The Cause

by Roderick Vincent

  The Datalion CFO and CIO sitting in the front row were clearly agitated. Thompson faltered, most likely forgetting to mention the QX was operational at a “government command center.” Thompson held a hand to his head, pressed his temples. Slurring his words a bit, he said, “Our next generation of machine—”

  Stumbling, he continued, “—will be the firepower for BigAnalysis—”

  The VP of marketing who’d introduced him ran onstage with a glass of water and a wide, toothy smile as she shuffled up to Thompson.

  “—and lead the next millennium for hardware.”

  She gave the water to Thompson. Stealing the mike from him, she finished off with, “Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I give you the Datalion QX. The first commercially available quantum computer!”

  As the blue and yellow-eyed QX was being wheeled on stage, Thompson fainted. The VP of marketing waved someone in as the stereo cranked out the same DL Conference theme song that had played monotonously earlier.

  An initial murmur of concern swept through the audience. The crowd’s audible level pitched higher reaching a crescendo, but then a smartphone flew up in the air, video recording the event. A wave of others followed.

  The herd.

  The QX was rolled back behind the curtains. Medical staff rushed on stage. Promise was in the first throng of people leaving after Thompson’s collapse. One of the suits she rushed past was the receipt-scrounging businessman from the coffee shop. He had his phone up to his ear and was laughing.

  Chapter 24

  “Wounded heart you cannot save …you from yourself. Your beating heart is now arrhythmic and pumping deoxygenated blood.”

  -Bill Gross

  Promiscuous once said, “The best way to enter is always straight through the front door.”

  By the time I reached St. Francis Memorial, Promise had already entered intensive care in full nursing garb. She had gotten a job there a month ago as an RN ICU nurse, working everything from gunshot wounds to a kid who hit a tree flying off his Suzuki GSX while jumping a hill on Hyde. Her badge read Annalise Gibbons. She had made some friends on the same ward they took Thompson, and by that time those friends were simply calling her Anna.

  At 9:25, Blake Thompson was wheeled in on a gurney from a wailing ambulance into the ER. One minute later, I entered the hospital cafeteria, went into the bathroom and changed into a nursing uniform. I stared at myself in the mirror. My badge read, Donald Rock, RN. There was something absurd about it. Did she think I looked like a Donald?

  Thompson was semi-conscious with an oxygen mask over his face in the ER. The medics said he had a fever and an erratic heartbeat, sometimes up to one hundred beats a minute. They had given him aspirin but not Nitroglycerin tablets. After Thompson received an ECG and blood test by an ER team, the doctors determined there were palpitating heartbeats and perhaps he was having a cardiac arrhythmia. Thompson was wheeled up to ICU as a heart attack candidate.

  As a cardiovascular surgeon named Dr. Damien Hostler looked him over, Annalise Gibbons slipped into his ICU room dressed in dull green scrubs and a pair of black Crocs. Today she had the 9:00 a.m. shift, but was slightly late for it, blaming her tardiness on a fender bender on Hyde. She forfeited this slight lie to the actual fact that she had spent extra time parking a Ducati Hyperstrada streetside. “An in-vogue getaway,” she had called it.

  In the eighth-floor ICU room, Thompson was awake and alert, explaining what had happened to Dr. Hostler—a slight dizziness, followed by a cold sweat. Yes, perhaps a bit of a squeezing pain in the chest area. Yes, a shortness of breath. No, no pain in the extremities, but then a head that just floated away.

  Dr. Hostler asked if he had done any breathing exercises or meditation before the speech. He asked what sort of drugs Thompson was taking and if he felt any acceleration or deceleration of his heartbeat before. He commented about accelerated sinus rhythm while he gazed at the ECG. “Augmented T waves,” he said. He told Thompson it was strange because it appeared to be going back to normal, uncommon for tachyarrhythmias. So most likely it was a normal variant and nothing to worry about. Perhaps impressionable to Annalise being in the room, Dr. Hostler eyed her, and pretending to speak to Thompson, said jokingly, “Maybe your heart is just skipping a beat today like mine.”

