Breakpoint

by Richard A. Clarke

“Performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals. Every other occupation is using drugs to make them better—why not baseball, why not athletes?” Jimmy asked. “Why the big fuss that the Chinese did gene-doping in the Beijing Olympics?”

  “It’s not natural,” Susan replied.

  “Tell me you don’t use Memzax. All the trivia you have at the tip of your tongue, you must. You don’t use Daystend when you have to stay awake for days in a crisis? They’re PEPs.”

  “Of course I do, now that our staff doc prescribes them and the government pays for them. I couldn’t afford Memzax on my own, and my health plan sure won’t pay thirty dollars for a single pill,” Susan admitted, “but in my job I need to have instant retrieval of lots of information. Memzax works, Detective.”

  “Okay, so in your job you memorize things and drugs are okay,” Jimmy argued while driving. “An athlete’s job is to send a ball sailing out of a park like that one there.” They were passing Fenway on the Mass. Pike. “And they can’t use drugs to do their job?”

  “You sound like Margaret Myers,” Susan said, and chuckled.

  “Who’s that?”

  “So, Sherlock, you haven’t done all of your homework on me. She was my dissertation advisor at Harvard,” she said as they crossed the little bridge into Cambridge.

  “Got me there, Bo—I mean, Susan. Damn these fuckin’ drivers up here. I just went for L and S to get us out of this jam. Forgot I’m driving a rental.”

  “In fact, we’re seeing her after lunch,” Susan announced. “She’s an expert on technology policy and the interaction between government and science. I thought she might have some thoughts about your theory on the six incidents. She knows somebody on every major research campus around the world. As Jimmy pulled the car up to a police line, she added “Okay, so I’ll bite. L and S?”

  “Lights and sirens. It’s why we become cops. To get the lights and sirens.” And then he smiled, again flashing dimples.

  0805 EST

  Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  The police lines surrounded the charred hulk of what had been a modern, redbrick building. The windows were broken out and the brick singed around them. One section of outer wall had collapsed and bricks were scattered across the side street. The firetrucks were gone by now, but Susan spotted a large van with “State Fire Marshal” on the side. The March wind chilled the few who stood around the fire scene. Ice patches were scattered across the asphalt. Steam rose from a mobile canteen truck dispensing coffee. It was the kind of aggressively gray winter day that Susan associated with Cambridge, with forcing herself down snowy sidewalks to Harvard Square.

  “Susan Connor, Intelligence Analysis Center, this is Lieutenant Tommy McDonough, Mass. State Police,” Jimmy said, breaking into her flashback. The state cop actually looked a little like Foley, she thought. The two of them could have been investment bankers, in their black overcoats and red ties.

  “Pleased ta meet yah. Let’s go inside or we’ll freeze like them firemen. The New Reactor Diner ovah there is pretty good. Warm anyway,” McDonough said, pointing to a classic silver-sided diner on the other side of the traffic circle.

  They squeezed into a tight, fake-red-leather booth and were quickly served coffee in chipped mugs. McDonough pulled out one of the newer PDAs and flipped up its screen to review his notes. “Friday night, after eleven. Initial explosion triggered secondary fires. First unit responding called in three alarms. Building fully involved. Everybody got out okay, but…” His voice dropped in volume. “Some of the staff that works there days arrived and tried to go back in. Kinda loosely wrapped, these MIT types. Digit heads.” He looked around the diner at the patrons, most of whom were hunched over laptops. “Fire marshal got an operating theory, and that’s all it is at this point, that there was an undetected gas leak that really built up a big cloud before static or some other spark set it off. That blast knocked an exterior wall out and severed the water line for the sprinklers. They had sophisticated halon gas suppression in some of the labs, but most of the place went up quick, like a three decka, you know what I mean? Question is how come there was a big, undetected gas leak. Shouldn’ta just happened all on its own.”

  Foley, who had been taking notes into his own PDA, looked up. “That’s good, Tommy, thanks. What’d the building do, what’s its purpose?”

