Breakpoint

by Richard A. Clarke

  4 Wednesday, March 11

  0945 EST

  230 Madison Avenue

  New York City

  Randall Ackerman carried his Starbucks grande mocha skim latte in his right hand and the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal under his left arm as he bounded into his thirty-third-floor office at Paragon, the hedge fund his father had started eleven years earlier. Now, under Randall, it managed seventeen billion dollars in assets.

  “Morning, Asimov,” he said to the silvery doglike robot standing by the window. It barked once in reply. “Let’s begin,” he said to the bot. It was what he said to the machine every morning. The bot barked twice and activated Randall’s office systems. A large flat-panel screen lit up on the wall, stock market data in several windows and a cable news channel in another. The overhead lights glowed on. The bot had cost him twenty-five thousand dollars and he thought that every penny was well spent. This fourth generation bot dog was not a toy. It was his assistant. “Book a table at the Four Seasons for four people at one,” he said to Asimov.

  Asimov was also a symbol of Randall’s own success. Only the most technologically savvy and financially prosperous had a canine assistant, or as the Kiasanjay company called them, Cassys. In the thirteen months they had been on the market, only thirty thousand had sold. Nine thousand of them were in Manhattan, Stamford, and Greenwich.

  Randall Ackerman spread the papers out on the glass table that served as his desk. “Asimov, ask Bartlett to join me.”

  The Cassy turned toward its master. And growled. It was a low, guttural sound that was used to warn off trespassers. “Who’s there, Asimov?” Ackerman asked, looking up from the papers. “What’s wrong, boy?”

  The dog barked and leaped up onto the coffee table, scattering the magazines. It barked twice more and then leaped the three feet from the coffee table up onto the surface of the glass desk, hitting the cup of grande mocha skim latte, which emptied its hot liquid onto Randall’s shirt and lap. “Ahhhh! What the fuck! Asimov!” Randall jumped up. “Asimov, system off! Off!”

  The dog bot was growling again, at its master. “Asimov, shut down!” Randall screamed. The dog did not comply. “Damn it, search for: First Law of Robotics!”

  The canine’s simulated human voice annunciator switched on: “Search results: Data set not found.” Asimov stepped back to the corner of the glass-topped desk and barked loudly three times. It then ran the length of the table and leaped into the air, toward, then through the plate-glass window, shattering the glass as it shot itself into the air thirty-three stories above Madison Avenue. Then Asimov, and pieces of glass, fell to the street and sidewalk below.

  Stunned, horrified, Randall Ackerman moved slowly to the window, suppressing his fear of heights. He felt a blast of cold air shooting through the hole in the glass. As he looked down Madison Avenue, he saw a window break in the building across Fifty-seventh Street. Another Cassy shot out of that window and arced out over Madison Avenue. He watched, incredulous, as the silvery dog bot smashed into a yellow taxi below, shattering the advertising screen on its roof.

  “Asimov!” Randall called out. Then, “Bartlett!” No one answered. He patted his coat, found his PDA, and then hit the speed dial for his lawyer.

  1145 Pacific Standard Time

  Moffett Airfield, Silicon Valley

  California

  “It’s so big that clouds form and it rains inside,” the Space Agency guard said to Susan while he was waiting for her name on the facility’s guest access list of his computer screen. “They built it to house blimps when this was a Navy air station. Then NASA took over for the Ames Research Center; now Google rents a big chunk of the base for the Googleplex. You’re going to the Stanford-Carnegie Advanced Informatics Facility, SCAIF. Turn right and it’s all the way down at the end of the road. Big building, no windows. Have a good one,” he said, handing over a badge for her and a Visitor sign for the dashboard of her rented Nissan battery car.

  SCAIF, a joint operation of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University and California’s Stanford University, was one of three American supercomputer hubs that were to be part of Globegrid. Another one, CAIN, in Cambridge, had blown up. The fiber-optic connections needed to link them to their counterparts in Europe and Japan had also blown up, or at least the U.S. ends of the fiber had. Susan expected security here to be heightened, but the NASA police guarding the campus seemed relaxed. In addition to the guard at the gate, there had been a NASA police car inside the perimeter. She wondered about the NASA police. They were probably like the National Zoo police, the Library of Congress police, the Washington Aqueduct police, and the twenty-one other federal police agencies she had counted in the nation’s capital. Now, as she approached SCAIF, she saw another NASA patrol car parked prominently outside the building, in front of a row of concrete Jersey barriers. Not enough to stop somebody serious, Susan thought as she walked in.

  Susan had taken the first flight out from Logan to San Francisco, and as she finally got to her destination at SCAIF, she remembered what its twin facility in Cambridge looked like as a burned-out hulk. Walking into the California computer center, she wondered exactly what her office had said to get her the appointment on such short notice.

  “I’m Dr. Walter Heintel, deputy director at SCAIF,” the tall, bald man said, thrusting out a hand awkwardly. “Our director, Dr. Stanley Goldberg, can’t be with you today, budget meeting up the road at Stanford, but he said to tell you anything, show you anything you want. You must be with the National Science Foundation?”

