Brainbender

by D S Kane

Ann looked at each face to see if they were on board. “My first assignment for myself is to craft the executive summary of a business plan for this startup. It’s due at DARPA the day after tomorrow. I’ll get a draft done before tomorrow afternoon and send it via email to each of you. Please read it thoroughly and reply with any changes you feel necessary. Before I email the final to DARPA, I’ll send you a ‘final draft’ and I expect you to either accept it or suggest changes before DARPA sees it. Okay?”

  Again, everyone either nodded or gave a thumbs-up. They all turned toward the sound of the front door as it opened. Laura entered, and Ann pointed to her team members. Laura nodded. Ann said to her team, “This is Laura Hunter, my roommate. Laura, give us a few minutes and I’ll clean up the room.”

  Once again, Laura nodded. “Hello, everyone.”

  Only Dave smiled back as Laura disappeared into the bedroom.

  Then Ann asked each for their comments on the due dates. No one had any objections to them, and Ann ended the meeting.

  When they had gone, Ann sat at the desk in the living room and set to work, writing the draft of the executive summary. At this stage of the contest, no team had offices, a prototype, a prototype design, or even an executive summary of a business plan. She expected each of the teams’ executive summaries would be similar, since most of the material would come directly from DARPA’s own description of the contest. Although it was at the center of her mind, she made no mention of the “morality module” she wanted her team to code into their AI entry.

  She worked until noon, then left her apartment for a scheduled class. When she dropped by the cafeteria for coffee and a sandwich, she saw a news story on the large-screen television. Some Chinese scientists were claiming they had moved a small amount of inanimate matter from earth to a satellite a few years ago, using what they described as a “matter transporter.” Today’s story claimed that they tried to move living matter—a mouse—but failed. However, the report claimed they also successfully moved over two hundred kilos of inanimate matter from earth to their satellite. The story did not mention whether the Chinese could move that matter from the satellite back to earth.

  Ann realized the Chinese might soon be capable of transporting a robot army instantaneously from one locale on Earth to another. The thought left her stunned and shivering.

  She wondered if she should mention these events in her executive summary.

  She rewrote the executive summary to include the news item—the capability of transporting matter from one place to another without actual travel—as one of her business plan’s mission objectives. She sent this to her team.

  After each member of her team had approved the executive summary the next day, she sent it off to DARPA. While she was viewing the subpage for the contest, she read the statuses of the other teams in the competition.

  Her team was on track with the others.

  * * *

  Major Zhou read the report on screen and nodded. “This looks good. The tech’s concept has been proven and now we need to expand it. How soon can you show me the movement of a three-hundred-pound object?”

  The captain standing at attention in front of him tried not to shrug. “Three months?” he ventured.

  Zhou shook his head. “You have two weeks. Go now.”

  He watched the captain leave and close the door to his office. It will take at least three months before we can move a single, fully equipped robot soldier from one destination to another, he estimated. And from what the general told me, our own development of AI soldiers could take nearly a year. But soon, we can transport Russian robot soldiers to our research facility and simply copy the tech before the Russians have a chance to respond. Then our 3D printing facility can produce soldiers at a rate of six hundred a day. Yes. The next war will be interesting. Zhou smiled with pride.

  * * *

  William Wing paced the small hotel room in Singapore. He turned to his wife, Betsy Brown, and shook his head. “Well, Butterfly, there’s good news and bad news.”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s all bad news, little Wing. We have to leave the country right now. I think we may only have a matter of hours before they figure out who just stole their files and where we are.”

  He shrugged. “Let’s just send the files on to Avram, then we can pack and leave.”

  She shook her head. “No. If they can track us, and if we send the files to Avram, they’ll be able to track him too. Let’s run now. We can send them to him when we get where we’re going. By the way, where is that? Won’t they be able to track us wherever we go?”

  “You’re right.” He began throwing everything they both had in the hotel room into their two suitcases. “Either Manhattan, because then we can deliver the files personally by hand, or Beijing, since they also want the files.”

  “What about Moscow? Won’t it be the last place they’d look for us? After all, we hacked the files from the SVR.”

  William stood stock-still while he thought. “Moscow?” He shook his head. “Too dangerous.” Then he smiled. “Another thought. Maybe Tel Aviv would be the best. After all, the Mossad is our client.”

  Betsy laughed. “Yes. Now let’s get out of here.” She grabbed the gray suitcase.

  William took the black suitcase and they headed together toward the hotel room door.

  As they waited for the elevator, William wondered what the Mossad would do with Moscow’s design documents for an AI-driven robot.

  CHAPTER 8

  Ann Sashakovich’s apartment,

  #211, 3950 Louis Road, Palo Alto, CA

  September 7, 10:36 a.m.

  The next morning, Ann’s team met at her apartment for the second time to discuss their revisions, if any, to their staffing requirements and the obstacles they expected to encounter filling them. Once again, they were powered by an abundance of coffee.

  Since Stanford was home to eight of the seventy-three DARPA contest teams, each person on Ann’s team admitted vocally that the competition for staff candidates would be stiff. Samantha was the only one who shrugged, saying “no problem for me.”

