by Jaq Wright
◆◆◆
Back at the server farm, the blond man called a number, and when it was answered, he said, “The FBI was just here.” He described the encounter. He listened for a minute, then hung up.
“What was that,” asked one of the other grad students.
“I dunno, we're just supposed to call anything unusual in. They told me to call again if they reappear.” He shrugged and lit up a joint.
Chapter 29
Monday, October 31
New Jersey
Mitzi strode up to the entry for Decadent Cake Design at 8:05. The space was very plain. Just an old desk with an old phone and an old chair, with an old lady sitting in it. Nothing on the walls, worn carpet on the floor. A single door leading deeper into the building, closed.
Mitzi approached the desk. “I would like to apply for a job,” she started.
The receptionist held up a hand. “We’re not hiring.”
“But I really need a job, and I have a lot of experience with cake design.”
The old woman smiled, her cheap dentures showing starkly white. “Leave your name and number. We’ll call if anything comes up.” She pushed a pad towards Mitzi.
She was just starting to write something down, when the door behind the desk popped open, and a woman rushed through, towing a girl who looked to be ten, but had on eye makeup and high-heeled shoes. She gave hardly a glance towards Mitzi, just steamed ahead and out the door, where she hurried to a car parked on the street in front of Cameron, and took off.
As Mitzi got back into the car, she told Cameron what she’d seen. “I’ll bet that place is a child pornography studio and server host. I’ll call Mary Jane from the office.”
They made their way back to Manhattan. Cameron dropped Mitzi at work, then headed uptown, planning to visit Westchester county and the Bronx today. He remembered to call the DDO.
“How are you, Hansen?” he inquired. “Ready to come back?”
“I think I’ll take another couple of weeks. I have plenty of PTO saved up.”
“Suit yourself.” The DDO sounded neither relieved nor annoyed. “Be ready to go two weeks from today.”
“Sure thing, Boss,” Cameron replied.
◆◆◆
Mitzi cleared up some pending work, then, around ten, closed her office door and picked up the phone, calling upstairs. She got Mary Jane on the line, and told her about what she saw at the Decadent Cake Design. Mary Jane sounded annoyed. “What, no psychotic megalomaniacs? What exactly were you doing there, anyway? I figured it was you that got my list of buildings. Too much of a coincidence, someone else wanting that list. No one had asked for it before, then two requests one after another. Subtle.”
“Hey, I’m just doing you a favor. Check this place out.” She hung up.
Her next call was to ServCorp's main office. Predictably, she ended up in a phone tree. After several steps and quite a bit of bad techno music, a woman came on the line.
“How can I help you?” The voice was polite.
“I am looking for a server to host my site, but I was wondering if you could tell me where the farms were located.”
“I’m sorry, we don’t give out that information. There is really no need for you to know where the facilities are located, and we want to limit your data's exposure to criminal activity.”
“Listen,” Mitzi responded, “I’m actually with the FBI and we need that information as part of an ongoing investigation.”
The woman’s voice became hard. “Then I suggest you get a warrant and present it at headquarters.” The line clicked off
Mitzi called Cameron. “What do you think about that?”
“Sounded pretty reasonable to me. All the way around. I wouldn't give out that information, either, certainly not on the phone just because someone claimed to be FBI and asked. Maybe we can check out ServCorp some other way.”
“Mary Jane would be the obvious choice, but I think that bridge is burned for now.”
“I'll try Phillips.” He called Phillips cell.
“Hey, Cameron Hansen calling again. I need some more information related to that server thing. Yeah, it looks like it may be related to a big server company called ServCorp. Can you have your people find out who owns ServCorp and the addresses of all of its facilities? You can call me back at this number.”
Cameron called Mitzi back. “Well, he seemed willing enough.”
“I hope he doesn't go back to Mary Jane. She already thinks I’m up to something. Listen, I don’t have anything pressing here. Come pick me up and I’ll help you with those addresses in the Bronx ”
“Okay, see you in an hour.”
◆◆◆
Jorge's fever had broken during the night, and by Monday morning he was alert. And surly. Cabrera examined him, then went out to report to Maxwell and Blaylock, who had been watching him on a monitor.
“He is better, but I am afraid, if we stress him again like last night, we might lose him.”
“Actually,” Blaylock replied, “this next part is low stress. We have his cortex completely mapped, we just need to get him to remember things, and map what happens. Piece of cake.”
“How are you going to do that?” Maxwell asked. “Do we even have mesh over the areas where the memories are stored? I thought that was deep inside – the hippocampus or limbic system, or wherever.”
“We don't actually know how memories are encoded, but the consciousness of the memories happens on the cortex, like all other thoughts. We can't plan on the computers actually storing and encoding memories in the same way as the brain. Instead, the plan is to mimic the effect of the memory encoding system. Similar to the artificial cerebellum we created for Pierre. The hard part is really not the record of the memories, but the brain's way of accessing and relating them. This is where all their home videos come in. We have a bunch ready. It will be easier to show you than to explain.”
Maxwell went to Jorge's room. “How are you?” he asked, his Spanish flawless.