  “No, but I am with another research arm of the federal government, the IAC,” she said, quickly flashing her credentials. “I was hoping you could tell me more about Living Software and Globegrid, and also the Human Brain Reverse-Engineering Project.”

  They sat in a small, dimly lit conference room inside SCAIF. The left wall was glass, and through it Susan could see what she assumed the inside of a laptop would look like through a microscope. Blue lights glowed and blinked down identical, three-story-high stacks of gray boxes. She counted twelve rows, each perhaps as long as half a football field. Catwalks wove among the machines, as did bundles of orange cables. She saw no humans.

  “Well, where to begin?” The professor looked away, as if to see the answer on the other wall. “Stanley, Dr. Goldberg, has really been the man on Living Software since the Cyber Crash, but simply put, once we go live with Globegrid, we will propagate Living Software into any network that opens itself up to receive it. So, LS will determine the task being done by existing software and it will create new, alternative, glitch-free, efficient, secure software to do the routing and to run the servers. The new software will then run on a test bed, and if the network operators like it, they can buy it for a nominal amount that will be paid to the manufacturer of the old software and to Globegrid. We have had self-modifying code for years in worms, but this new code is for a good purpose. Of course, privacy and security rules will mean that sensitive information cannot leave a network. Living Software won’t export anything from the networks it fixes and rewrites, just diagnostic data about itself.”

  “Any idea who would want to stop it? China? Russia? Iran?” Susan asked.

  “Maybe bad software manufacturers? No, just kidding.” Heintel laughed nervously. “We are dreadfully sorry about CAIN and everything that has happened this week, but Stan is still planning to go live with Globegrid and Living Software by the end of the month. We had hoped that all six computer centers would be linked to save computing time and to ensure that we produced the same result to the same problem everywhere, but we think we can use the two U.S. centers, here and San Diego, with a smaller facility in Pittsburgh, and then we can fly copies of the memory to Japan and Europe every few days and we will sync every five days or so.”

  “Who knows you’re still going ahead?” Susan asked.

  “People at all the remaining five centers and in Pittsburgh. Only about a thousand or so staff of the Globegrid project. We don’t wa
nt to announce it until we are sure we can do it and we have a specific date. It will probably be March twentieth.”

  Susan sat silently for a moment, then asked, “Have you personally read and understood the code for the new Living Software?”

  “Pieces of it. No one individual has read all of it. My dear, no one person has read all of any operating system for years. Too many lines of code, seventy million lines in most operating systems,” Heintel shrugged, “and eventually what LS writes will get too complex to read and understand with the naked eye anyway. You’ll need a reader application as it evolves.”

  “Software to read software. I get it—why not, since software is writing software?” Susan said aloud, but apparently to herself.

  “So. Can I tell you about the Human Brain Reverse-Engineering Project—that’s my baby,” Heintel volunteered. He flashed images on the large screen that was the wall at the front of the room. “We just completed the project last November. It’s so exciting, I’m sure you saw all the press about it. It’s like when they finished decoding the human genome and, who knows, maybe as important, or almost. We know now what every part of the brain does and how. We can implant electronics in the ear, eye, and elsewhere directly into the brain, and send signals that are converted to the biochemical language of the brain. And we can go the other way now, taking biochemical signals for memory and turning them into ones and zeroes for copying and storing in silicon, in electronic computers. So, phase two will involve nanotechnology inserts, but we need another five years before we can test that in humans.”

  Susan was embarrassed; she had really not noticed all the media coverage of the brain project last November. She had been on a vacation hiking through New Zealand with her boyfriend, Sam who had just accepted a job at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Rusty Macintyre had ordered her to take a month off, and she and Sam had camped, fished, and sailed for three weeks. Then Sam had gone went back to surgery and she to IAC. Last month, they’d been together all of three nights. In Baltimore.

  “And exactly how would the Globegrid help?” Susan asked.

  “Well, it will give us the computing power and the software to accelerate the research into the nano program and other things we have not really cracked yet, like the consciousness problem, connectivity, other things…” Heintel almost mumbled.

  “The consciousness problem?” Susan asked.

  “Yes, you see we have successfully downloaded the short-term and long term memories of almost three hundred human subjects. We can send sensor inputs like what their brains receive to a processor, but we haven’t really been able yet to get a computer to take those inputs and, well, puts them all together. We need to develop an application or program that is the master control, something like human consciousness. We can’t find a single place in the human brain that is the locus for consciousness.”

  Susan didn’t know whether to be disappointed or reassured. “And the connectivity problem?”

  “So, there we are in better shape.” Heintel beamed. “My own work is in this area. We have built converters that will take a series of standard Internet Protocol–formatted packets of data and convert it to the appropriate biochemical-electrical message that the brain will understand and process, and vice versa. Add a WiFi transceiver connected to the internet and you could literally think an e-mail message, see it on your visor, and send it, or think a Google search and then see the results by using wraparound visualization glasses. The Google guys down the street love it.”

  “You’re serious?” Susan breathed.