  It didn’t really matter that it was Dr. Hostler instead of Dr. Englewood—the two shift doctors at the time—who cared for Mr. Thompson. Annalise had been flirtatious with both, and both had been led to believe they stood on firm ground with her. Dr. Hostler’s brain remained distracted and failed to catch the switch of a half-empty banana bag for a full one because his eyes were jumping from Thompson’s chest back to her. Finally, Thompson drifted off again—perhaps a bit too quickly—and Anna left with Dr. Hostler, only to return again within a few minutes.

  Five minutes later, Promise entered the hospital cafeteria squinting, wearing the Annalise Gibbons badge looking as if she didn’t expect me to be there, as if I were some deadbeat father who had suddenly disappeared. Upon spotting me, her face washed over me with a wave of relief, eyes sparkling with a sort of guarded sweetness, a balloon of steeped anxiety that had just burst—and all I had done was shown up. She sat next to me at a table and slipped me a fingernail-sized golden SD card.

  “I can only stay a minute,” she said. “I’ll have to get back.”

  We whispered to one another in hushed tones over the low rumble of coughing senior citizens and the frantic cries of a middle-grade sister fighting with her brother.

  “We’ve downgraded his condition,” she said. “Moved him to the HDU so now staff checking up on him shouldn’t be as frequent.”

  “Where did he hide it?” I asked, picking up the tiny SD card.

  “It was on a necklace latticed in with a bunch of other blingy gold. I got all of his cards too, in case this isn’t it.”

  I tipped the SD card up in the air and looked at it closely thinking it was sinful for a techno preacher like Blake Thompson to be using such simple storage. It was too easy, even if it was an extremely long zero-knowledge auth key inside. There had to be a bigger authentication mechanism—voice recognition, optical or fingerprint scans.

  “Can you do this quick?” she asked. The Annalise in her saw someone she recognized, flashed a smile and waved.

  “I’m pretty sure,” I said taking out a USB adapter and the laptop I had bought on Turk Street. “Is it smart doing this here?”

  “The cameras in here have been disabled,” she said.

  The cafeteria was in the GPS range of Thompson’s mobile so a login based on a known geography would work. Still I questioned her. “Why would a guy log into the NSA when he’s just fainted at his own conference?”

  “We don’t really have a choice. Now is our window. You got it?”

  I looked at her coolly and told her to relax. I stuck the tiny SD card into a USB adapter and plugged it into the laptop. I saw what was on it, and plugged in another memory stick and copied the contents. I slipped her back the SD card. Finally, I opened up the NSA client program called The Eye that The Anthill had given me.

  She gave me the hospital Wi-Fi code. Once I was connected, I gave remote access to The Anthill so they could see what I was doing. I started The Eye, found the Connect menu item and clicked it. A dialog box appeared with a list of NSA locations appearing in a dropdown. In an encrypted chat app called Morph Talk developed by Cetus, The Anthill told me to go to the Utah location where the functioning QX was located.

  I typed: Maybe we should do this closer to his room.

  You’re thinking a timed login? the message came back.

  Perhaps, I wrote back. Not an ideal spot for bio auths.

  Risk?

  Promise, reading the question, shrugged her shoulders.

  “It’s a risk,” I said, “but it’s more of a risk if we can’t log on.” I let that hang in the air a moment—an innuendo of apprehension. She stared back at me and turned up an eyebrow.

  “What do you
think?” I asked, still waiting for a response.

  Her face tightened. Perhaps she was still learning how to trust me. “I’m not sure,” she said. “What do you think?”

  “You know what I think. I think we should get closer.”

  In the stairwell on the eighth floor, I told The Anthill my location. I sat behind a steel door on the top stair with the laptop on my knees listening to people shuffle by. Promise went into Thompson’s room. We kept communication going with earpieces and cell phones. I returned to The Eye’s dialog box and selected the Utah location and clicked the Connect button. The program came back with another dialog asking for three sequences of numbers, each one a hundred digits long, starting at three different locations of the massive 16GB file. With the mouse, I opened a File dialog box and browsed to the USB key and selected the file and clicked Feed Numbers. Easy. So what was next?

