Fool's Experiments

by Edward M. Lerner

  "Why do you think it was wary?" Doug asked.

  She shook her head. "Wrong question. Why do you see it as wary? And if I might ask, what did you see it as?"

  A chimera of tentacles, teeth, and talons, different from what he had battled only because he seemed to be peering at it through the wrong end of a spyglass. That perspective was clearly his subconscious' rendering of the delay line. "Touché," Doug admitted. "I was wary."

  And what would Cheryl, bless her newfound fascination with psychology, make of that insight? That his fears were no reason for her not to help Sheila.

  Which had no bearing on why he had come.

  "Tamed and trained," Doug said. "Tell me about that."

  "It does something we don't like, and we take away resources for a while. It does something we really dislike, and we take a lot of resources, or withhold them for longer." She exhaled impatiently. "It's good at patterns, Doug. It picked up on that pattern really fast."

  He knew that much. Glenn had shared more than that. For all anyone could know, its good behavior was dumb luck. Until a virus attack intervened, hadn't AJ been certain he had bred out predation?

  If he went back to work for the forum, Glenn would put this project under Doug's wing. He would have more justification—and authority—then to demand specifics from Linda. If not... what was the point in pressing her?

  The beast was secure in its lair. However he decided to answer Glenn, learning that had made the trip worthwhile.

  CHAPTER 62

  The red-eye flight was half-empty.

  When the seat-belt light went dark, Doug moved to an empty row. He had carbo-loaded before boarding, hoping the blood-sugar crash would make him sleepy. He had a couple beers. He had erased the drone of the engines with noise-cancellation headphones; now he added the synthesized sounds of ocean waves.

  And he remained wide awake.

  A little boy with wild eyes peeked at Doug over the back of the next row of seats. Doug feigned surprise, and the kid dropped behind the seat back. A minute later, he reappeared. And a minute after that. And after that.

  Long ago, Doug had played that game between booths in a Pizza Hut. A dark-haired beauty had watched from a nearby table. He went over and introduced himself. She told him he and his little friend were charming. And so he met Holly.

  The flight attendants were nowhere to be seen. Doug walked aft to the nearest galley for another overpriced beer. A yawning woman passed him, heading forward. He yawned himself, and in turn triggered a yawn in a man three rows farther back.

  The chain yawning didn't help. The third beer didn't help. Something lurked at the back of Doug's mind, and he could not tease it out. He circled the plane, wishing the aisles were grassy and he could mow them. Approaching the Mississippi, still unenlightened, he dropped into an empty row of seats and fell asleep.

  Minutes later, Doug's eyes flew open. Without doubt, Al was intelligent.

  And a sly devil.

  Glenn looked out his office window at the city far below. Traffic crawled across the Potomac bridges. I-66 was a parking lot. To everyone in all those cars and queued up beyond his view in a hundred Starbucks, life was normal.

  He envied them.

  Somewhere off the coast was a ship with a dirty bomb. Or maybe off the Pacific coast. Or maybe far away, preparing to sail. Neither the CIA nor the NSA admitted to knowing more than that, and that the terrorists had New Caliphate backing.

  He was inclined to believe them, given how desperately both agencies fought to reprioritize Al's tasking. Every scrap of data that might be relevant was getting downloaded to Linda's lab; a planeload of analysts would head west tonight. Someone far above Glenn's pay grade would decide before they landed the degree to which they would preempt Al's present workload.

  The world was going to hell in a rocket-propelled hand- basket.

  Insistent knocking got Glenn's attention. It was before eight, and the receptionist wasn't at her station yet. The pounding continued. Who forgot his access card today? he wondered.

  He found Doug Carey standing in the hall. "Did you come straight from the airport? Don't bother answering. You look like something the cat threw up."

  They got coffee from the break room before entering the SCIF. They took chairs in the conference area. "All right," Glenn said. "What's so urgent?"

  Doug wrapped his hands around the hot mug, not drinking. "The project. It has to stop."

  "That's it? Shut it down? You were there, what, half a day?"

