by Draker, Paul
“I took her on a Girl Scouts camping trip last weekend,” Jen said. “I know she was supposed to come stay with you, and I’m sorry, but I want her to socialize more with kids her own age. I thought it would help.”
“I need to see her,” I said. “I need to see my daughter.”
“You know I want Amy to spend time with her dad. It’s important. But the situation is kind of complicated right now. The way she lies… It’s not natural for a little girl. It’s pathological—”
“Don’t say that!” I grabbed the top of my head and massaged my skull, feeling the bristly buzz cut against my fingertips. “Don’t ever use that word to describe our daughter.”
“She told you she had soccer practice. Scored goals. We took her for ice cream. None of that is true, Trevor. None of it.” Jen’s voice was bleak. “But does Amy even know she’s lying?”
CHAPTER 20
“Korn,” I grunted, swiping a sweaty forearm across my sweatier forehead. “‘Here to Stay.’” I went at the heavy bag again as the music’s opening riffs shook the floor beneath my feet. My shoulders and chest burned with lactic overload. Even though I had pulled the boxing wraps extra tight to take pressure off my bruised knuckles, my hands ached and throbbed. But this was exactly what I needed right now.
The crushing paralysis and black despair that had gripped me after Jen’s call were gone, replaced by newfound clarity and resolve.
I shook my head, flinging droplets, and blinked to clear the sweat dripping off my eyelashes. In the chill air of the server room, my heated breath misted in front of my face.
In the past few years, Amy had had a lot to deal with: her parent’s divorce, and the move from Boston to California, leaving all her friends behind. My daughter was an exceptional child, several standard deviations beyond the normal bell curve of intelligence, and kids as smart as Amy faced a brutal dichotomy. The reactions of her peers—and even adults—would be painfully transparent to her. She would find the behavior of others trivially easy to influence. But at the same time, a normal seven-year-old’s emotional development left her ill-equipped to understand the hypocrisy, contradictions, and self-delusion that defined the adult world around her.
She was simply trying to find her own way through a frightening, illogical landscape that was invisible to most kids her age.
“Saliva,” I gasped. “‘Click Click Boom.’” The music changed. The bag shook and jittered against the chains beneath the crossbar of an empty server rack as I drove into it again and again. I had rehung the hundred-pound bag in a corner of the server room, where a square area of raised computer floor lay bare, awaiting the dozens of new racks that Frankenstein’s GPU cluster upgrade would require.
I accelerated my rhythm, merging combos into a nonstop flurry of jabs, hooks, and uppercuts. Sweat flew from my elbows and ran down my bare spine, soaking the waistband of my shorts. My abdominals ached and burned, on the verge of spasm. Perspiration coursed down my linea alba and pooled in the intersections that cut the six-pack muscles of my rectus abdominis. I was pushing myself hard, to the edge of exhaustion, but I wanted the burn right now. It helped me focus and clear my mind for what I needed to do.
There was nothing in the world more important than my daughter. I would do anything for her. And she needed my help now. I would do whatever it took to protect her.
Pathological? They could take their ‘pathological’ and go fuck themselves. There was nothing wrong with Amy, and I could prove it.
I had a tool at my disposal that psychiatrists could only dream of. I had Frankenstein. I would help my little girl, and I would let nothing stand in my way.
“Mudvayne,” I gasped, heart pounding, barely able to get the words out. “‘Dig.’” I sped up in time with the music, faster and faster, channeling my fury until the pops and snaps of the bag blurred into a continuous ripple of sound. I could feel the endorphins coursing through my bloodstream, purifying, sharpening my thoughts.
I still cared about Jen, too. A lot. The mother of my child wouldn’t have to cry anymore. I would make everything all right.
“Disturbed. ‘Down with the Sickness—’” A small motion caught my eye, and I turned, letting my arms drop. Cassie stood near a server rack, watching me with a strange look on her face. “Frankenstein,” I said, “music off.”
