The Abraham knew a great many things; not least that United States officials were often too conscientious for their own good. They wanted to stop anyone and anything coming into their precious country and always asked far too many questions. Deception through silence was so much easier than through explanation. Speak no English and they become lazy. They stopped travellers with one kind of barrier and The Abraham instructed Zebulun to respond with another; language. Within a matter of seconds he was stamped and waved through.
Los Angeles’ world famous smog was putting on a good show today. Zebulun hated it. Always had. It was so far removed from the pure clean air of Alexandria; the kind which, even when warm, felt like clear ice in the lungs. Here the smell of human infestation and corporate corruption was carried in every breath he took and it swamped this city more than any other like a cloud of evil, lingering. God’s natural payback for the plastic icons and false prophets who preached their sordid gospels from this forgotten corner.
Los Angeles? City of Angels? What a joke.
He would be far happier when he had collected the car and escaped into the hills, though perhaps not as happy as he might usually be. It was not a long drive to Lancaster and it was always an honour to serve but this would not be a good kill. A good kill was one he administered first-hand, like the Spaniard. One he saw with his own eyes. Today’s was a ‘remote’; plant the device and go. There was no pleasure if he could not see the spark of life draining from a victim’s eyes. He wanted to see God’s vengeance, not read about it in some third-rate tabloid. He wanted to linger over the corpse; long before the zipper on the bag covered up whatever expression death had sealed them with.
Still, The Abraham knew best. Zebulun was only pleased that the customs official had been more careful with the mobile phone than he had last time. The man, clumsy oaf that he was, had all-but dropped it when it had been Kalifa Halil’s, unsuccessfully attempting to undo the catch and open it so that he might ogle the screen. It did not break, but it might have done.
On that occasion his bumbling would not have mattered, because Kalifa would simply have bought himself another phone. He did not even bother to insure such cheap items. Today, however, the phone could not be replaced. Today, some of its insides had been stripped and a tiny bag of clear liquid had carefully been inserted. Hidden.
It was nearing 9am. The airport was busy; two or three hundred travellers in view at any one time. Zebulun had watched them all with the same derision he reserved for all those were who were not chosen to serve. Most of them had a plane to catch or a relative to meet, though some just loitered. All were little more than worker ants, scurrying insects who blindly went about their business. The only difference was that the human lung demanded immeasurably more oxygen than that of such a tiny bug.
Every living organism on the planet needed to breathe. Men, women, children included. It did not matter whether the air was clean like Alexandria or filthy like Los Angeles, the human lung would always desperately claw for whatever it could get.
It was a simple truth which meant that, had the fat official been clumsy for a second time - today - then he could unwittingly have killed two or three hundred human beings in a matter of seconds.
In a single breath.
eyes to see and ears to hear
Deuteronomy 29:4
Each of IntelliSoft’s Research and Development Team Leaders, two men and two women, were already seated on two sides of the boardroom table as MaryBeth breezed confidently through the doors. Though it was nearly midnight, it was not unusual for her to call the group together so late in the day. For the past twelve months they had conducted similar clandestine meetings on numerous occasions, each Team Leader having been assigned a task which related to an ongoing project code-named ‘Queen’, a title suitably innocuous enough not to arouse Jack’s suspicions. Whether or not he would ultimately approve would remain to be seen but either way, as far as MaryBeth was concerned at least, this was to be the ultimate surprise gift.
In the glow of gentle up-lighting MaryBeth greeted them, laid a black leather file on the desk and took her seat at the head of the table. The eyes that watched her looked tired, and with good reason. Whilst the twenty-four hour work they were charged with overseeing was operated under a shift system, they were all departmental heads and all had to spend many more hours on the campus than the rest of their teams.
She turned to Sarah Peake, in charge of graphics. “Soo...? Do you think you can work with ReelRooms?”
Sarah had been with IntelliSoft for almost six years now, and in that time she had not only developed a marketable graphics language which was being licensed and implemented into nearly every three dimensional game currently being launched, but also advanced random particle generators which had been used to create digital extras for epic crowd scenes to be found within numerous large budget films. She was one of the top ten computer-graphics experts in the world.
She smiled confidently. “Hey, if I.Q.3. can run my graphics at the same time as everything else with no discernible loss in quality, then we have no problem. The texture maps I got from the movie files might only have been displaying in two dimensions on the old system, but they were always reading from a library of three. The digital information is already there if the processing power can handle it.”
MaryBeth smiled and turned to Geoff Hoyle, a large red-headed man with wide cheeks permanently pushed upward by an even wider smile. At fifty-four Geoff was the most senior team leader and the man who had been at the centre of the I.Q. Project since initial development of a chess-based computer began. He was already nodding.
“Not a problem,” he said with a confident shrug. “I.Q.3. has all the processing power of the one that won in New York. I don’t want to bore you with how many billion instructions per second she can handle, but it’s a good ten to fifteen times more than any other unit I’m aware of.”
“And how are we doing with the speech?” she asked, looking further along the table to the ever-vibrant Lisa Stanhope; Team Leader for Audio Recognition and Synthesis.
