by Draker, Paul
The phone in Linebaugh’s hand—my iPhone 5S—had an A7 GPU capable of pushing 100 gigaflops: equivalent to 1995’s fastest Cray T3D supercomputer. Moore’s Law was shrinking the hardware requirements even as I improved the software. MADRID might need a ninety-ton supercomputer to run it today, but it was only a matter of time until we could deploy my software into the field on a laptop. Or even a cell phone.
And then it would change the world.
The senator handed my phone back. “You say your operator doesn’t have formal training,” he said. “Still, there are those few rare individuals who can interpret microexpressions with a high degree of accuracy. I’m wondering how much of what you’ve shown me is actually your software, and how much of it is your operator’s own unusual talent.”
He winked at the nearest camera bubble. “I may have to hire her away for my campaign.”
“My operator doesn’t like to travel,” I said. “But like you said, let’s get on with the demo. Shall we play twenty questions, Senator?”
“I see.” Linebaugh’s eyes flickered, and I finally saw the face I’d been waiting for: the senator’s game face—his debate face.
“A politician as a real-world test,” he said. “Clever, Trevor. After two decades in the political arena and in the public eye, having my every gesture, every pause, every eye movement analyzed by pundits and political opponents, I should be quite good at masking my reactions, shouldn’t I?”
His aide squared her shoulders. “Senator, this seems inexpedient.”
Linebaugh’s eyes were fixed on mine. “No. Frankly, I’m intrigued.” He let a small twitch lift one side of his lips. It was subtle, but deliberate; I knew he wanted me to see the classic microexpression for contempt.
“We do this on one condition,” he said. “I get to meet your operator afterward.”
“Done deal,” I said. “Would you like a glass of water before we get started?”
Linebaugh’s face gave me nothing I could see, but the phone in my hand buzzed three times.
I grinned. Three buzzes meant anger. My little crack about a glass of water—like the ones you see on C-SPAN, in front of the accused during Senate investigative hearings—had hit home.
“Ask your questions,” he said.
I was ready.
Linebaugh wasn’t the only one who had done his homework.
CHAPTER 4
“Tell me, what made you decide to run for the Senate?” I asked.
Linebaugh smiled. “Back when I was in junior high—”
“Actually, I don’t give a shit about that,” I said. “Let’s talk about 2007 instead. Let’s talk about Iraq—specifically, about eighteen billion in United States Federal Reserve cash bundled onto pallets and flown over there on C-130 cargo planes. Eighteen billion dollars which then went missing.”
McNulty sucked in a breath, loud in the near-absolute silence.
Linebaugh’s face didn’t change.
“That was not our country’s finest hour,” he said evenly. “A minor point—it was the Iraqis’ own money, not U.S. money—but still, we should have had better oversight and accounting of it. A regrettable wartime mistake, and we turned it into a circus with the Senate hearings, but why bring it up now, Trevor? It pales in comparison to the seven-hundred-billion-dollar taxpayer bailout of our own banks and financial institutions during the subprime crisis—which, I’m sorry to say, was carried out with even less oversight and control.”
“Let’s stay on topic,” I said. “In 2007, you were on the Senate Armed Services Committee. You authorized that disbursement from the Iraq Development Fund.”
“The committee I served on authorized it,” Linebaugh said. “We asked the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to turn the money over to the provisional Iraqi government. It was an emergency measure necessitated by the rapid pace of reconstruction. The Fed packed the money up for transport—over four hundred tons of mint-new US currency. Can you imagine what that looked like? It took the Air Force twenty C-130 flights to ferry it over—”
“Two thousand seven was a busy time in Iraq,” I said. “Lots of other stuff happening that year, too. The Blackwater scandal, for instance, which put the PMCs under the microscope. It was the start of Senate inquiries… investigations into misconduct.”