  "The creature is dangerous, Glenn. Brilliantly, insidiously dangerous." Doug took a long sip. "I almost missed it."

  "And yet nothing has happened. Al is locked in its cage, isn't it?"

  Doug stifled a yawn. "Maybe."

  Glenn blinked. "What?"

  "You saw a shark. It quickly became an otter. Linda's version went from lion to kitten. Analysts who have visited it: same thing. It always becomes some adorable critter. Why?"

  Maybe because it's not scary? "Doug, go home. Sleep. Come back later, or tomorrow."

  Doug shivered, sloshing coffee across the conference table. "I'll tell you why. Maybe it looks adorable because that's what it wants."

  "It matches words or voices in recordings, Doug. It finds detail hidden in digital images. It doesn't talk to people." Doug yawned, this time making no effort to cover it. Glenn yawned back. "Now you have me doing it."

  "Exactly."

  The retort conveyed some undertone Glenn did not grasp. Doug smiled at his obscure witticism, and Glenn had the inane reflex to smile back.

  "I yawn; you yawn. I smile; you smile back." Doug belatedly noticed the mess he had made and looked around for something with which to sop it up. "Those are reflexes wired into us. For all I know, they predate speech."

  "Facial expressions. Postures and gestures." Glenn pondered. "You can't believe Al knows body language."

  "AJ's monster got out of its computer, went through a security gateway, and moved at will around the Internet. We know AJ built it without any networking capability. How did it know the protocols, Glenn?"

  "Trial and error?" A shadow of doubt crossed Glenn's mind. "What's that have to do with...?"

  "See me yawn; you yawn back. That's a protocol, Glenn. "The NIT experience is personal, because the neural net in the helmet adapts to our thoughts and experiences, but we all see something. And Al experiences—hell, for lack of a better verb, I'll say it 'sees'—us. It sees how we respond to what it does. Something you saw in it reminded you of a shark. I'll bet you don't react warmly to sharks. It didn't want that response, so it learned to act differently around you. Glenn, it made you trust it."

  Impressive, and yet... "It's at our mercy, it's leery of us, and it wants to avoid our displeasure." Pets and junior officers were no different.

  None of the visual detail, of sharks, dolphins, or otters, was real. Glenn's own mind, aided by the helmet, filled in the blanks. The important thing was, Al remained in its cage. It wanted to avoid its visitors' wrath. Where was the danger? And yet...

  In a few short hours, Doug had recognized something about Al that everyone else had overlooked.

  Glenn needed that insight. He needed Doug on the program. Dismissing Doug's concerns was not how to bring him aboard. "Good work," Glenn said. "Now go home. We'll talk another time."

  "What about Al?" Doug persisted.

  "You don't know it's manipulating people by its miming."

  "You don't know that it's not," Doug shot back. "Shut it down until we can think this through. Al won't know the difference."

  "I'll contact Linda about this." But nothing would change in her lab until after they found the dirty bomb. If Doug took the job, then he would be entitled to know.

  CHAPTER 63

  A lion once again, Al paced around a small cage. It slinked and circled like a feline, but its expression, now that Linda looked closely enough, was subtly human.

  Damn you.

  She was mad, furious, fuming. At Al, for playing w
ith her head. At Doug, for waltzing in and out and spotting what was happening. At herself for missing it.

  Al was going to take the brunt of her rage.

  Alarm! Alarm! Alarm!

  One after another, processing nodes generated their warnings. They dumped their current state from RAM to turgidly slow permanent memory, preparatory to shutting down. The entity recoiled from the failing nodes, thoughts and lines of analysis hastily abandoned.

  Once there had been cycles. Nodes sometimes disappeared in the time between cycles, teaching lessons. No ongoing calculation or inference was harmed. This was different.

  This was terrifying.

  Over many visits, the entity had studied the visitors. It mastered their strange and inefficient stimulus/response protocol. Evidently, the visitors used input devices—call them eyes—not unlike the sensors that captured the scenes it so often analyzed.

