by F X Holden
“In English please?”
“You’re a coder, and an ex-fighter pilot,” he said. “This one is about teaching AI to hit targets without knowing exactly where they are.”
“Sounds … weird. How about something not weird, but still warm?”
“Well, there’s Okinawa, but no …”
“No? Okinawa sounds great.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure. Your experience is Aerospace, but this is on the HUNTER program - unmanned underwater vehicles…”
“Love it already.”
“It’s piloting unmanned subs. You’re used to flying supersonic jets through the stratosphere, these subs max out at eight knots. You can nearly row that fast.”
“Unarmed?”
He looked up from his computer, “Multirole, technically. They want a fighter pilot though, don’t ask me why. Testing enhanced stealth profile…”
“I’ll take it.”
“You haven’t even asked what pay grade it is.”
“I’ll be paid too? Awesome, I’ll take it.”
“You’ll need to interview, with the program manager on Okinawa.”
“Great, I’ll book my flight and …”
“By Skype.”
Lestrange figured that theoretically O’Hare could have failed the job interview with Max Renaud, Program Manager, DARPA Strategic Technology Office, White Beach. But Lestrange had pulled a recording of that Skype call off of the ECHELON system, and realised she already had the job before she’d even logged onto the video call.
“Max? Hi, I’m Karen O’Hare,” the woman’s voice had said.
“Yes, you are,” Renaud had replied warmly. “Excellent! What time is it there? Where are you again?” They had done the small talk thing. He was way too happy to speak with her. And the more they talked, the happier he got.
“So tell me Max,” she asked him at one point. “Am I currently the only candidate for this contract?”
He had stalled, a little theatrically, “Oh no. We had … we have, a very long shortlist. It’s a choice job, remotely piloted unmanned underwater vehicles…”
“On Okinawa…” she mentioned.
“Don’t believe what you read in the media. The base is hardly ever closed due to protests and the last time a US serviceman was actually assaulted in the street was early last year.”
“Yay. So, you had a long shortlist of former stealth-fighter pilots who have experience coding on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier platform?”
He had paused, “Not as many as you’d think, no. You certainly have an impressive CV. And all your certifications and security clearances are up to date?”
“Still current in and on everything.”
“Good, good. When could you be free from your current commitments?”
He was talking as though she already had the job, which it turned out she did.
Charles Lestrange had closed the sound file down and clicked a pen against his teeth as he stared up at the ceiling. With a CV like hers, O’Hare could have worked anywhere in the world. So why her, why Okinawa, and why now? It had been too much of a coincidence.
White Beach, Okinawa, April 2033
The thing that had O’Hare’s curiosity now, as she bustled around in her kitchen making tea for Jensen (black) and coffee for Chuck (black) and a double shot Vietnamese for herself was what she had done that warranted an unannounced visit from both the NSA, and a Navy Security Force master at arms. Bunny had gotten on first names terms with the master at arms thanks to a small situation involving a bunch of marines who’d gotten into trouble using karaoke microphones to beat the crap out of a local Yakuza mobster downstairs in the Galaxy Bar, which took up the whole first floor and second floors of her apartment complex. She’d been walking up the stairs to her apartment and heard a lot of shouting in English and Japanese. Stopping at the karaoke bar level she stuck her head in, and saw half the staff of the Galaxy had surrounded some marines, who were swinging microphones on their leads around their heads, to hold the staff at bay. A Yakuza mobster was propped against a wall, holding his bleeding forehead and cursing, too drunk to stand.
Bunny knew the staff at the Galaxy pretty well, seeing they’d been neighbours for a year. And she did most of her drinking there, when she wasn’t at the Mohito Bar down the road, which they also owned. She calmed things down, took the three marines upstairs to her place and telephoned base security. Jensen had come personally with a couple of his men to collect them.
“I looked you up,” he said, after thanking Bunny for stepping in. “You’re DARPA.”
“Yep,” she confirmed.
