Harbinger (The Janus Harbinger Book 1)

by Olan Thorensen

  “Harper even hinted that he was considering flying up there one day to check out our ‘mutual effort’ on Canadian soil. Notice the implied threat of a surprise inspection and at the same time reminding me that Site 23 is not in the U.S. Not that I blame him, but he’s going to be royally pissed off when he finds out how much we’ve been hiding from Canada.

  “Right after placating the American public, I’ll have to do the same with Canada. That’s without even getting into the responses of Europe, China, and who the hell knows who else?”

  Chesterton sighed and waved a hand. “I know all of you are well aware of this. Sinclair, you’re doing your best, but I need more. A lot more. And yes, I know you’ve been slowly getting more out of the Object. From the reports I read, the hints about improved solar energy technology and integrated circuits are expected to pay off big, but the projections are that applications are years away. Those will sound good, but the public won’t see immediate effects.

  “We’re coming up on the six months I originally said was about as long as I thought we could keep all this secret. I’ve given all this some serious thought. I’ve gone along with how this is being handled at Site 23 until now, but I’m afraid I’ve decided to give you just another six months to show some real progress, or there will have to be some drastic changes. What those might be, I couldn’t say right now.”

  Neither Sinclair nor Hardesty and Wallens argued with the commander in chief. After they were dismissed and left the White House, they drove away in an unmarked vehicle to return to the Pentagon. Nothing was said until they passed through the White House security gate.

  “Leo, the boss has given us six months, but I think that may be optimistic. Whatever you can do up there, I think it’s better to get it done in the next three or four months.”

  CHAPTER 34

  FATEFUL CALCULATION

  Headquarters, Shenyang Military District, Harbin, China

  Senior Colonel Kwan Chan entered the conference room expecting with whom he would meet. He was wrong. Major General Song had coordinated the meeting with his superior officer Lieutenant General Zhang, as befitting his role as Zhang’s intelligence staff leader. Although Chan’s unit had carried out the most sophisticated analysis being reported today, Song had facilitated input from other departments in preparing the final report.

  Chan was not surprised when Song assigned him to give the verbal briefing, even though many of the sections had been produced by other of Song’s units. The conclusions and recommended actions were expected to be received with skepticism all the way to the Central Committee in Beijing, where a final decision would be made after passing through multiple layers of the Communist Party’s apparatus. A negative assessment anywhere up the ladder of authority would inevitably reflect poorly on the person serving as the face of the report and the proposal. Should the review results be unfavorable, most of the reprobation would fall to Chan and would minimize Song’s exposure.

  Chan knew how the game was played, and the potential for blame falling to him was the price he paid for Song’s patronage. Thus, for the last week, Chan worked long hours on a presentation tailored to General Zhang’s background and the history of their previous briefings. Hence, Chan felt a moment of panic on finding a larger audience than he had expected. Zhang sat at the end of the long conference table with Song on his right, along with two colonels Chan recognized from Song’s staff. However, to Zhang’s left were three men Chan did not recognize. One wore the insignia of a political lieutenant general, and the other two wore dark suits with no hint of their standing.

  Zhang motioned to the opposite end of the table, and Chan sat.

  “General Song reminds me that you were expecting only the two of us at this briefing. However, your report made its way to other eyes. You are familiar with General Song’s staff, but the other attendees are observers, though they may have questions when you are finished. Please proceed as if they were not here.”

  Under other circumstances, Chan might have laughed, as if he could possibly ignore the three strangers. He took the lack of introductions to indicate their connection to the highest levels of the Peoples’ political and military commands.

  “Yes, sir. In my last briefing to you about the American base on Ellesmere Island in far northern Canada, I summarized our puzzling findings. At the time, we had indications of three areas of advances somehow connected to this base, namely, in mathematics, armored vehicles, and semiconductors. Further work by agents in the United States and our analyses support the early indications for all three. For armored vehicles, we do not have more direct hard data, but multiple confirmations indicate the Americans are developing armor possibly based on new alloys and not the composite or reactive armor emphasized in the most recent developments. This is completely unexpected because it was thought that merely increasing the metal durability had reached a limit of protection with modern antiarmor weapons. It also suggests a breakthrough of some kind. The Ellesmere base commander, Major General Lionel Sinclair, has twice visited the plant doing this armor development.

  “Second, America is the leader in semiconductors, and China has made it a high priority to match or surpass the Americans. Since our last meeting, the American Defense Department quietly put a billion dollars into several semiconductor development programs, including one at Intel’s main facility in California, where we identified visits by a junior army officer also seen with Sinclair at the Pentagon. We’ve now traced this officer to a company not far from the Intel facility. The company is named Virtual-Reality, Incorporated, previously best known for the research and development of video games, software simulations, and, more recently, moving into virtual reality systems, probably intended for the global video gaming market.