Jorge simply turned away. Maxwell spoke to Marta, “Listen, Jorge just needs rest today. We have a bunch of old videos for him to watch, just to remind him of what it will be like when you go home.”
“When will we go home?” Marta asked.
“You will be gone by the end of the week.”
◆◆◆
Back in the control room, Blaylock was studying the screens intently. Perez rolled in, and looked at all the screens. “Explain,” he said simply.
Blaylock turned to four monitors mounted in a column. He pointed to the top screen, which was playing a scene from what appeared to be a birthday party. “This is the video the subject and his mother are watching.” He pointed to the next screen down, which showed the same scene, but moved around a little. “This is a camera mounted in the bandages on the subject's head, synced with electrodes around his eyes, so we are seeing exactly what he is looking at.” The third monitor showed a similar scene, with some of the colors slightly off, and some of the details rather fuzzy. “This is what we are recording from his cortical mesh, which, as you can see, is pretty much the same.” The lowest monitor had irregular lines scrolling across. “This is the same for the audio. The upper line is the sound track from the video, the middle is the room microphone, and the lower the recording from the subject.” These lines were very similar, except for every now and then, when the cortical recording would suddenly change dramatically. Blaylock pointed to one of those areas. “That is when there is another noise in the room. See, here he has turned from the video to his mother and she is talking, and the video no longer matches up, nor does the sound. The sound is interesting, in that the cortical recording looks like the room microphone MINUS some of the sound from the soundtrack. His brain has partially repressed the soundtrack. But here is the most important part. He tapped on his keyboard and another monitor to his left started playing video. “This is that same twelve seconds we just saw, where he had turned and spoke to his mother. What do you notice?”
/> Perez watched the screen. “The scene from the video is there as well. Lighter, in the background, like a water mark. Show me again.” Blaylock complied.
“Since he could still hear the video, and this was a familiar scene, he continued to remember the scene, even when he was not looking at it. This is perfect, we can subtract the signal and map the memory. Same for the audio.”
Perez watched for a while. “What comes next?”
“We will go and ask him what he watched, and as he tells it, we will again subtract the current sights and sounds, and get more information on memory storage. This is where your investment in artificial intelligence pays off. We have a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of hardware and software, and with that, we should be able to determine how and where the recalled memories are experienced. The brain is orderly, and I expect to get enough data to determine that by the end of the day. By morning, it should be analyzed and we will be ready for the next step.”
“Which is?”
“We need to access his entire memory and upload it to our system. Then comes the part we really don't know yet, which is how the relationships between current brain activity and memories, and memories to memories, are maintained. In other words, what is the nature of the brain's relational database.”
“The artificial hippocampus. How will you do that?”
“Come back tomorrow. I have some ideas.”
◆◆◆
In her office at the Lake foundation, the phone rang, and Cathy was told that Ambassador Tapata was on the line. “Hello, Señor Ambassador. So pleased to hear from you.” She did not remain pleased for long.
“We no longer require the services of the Lake Foundation.”
Cathy was aghast. Months of work on a multi-million dollar project could simply not be for nothing.
“Why not?” she almost shouted.
“There are political considerations.”
“What is that supposed to mean? Who does not want to provide safe water for the whole southern third of your country? Is this about that wretched Minister of Health and his conniving brother?” She had lost her filter, despite knowing that speaking like this to a diplomat was unlikely to help her cause.
Señor Tapata was unruffled. “No, we all want clean water. We have simply been offered funding from another source. The MexiVox Foundation will be underwriting the project. I am sure that you can appreciate that the people of Honduras would prefer help from our Central American brothers.”
Cathy tried to remain calm. “Señor Ambassador,” she started, “please be careful. Six years ago in Nicaragua, there was a similar episode with MexiVox. The sewage treatment plant, which was to be completed in three years by the Lake Foundation, is still less than halfway done, and is not progressing. Meanwhile, MexiVox has made hundreds of millions of dollars with the virtual telecommunications monopoly guaranteed to them in exchange. I am sure your government has made similar arrangements.”
“There will be some mutually beneficial aspects of our agreement. The details are not important, to you at least. I'm sure that we in Honduras will be able to avoid the labor issues that have hampered construction in Nicaragua. Thank you so much for your efforts. Your engineering plans will continue to be most helpful. Goodbye.” He hung up.
Cathy was vibrating with anger. Months of work, only to have her project taken and her plans given to Juan Carlos Perez and his gang of hoodlums.
◆◆◆
When Overbridge got off of the elevator that evening in Queens, Pierre was walking, unaided, down the long corridor towards him. He was tethered by a long thick cable to a workstation on a cart, which a technician was pushing behind him. Pierre approached him slowly, a very slight wobble to his gait. His legs and feet were bare.
“Check it out! I can walk. I can feel my legs!”
Overbridge watched him approach, then examined his scalp incision. Everything appeared to be in good shape. They spent the next hour simply walking up and down the hall, side by side. Pierre was talking non-stop. Overbridge had nothing to say.