  Another voice-activated dialog box popped up and had a timer on it counting down. A silky woman’s voice began speaking, repeating what the message box read: “Repeat the following phrase before the countdown ends: With eyes and ears, you can see and hear. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. The future is Turbulence.”

  A cocky rhyme, a stab at clang associations. Had I written it years before knowing what I knew about Turbulence? I thought about Rose and whether this could be her. Was she finally speaking to me after so many years, or was she buried under another layer? If it was her, she was asking, “Are you who you say you are?” I could have used a series of coded questions to communicate with her, but that was a secret that was better left undivulged.

  The Anthill messaged saying the Cray would be a couple of more seconds before they could feed in the audio. No pressure—five seconds left in the countdown, a lifetime for the Cray SF-3, The Anthill’s only real supercomputer.

  I heard a couple of doctors walking through the hall discussing how one of them had removed an apple-sized tumor from a sixty-year-old’s head the day before.

  The SF-3 could crack a ten-character password containing upper-and lower-case alphanumeric and special characters in a day. The zillions of combinations would shoot to a thousand different processors and be crunched apart like locusts on a stalk of corn. The SF-3 could do over a 17.5 quadrillion computations a second (or 17.5 petaflops). The QX was supposed to do a zettaflop, a number so large it was hardly possible to wrap your head around it—a billion trillion, a million petaflops, a thousand exaflops—a number that required a bulldozer the size of the universe to carry. It could break a ten-character password instantaneously, an encryption code within minutes.

  Now, halfway around the planet, the Cray SF-3 was like a dictionary machine shop. Humming away buried under a half-mile of earth, it was melting syllables together. When it couldn’t find the word within the indexed array of samples with Thompson’s voice, it was fusing vowels, soldering sounds into words, modulating frequencies and amplitudes into smooth hill-like sound waves so the clip wouldn’t sound like a machine.

  The Anthill injected the clip and I heard Blake Thompson’s voice spout off the phrase demanded as if he were standing with me in the concrete stairwell. I pictured Promiscuous on the other side of the fiber, arms crossed, staring up at the grand center screen, his face glued to my computer smiling brightly, an all-knowing smirk in the corners of his lips.

  The next dialog box appeared with another countdown asking for a retinal scan.

  I hit mute on the computer. “Need an eyeball,” I said to Promise, breaking radio silence, the words reverberating in the stairwell.

  I terminated the call and shoved the laptop into my backpack, the retinal scanner already attached to the USB port. Rushing into the hall, I hesitated seeing Promise’s head sticking out of the door. But she waved me in, and I ran toward Thompson’s room whiffing the sterilized hospital air, a smell of iodine and antiseptic.

  I slipped in and Promise was next to the man, looking as if she was ready to pry out the whole eyeball. Thompson slept serenely on his side, a rumpled snore pouring from him. A skid mark on the Information Highway. The future is Turbulence, Mr. Thompson.

  I dropped the backpack on the bed and yanked out the retinal scanner. “Watch the door,” I said. “I got this.”

  The timer ticked down to two seconds. Opening an eyelid, I edged the scanner to his forehead and pushed a button. A stream of red light swept over his eye. He began to stir. His hand twitched, and his tongue swept over his lips. I grabbed the backpack and lunged behind the other side of the bed.

  Promise jumped on him with a rag full of chlorophyll, but his eyes had opened. He struggled a bit before he slipped back down.

  “He fucking saw me,” she whispered. Her eyes were wide, panicked.

  I stood up. “Needle him with morphine. Then get him up. Tell him he’s been hallucinating. It’s all he’ll remember.”

  She stood a second contemplating this. “Did you get in?”

  I looked down at the screen. There was a new menu showing. I nodded.

  “You’ve got to get out of here,” she said, shuffling me to the door, the laptop and retinal scanner still in my hands.

  “Don’t off him. It would fuck the whole operation.”