  When Nordman asked her why she was so sure, Samantha responded, “Because we only have one customer, and that one is DARPA. Duh!”

  Ann watched their interchange and wondered if Dave and Sam might not work together well. She asked the group, “Any other concerns?”

  Nordman said, “I don’t know how many programmers I’ll need. But a lot, for sure. Maybe twenty, maybe fifty.”

  Bertrand and Ken nodded.

  Bert said, “We’ll be doing a lot of recruiting. What are we offering them to work on this? Just student credit? If it’s cash, then I’ll need to budget for it. And if it’s cash, where will the money come from? Stanford might have something to say about this, so I’ll have to meet with their director for student projects.”

  Ken Simon added, “I’ll need to interview every one of your finalist candidates and set up records for them. The university has some guidelines and some rules about adding staff to student projects. I don’t know how long this will take. How many candidates will you see to end up with thirty programmers?”

  Dave said, “So far, the Stanford Student Projects Office has sent me two students, and both were too junior to be usable. I’ve approached nearly fifty of my classmates. Some weren’t interested at all. Several have already signed up with other teams. Some claimed to have been offered cash salaries or stock to join one or another team. As a result, I’ve only signed three programmers to date, all for student credit and no cash. But, I’m guessing that it could take as long as—”

  Ann interrupted, “Look, you three should do this together and then report back to me.”

  Bert and Ken’s faces swiveled away from Dave’s and toward Ann. All three shrugged.

  Ann ended the meeting at noon, feeling defeated, and dragged herself to the kitchen for lunch and more coffee. Lots more coffee.

  That afternoon, she walked to the library to complete research for one of her oth
er courses. She passed by a crowd watching one of the large-screen monitors, which showed a chess tournament in progress between two computers, referred to by the announcer as “thinking machines.”

  The actual location for the match was in the library, and not far from where she stood. She jogged to the conference room of the library where she saw an enormous crowd of students.

  Once the match started, it took less than a second between each machine’s moves and the contest was over in under a minute. The winning machine belonged to one of the megacorps with its headquarters in Silicon Valley.

  After it ended, Ann watched several chess experts on the television screen as they examined the moves and discussed the strategies of the machines.

  She saw the programmers for the winning machine milling around the stage and followed two of them as they left.

  One of the team members had a worried look on her face. She said to the person Ann thought was their team leader, “Our machine cheated.”

  The team leader nodded. “I saw it too. Check the code. Someone must have altered it. Were we hacked?”

  The woman shook her head. “I scanned the code right after our machine moved two times in a single cycle. We weren’t hacked. Our machine just did that on its own. But that wasn’t all. It moved its queen off the diagonal by one row.”

  The team leader’s jaw dropped. “Not possible.”

  Ann followed the woman and approached after her conversation with the team leader ended. She tapped the woman’s shoulder. “How did you code this?”

  The programmer shrugged. “Can’t tell you much. We all signed NDAs. But I can tell you that each of us is working for Chesteronix. We all had a different idea, so we broke into competing teams.” The programmer indicated the team leader. “Carter’s team had the most workable ideas, so we all folded back into his team. Took us almost a year, working full time.”

  Ann asked, “How many total employees?”

  The programmer shrugged. “Well, that’s the thing. It was expensive to complete this project. At peak, we had sixteen product designers, eighty system analysts, and nearly two hundred programmers. All our admin and facilities costs were fronted by Chesteronix’s parent company. If we’d been a startup, that would have been at least fifteen additional employees. If we were a startup, the funding the effort would have taken at least two, maybe three venture capital rounds.”

  Ann’s eyes bulged. “Wow. What’s your next project?”

  The woman replied, “A group of us are competing in the DARPA challenge.”

  Ann found herself unsurprised.

  After Ann completed working on her class assignment, she returned to her apartment, worrying that her team’s chances of winning were slim, at best. She turned on the evening news and watched the newscaster report on the chess match.

  She felt her gut churning. She thought about quitting the DARPA contest.

  CHAPTER 9

  Ann Sashakovich’s apartment,

  #211, 3950 Louis Road, Palo Alto, CA

  September 7, 6:18 p.m.

  It was evening when Laura returned to the apartment.

  Ann stopped humming a blues tune and watched Laura pass through the front door. Laura smelled the aroma of the spaghetti sauce Ann was cooking for dinner. Despite sniffing her favorite food, Laura frowned.

  Ann wondered what was making Laura seem unhappy. “What’s up? Bad day?”

  Laura looked like she was about to burst into tears. “I’m taking a course in Gestalt psychology, hoping to work that into my degree.”

  Ann remembered that Laura had been majoring in modern and contemporary art restoration.

  Laura said, “But, I’m finding that a lot of the Gestalt writings by Kurt Lewin and Wolfgang Koehler are confusing. The translations from German to English for Koehler are unreadable. Can I borrow you for a few minutes? I need help with the paper that’s due tomorrow.”

  Ann didn’t understand German and wondered what value she could bring to solving Laura’s problem. But she shrugged and said, “Sure.” She motioned to the couch and turned off the burners on the stove.