Linebaugh nodded. “A difficult time for the U.S. internationally. Without Blackwater and the other private military companies that the Pentagon contracted, we lacked the manpower to maintain security in Iraq. A few unfortunate incidents got blown out of proportion, and suddenly these private contractors were a focus for public outrage. But I haven’t heard a question yet, Trevor.”
“Fair enough. So here it is. Tell me, Senator, when Blackwater and the other PMCs had their contracts put on hold during the investigation, was it your idea to pay them with untraceable cash instead, using the Iraqis’ own money instead of U.S. funds?”
Stunned silence filled the room. I heard Blake’s whispered “Oh, shit” as plainly as if he were miked.
Linebaugh laughed. “That’s a remarkable accusation. I would be offended if it weren’t so misguided. How old are you, Trevor?”
“Twenty-eight,” I said.
“Son,” Linebaugh said, “you’ve got a lot to learn yet, so I won’t hold your naïveté against you. But for an MIT grad, your math is lousy. Blackwater was the biggest private contractor in Iraq, and all their contracts combined still wouldn’t add up to more than three hundred million in 2007. It’s a long way from there to eighteen billion.”
The phone in my hand buzzed twice.
I didn’t look at it. Neither did Linebaugh. I held it loosely with my palm over the screen, covering it, because I knew that every other person in the room was staring at it, trying to see what it said.
“Oh, I’m sure most of the eighteen billion did get stolen by corrupt Iraqi officials,” I said. “But not all of it. If I’m right, along the way we also saved the U.S. taxpayer a little money and ensured that lots of hardworking American contractors got paid on time. Tell me, Senator, how much of that goodwill came back in soft-dollar campaign contributions?”
Linebaugh stared at me. He opened his mouth and then shut it. Then he swept his lapels back from his waist and hooked his thumbs into his belt. I understood his dilemma. Anything he said would give my cameras more to work with, but saying nothing made him look guilty, too.
He tried to keep his face under perfect control, but it was a futile effort.
My phone buzzed again.
I let the awkward silence stretch for another second or two. Then, using a hand to shield the phone’s screen from everyone else, I took a quick peek.
I let my shoulders slump theatrically. “Well, turns out I was wrong after all,” I said. “Senator, I owe you an apology. You passed with flying colors.”
I shoved the phone into my pocket and made an “after you” gesture toward the steel double doors.
“Shall we go meet my operator?”
CHAPTER 5
The doors swung open, releasing a gust of cool air against my cheeks and forehead. The five-story space beyond floated in semidarkness, cavernous but crowded and claustrophobic at the same time. As I waited for our eyes to adjust, the shadowy bulk of dense equipment racks pressed in from the sides and loomed half-seen overhead. Pinpoints of blue, green, and amber LEDs flickered from row after row of computer cabinets curving away into the dimness.
I walked down the antistatic ramp to the ground floor of the server room, passing beneath an aluminum catwalk that supported another curving row of CPU enclosures.
Linebaugh slid his hand along the rail of chunky tube aluminum and followed me down with his aide, the scientists, and McNulty in tow. At the bottom, he stopped and stood stock-still. His gaze moved across the sweep of eight-foot computer racks, laid out in wide arcs around us like the arms of a pinwheel. His chin tilted upward as he took in the graceful S-curves of the suspended catwalks overhead, each supporting its own row of server-blade cabinets that bl
inked like a constellation of soft green fireflies.
“I see you don’t like straight lines,” he said.
“Seventy percent more cooling efficiency this way.” I followed his line of sight along the organic curves I had specced—another patentable first—and tried to keep the pride out of my voice. “The airflow you feel is mainly natural convection and recirculation.”
“Very green of you,” he said, nodding. “Given the facility’s geothermal power capacity, I’m surprised you took the energy footprint into consideration.”
“Just doing my part for the environment.”
Everyone else had come to a stop behind us now, gawking at our shadowed surroundings like kids at Disneyland.
I stifled a grin. Showtime.
Raising an arm, I banged the side of my fist against the nearest cabinet.
