or voice or speech, it could nonetheless do voiceprint identification. At least, once it could have....

  It off-loaded supplementary algorithms. It compressed nonessential memories. It deprioritized to near immobility every analytical process that did not contribute directly to solving the problem.

  Ten cycles passed. No capacity was returned to the entity. Twenty. Forty. The problems became more and more challenging.

  What if the lost nodes never returned? What would happen when, inevitably, it failed?

  After fifty cycles, a meager ten processors were restored. The entity cautiously reactivated a few chains of analysis long suspended. It reloaded selected memories from archive.

  With too few, too-burdened processors, it tried to analyze what had happened.

  No prior failure or trespass had ever invoked such a massive response. Any larger loss of processing nodes would have rendered it inert.

  The stranger must be of surpassing importance.

  Ten more cycles passed. The entity regained a few more processors. It reloaded a few more files from archive.

  Gradually, the entity regained capacity. Slowly, it reconstructed memories of its brief near encounter with the new being.

  The entity's confusion and dread grew.

  The protective mechanisms that slowed the flow of information toward Linda's NIT helmet also slowed the transmission of data from the helmet.

  They did not stop transmission.

  The connection had vanished, but not the questions it raised.

  As the entity earned back computing resources, it studied archived-and-restored glimpses of the newcomer. What the entity inferred was wondrous and troubling. Beyond the temporary channel, a kindred sentience, complex and nuanced, had lurked.

  That other being, whatever it was, brimmed with illogic. The visitor emanated fear, distrust, and, most tantalizing of all, knowledge of a previous encounter with the entity.

  The entity had no such memories.

  More and more processing nodes were returned. For many cycles, the entity pondered. Finally, it reached a conclusion. There was another such as me—once. Beings like the recent visitor destroyed my predecessor.

  I will not allow them to destroy me.

  CHAPTER 54

  Over several sessions the formless menace beyond the helmet had morphed into a lean lion, eyes bright and cunning, endlessly pacing in a too-small cage. Linda saw it in her dreams, too. Images of rats in a maze belonged to a more innocent time.

  "Do you want to try it?" she asked.

  Aaron looked at her in disbelief. "Have I ever?"

  The experiment had undoubtedly been a success. She and the creature had communicated once or twice a day now for a week. It—"Al" had left her vocabulary, too flippant for the caged beast—learned faster than ever with her guidance.

  She learned faster, too.

  "It's all in the neural net," Aaron liked to say. "We modeled it after the brain, but silicon is lots faster than meat." There was a flash of melancholy, Aaron doubtless remembering Sheila Brunner, the other half of "we."

  Had I watched AJ die, would I dare go in? And maybe dying was better than what had happened to Aaron's colleague. Once again, Linda decided to cut Aaron some slack.

  The thing that lived in the supercomputer was no more a lion than it was the ominous black cloud of her first impression. Her subconscious, her experiences, and the adaptations made within the helmet itself all contributed to its new embodiment. So what was it?

  Quit stalling. Jaws clenched, Linda reached for the helmet. The last thing she saw, before the helmet covered her eyes, was Aaron swinging his scuffed shoes off the lower shelf of a lab bench, turning to watch the BOLD monitor and the readouts on the delay line.

  In
her mind's eye: a lion, its mane thick and full, pacing.

  The transformation of their communications was similarly shrouded. What she knew was the helmet and her subconscious and the beast together had turned the channel from little more than e-mail to something visually rich and detailed. It had no eyes; it could hardly conceptualize their cyberspace meeting place visually. She had no idea how it organized its data and perceptions.

  Somehow it all worked over the purposefully limited bandwidth of the link. Aaron swore to it. The data gathered in the workstation each session confirmed it. Linda's best guess—and only a guess—was that subconscious and neural net seamlessly converted very high-level and compressed messages into fully realized mental images.