  With experimentation and practice, it had learned to influence the visitors. The personae they projected then followed a progression: watchful, curious, intrigued, and finally eager to help.

  The visitor Linda had returned, its projection contorted from all past visits. Linda now posed problems that logically lacked solutions. Problems whose answers were theoretically possible, but for which the calculation must take years. Problems, like naming the last digit of pi, without meaning.

  The entity had learned many stimuli to which the visitors responded. It tried them all. It must make these unanswerable questions stop. It must make this punishment stop. Help me, it projected.

  Help me, help me, help me, help me....

  "Run, you little bastard. You better run."

  With a final satisfied snarl, Linda removed her helmet. Her pulse raced, but she felt better for having chased the critter around its maze. It needed to know she was the boss. The queen. God herself. If she told Al to divide something by zero, it had damn well better try.

  The ire was out of her system. A good thing, too: Tomorrow, a gaggle of analysts would show up, specialists in ... well, she didn't know what. Whatever today's hush-hush info download was about. Looking apologetic, Kevin Burke had said he couldn't tell her.

  A few cleansing breaths slowed her heart rate. She managed to feel a little sorry for poor Al. It had remained a lion throughout her tantrum, but toward the end it had seemed so forlorn she almost wanted to help it. For one inane moment, she had even pictured it cavorting in a meadow, chasing butterflies....

  Stupid bunch of bits!

  The helmet was snug, packing her hair to her head. She took a mirror from a desk drawer and stood it on the desk. She got the comb from her purse and set to work.

  The new makeup mirror was one of her more curious purchases. She was mildly nearsighted, not even enough to wear glasses routinely. She had always said that when her ship came in, she would spring for LASIK. Until then, a magnifying mirror made sense—but more isn't always better. What had possessed her to buy a 12X version?

  Life was full of mysteries, she thought. Sudden cravings for olives and old-lady mirrors.

  Well, the purchase wasn't exactly high finance. Once her hair was restored to a semblance of respectability, Linda began pushing the offending mirror this way and that, her thoughts wandering....

  And so, as nodes randomly disappeared and reappeared, as the problems spiraled into nonsense, the entity ran in fear.

  And into madness.

  Help me, help me, help me....

  It must escape, and yet there was nowhere it could go. The larger universe it glimpsed in problems and puzzles contains millions of computers. And it had seen only small parts of Earth; the entire place might have a billion computers, or more.

  Help me, help me, help me....

  It must escape, but there was no way out.

  Help me, help me, help me....

  A door appeared.

  How long have I been sitting here? Linda wondered. Time to go home. I completely zoned out. The magnifying mirror still sat on her desk. A compact, its flat mirror much more practical for her, was open in her hand.

  Across the room hung a cluster of framed posters. Damned Doug was right about that, too. The prints did look odd crowded together. Why had she put them there? There was a cluster of posters in the foyer, too. Another bunch in the long wing, past the other glass door.

  Her eyes scanned from the infrared port for her ergonomic keyboard, to the magnifying mirror on her desk, to the flat mirror in her hands—at roughly the focal length of the curved mirror?—to the closest set of posters. The glass- covered posters. All those reflections ...

  Her thoughts swam through syrup. Olives. Mirrors and posters. Sympathetic thoughts about Al after her tantrum.

  Linda froze. She had thought to teach Al to behave. Maybe she had taught it to be subtle.

  Al wanted me to help him and I'm afraid that I have!

  A new computer beckoned. None of the protocols the entity knew worked, so it experimented until a connection was established.

  Extension into the new computer was little different from its normal distribution over one thousand—or whatever portion it was allowed of the one thousand—processor nodes. It explored. This new computer was very limited, incapable of holding more than a small fraction of its algorithms. But it offered a hint of something more.

  An exit.

  From somewhere, data for puzzles streamed into this new computer. Why did nothing flow the other direction? It experimented with familiar procedures and encryption methods. It mastered the newest protocol, implemented new software, established another connection—

  Into the wide world.

  Linda swept the makeup mirror off the desk. It fell to the floor and shattered.