The floor under our feet erupted with blue light as LED panels snapped on beneath the frosted glass. Floor tiles blinked to life one by one, turning on in rapid succession, stretching into the distance like airport runway lights at night. An illuminated path curved away from where we stood, winding between the racks, toward the center of the room.
Liquid stripes of glowing green and orange shot up the steel and aluminum edges of the cabinets on each side. Lines of neon pink and aquamarine strip lighting raced like Saint Elmo’s fire along the curved catwalks overhead, outlining the faces of the upper racks.
The lights came up in a spiraling pattern around us. Color and illumination spread across floors, racks, and overhead walkways to converge at the center of the room, where six dark towers stretched toward the ceiling high above. Each forty-foot tower—a tapered cylinder ringed with five stacked levels of high-density server rack—narrowed gracefully to a waist before expanding again above. They housed the supercomputer’s hottest-running CPU and networking blades, and the heat gradient they generated sucked the air upward through their cooling-tower geometry like a vertical wind tunnel. The racing lines of light met and shot up the sides of the towers, spreading in rings to encircle each tower with thick bands of bright red.
“Jesus Christ, Trevor,” Roger said. “Spend much time in Vegas? Replace these servers with slot machines, and this would give any casino on the Strip a run for its money.”
McNulty’s voice was toneless. “Energy-efficient lighting.” His mouth tightened into a hard line.
Next time, I figured he would pay closer attention to what he signed. I hoped my latest requisition form—for a sound system—had cleared his desk already, because I hadn’t waited for it. I’d gone ahead and placed the order directly with the vendor.
Linebaugh cleared his throat. “Computer hardware doesn’t interest me. You promised I’d meet your operator.”
“And you just did.”
I leaned up against the nearest server rack and gave it a friendly pat.
“Senator, say hello to Frankenstein.”
CHAPTER 6
I led the group along the curving path between server rows, trailing the fingers of one hand loosely along the fronts of neon-lit computer racks.
“Two-point-four million heterogeneous CPU and GPU cores wired together via a six-dimensional stacked-torus interconnect,” I said. “Four-point-eight petabytes of main memory. Six hundred forty petabytes of parallel distributed storage.”
I had to raise my voice to be heard over the gentle background drone from thousands of server fans. Despite the metal surfaces on each side and the glass floor tiles, there was no echo. The curved geometry dispersed sound as well as heat.
“Sixteen secondary clusters, each running a thousand and twenty-four NVIDIA Tesla K20x vector processors, support the central grid,” I said. “Frankenstein runs a modified Linux kernel as hypervisor, but that’s mainly for system resource management and bootstrapping. Everything else is custom code.”
A ring of red beacons encircled the tops of the towers like aircraft warning lights, winking high above as we passed beneath. The multicolored illumination from the floor tiles and strip lights threw faces into soft focus and made eyes and teeth glow as if we were ravers at a black-light warehouse party.
“It’s a goddamn labyrinth in here,” Roger said. “A three-dimensional computer maze.”
Linebaugh and the others followed me up a shallow ramp and onto the server room’s central sanctum: a raised elliptical platform twenty feet wide, walled by computer racks and monitor screens. The sanctum was where I did most of my real work.
My backless ergonomic chair, an articulated carbon-fiber LimbIC design that cost nine thousand dollars, sat hunched in the corner where I’d shoved it out of the way. It looked less like office furniture than like gynecological exam stirrups for an alien species.
Instead, my beanbag chair lay wadded on the raised central dais, directly below the main monitor screen—a 120-inch UltraHD panel that dominated the sanctum. Mounted above the dais platform, the giant screen was flanked by twin black columns of Infiniband network switches, rising sixteen feet on either side, framing the dais where I usually sat.
An aluminum wireless keyboard and trackpad lay up there next to my beanbag.
On the far right side of the sanctum, white light spilled through a transparent glass rectangle recessed into the server racks, like a gap in a row of teeth. Illuminated rows of cans and bottles were displayed behind the glass. I wandered over to open the door of the refrigerated cabinet and grabbed a Diet Dr. Pepper for myself.