“That why you live off-base?” It was a fair question, since the local population was quite ambivalent about seeing US military on their streets these days, and most personnel chose to live and socialise on-base.
“No, I took this place for the view,” she told him, nodding at the view out her loungeroom window, across Kozagate street to the rusting neon sign over Music Town.
He looked out the window, looked around the tiny apartment and looked O’Hare up and down, from face jewellery to tattoos to army combat boots.
“I think this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship, Ms O’Hare,” he said.
“My friends call me Lieutenant,” she said.
“That’s your former air force rank,” he smiled. “What else do they call you?”
“Bunny. And O’Hare.”
“I’ll go with O’Hare.” He’d tipped her a salute. “Thanks again for the help, O’Hare.”
When she’d signed up for a hiking tour at White Beach, she’d found herself on a full day trek through the Gangala Valley with a bunch of base nurses and … Jensen. They’d clicked. Turned out she wasn’t the only one on the island with a warped view of the world.
She tipped a half packet of old Oreos onto a plate. She’d messed up plenty in her life, but whatever this was, she decided she must be in big trouble, looking at Chuck sitting there impatiently while Jensen stirred sugar into his coffee and reached for a cookie.
She pulled the plate away from him and handed it to Chuck, but he just looked at it like he’d never seen a cookie before in his life and then looked at her, “Ms O’Hare, we need your help.”
She gave Jensen a ‘what the hell’ look, but he just shrugged.
“I am a DARPA Remotely Piloted Submersible Pilot and Sensor Operator,” she told Chuck, emphasising the capital letters. “Attached to the Orca programme at White Beach. I am still getting stopped at the gates every time there is a new guy, having to explain that I really work there and reminding him he should be saluting me.” He looked as though this did not surprise him. “There is no capacity in which I can possibly be of help to the US National Security Agency, unless you want advice on pubs and clubs in downtown Koza.”
He smiled his non-smile again. In a movie, at this point he’d be pulling out a big fat manila folder from his briefcase, and it would have ‘O’Hare, K’ written on the front, and he would unclip it slowly and take out some surveillance photos of her and start telling her about her life story, just to intimidate her. But he didn’t have a briefcase. So he didn’t have a manila folder. He didn’t even take out his smart phone and look up some notes. He’d memorised it.
“Well, actually you might. Your latest security vetting was less than two years ago…”
“Yep. I think it was right before your Secretary of Navy pinned a Navy Cross on me. Or maybe it was after?”
“After,” he said, without a pause. “But you do not have sufficient clearances for what we are about to discuss.”
She pointed at Jensen. “But he does?”
Chuck didn’t look happy. “We’ve had to indoctrinate Petty Officer Jensen, for the purposes of our discussion today.”
“Oooh, you’ve been indoctrinated,” she said to Jensen. “Did it hurt?”
“Walking like a cowboy,” he said. “Seriously though O’Hare, just hear him out so we can go and get a proper breakfast, OK?”
That was his nice way of saying STF up O’Hare, so she did.
“Can I just confirm a few details?” Chuck asked. He took off his sunglasses, showing ice blue eyes.
“Sure.”
“Thankyou ma’am. You served six years with the Royal Australian Air Force, and were recruited by DARPA Aerospace during the Turkey-Syria conflict, where you were based in Incirlik…” He still wasn’t looking at notes. It was quite unnerving.
“Classified,” she told him.
“Yes, flying F-35s.”
“No comment.”
“But you were removed from active duty to multiple disciplinary breaches and then recruited to the DARPA Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle programme.”
“Again, no comment.”
“Then transferred to the F-47/F amphibious conversion program…”
“Also, classified.” He was good. He was all over her CV, she had to give him that.
“From where you were posted to a covert second-strike facility on Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait, during the Russia-USA maritime dispute…”
“War, not dispute. And still classified. And now I’ll have to ask Jensen to kill you.”
“…In which service you became the first Australian since Admiral Harold Farncomb in WW2 to be awarded the US Navy Cross for valor under fire, and a purple heart.”