Chest heaving and heart pounding, I stared back, trying to read her expression. It was early, not even six a.m. yet, and I hadn’t expected her to show up before eight. She had caught me mid workout, and neither of us knew what to say as the thundering music gave way to ringing silence.
She wore a gray knee-length silk suit with a cream blouse, and a sage green scarf that matched the medium-heel pump on one foot. Its mate lay nearby on its side, and the arch of her slender bare foot draped against her other calf. She lowered her foot to slide her shoe back on. Her toenails were painted green.
“Poor Ray.” Cassie’s voice sounded huskier than I remembered it. “Big dummy really had no idea at all…”
Pushing aside the troubling memory of Ray’s kid’s car seat, I reached up to grab a towel slung over a bundle of network cables. I mopped my face with it and draped it over my shoulders as I strode toward her. She took a step back.
“You’re late,” I said. “Cancel your lunch and dinner plans while I take a shower. We’ve got work to do.”
Last night, I had come to some decisions about Cassie, too. She was going to help me. The one remaining problem was how to keep her from finding out what she was really helping me with.
“A hundred-million-dollar MP3 player,” she said. “And to think people were angry about three-hundred-dollar screwdrivers and thousand-dollar toilet seats.”
But her cheeks held a faint flush as I passed her.
I stopped but didn’t turn around. “Frankenstein,” I called out, “what is Cassie feeling right now—?”
“No!” Cassie said quickly. “No, wait, Trevor! I mean… it’s just that I think we should have some ground rules if we’re going to work together. Listen, I’m sorry I asked Frankenstein about you. I had no right to violate your privacy.”
“Ground rules?” I asked. “Like what?”
“From now on, if I want to know what my co-lead thinks or feels, I’ll just ask you. And if you don’t want to answer, that’s fine, too.”
I paused. “I can live with that.”
“Otherwise, it’ll be too weird. We’d be totally exposed all the time, like we’re both naked…” Cassie cleared her throat. “What I’m trying to say is, you need to have some personal space and so do I, or this isn’t going to work.”
Problem solved.
“Okay, then.” I let her hang for a moment longer, then nodded. “I won’t ask Frankenstein about you either.”
I let the server room’s doors swing shut behind me, cutting off any reply.
CHAPTER 21
I showered quickly at the enlisted men’s club, in the locker room next to their small gym. On the way out, I passed the young guy who worked bar during morning-shift, serving coffee to one or two solitary guys mostly. The big TV screen was off.
“How come you’re the only DARPA person we ever see over here?” he asked.
“DirecTV is sending a truck out this morning to hook up your satellite channels,” I said. “When the guy at the gate calls you, go sign ‘em in.”
His eyebrows went up. “But I heard that security—”
“Not an issue anymore,” I said.
“I need to clear this with the base commander.”
“I already did,” I said. “He’s a sports fan, too.”
He still looked uncertain. A young guy, twenty or twenty-one, like a lot of the Navy boys. Stuck here in the middle of empty reservation land, almost three hours from Reno.
“I like boxing,” I said. “For the pay-per-view events, I had to get the premium package. The one with all the channels.”
He swallowed. “All the channels?”
“All of them.” I winked at h
im and left.
• • •
Cassie had Frankenstein’s code up on the screen when I got back.
“The nuclear fission software models we used at LLNL are some of the most complex simulations ever written,” she said. “The source code was a mess when I took over—three million lines of undocumented spaghetti C—and still it took me only two days to understand it all and start optimizing its performance on Sequoia.”
I leaned against the black Infiniband racks. “Your point?”
“My point is, what you’ve written here—singlehandedly, as I understand it—it’s just… I don’t know what to say.”
“You think my code’s a mess?”
“No, the opposite. Your code’s so tight, so minimalist, it’s hard to believe it actually does what it does, until I go through it line by line, and even then I…” She shook her head, her earrings giving off a faint jingle. “The video processing stuff is self-explanatory, and so are the three-D models of facial musculature. But I have a lot of questions about the rest.”