“Same as Sarah,” Lisa replied, correcting small round spectacles across her Roman nose. Her confidence was similarly unaffected. “It was all working for the two dimensional model we were going to unveil, so it doesn’t affect me in the least that we’re now in three.”
MaryBeth’s eyes were probing. “Have you got the voice yet? As I recall you were having problems when we last met. I don’t need to remind you that time is running out fast.”
Lisa took a deep breath. “Well, I won’t say it’s been easy, based on the limited speech segments you could supply me, but yeah, I think we’ve cracked it. We got the intonation patterns pretty accurate early on and then started programming the two sound generators; the one for periodic or voiced sound, and the one for noiselike or ‘sch’ sounds. What we’ve done now is to the run the final sounds through spectral shaping modules and... well... the results are pretty damn good.”
“Run them through what....?” MaryBeth asked. At times she really felt that ‘R&D’ was some forgotten corner of a foreign country. They sure as hell spoke a foreign language.
“Spectral shaping modules;” Lisa explained, “we have four in total: A ‘Synthesis by Rules’ module shapes the phonemes and creates better transitions between them using formant frequencies; then a ‘Synthesis from Stored Segments’ module is accepting and reshaping data from the speech you gave me where necessary; a ‘Spectral Synthesis’ module then handles all the complex networks of resonances to produce vowels, nasal consonants, fricatives and stopped consonants and a ‘Spectral Parameters’ module we added has been adjusted until the mathematics of the words match the stored segments. I listened to the last batch of Linear Predictive Coding output and it pretty much had me fooled.”
MaryBeth nodded and smiled. “And where are we regarding recognition?”
Lisa filled her mouth with breath and then quickly let it go. “Always a toughie. I can’t give you one hundred pe
rcent on that, because everybody speaks differently, but I played her some tapes of Jack’s press conferences and she understood everything he was saying in them. And let’s face it - if she can do that then she can do just about anything.” She smiled gently at her own joke. “I’ve also been working with Paul on individual word recognition and understanding.”
She shared a nod with Paul Thomas, the man responsible for programming the database of knowledge into both FireWorX and now I.Q.3. He smiled back at her, effortlessly spinning a gold fountain pen through his fingers. “The logic decoder already embedded within I.Q.3,” she continued, “is also getting her to recognise homonyms by looking at the context and choosing the most logical answer. She’ll need to have been in place a good few months before she knows everything she needs to know though.”
“Homonyms?” MaryBeth asked, looking vacantly around the table.
“Words that sound the same,” Lisa explained as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Such as ‘their’, ‘there’ and ‘they’re’.” She struggled as best she could to pronounce each one slightly differently, then laughed quietly. “It was quite amusing really... when I was first having problems, the test we ran was; ‘Why can’t you recognise speech yet?’, and her reply was; ‘According to my database, that would be an act of vandalism.’” She looked around the table and saw puzzled faces on all sides. “Wreck a nice beach? No? Never mind, she’s a lot better now, and not quite so formal either. You ought to try the ‘Time Flies...’ test when you come visit.”
MaryBeth nodded. “I will. Which really leaves just one thing, the vision....”
The open-ended question was directed squarely at Liu Se Tan, or ‘Liu Se Tan - Camera Man’ as he was generally referred to. Born in Hong Kong, Liu was a Harvard graduate with three years’ experience working with fault recognition systems. His earliest work had been on vehicle production lines training computerised systems to identify defects in body panels via thermal imaging graphs. He had joined IntelliSoft’s Research and Development team just nine months ago and had been given what everyone assumed was the formidable task of making I.Q.3. ‘see’. It appeared now that either the problem was easier than everyone expected, or Liu was better than they thought.
“Vision’s one of the easiest,” he said confidently, leaning over the table to outline his achievement. He knew that he was bending the truth somewhat in an effort to make himself look good. What his team had achieved was by no means easy. If the things he did really were as easy as he somehow made them sound, then other firms would have manufactured a viable system a long time ago.
“Most objects are unique and humans always are. I.Q.’s hard drive means that she can store parameters for everything she ever sees and re-scan them when necessary. She’s filming constantly from the sub-units on the walls and the images are combined and then split into two. One split uses pixel information to measure unique feature distances such as eyes, nose, mouth, arms, legs, height etc. No two sets of complete co-ordinates should ever be the same. The other image uses set matrices linked to false-colour thermal imagers to sense facial movement. She can see a smile, a frown, fear, anger and surprise. A bit more playing around and she might detect some of the smaller nuances as well. I don’t know...” He looked around the table. “...‘slightly confused’ for example. The cameras, coupled with the laser readings from within ReelRooms itself means that as long as she’s met someone before, she’ll recognise them again.”
“So she never forgets a face?” MaryBeth asked.
Liu nodded and smiled. “You’d better believe it. I’ve already programmed Jack in from pictures so yeah, she’ll know him when she sees him.”
“So when do we think he can meet her in person?” MaryBeth asked, her head flicking from person to person to indicate that the question was directed simultaneously at everyone within the room.