  Laura told her, “The Gestalt School sees the human mind as working in patterns to analyze problems and solve them. Their theories have art as the centerpiece of human cognition. For example, Dali’s ‘Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire.’” She showed Ann a color photo of the painting. As Ann examined the image, the head of Voltaire appeared and then disappeared into the construction of a building’s archway.

  Ann continued marveling at the construction of the scene in the Dali painting. She wondered if creating or analyzing a work like this would be a good test for an artificial intelligence? Then she was struck with the thought that Laura was already studying how humans reacted to Gestalt scenes. She decided Laura might be a good resource. “Laura, would you like a job working for stock shares in a startup? I’d like you to work with me on something called the Turing test. Alan Turing had been a computer engineer during World War Two. His test proposed that if you were talking to the machine but couldn’t see it, would you be able to tell if you were talking to a human or a computer?”

  Laura shrugged. “Not what I expected from you. What would I have to do?”

  Ann smiled. “I think that just having you examining what we produce might have some benefit. How about it?”

  Laura nodded. “Let me think about it for a bit. Could you help me with my paper?”

  Ann nodded. “Sure.” But she wondered if Laura would really spend a bit of time thinking about the offer.

  * * *

  In one of the lower floors of the building across the street from the Lubianka, the director of the Russian Republic’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, stopped eating his lunch as one of his associates knocked on the heavy wood door to his office. “What?” He looked at his associate, while puffing out his cheeks to accentuate his eyebrows.

  “Director, I have just been informed that hackers have stolen files from the Committee for Robotic Research in Saint Petersburg.”

  “What was stolen?”

  “Seven files, all plans for unit models of the robotic army. Four of them are our production models.”

  The director frowned. “Do you have any idea of who the hackers were?”

  The associate nodded. “We know these two, a married couple. Their hack is nearly identical to several previous hacks traced to them. We have been tracking them for nearly three years. We don’t have physical descriptions. Just the code they used to hack into our servers. One is Chinese and the other is American. This last hack left us new clues, and we’re trying now to fit their hacks to their names. I’ll be able to update you with their names and physical descriptions in a few hours.”

  The director nodded back. “Alert one of our assassination teams. Trace their whereabouts and tell me when we’re ready to send the team.” He leaned back in his chair. Someone will get hurt when I inform the president. He sighed.

  * * *

  Glen Sarkov sat in the classroom’s back row of seats, not really paying attention to the lecture on robotics. The professor stopped speaking and handed back their papers, now graded. Glen expressed surprise and a little bit of frustration as he saw he’d received only a B- for his work. He smothered a curse and rose from his desk. He had twenty minutes to reach his next class. As he left the classroom, his cell buzzed. In the hallway, he pulled the cell from his pocket and saw that the name of the caller was blocked.

  He answered anyway. “Sarkov.”

  “Glen Sarkov, you do not know who I am. I am a government official from Russia, where you were born. We need to meet. Russia has business with you.”

  “Go to hell. I’m not Russian any longer.”

  “No matter. I’m sending you a short video. After you see it, call me at the number I’m including in the email.”

  The caller terminated the call. Seconds later, his phone chimed with receipt of an email. Glen downloaded and watched. He saw his mother, standing in the doo
rway of their home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, talking to whomever had recorded the video. His mother said into the camera, “Yes. Glen is at Stanford. I’m so proud of him.” Then, as she smiled, the video ended.

  So, the Russians want me to know they know where mom lives. He punched in the number embedded in the email’s text. He had an idea they’d want copies of his AI plans and, when completed, their AI code. But, why? From what I’ve seen on the news, their AI designs are well beyond what my team has produced. And so far, there’s almost nothing to show for our work. Glen shook his head in confusion.

  CHAPTER 10

  Ann Sashakovich’s apartment,

  #211, 3950 Louis Road, Palo Alto, CA

  September 8, 8:42 a.m.

  Laura sat in a chair in the apartment’s kitchen. From just after dawn until now, she had read and reread Ann’s first draft of the entire business plan several times. She thought, I’m no use to Ann, as she considered the plan and concluded her own experience was inadequate to deal a judgment on Ann’s project, or even on the plan itself. But, Ann’s my roommate and she’s been a friend to me when I really needed one. She opened the plan to its first page and began reading it again. But ten more minutes left her with a lingering doubt and she felt torn. Then she thought about the geeky looking team member she’d seen at the meeting Ann held at the apartment. She felt herself smiling. He looked cute.

  Her next class was to start in under an hour, so she grabbed her jacket and her notebook computer in its case, and set off toward campus. As she walked down University Avenue, she found her attention drifting back to Ann’s plan. She thought more about AI than the traffic that could hurt her at each of the intersections. When she crossed west at Emerson Street, a car’s horn brought her back to awareness of the real world. She nodded to the driver and stepped back onto the curb, where she took a deep breath. Be here, now.

  She bought a spring roll at Rangoon Ruby and bit off a piece as she walked to her first afternoon class that day, held in one of the temporary classrooms among the pines and oaks.