  “We have yet to succeed in penetrating the company’s operations for details, but we know they involve a highly classified virtual reality project underway with Department of Defense funding. A liaison officer to the project is Captain Andrew Jefferson, the same officer connected to Sinclair. This project was suddenly shut down just over five months ago. The captain and two or three of the main staff working on this project have disappeared. We were able to get the names of one of the disappeared staff members from a secretary who processed their separation paperwork. His name is Jason Cain. We couldn’t get more information on him from the company, but Internet searches found a few references and photos of a Jason Cain whom we believe is the same person. He was a mathematics graduate student who left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under controversy. We are still looking into this, but Cain’s graduate adviser has since retired under pressure from the Institute, with hints of his inappropriate treatment of students.

  “As you also know, we placed a Yupik Eskimo on Ellesmere Island six weeks ago. He has been observing the American base using Russian high-resolution optics. All his clothing and equipment are Russian, in case he’s killed or loses anything. He has a Russian directional radio transmitter to send image files of the terrain, the American base, and personnel to our submarine waiting off the coast of Ellesmere, which in turn uploads the images to us via satellite. Unfortunately, the Yupik only speaks rudimentary Russian besides his own language, so the verbal reports have yet to prove useful.

  “However, even though the images of the American base are from a distance, several of the image files are of high enough resolution to apply facial recognition. We got good face images for twelve people, three of whom are Captain Andrew Jefferson, Jason Cain, and a man named Ralph Markakis. The last man is a famous video game designer who we believe was working at this same company as Cain, though that has not been confirmed.

  “Of the others, one is the woman who is our inside contact, Ying Lin, and there is a man named Richard Lindskold. His history is working at and managing Arctic and Antarctic weather and research facilities, including two one-year tours in the Americans’ McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

  “A sixth person is Bjorn Nylander, a linguist and anthropologist specializing
in obscure native languages. He has been on a year-long sabbatical from the University of Michigan for the last eight months, but we did not find anyone who knows where he is now. The other faces were not matched to anyone in our databases.

  “The Lindskold man’s role is obvious. He must be involved in managing the day-to-day operations of the Ellesmere base. But what about Nylander? The only Inuit settlement is too far away, and this base has no connecting roads for him to interact with the indigenous peoples. Why is he at this base?

  “In addition, why are at least two men associated with a classified virtual reality development project moved to Ellesmere Island, likely with the system developed at the Santa Clara facility?

  “Now I will return to the question of advances in knowledge or technology associated with the base. I mentioned Jason Cain. We previously noted the presence at this Ellesmere site of the American mathematician Fred Hoyle. In investigating Hoyle more closely, an agent was able to obtain two mathematics preprints. These are papers meant for publication in scientific journals and are at the stage where they are being reviewed and possibly modified in preparation for formal publishing. A team of our mathematicians at Beijing University has been analyzing the two preprints for the last week. They tell us the mathematics are too complex for them to give a thorough evaluation for another few months, but so far, they have two impressions. One is that the mathematics are too ‘beautiful’ not to be valid.”

  One of the unintroduced listeners grunted and turned to Zhang with a raised eyebrow.

  Zhang nodded. “Yes, I’m confused as well. How is mathematics beautiful?”

  “Ah . . . yes . . . sorry. Briefly speaking, it is an expression a mathematician may use to describe a simple and elegant solution to a problem or, similarly, a theorem that leads to other, perhaps unexpected, connections to other mathematics.

  “The two preprints have Frederick Hoyle as the first author and Jason Cain the second. One paper is believed to be a novel restatement of the Herzog–Schönheim conjecture, a problem that uses combinatorics applied to group theory. No one in my unit understands what the Beijing mathematicians tell us about this preprint, but they say it is a novel approach.

  “The second preprint has an explanation from Beijing that is no more understandable to us, but they say it apparently shows an unsuspected connection between Diophantine geometry and iterative methods in numerical analysis. Again . . . please do not ask me to explain more. However, as with the first preprint, Beijing University tells us there are startling implications in this work. In fact, they say that even if the work turns out to have major errors, the approach being used is already being considered for other branches of mathematics.

  “In summary, Beijing believes that while a savant like Freddie Hoyle might come up with intuitive leaps and be assisted by Jason Cain, they say the sophistication of the proofs is beyond most of them, and nothing in Hoyle’s or Cain’s past suggests they could do this work at all, much less in the time they have been together at the Ellesmere base.

  “And now I come to the final new piece of information. General Sinclair has just finished a short trip to Washington. After one day in the Pentagon, he flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico. We were able to contact an agent watching the Sandia National Laboratory complex there just in time for him to be at the airport to follow Sinclair to the Sandia complex, where he visited a building housing photovoltaic research and development.