Geoff chose to answer. “The ReelRooms guys are installing today and tomorrow, then we’ve got hardware installation for a day and software the following day. All departments are working together to alleviate incompatibility problems and each are running three shifts so... allowing a day or two for teething troubles, I should say Jack can meet her on Tuesday.”
MaryBeth’s smile grew impossibly wide. “Brilliant. I was looking forward to this on a conventional screen but I think getting this ReelRooms Suite is going to blow his mind. I hope he likes it, it could be just what he needs right now.” She gathered her notes together, symbolising that the meeting was complete and that she at least was going home to get some much needed sleep. “Until then....”
Four chairs shuffled as the Team Leaders stood and prepared to leave, each mumbling their stock response a well-rehearsed lack of synchronicity:
“We know,” they said, “not a word to anyone.”
lifted up from the earth
John 12:32
Montecastrilli was the Italy of postcards. Located high in the hills of Umbria, it held many more aesthetic elements than the innocuous banality of the ironically named Leonardo Da Vinci airport, from which Jack had just made his three hour drive. The walled town, situated on the highest of the local peaks, could not have been further removed from the highly technological environment in which he had chosen to immerse himself for the past eight years. Weathered stone buildings wrapped with dark ivy clung desperately to the hillside at the top of the winding road as though they might suddenly lose their grip and slide into the valley beyond at any moment.
As he approached the gates of the town he wondered if the Fiat would actually manage to squeeze through the narrow opening they created but then, as he saw other vehicles lined neatly along a designated parking area, he realised not only that it would not; but also why. Cars, it seemed, were not permitted to enter the town for the simple reason that cars were unable to get into the town. He parked up, stepped out and stretched his tired arms and legs for the third time that day.
He pulled his laptop bag from the boot of the car, having assured MaryBeth that he would make it not just a companion on his trip, but also a constant one, and made his way toward a long stone tunnel which had been cut through the outer wall of the town. He doubted whether the cellular device was actually getting a signal in an area so remote, but then remembered that this was not one of the usual laptops given to most IntelliSoft personnel.
Four years ago Jack had brokered a deal with a consortium which had bought airtime from a series of satellites launched by the European Ariane rockets. As such, his personal communicator did not rely on local transmitters relaying to a central transceiver. Like the Magellan Positioning System his daughter had defiantly chosen to switch off, his laptop relayed not to antennae, but to satellites. As such it worked anywhere on the face of the earth.
The salesman had explained it all when he had been trying to justify the ridiculously high price.
And suddenly, Jack could not believe that he had been so stupid as to miss something so blatantly obvious.
At the other side of the tunnel he was greeted by a small, almost deserted café. He ordered a Coca-Cola by pointing to the sign and took a seat on the terrace. As the waiter delivered his order and retreated to the shade offered indoors, he placed the computer on the blue linen tablecloth and opened it wide with subtle excitement.
He checked his watch; a little after eleven, which made it two in the morning in California. He hated to ring at such an unearthly hour, but unfortunately for MaryBeth and the beauty sleep she did not really need this was important. If he got her working on it now, she might well have gleaned him an answer by the time he returned.
A floating palette appeared on screen offering an index of numbers and he selected MARYBETH/HME. When he clicked ‘DIAL’, another floating palette appeared with the word ‘CALLING’ flashing intermittently in the centre. A few seconds later it was replaced by MaryBeth’s worried face.
“Jack, what’s wrong?” She was sitting upright in bed, looking tired. Sad, Jack thought, that she kept her computer at the side of
the bed, although he had to admit that he did the same. Her bedroom looked quite ornate; decorated with gold and green wallpaper with an intricate tapestry hanging into his field of view. It looked like an original of the mock Persian tapestries that sold for under twenty dollars on QVC.
He hoped it was an original. God knows he paid her enough.
“Nothing,” he replied. “Did I wake you?”
“Yeah, but it’s okay,” she said. Jack could tell that she held a fresh tone in her voice, indicative that she had probably not achieved deep sleep just yet. What he did not know, however, was that she had only just arrived home from the midnight meeting. “So what did your monk have to say?”
“Nothing yet, I’m still on my way, but listen...” the excitement had built to the point where he sounded almost frantic. “I know how to pinpoint Lara’s last transmission.”
As he spoke, something caught his eye above the screen. He glanced up and saw three elderly local women who had previously been sitting quietly and making their skin a little more leathery in the morning sun. Now they stared intently back at him, muttering quietly to each other. Their eyes, a mix of amazement and a worried lack of comprehension said it all. They could not see his screen, and saw only a strange man who chose to talk to a box on the table. Stranger still, it was now talking back to him. He smiled and nodded his head gently but they did not flinch. They just stared.
MaryBeth sounded both puzzled and excited. “Pinpoint the transmission? How?”
“Her laptop cellphone was via GlobeLink, like mine. If you access my personal file, you’ll find the last three transmissions by date and time. Give those dates and times to GlobeLink and they’ll be able to triangulate a position based on the strength of the signal within particular satellites.” He paused for breath. “They told me all this when they came to sell me the bloody thing, I’d just forgotten about it that’s all.”
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