  “CAIN. Center for Advanced Informatics and Networking. They were the U.S. end of an international project with Japan, France, and Russia involving gridded supercomputers. CAIN was also big in a project involved in reverse engineering the human brain. They’re mainly famous now as the ones there that created the Living Software,” McDonough said matter-of-factly. Susan was learning not to underestimate this clan of Irish cops.

  “And all of that’s gone?” Susan asked.

  “Shit no,” the lieutenant shot back. “Pardon my French. No, the Living Software thing wasn’t just here. Others have it, too. The supercomputers here, well…the professors are trying to figure out how to get them outta the building and see if they can clean ’em up. Good fuckin’ luck with that, huh, Jimmy?”

  “No leads? Forensics on the gas pipes? Anything on the videotapes? Pissed-off staff been fired or screwed over? Nut-job protest groups got a reason to hate the center?” Jimmy asked.

  “’Course we’re runnin’ all that kinda stuff down, Jimmy, but it ain’t lookin’ good, I’ll tell yah. The pipes and all that at the blast scene are atomized. Cambridge cops had video, course, but nuttin’ on it. No one went postal. Apparently, everybody loved to work there. Changin’ the world, they said.” McDonough scanned the diner again, then whispered, “Nut-job groups? Cambridge is nothin’ but nut jobs, you ask me. People’s Republic of Cambridge. But none that had it out for the center, not that we found.”

  “Could we put on hard hats and walk through some of it?” Susan asked.

  “Sure, but listen, Jimmy, after that, my mother made me promise to take you ovah her place for lunch. Wants ta hear about your dad. And see you, of course,” McDonough said, putting away the PDA.

  Foley looked questioningly at his boss. “You should do that, Jimmy,” Susan said firmly. “Besides, I have to meet up with Professor Myers, and that’s likely to go on and on. I’ll hop on the Red Line two stops and we can meet up later at the Charles.” She turned to McDonough. “This has been very helpful, Lieutenant, but there is one thing I do have to ask.” She paused. “Why is it called the New Reactor Diner? Spicy hot food?”

  “Hell, no, the food sucks here,” McDonough bellowed, laughing loudly. “The diner’s name’s cuz these MIT nut jobs have a fuckin’ nuclear reactor other side a the alley.” In the nearby booths, a dozen heads briefly popped up from laptops and looked around as if sniffing the air for something. And then they went back down, down into cyberspace.

  Susan thought about what could happen if another white van filled with RDX went down the alley. As they walked into the ruin of the building in yellow hard hats, a video-surveillance camera across the street zoomed in on their faces.

  1055 EST

  Summers Hall, Allston Campus

  Harvard University, Boston

  “So it’s all very well to say that big government is bad and that big government backing big science projects is worse,” said the woman behind the podium. “I know some of you think the American corporation is the highest achievement of efficiency that humanity has ever produced…but when you say all of that, my dears, remember not only that big bad old government created the internet but that the private sector would never, repeat never, have done so. There was no single company, no group of companies that either would have or could have accomplished it, including the single very large phone company we once had in this country.”

  Margaret Myers stepped out, taking the microphone with her, as she spotted Susan in the back row of the amphitheater-style class room. “The private sector found all sorts of things to do with the internet, and that has changed the way we live, but they would never have built it.” Think
ing of Susan’s role in the Islamyah crisis, she continued, “The private sector would also have continued producing gas-guzzling cars, paying for overseas oil to make into gasoline, until the last drop of oil was pumped and the last dollar was spent on it. Only because of the government of Islamyah and its research and its investments in companies in the U.S., can we say that half the cars in this country are now powered by either hybrid engines or by ethanol from corn, sugarcane, and switch grasses.