“No doubt,” I said. “Let’s get them out of the way, so we can get to work.”
“Okay, for starters, why virtualize?” she asked. “You don’t need virtual machines when you’re the only user.”
“Think of genetic algorithms,” I said. “You ask a question, and, like a GA, Frankenstein starts from lots of different random assumptions simultaneously to find a logical answer. He searches all of them in parallel, assigning a changing level of resources to each solution path based on ongoing evolutionary fitness, until one of those paths reaches an answer he likes. So why should I reinvent the wheel when I can use off-the-shelf virtualization to manage that part?”
“But there’s something weird about it, Trevor. Frankenstein’s different virtual machines can come up with multiple solutions to a problem. Ask it the same question, and it won’t necessarily answer the same way each time.”
I shrugged. “Do you?”
“I’m not a computer,” she said. “This is going to take a little getting used to, that’s all. But I’m wondering, what happens to all the other virtual machines after Frankenstein answers the question?”
“He leaves them running in the background. Most will converge to a suboptimal solution and shut down by themselves. But sometimes they keep going and eventually come up with a different answer that he likes even better.”
Cassie gave an incredulous laugh. “So Frankenstein not only gives unpredictable answers, but it can change its mind after the fact, too?”
“It’s part of how he learns.”
“About that,” she said. “When I first heard Frankenstein speaking to you, I expected you’d built a layered expert-system inference engine like DeepQA. You know, what IBM’s Watson supercomputer used—”
“—to win the Jeopardy world championship back in 2011?” I snorted. “As if beating humans in a game show was supposed to be difficult or something?”
“Winning Jeopardy was only a demo,” she said. “Since then, they’ve retrained Watson on oncology and radiology data, feeding it CAT scans, patient histories, and MRIs. IBM installed it at Sloan-Kettering, where it’s more or less serving as a consulting physician now, recommending diagnosis and treatment plans for cancer patients.”
“Watson’s a toy,” I said. “It maxes out at what? Eighty teraflops? Frankenstein’s got seven hundred times more processing power.”
Her eyebrows went up in surprise. “That’d make Frankenstein the…”
I nodded.
“But we’re talking about software, not hardware,” she said. “Your learning algorithms aren’t expert-system inference engines like Watson’s, and they aren’t neural network-based either.”
“Both approaches are a waste of time,” I said. “An expert system is a closed-loop dead end, because the inference engine is only as effective as the human-curated dataset you feed it. And neural networks—why use modern semiconductor technology to model an inefficient biological kluge that’s five hundred million years old? Imitating organic brain structure is flat-out stupid—like welding fake trees out of steel so you can chop them down and build yourself a log cabin. Much smarter and cleaner to use hidden hierarchical Markov models and layer them deep, like I did.”
She shook her head. “But this way, we—”
“With the kind of processing power Frankenstein has, I can let him do most of the work. I just give him a bunch of different algorithmic building blocks and data taxonomies and let him figure out the optimal way to use them.”
“So you’re cheating.”
I laughed. “No, but I’m smart enough to recognize a job a computer can do better than I can.”
“But don’t you see the problem? This way, we’ll never really understand exactly how the software works—why it answers the way it does.”
“We don’t need to,” I said. “Don’t get confused about the goal of our research here. Frankenstein’s only a tool. Its job is to help us figure out why people answer the way they do.”
CHAPTER 22
“Next week,” I said to Jen. “Just give me until then.”
“Which day?” she asked.
“I’m still working out the exact time with his office. But he’s good. He’ll talk to Amy unofficially, and we’ll figure out where to go from there.”
“How come I can’t find this Dr. Frank on the Web?” she asked.
“He’s retired from regular practice now.” I pushed the earbud headphones deeper into my ears, so I could hear over the noise of the nearby server fans.