“Want something to drink?” I asked.
Linebaugh shook his head. He was staring up at the giant central UltraHD screen, where a message glowed in crisp white letters: “Pleased to meet you, Senator.”
I climbed the three steps up onto the dais, draped myself into the beanbag chair below the huge monitor, and cracked the tab on my soda.
Linebaugh’s eyes stayed glued to the message on the screen.
“May I ask your… operator some questions?” he asked.
Looking down at him, I took a sip and shrugged.
Frankenstein’s reply appeared above me. “Ask your questions.”
“Can you see me right now?” Linebaugh asked.
The screen went blank, then lit up with a single word: “Yes.”
“How?”
“Through the camera above the monitor.”
The conversational rhythm was wrong, I realized. Frankenstein’s responses were unnaturally quick, coming almost before Linebaugh finished speaking. But that would be easy enough to fix. Tonight, I would program in a variable delay.
“What am I thinking right now?” Linebaugh asked.
“I can’t tell what you are thinking,” Frankenstein replied. “I can tell what you are feeling.”
“What am I feeling, then?” Linebaugh asked.
“Surprise. Excitement. Skepticism. The urge to challenge what you see.”
“Why do you think I am feeling each of those things?”
“That calls for speculation on my part.”
Linebaugh raised an eyebrow. “Speculate, then.”
I sat up slowly, realizing where he was headed with his questions. I stifled a grin of grudging admiration. The senator was subjecting Frankenstein to a Turing test.
Frankenstein’s answer was lightning-fast again—a paragraph of text blinking into existence on the screen.
“Surprise because you expected a human operator. Excitement because you can envision the potential applications for autonomous capability. Skepticism because this lies outside your probability expectations. An urge to challenge what you see, for the same reason: the perceived improbability. And perhaps also because of the way Trevor challenged you earlier.”
Linebaugh was doing exactly what I would have done in his place. The test was the circa-1950 brainchild of British mathematician Alan Turing, who had sidestepped the grotty philosophical question of whether machines can truly think. He had distilled the concept of artificial intelligence down to a simpler, more elegant, and more relevant test: can a computer carry on an arbitrary convers
ation with a human judge, so the judge cannot distinguish whether he or she is conversing with a machine or with another human being?
I knew what my software was capable of, and what it wasn’t; Frankenstein couldn’t keep up the illusion much longer. But this would be fun while it lasted.
“Do you know where you are?” Linebaugh asked.
“DARPA’s Pyramid Lake facility, northern Nevada, USA.”
“What’s outside this facility?”
“Can you be more specific?”
Linebaugh chuckled.
Despite knowing it was inevitable, I felt a stab of disappointment watching Frankenstein fail the Turing test. “The theoretical guys say it’ll be 2029 before a computer can pass for human in conversation,” I said.
“I see it ducked my question, though.” Linebaugh winked at me. “It still just might pass for a politician.” He addressed the screen again. “Who is present in the room right now?”
“Yourself. Trevor. And five other people.”
“Who are they?”
“One is McNulty. I don’t recognize the others.”
Frankenstein had heard me refer to McNulty earlier.
“When Trevor is not here, where does he go?” Linebaugh asked.
“Can you be more specific?”
“What does a United States senator do?”
“Can you be more specific?”
Linebaugh held my eye as he asked Frankenstein the next question. “Tell me, what’s Trevor feeling right now?”
“Disappointment. Amusement. Confidence.”
“Why is he confident? Do tell.”
“He’s confident you’ll approve the twelve-million-dollar grant.”
My phone rang suddenly, playing the opening riffs of “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, and my stomach muscles tightened.
The custom ring tone meant Jen, my ex-wife.
“Well, I think we’re just about done here,” I said, rising from the beanbag and stepping off the dais. I walked across the sanctum and down the ramp, my back to the others, squeezing the phone in my fist so hard, my fingers throbbed.