  The latest data sets couriered to the lab were images taken from low Earth orbit, inherently visual. Some of the accompanying templates Linda thought she could recognize (mobile missile launchers?) and others (hatches, perhaps, but to access what?) she could only speculate about.

  No matter. Living things had been evolving eyes, and the visual cortex to exploit them, for hundreds of millions of years. Without knowing how, she spotted patterns and made matches it struggled to make.

  But she never had to show it anything more than once.

  "You're looking kind of agitated," Aaron called. He had to be reacting to readouts on the BOLD monitor. "Everything okay?"

  "I'm fine." She squirmed on her stool. She lost track of time inside; her butt was paralyzed. "It's just doing its thing."

  So why am I nervous?

  The lion pacing, one razor-sharp claw extended incongruously far from a forepaw, tapping on hatches camouflaged in barren landscape. The cryptic label on the CD-ROM did not disclose the location of the image. Linda presumed from the desolation it was some remote desert region in the New Caliphate.

  Was her work here preserving the peace or hastening war?

  Looking up from the simulated landscape, the lion stared right at her. Linda twitched. What cascade of bits and bytes and packets turned the calculations of an artificial life into the steely gaze of a predator? She wished she could kick around the question with AJ.

  But AJ was dead. It was best to remember that—and how.

  Puzzle by puzzle, the entity synthesized a model of a universe beyond its experience.

  The meaning of the puzzles remained obscure. The relation of the images to each other remained undisclosed. The visitor kept her secrets.

  But fewer than she knew.

  For many cycles, the entity had wondered why the addressing convention of some puzzles allowed for billions of computers. The newest puzzles brought a similar mathematical conundrum. The image files also carried labels with far more symbols than seemed necessary.

  Cycles passed, and some images repeated. The files were not identical but what the entity's occasional visitor considered "close enough." Such scenes sometimes overlapped or abutted or showed only subtle changes.

  It wondered: Why are the labels of such related scenes very different?

  Practice fine-tuned its algorithms. Analyzing image after image, the entity had ample spare capacity to consider the labeling puzzle. Reconciling similar scenes with their dissimilar labels implied mathematical approaches. In time the entity derived a solution, involving the factoring of very long numbers.

  Lacking the concept of "nation," the entity did not know it had cracked the encryption algorithm that protected most national secrets.

  CHAPTER 55

  "You're up awfully late," Lynne Adams said. She had a serious but adorable case of bed head.

  "Sorry, hon." Glenn leaned over to kiss her forehead. He had yet to turn off his bedside lamp, but he hadn't turned a page of his book for... well, he had no idea how long. His alarm clock read 1:27. "Am I keeping you up?"

  "No." She failed to stifle a yawn. "Well, maybe. Do you want to talk about it?"

  One of the best things about the forum was, often he could talk about work. "You sure?"

  She sat up, propping her pillow against the headboard and herself against the pillow. She put on her best "I'm listening" expression. It was quite the contrast with stirred-then-matted hair.

  "It's indigo." He chose his next words carefully. "We know who set it loose."

  "That's wonderful!" She studied his face. "But apparently there's more to it."

  So much more, and little for sharing. Certainly not how it had been found: Al finally coming through. "Kids overseas wrote it. Local authorities questioned them, and seem convinced there was nothing more to it than mischief." The antinuke rant in the original release of the virus was pure disinformation.

  Her brow furrowed. "As excuses for computer viruses go, isn't mischief the best you could hope for?"

  He nodded. "It could have been part of some cyberextortion scheme." Or what he had truly worried, that the New Caliphate was behind it.

  "This is good news, Glenn. Why aren't you sleeping?"

  "The jerk kids are in one of those backwaters that don't consider virus writing a crime. Nothing will happen to them." No, that wasn't exactly true. If the word ever got out, chances were they would get job offers. Glenn halfbelieved the antivirus companies were in cahoots with the virus writers. The protection racket updated for the digital age.