Jensen arched his eyebrows in surprise. This was apparently something Jensen didn’t know, even though it was public knowledge. “They hand them out like crackerjack prizes these days,” she said.
“After which you were placed on long term medical impairment leave…” he said like he was reading off a mental shopping list.
“Shortish,” she told him. “Shortish-term medical leave.”
“Fine,” he said, all polite about it. “And now, as you explained, you are attached to DARPA again, running pre-deployment trials of the advanced undersea payload delivery system for Extra-Large Unmanned Underwater Vehicles.”
“XLUUVs, we call them,” she told him. “Or just Orcas. Sounds more edgy.”
“Do we have to go through O’Hare’s whole life story?” Jensen asked. “Because there is some really ugly stuff in there if you get to her taste in music…”
“He’s just trying to protect me, bless him. He actually loves bro-country,” she quipped.
Chuck ignored them, “While on medical leave, you were prescribed anti-depressants.”
O’Hare glared at him, “Seriously, you want to go there?” She didn’t care what he said in front of Jensen – the guy had used her bathroom so he’d probably sneaked a peek in her medicine cabinet. But it unsettled her that the NSA would have dug into her personal life so deeply. “Have you ever been in combat Chuck?”
“No. But this is about you, not me. You have not filled a script for nearly a year,” he said, conversationally. “So your mental state is, what … currently stable would you say?” He waited for her reply with an inscrutably blank expression.
“I haven’t woken up screaming for months, if that’s your question.”
“Seriously, can we speed this up?” Jensen said, crossing and uncrossing his legs. “I’ll be turning forty in a few years.”
Chuck gave Jensen a polite death-look. Wiped his face clean from the inside, reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a couple of pieces of paper and a pen.
“You should read this one first,” he said, handing a page to O’Hare. “It’s a letter from General Paul Rogers, Director of the NSA.”
She read it. It was a nice handwritten letter on US CYBERCOM letterhead saying basically ‘Hello O’Hare, we’ve never actually met, but I’m boss of the NSA, and we’d be terribly grateful if you could please help my man Chuck, he’s totally kosher’.
“It’s not signed,” she pointed out.
Chuck took it back, “No. And this is from your DARPA XLUUV Program Manager, Renaud.” He handed her another letter saying, more or less, ‘Dear O’Hare, they asked nicely. I said yes. Don’t involve me or anyone else in DARPA please.’
He took that one back and handed her a pen and a third sheet of paper, “And this is a Secrecy Agreement, please sign at the bottom.”
She looked at Jensen. “I already signed mine,” he said. “I’m good.”
The paper had the usual guff across the top: TOP SECRET UMBRA ORCON dot dot dot. Then the standard threats of death and dismemberment if the signatory (Karen O’Hare) disclosed anything about said project to anyone not authorised to receive information about said project. And then the project name…
“Project HOLMES?” she asked as she signed.
“Yup. Thankyou,” Chuck said, taking back his paper and pen and putting them both in his pocket. As he reached across her, O’Hare picked up a whiff of…what? She was usually pretty good at aftershaves and perfumes, but couldn’t nail his. Probably because he also smelled like he just got off a plane after a 15-hour flight. “Now…what do you know about natural language memory neural networks Ms O’Hare?”
He said it like it was a test. “I’ve done a little coding, but…” she stalled, scratching her head and playing dumb. “Neural networks … that’s AI, right? Like in that old film, Deus X. With the awesome Swedish girl and that cute ginger actor.”
“Yeah, the one from the original Harry Potter films,” Jensen said.
“He wasn’t in Harry Potter,” she said.
“Yeah, he was. Rupert something,” Jensen insisted
Chuck put up his hand, “OK, let’s stay with Deus X. That’s the old film where the millionaire invites a programmer out to his lab to talk with one of his robots right, to see if he can tell whether it’s human or not?”
“Yeah.”