  “So your assignment for next week is a short essay, no more than two thousand words, on some technology problem of your choice that only a government can solve in the first instance, thereby creating opportunities for the private sector to build on. See you next week.” Students immediately flocked around the short professor, asking questions, introducing friends, offering things for her to read. Susan thought her friend and one-time advisor looked older, more gray in her curls, her broad shoulders beginning to slouch. Still, she radiated a physical and intellectual strength and presence that lit up the room. Susan knew that some students would hang on, following Myers back to her office, so Susan signaled that she would meet her there.

  The lecture hall and the professor’s office were across the river on the Boston side, in Summers Hall, part of Harvard’s new Allston Campus. The picture window in the office offered a stunning view of the old Cambridge campus, causing Susan to be lost in thought until Myers shut the office door behind her. The two embraced. “I hoped you would get a chance to work on the internet bombings when I heard about them,” Myers began. “I can’t help but think that there is something bigger about to happen.”

  “Bigger than severing the cyber connection between the Americas and the rest of the world? Bigger than causing communication satellites to disappear? That’s already a big deal to some of us, Margaret,” Susan replied. “We have a theory that China is involved. And now we think that other fires and explosions at scientific institutions over the last few months may be connected.”

  “Yes, of course, dear. And I know you know that the internet wasn’t fully severed, just drastically reduced. I’m sure our Pentagon friends are busy even now trying to shift more of the load to their own military satellites.” Myers dropped her lecture notes and papers on a coffee table already covered with other stacks of paper. “I know the theory that they are trying to distract us while they do something else, Taiwan maybe. But I can’t help but wonder if we’re looking at it wrong, if China might be doing it because they know more than we do about our technology, that we are about to leap ahead and leave them in the dust.” Myers swept her arm across her desk, toppling a mound of books and journals, “Oh, no. That was my next book, sitting here in pieces. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.” She plunked down in a large wooden chair. “Susan, I’m afraid of those who want to whip up a war with China. We should share our technology with them, with everyone. That is the nature of scientific inquiry.”

  “Depends on the technology.” Susan smiled and bent down to pick the books and paper off the floor. “What’s this next book on?”

  “Transhumanism,” Myers said, rescuing a loose-leaf binder from the floor.

  “What?” Susan felt a pang of disappointment. She had sought out Professor Myers for her understanding on the attacks, but she’d just been reminded that Margaret was often into some academic theory not necessarily related to the real world.

  “I’m sorry, Susan. I know you spend all your time now running around the Middle East and saving us from bad guys. No time to keep up with things here.” Myers dug out a journal and handed it across the desk. “I did a piece for Sociology and Science last fall. Transhumanism is the philosophy that espouses using genomics, robotics, informatics, nanotech, new pharma…to change humanity into a new species.”

  “New species? Or just one with the mistakes corrected?” Susan asked, flipping through the journal to be polite. “What’s the concept?”

  Myers sketched a graph on her whiteboard. Across the middle of the chart she drew a line. Below the line she wrote “Corrections,” and above it she wrote “Enhancements.” The arc on the graph passed through the line at a point indicating 2008, four years before.

  “Something very big happened around 2008. We crossed over from just doing genetic corrections to creating genetic enhancements. That’s where we are going now, to a human so enhanced, so improved, that some would say it is no longer human. Part carbon-based life-form, as you and I are, and part silicon-based, as this thing is.” Myers whacked the computer console by her desk. “And the poor old carbon part will have been so transformed that it will be as far superior to us as we are to Neanderthals. You should catch up on the technological changes.”

  Susan unfolded a chart from the journal, showing the advances in several sciences and their convergence into a Transhuman over the next two decades. “Margaret, I have China blowing things up in the U.S. I don’t have time anymore to keep up on all this crazy stuff, with what the Transwhatevers fear might happen someday.”

  Myers smiled her motherly look, then spoke softly and slowly, as if explaining about boys to an innocent young daughter. “Susan, this ‘crazy stuff,’ as you call it, is happening. Of course, the fundamentalists, Christian and Muslim, really hate it.”

  “That’s not the only thing they have in common,” Susan said, and laughed.