  “I know, and it was only what, just eight years ago that we first used the thoughts of paralyzed patients to move computer mouses and keyboards? Then we had the little brain-connected appliances that stopped depression and the like.” Sensing Susan’s apparent concern, he added, “Of course, no one will be connected directly to the internet for a while. The subjects we have will be tied into a closed, firewalled sub-network on Globegrid, but the subjects will be able to search some files and send each other text messages. And Living Software can learn from what they, the humans, see and do. That way, Living Software will make the big step from artificial intelligence–using rule-based theory—to sentience. I just can’t wait to start.”

  “When?”

  “Realistically, probably not until May,” Heintel said, and sighed.

  “Of this year?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.” The professor beamed, “As soon as we get the Globegrid work-around up for a while. Soon. So, can you help us with our funding shortfall?”

  Susan Connor sat quietly in the rental car, forcing her own gray-matter processor to sift through what she had just been told. Living Software, an operating system itself written by software, would pretty soon offer to install itself on every network in the world. Most network operators would accept it. Even though the Globegrid computers were not now all linked in real time, they would still coordinate their files every five days, comparing and conforming the programs that Living Software had written and installed everywhere. There would no doubt be diagnostic applications left behind everywhere to monitor how the software was doing and report back to the LS master program on the Globegrid processors. And Living Software would, as its name implied, continue to live and grow, changing itself and its offspring to meet new security threats and problems.

  Across the parking lot, Susan noticed that a surveillance camera on the streetlight had just turned in her direction. At least the fearsome NASA police had installed security cameras.

  She had heard of Living Software for three or four years now, but this was the first time the implications were sinking in. It was more than just glitch-free programs, a lot more. And soon some human brains would be connected to a computer network on which Living Software was running. The human interface would be firewalled off, of course, on a sub-net. Right. Megs was right, there was a lot of technology that was about to be sprung on an unsuspecting world. And that was just what was in the open. What about the technology developments that were hidden? How ironic that the Chinese and others knew about the underground research and development, but Washington did not. She had to find the full extent of it, before it, too, was attacked and set back or destroyed. Megs had pointed her in the right direction, but now she needed more help to uncover the partially hidden new world of computer science and genomics, of nano and quantum computing, of reverse-engineering the human brain.

  She thumbed through her notes on the PDA, went online to get the number for Jupiter Systems, and connected through to the main number in Menlo Park, five miles away. “Could you put me through to the office of Will Gaudium, please?” Mr. Gaudium, a founder of the information systems giant, was no longer full time in Menlo Park, Susan was told, but she could send an e-mail to his assistant who would consider her request for a meeting. Susan dashed off a message explaining not just that she was a Fed who wanted to interview him on a matter of national security, but also that she wanted his help understanding the security implications of Living Software and the Human Brain Reverse-Engineering Project.

  As she drove away from SCAIF back to the main gate, she was distracted, her mind still in a fog, trying to understand what was spinning around her and why she had not seen it before. And why no one else on this case apparently got it yet. She needed to talk to Jimmy, get his reaction…. And then it happened. In her peripheral vision, she caught a flash up ahead, then heard the sound of a thud. At the end of the road, near the gate, over a half mile away, a cloud of dust billowed up, and shooting out of the dust cloud came a truck, a red eighteen-wheeler tractor-trailer, coming fast down the road right toward her.

  Suddenly she knew. No processing time was required. The situational understanding was instant. The gatehouse had just been attacked and now SCAIF was about to go the way of CAIN and the beachheads. Where the hell were Jimmy and his guns when she needed them? The truck was probably one giant bomb.

  Without stopping for second thoughts, Susan threw the car into park, pulled the
belt off her bag, and strapped it around the steering wheel and the seat-belt hook. Then, aiming the car for where the truck would be in a few seconds as it came around the curve, she pushed open the driver’s door, threw the gear into drive, set the cruise control for seventy, and leapt from the car as it sped up. Hitting the grass hard, she rolled, and then, her back facing the road, she assumed the fetal position and waited.

  And…nothing happened.

  Nothing. If the car had missed colliding with the eighteen wheeler, at least the truck should be roaring by her…

  The ground shook below her as though a dinosaur had put its foot down next to her. Then the concussive wave pounded her everywhere on her body, like she was being punched by ten men. As the sound overloaded her brain, she was simultaneously aware of pieces of flaming metal landing all around her, setting the grass on fire. It had worked, she thought as the air rushed out of her lungs and she passed out.

  The impact of the Nissan hitting the charging truck had set off the detonator. The truck bomb had gone off on the approach road, blowing out windows across the campus, sending a column of smoke and debris thousands of feet in the air, causing a crater thirty feet wide and eight feet deep, throwing the chassis of the truck cab over the fence and off the base. The person or people inside the truck cab would never be found, except for microscopic pieces of flesh that would be analyzed for their DNA signatures.

  Inside the windowless SCAIF, the earthquake shock absorbers had adjusted instantly when the blast occurred. The rows of parallel processors did not miss a byte. They continued to hum and to glow blue.

  2030 Greenwich Mean Time

  The Cabinet Office

  Whitehall, London

  “Sol, I thought I would just check in before I go home,” Sir Dennis Penning-Smith said into the secure telephone in his London office. “We’ve seen media reports of a terrorist attack near the Googleplex.”