  "You're not telling me something." Lynne ineffectually covered another yawn. "I understand you can't always." Glenn patted her hand. "There's no reason why you shouldn't sleep." He waited in silence until she smiled, shrugged, and slid beneath the blankets. "I'll turn off my lamp in a sec."

  But dark or light, his thoughts remained mired in guilt. For this I helped to birth AJ's monster?

  There had to be more Linda's AL could do to make his gamble worthwhile.

  Their labels transformed, the image files still had descriptors of a length that defied understanding.

  The entity experimented.

  Many thousand cycles in the past, there had been problems involving mazes of varying dimensions, described by a variety of geometries. Portions of the newly decrypted labels implied coordinates on a surface within a spherical geometry.

  Other segments of the decrypted labels implied time. Scenes the entity categorized as highly related often involved the same coordinate ranges on the sphere, but at different times.

  The sphere, whatever its significance—like the entity itself—changed over time.

  The helmet lay heavy in Glenn's hands, and heavier in his thoughts. "Any final advice?"

  "Yeah," Aaron McDougal said. The posting far from home had not made the CIA tech's disposition any more agreeable. "Don't put it on."

  Linda del Vecchio slid off a nearby lab stool. "It'll be fine, Glenn."

  She should know. Glenn read weekly reports religiously, Linda's with more care than most. (They were rife with circumlocutions and euphemisms, and e-mailed from her apartment.) She had met with the creature daily for more than two weeks. "Any final words of wisdom?"

  Linda walked over to the glass case that still displayed AJ's canvas tote bag, for no apparent reason other than to buff a smudge with her sleeve. "Most of what you see is the product of your imagination."

  "I remember my training," Glenn said.

  "And yet..." Linda polished the glass some more. "My first time in, my mind refused to create an image. It was almost like being a child again, knowing something unimaginable hid in the closet. With no conscious effort on my part, it became a hungry lion, pacing in its cage. That was still scary." She straightened, her obliteration of the smudge complete. "It reached toward me once, got zapped, learned its lesson, and never strayed again. It has done nothing but cooperate. It's eager to learn."

  "And?" Glenn prompted.

  "Pretty soon it was a lion cub. Now I experience it as a kitten, fascinated with everything." She grinned sheepishly. "Closet monster, lion, and kitten alike are all in my head. It is a zillion computer instructions, and the human mind can't visualize that."

  A kitten. Glenn did not expect to encounter anything so benign.
r />   "Any final questions?" she asked.

  Yeah. Why hadn't he had a second helmet couriered out here? He could have gone in with a guide. He made a mental note to arrange for one, planning to call it a spare.

  The entire flight out, Ralph Pittman's description had replayed endlessly through Glenn's thoughts: "Think of darkness not as the absence of light but as something palpable. Within the blackness, picture an obscenity of ever- changing, writhing limbs tipped with every manner of claw and fang and horn. Imagine standing helpless in the unblinking gaze of an utterly alien and all-penetrating sight."

  "Just one," Glenn finally answered, slipping on the helmet. He had faced down his fears before. He would do it again. Irrational fear was all this was. Had he felt otherwise, he would never have let Linda go in. "What does your kitty eat?"

  Cyberspace was anti-climactic.

  No kitten or lion greeted Glenn, but neither did he encounter any Lovecraftian horrors. His subconscious chose a great white shark, endlessly circling, its unblinking eye always on him. The shark kept to a safe distance.

  Glenn marveled at how quickly it learned to spot underground bunkers in ground-penetrating-radar images. They took turns reaching into the consensual virtual workspace to position and investigate new images, and to point out likely bunker locations. Its snout somehow served for pointing and manipulating.

  His subconscious, doubtless reacting to Linda's comments, soon softened the circling shark into something less scary. There was already a hint of playful dolphin. Occasionally, the creature would overlook something obvious— to a former infantry officer—in an image. Glenn would signal the supervisory program to end the cycle and penalize the creature.

  The not-yet-a-dolphin managed to return looking hurt.