  “Our computer hacking group outside Guangzhou made a serious attempt at accessing the Sandia network but was rebuffed by security protocols and software. However, an intrusion into a New Mexico senator’s computers revealed an unencrypted email mentioning that the senator had been told of a sudden five hundred million–dollar addition to the Sandia Albuquerque photovoltaic unit and an anticipated tripling of staff in the next year.

  “We have no other information, and our agent says he doesn’t believe there is any chance of him finding out more anytime soon because he does not have access to that particular facility or any current contact with its staff. He is too valuable to risk, so we told him to resume his normal activity and not to approach the photovoltaic group.

  “Based on all the other intelligence, we believe we must assume the Ellesmere base is somehow involved in a breakthrough in solar collection wafers.

  “Now, sirs, I will move into a controversial area of research in my unit.” Chan stopped talking when one of the strange men whispered to the man next to him. That man shook his head and whispered back. Chan could not hear the words, but evidently General Song could.

  “Colonel Chan’s unit is named to divert suspicions about what they actually do,” Song said to the unidentified man. “For administrative purposes, it is listed as a records archival center with no Internet connection. It is easier to remain invisible to foreign espionage by appearing innocuous. In reality, Colonel Chan’s unit is involved in some of our most advanced AI usage for intelligence analysis.”

  Song turned back to Chan and nodded for him to continue.

  “To summarize what you have just heard and from written reports you may have read, we have the following: a secret American operation with multiple layers of concealment placed in one of the most isolated places on Earth; the main purpose of the operation being kept secret even from the Canadians on whose soil it is located; a classified and extraordinarily expensive development in virtual reality being transferred to this base; confirmed or indicated advances in mathematics, semiconductors, armored vehicles, and photovoltaics, either that originated at this base or the base is somehow involved in their development—even though the staff size and background are not even close to being sufficient to explain the advances.

  “My unit has been working on AI approaches to analyzing complex situations and making predictions. It is a relatively new field of effort, and we have several approaches ongoing. One of those has been named ‘Shining Light.’ It is unique, in that it uses a combination of human and machine intelligence. On the human side, it involves variations on the concept that in the West is called ‘the wisdom of crowds.’ The basic concept is that a group of people working together to make decisions will often do better than individuals, often better than purported experts. The theory is that the group decisions cancel out individual biases, lack of knowledge about the topic, or other types of error.

  “A classic example is an experiment run by the British statistician Francis Galton in 1907. At a country fair, he asked eight hundred people to estimate the weight of an ox. Some of the people were farmers, whom you might think would be good at estimating. Others had no such experience and would be purely guessing. Galton then averaged their estimates and found that the group estimate was less than one percent from the actual weight and better than any individual estimate, even from people with many decades of farming experience.

  “There are many historical examples of group decisions often being better, though it has also been found that at least some participants must have a minimum level of relevant knowledge. After all, the average of total ignorance is still ignorance.

  “In recent decades, the Americans’ National Intelligence Agency has had a subunit called IARPA—Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity—researching ways to harness this ‘wisdom of crowds’ concept. They ran a competition with different approaches to this problem, and a consistent winner was the entrant ‘The Good Judgment Project,’ headed by a university professor named Tetlock. This project eventually found that not only did groups do better at forecasting than individuals, but groups with members relatively uninformed on a specific topic often did better than individual experts or groups of experts.

  “They also found that some individuals were consistently better at forecasting than others. These superforecasters, as they are called, could be gathered into groups to perform even better. I will not go into the details, but Tetlock’s project believes it identified tools used by superforecasters. These include basing decisions on multiple approaches and models, taking in op
inions from so-called experts, and generally not relying on any one influence too much.

  “Other units of General Song have investigated this approach and have developed several sets of ‘superforecasters.’ The members of some sets meet regularly, while in other sets the members work physically isolated from one another. We use several of these sets in conjunction with our advanced AI systems.

  “In applying this approach to problems such as the Ellesmere mystery, we focus not on choosing among a set of defined options, such as yes or no, but on a wide range of possibilities going from easily understandable to what seem to be totally outrageous. We find there needs to be such outlying possibilities to better select among more realistic options.

  “Artificial intelligence is involved in creating the initial range of options to minimize inadvertent bias as to what is likely and then refining the process through interaction with human forecasters until a set of options settles unchanged.

  “In a typical test of the Shining Light system, we end up with anywhere from six to twenty possibilities, depending on the complexity of the problem. These are given crude probability scores. In one case, the most likely option rated at a 31 percent probability, with the next most likely at 18 percent, and other options lower, down to 1 percent.”

  “Maybe it is a good idea to tell our visitors what the example dealt with,” said Song.

  “It was related to the trade and tariff situation with America. In retaliation for their putting higher tariffs on our goods, we weakened our currency, making it more difficult for us to purchase American goods. It was expected that this would put pressure on the Americans to stop the trade war that had gone on for several years.