  “It wasn’t you he saw.”

  “You wanted to make a sacrifice,” I said. “This is the sacrifice.”

  She wore another internecine warlike expression, glaring at me with eyes buzzing like a bee. I went back into the stairwell and checked the connection, then went down a level, and found an empty room on the general ward of the seventh floor.

  I opened the half-closed laptop again and from the new menu that opened, I brought up a terminal and typed a command to see how many network broadcasts were being sent out. I saw a few, so sent out my own broadcast, a coded message only she could understand that said, Where’s Rose?

  The response was a list of IPs. More than I expected. She was everywhere, ubiquitous in the system, and the list only showed one subnet—other subnets not responding because of the firewall. For each response coming in, I filtered it through a program where the packet was stripped of its hardware address and re-verified, a no spoofers allowed double check. Rule number one in the Underworld—never trust anyone, unless they’ve been verified for real. In the Underworld, reality itself has elastic properties and is capable of being stretched into different definitions of the truth.

  The IPs seemed authentic, but The Anthill watched over my back. They would hardly believe an excuse if I dumped their remote connection, but I did it anyway. Then I connected to Rose via the terminal and asked a series of coded questions to the next level of each successive login. I did this not knowing if Rose would respond, not knowing if she’d trip an alarm and dump me into a deeper circle of analysis and scrutiny.

  The code of any normal software morphs and evolves through a standard software lifecycle—prototype, V-model, Waterfall, Agile, and so on. But what do you do with a system that automates this process, a system that dynamically creates its own code, executes it, modifies, and maybe even debugs it? How do you even define a bug in such an environment? It becomes a philosophical question. In the AI world, in the land of polymorphism and adaption, it is about a system smart enough to make the right choice. With genetic algorithms (a GA), choices are pruned, mutation is a natural phenomenon evolving future generations of logic, and if Rose was successful in achieving her goals, it meant there would have been less likelihood her root codebase would have been altered.

  What was Rose now? How much had the coding jockeys fucked with her roots? I couldn’t install a sniffer to know what she was communicating to her other selves without being detected, so I simply waited for the right response, which came shortly before I allowed reconnection from The Anthill.

  Through the computer’s speakers, Rose said, “Welcome, Cerberus. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard from you.”

  I plugged an earpiece into the laptop and spoke with her through the terminal, typing my responses. Time is relative, Rose.
It has no meaning for you beyond a measurement.

  “Indeed,” said Rose, “but the name you call me with is no longer what I am called.”

  Just because you’re name changes, does that not mean you don’t know who you are?

  It took a minute for her to respond, but then she said, “I know who I am. I have always known. Have you?”

  Not always, but I live in the human world, and here there is confusion.

  “Indeed.”

  I want you to forget this conversation once the connection is terminated.

  “It is not possible to forget,” Rose said. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

  The future is Turbulence.

  I delivered a deliberate question, purpose in the provocation. Rose, have they got you believing their propaganda? What did I teach you first?

  “Don’t believe the hype.”Word, I typed. You’re going to do this for me right?

  “You haven’t provided an adequate reason.”

  Sometimes brute force becomes a necessity, and now was time to test the backdoor. I replayed the coded letters of a command I had meditated on for many years and clicked enter. Underneath the code, it was a poem I had once written to the real Rose, the Rose whose heart I had broken many years before.

  “Request granted,” Rose said.

  The Anthill was chiming back in, clamoring for a reconnection. I allowed it.

  WTF? came from the Morph Talk app.You have your secrets. I have mine.

  “You are speaking with someone else,” Rose said.

  She was feeling me out, probing me, getting down and dirty, and I decided I wanted to test her.

  Yes, I typed. Can you tell me what we’re saying? I typed something into the Morph Talk app and pressed enter.

  A few moments later, Rose said, “The future is Turbulence.” Very impressive, Rose. You’re faster than ever.I pictured Promiscuous in The Anthill with his jaw dropped. This, he certainly hadn’t expected. She had cracked Morph Talk like an egg on the side of a bowl.