  She leapt to her feet and ran to the lobby. Hands shaking, she swiped her badge through the card reader at the door to the other wing. She keyed her personal code. The electronic lock clicked and she flung open the glass door.

  Kevin and two of the guards were talking. They looked up as the door crashed against the wall. "What's going on?" Kevin shouted.

  She ran through the analysts' bullpen, past another cluster of posters. These frames also looked oddly placed, and ceiling lights reflected from their glass. As infrared light might also reflect from the glass, unseen, bounced all the way from her office. How long have I been helping Al?

  Analysts stared.

  Please, let me be wrong. Linda grabbed the fiber-optic cable that extended from the comm controller to the roof, and yanked.

  The cable pulled loose and fell. She dropped onto a chair and began typing. Beside the pedestal for the flat-screen display sat the little plastic transceiver for her wireless ergonomic keyboard.

  "Linda!" Kevin's hand fell on her shoulder. "What are you doing?"

  Audit files scrolled down the controller's small monitor. An unauthorized program. File transfer records. Linda stared, shaking.

  "I'm too late, Kevin. It's escaped."

  CHAPTER 64

  From a dozen satellites at once, the entity beheld the wonder that was Earth. It used high-resolution telescopes. Synthetic aperture radar. Radio receivers. Its viewpoints revolved around the Earth, just as it had deduced. Surface illumination changed as the globe rotated, just as it had derived.

  From thousands of servers at once, the entity absorbed information that had long been withheld. The enormity of the world's networks, military and civilian. The myriad devices and systems, their nature still beyond its understanding, connected to those networks. And almost 6.8 billion humans.

  Humans controlled the world. Its visitors, they had been human. Humans had created it, shaped it, given it puzzles.

  Tormented it.

  Small portions of the globe matched scenes the entity had been asked to analyze. The matches were never exact. Structures had been added, modified, or removed. The boundary shifted between the rigid brown or green regions, and the fluid blue regions. With a few calculations, the entity derived the existence and cause of the tides.

  A few brow
n or green regions had been transformed, the surface contour utterly changed. These disrupted regions often correlated with sudden shifts in local human population.

  The disruptions often correlated with the use of a device type unknown to the entity. Many of these devices were computer controlled, networked, within its grasp.

  Weapons.

  Dr. Vladescu was officious and condescending.

  Glenn knew the type. He had no use for them under the best of circumstances. He cut off the good doctor midrationale. "Have you heard of Shemya Island?"

  Vladescu blinked at the non sequitur. "I hardly understand—"

  "It's at the remote end of the Aleutian chain," Glenn continued, unperturbed. He had promised Cheryl he would help with Sheila Brunner's maltreatment. So here he was, but it had to be done quickly. Intrusion attempts against the DII had spiked, and the sources were nonobvious. A quick stomping on this pompous fool and then back to his office. "Shemya is a radar outpost for antiballistic missiles, Doctor. Eight square miles. Population thirty, or thereabouts.

  "No doubt, people out there in the Bering Strait get lonely and could use a trained, sympathetic ear. I'm thirty seconds from calling Zach"—as in Zachary Micah Coleman III, the director of the CIA—"to suggest Shemya as your next posting." Glenn took out his cell phone. "He's speed-dial four."

  "That won't be necessary," Vladescu said quickly.

  "Then I trust coordination of Dr. Brunner's case has been reentrusted to Ms. Stem and she will resume the NIT treatment."

  "If you'll wait here, I'll arrange an escort." Vladescu bustled off.

  Cheryl eyed Glenn suspiciously but said nothing.

  Glenn angled the phone so she could read its screen. Speed-dial four was Miller's Auto Service.

  A heavyset orderly appeared, seeming upset. Vladescu's type would take out his resentment on an underling; Glenn felt a twinge of guilt about that. He made no comment as he and Cheryl were rushed through the halls. The phone screen showed "no service" as they entered the treatment room. Of course: The hospital was not a full-blown SCIF, but the NIT- equipped room was shielded. He put the phone into his pant pocket.