  “True, but because of the political power of the fundamentalists in this country, stem-cell research was delayed and all sorts of rules imposed on federally funded research that prohibited work in genetics to enhance humans.” Myers lifted a big publication from the National Institutes of Health. “Nonetheless, it is happening quietly in labs all across the country and overseas. Private research money, people skating around federal rules. A lot of it is now done in secret, or offshore.”

  Susan Connor was intently studying the large foldout chart, the arrows showing milestones of progress in genetics, nanocomputing, robotics, pharmaceuticals, information science, brain studies.

  “That chart you have there is already out of date. Many of the key breakthroughs have taken place experimentally. Now it’s a matter of scaling and integration. It’s just that most people don’t know how far the technologies have come, or don’t see their implications.” Professor Myers seemed almost weary. “Most people are focusing on the latest Hollywood murder scandal or on what’s going on in Iran. Most Americans may know only about one or two scientific fields and don’t see the combined effects of the several sciences that are now racing through advances.”

  “Racing?” Susan asked skeptically.

  Myers seemed to get renewed strength when challenged. She rose quickly and went to the whiteboard and began sketching lines that were at first parallel, then intertwining, then spinning out in all directions. “This is what you have to internalize. Knowledge builds on itself, always has. Now armed with cheap, highly capable computers, the rate of progress in all of these fields is accelerating, building on itself, speeding ahead. And these fields are merging, reinforcing, enabling each other. The rate of acceleration today is five times what it was forty years ago when the internet was creeping out of the BBN labs up the street. In three years, 2015, scientific engineering will be blindingly fast, and in eight years, humans may not be able to keep up with it.”

  Susan’s head was spinning; there were details, concepts that Myers was assuming she knew. “Okay, okay…there’s a lot of catching up I have to do. But let me bring you back to the internet bombings. Any thoughts on them? Who actually did them? What will they go after next?”

  Myers sat back down. “The attacks will slow things down enormously. China may be able to catch up. We have been moving out faster than China in the last few years. They can’t invent well, it seems. They can copy and understand theory, but that’s not enough anymore. Labs in other countries around the world are collaborating, sending huge chunks of data back and forth, petabytes, on fiber-optic cables under the sea. Just look at the Globegrid Project. How, Susan, can you merge the three biggest civilian superc
omputer farms in the U.S., with ones in France, Russia, and Japan to create into one virtual machine, as was planned, if there is now no big pipe to connect them? Note, please, that we left China out of the project because of U.S. paranoia.”

  “Wait, Globegrid. Was the U.S. end of that network going to be in CAIN, the building over at MIT that burned down Friday night?” Susan asked, looking at the soot on her shoes.

  “The penny drops? Globegrid was to go online this month. Think what could have been done with all of those huge parallel processors working as one. Then Friday night, CAIN catches fire, and Sunday morning truck bombs take out the fiber-optic beachheads. Had you all really not put that together yet?” Myers asked incredulously. “The other two U.S. computers are at Stanford and UC San Diego.”

  Folding her hands together under her nose, Susan framed her question carefully. “What was Globegrid really going to do?”

  Again, Myers pushed herself up out of the chair and began sketching on the whiteboard behind her. “Once the supercomputers were linked, a special version of the new Living Software would be added to them as the control program. It would be given the task of making the three supercomputers into one virtual machine. Living Software would then be proliferated throughout cyberspace to prevent another cyber crash like the one in 2009. A grid with that power could also solve the remaining problems in genomics and brain science. And that’s what they intended to use it for. Their first task was to test the results of the consortium’s work on reverse-engineering the human brain.” Myers looked at her former student, who sat in front of her silently, glumly, with a facial expression that cried out, “I still don’t get it!”

  “Susan, Susan, Susan…don’t worry. I didn’t understand much of this either until the last year or so. You have to master so many disciplines simultaneously to get it, and even then you can’t know everything that is going on in the labs now. Much of it has gone underground.”

  Susan stacked the last of the fallen books back on Myers’s desk. “Underground? What about your principles of open scientific inquiry, about sharing information?”