“But the school counselor gave me a list of child psychia—”
“Can you imagine what kind of private-practice failure has to rely on referrals from schools to stay in business?” Even though I’d left Cassie back in the lab, I walked to the edge of the sanctum and glanced around the server room to make sure I was still alone. “This is our daughter’s future we’re talking about here. Her life.”
“They’ve given me a week. They won’t let her stay in school unless we take her to see someone, Trevor.”
“Please. A week is all I need.” I gripped the wire of the headphones tight and shut my eyes. “I’m begging you, Jen. Please.”
She sighed. “I stay with Amy for the whole call.”
“Of course.” I paused. “I’m sending you an iPhone to use.”
“But I still have my old one, and you just sent us another one two days ago.”
“I’m modifying the conferencing software on this new one,” I said. “The video needs to be crystal clear.”
• • •
Later that morning, I left Cassie optimizing the heuristic search convergence code and went over to the administrative wing. McNulty was sitting at his desk, staring out the window with glazed eyes. He had a phone in his hand.
“Still waiting for that call from Sweden?” I asked.
He jumped.
“McNulty, I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but there’s no Nobel Prize for Administrative Paper-Pushing.”
His eyes narrowed, and he put the phone down on his desk with a clunk. “Please tell me you’ve come to hand in your two weeks’ notice.”
“Hardly. My new co-lead sent me to give you this.” I handed him the written justification for Frankenstein’s GPU-cluster upgrade. “She would have come herself, but you know how it is—she doesn’t want to waste her time talking to clerical admin types.”
McNulty gave it a quick scan. “Nine million? I guess you weren’t listening when we spoke about fiscal responsibility…”
“Linebaugh didn’t approve the larger grant amount just so you could sit on it.”
I had a week, and I could feel the minutes slipping away. I put my hands on McNulty’s desk and thrust my face toward his.
“You’ve had your fun,” I said. “Now, pull that rubber stamp out of your ass and make this happen.”
McNulty leaned back, an expression of distaste on his face. But I had seen something else underneath, too, in
the brief flicker of a microexpression:
Fear.
I pictured the glazed expression on his face before I’d come in. McNulty had been staring out the window with the shocked look of a man who realizes he is doomed. Whatever problems he had gotten himself into—financial, marital, medical, or whatever—were none of my business. But this conversation wasn’t going according to plan. I needed to know why.
“What have you done?” I whispered.
“God damn it!” McNulty stood up, sending his chair bumping against the wall. He backed away from his desk. “Bad enough that I’m stuck out here in the middle of Bumfuck nowhere. But on top of that, I have to deal with…” He gulped, and I saw the fear again.
“With what?” I needed to know. “Just say it, McNulty. What is it exactly you’re dealing with? Just say it.”
“A goddamn maniac.” His eyes were bright. “I’m dealing with a goddamn maniac here. You, Trevor. I’m scared of you.”
CHAPTER 23
Night. Lightning arced in the distance, a muted glow rippling through the gray clouds over the lake. Much closer, below me, flickering light splashed from the windows of the enlisted men’s club, throwing trapezoids of changing color onto the porch and the rocky ground outside. Men’s laughter and excited cheers spilled into the air—the sounds of a large, boisterous crowd inside.
Crouched on the rooftop, careful not to be seen, I held the iPhone in my teeth and connected the last wires by its light. Then I pulled a high-powered laser pointer from my pocket and aimed it at the corner of the lab building’s roof, a half mile away and five stories up.
The pencil-thin beam of bright green light would be visible from much of the base, so I worked as fast as I could, adjusting the small dish antenna I had mounted alongside the larger satellite TV receiver, visually aligning it with the laser beam.
Fifteen minutes later, the green laser skewered the dark sky again, going in the opposite direction. The storm over the lake was headed toward the base, closing fast. The angry rumble of thunder echoed overhead. I stood on the roof of the lab building now, aiming a matching mounted dish down at the enlisted men’s club. I flicked off the laser and used a handheld link tester to fine-tune the dish position until I had a strong point-to-point network link.