At the end of that time, the wobble had decreased significantly. Maxwell came to get Overbridge, who again objected to having to wait until the following evening to return. Once again, Maxwell was firm.
Chapter 30
Tuesday, November 1
Queens
Perez sat in the control room with Blaylock and Maxwell, watching and listening as Cabrera was talking to Jorge.
“What did you do yesterday?” he asked the boy.
Jorge embarked on an enthusiastic description of the videos they had watched, with particular excitement as he recalled a trip where he had ridden on a horse on the beach near Puerto Vallarta the previous summer. Perez watched the screen showing the thoughts and sounds picked up from the cortex, which were similar to the scenes he had seen the boy watch the day before. Not exactly the same, rather from a point of view inside his head. The details also faded in and out as he talked about different aspects; the sky, the horses, the sand, the sea.
Blaylock, on the other hand, was ignoring all that. His attention was focused on a monitor showing the entire brain, with levels of electrical activity displayed as various intensity of color, as on a television weather map showing temperatures across the country. He was wearing a headset and talking excitedly.
“Juan, are you seeing the spikes in areas 267700 to 302400 when he initiates recall? Good, good. See if you can map the pathways to the visual cortex. Jeff, the auditory is yours. Bev, help Juan. Let's stick with the horses. I'll get Cabrera to ask him more about horses.” He pushed a button, and Cabrera put a finger in the receiver in his left ear. “Keep talking about horses, ask him everything he knows about horses.” Cabrera looked at the monitoring camera and nodded.
Once again, horses were the focus of the child's thoughts, and Perez watched as horse after horse flashed by, different sizes, colors, standing, trotting, galloping, sometimes isolated, sometimes with riders, sometimes in groups.
Blaylock was listening and nodding. “Excellent. Let's go with 266942, modulated with the eight adjacent points.” He turned to Perez. “The mesh allows us to map and either record or stimulate at about eleven million individual points, and with phased and coordinated analysis of adjacent points, effectively nearly nine hundred million neurons. There are about sixteen billion individual cells in the cortex, so it is still less than perfect, but I think it will be high enough resolution to get what we need.” He tapped a number of lines on his keyboard. “Watch the monitor.” He hit return. A rough four-legged form came up on the screen, which took on more shape, almost a dog, then settled down as a horse. The computer at that point detected a spike again at the original point.
“Add in the color and movement areas.” The horse started to move, then became first a deep brown, then black, then white, then developed more and more detail. Jorge started to shake his head, then cry. Blaylock stopped the program, and the boy settled down. Blaylock turned to Maxwell, smiling.
“We can do it. The algorithm works. The request for memory is originating in the pre-frontal cortex, then proceeds by deep pathways which we can mimic, and eventually ends up in the visual and auditory and olfactory cortex, at which point the original request point fires, like an acknowledgment of success.” He tapped on the button, and told Cabrera to come out.
“Okay,” he said to the veterinarian, “here's what you need to do.” He handed him a vial of medication. “Give him 12 cc's of this, and put in a breathing tube. It will last about an hour, so you will need to keep dosing him.”
Cabrera looked at the vial. Pancuronium. It was a long-acting paralytic agent. Cabrera was familiar with it, as it was part of the cocktail commonly used to euthanize animals. Or to execute prisoners. In both of those cases, it was combined with a powerful anesthetic so that they lost consciousness, and potassium to stop the heart. Given alone, it would completely paralyze the subject, but leave him fully conscious. He started to object, but looked at the unblinking eyes of Per
ez, and thought better. He left for the operating room to get the breathing tube and ventilator.
Twenty minutes later, Jorge was lying inert, unable to move, but able to see and hear. And feel. The screen showing his visual thoughts worked just fine, as Cabrera first opened, then closed his eyes. The audio line also functioned perfectly.
“Okay,” Blaylock said, “Let’s get started. Let's start at 266942 again, then move about twenty points, and see what we get.”
It was not immediately obvious, but in just a few minutes, it became clear it was a frog, at which point the stimulus point fired, confirming the success. They moved ten points closer to 266942, and quickly were able to resolve a cat. The artificial intelligence neural network took over, and soon each point was quickly followed by an appropriate picture, first animals, then plants, structures, machines, and, in a large separate area, people's faces. The process became faster and faster as the machine learning became more and more efficient. Soon the monitor was changing far too fast for Perez to even have time to recognize the images.
He turned to Blaylock. “How long for this process?”
Blaylock shrugged. “I'm not sure. The way it is going, probably about two hours. The next step is to use that mapping to decode not just static shapes and forms, but actual events. We have all the data that we recorded yesterday, and it should allow us to determine those pathways once we can filter out the static forms. We think that there will be a finite set of pathways, which will then correlate to form the likely ten terabyte memory capacity of the child. The process is more or less automatic now. I think we should be done by morning.”
Perez smiled. “I will be here at ten a.m. Have everything ready.”
◆◆◆
Cameron and Mitzi had been working tediously from address to address, with nothing that seemed at all promising turning up. Having heard nothing back from Phillips, Cameron finally called him about three.