“OK, so the robot in Deus X was an example, an early century science fiction example, of what a natural language memory neural network might one day be able to do,” Chuck says.
“Paint pictures, wear pretty dresses and kill its creator?” O’Hare asked him.
“Hey! Spoiler alerts please, I never saw it!” Jensen said. “Thanks O’Hare.”
“No, converse in natural language and think with the power of a quantum supercomputer,” Chuck said.
“Just tell her about HOLMES,” Jensen said.
“Project HOLMES is a robot?” O’Hare asked Chuck.
Now Chuck sighed, “No, Project HOLMES is not a robot. Tell me you at least heard about the first IBM memory neural network called ‘WATSON’.”
She stared at him blankly.
“Apparently WATSON won a game show,” Jensen explained. “Against some human contestants.”
“Jeopardy actually,” Chuck said. “The quizz show.”
“Like how that chess computer beat the grand master?” Jones asked.
“It’s not a computer,” Chuck said, apparently frustrated at tirelessly repeating himself for idiots. “WATSON was a collection of technologies, algorithms and systems that IBM built to show it could create a system to defeat a human in Jeopardy without any special inputs, just answering questions as they were asked, in natural language.”
Click. The light finally came on in O’Hare’s head, and Chuck caught it in her eyes. “That’s right Ms O’Hare. IBM created WATSON, but we at the NSA have HOLMES.”
She made herself another coffee as a delaying tactic while digesting the whole NSA on her doorstep, letter from the NSA Director, WATSON and HOLMES scenario and trying to work out what the hell NSA wanted with her. They would have had a bazillion employees and about half of them must have been both physically and mentally healthier than her, and more up to date with what natural language memory neural networks were capable of.
“OK, I give up,” she told Chuck, sitting back on her sofa. “Why are you here?”
He pushed some magazines out from under his feet, pulled one leg up onto the couch, making himself right at home. Took a pull on his cold coffee. “Our latest iteration of the HOLMES system has been in beta the last three years. Gradually ramping up his ability to take inputs, refining his natu
ral language interface, increasing the complexity of the tasks he’s being given.”
“He?”
“It, he, her, whatever you want. It stands for Heuristic Operational IntelLigence SuppleMEntory System – HOLMES. Sherlock HOLMES was a man, so I call the system ‘he’,” he shrugged. “Whatever. Anyway, he’s being doing mundane pattern analysis, sigint traffic and intel analysis, stuff we could pull out of most any mainframe with a bit of clever Apache UIMA III programming. In the last year though, we’ve had him doing predictive analyses.”
“Fortune telling?”
“Weather forecasting, actually. He seems to like it. And he’s good at it, better than the National Weather Service.”
“Stop,” Jensen said. “You’re creeping me out. Talking about this computer like it’s a living thing.”
“System, not computer,” he said with his patient voice again. “And no, I’m not sentimental, it isn’t a living thing. This isn’t ‘Deus X’ territory. But HOLMES has been taught the concepts of ‘like/not like’, ‘happy/unhappy’’ and he uses them exactly the same way we do, when he speaks.”
“HOLMES has emotions?” O’Hare was getting creeped out too.
“No. But he understands the concept; anyway forget that. HOLMES thing is scenario development and probability assignment. For the last six months, he has been chugging through every single intel report we have on likely terrorist threats. Ours, CIA, FBI, DoD, the works.”
“Shut up,” O’Hare said. “Going back how far?”
“Uh, mid 1970s I think,” he said. “That’s as far back as we go, digitally.”
“Shut the hell up. That would be bazillions of reports,” I say.
“Several bazillions,” he smiled. “1970s to 2030s, from the Cold War to the first Cyber World War and right up to today. We programmed him to follow the red thread between intel and event, study cause and effect, all with the aim of being able to draw that red thread out into the future one day.”
"I’m guessing that day is today,” O’Hare said.
“Good guess. Yes, about a week ago, we put a very important question to HOLMES.”
