The Footprints of God

by Greg Iles

  “Deep Blue?” I laughed, the sound strangely brittle in the amphitheater. “Yes. But it won by using what computer scientists call brute force. Its memory contains every known chess game ever played, and it processes millions of probabilities every time it makes a move. It plays very good chess, but it doesn’t understand what it’s doing. As a human being, Garry Kasparov never has to consider the billions of possibilities—many of them ridiculously simple—that the computer does. Kasparov’s acquired knowledge allows him to make intuitive leaps, and to learn permanently every time he does. He plays by instinct. And no one really understands what that means.”

  Rachel sat on the edge of the stage. “So, what are you telling me?”

  “That computers don’t think like human beings. In fact, they don’t think at all. They simply carry out instructions. All those TV commercials you hear about ‘software that thinks’? They’re bullshit. Serious AI researchers are afraid to even use the term artificial intelligence anymore.”

  “Okay. So what’s Project Trinity?”

  “The holy grail.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone wants to build a computer that works like the human brain, but we don’t understand how the brain works. Everyone concedes that. Well…two years ago, one man realized this didn’t have to be the obstacle everyone thought it was. That we might be able to copy the brain without actually understanding what we were doing. Using existing technology.”

  “Who was this man?”

  “Peter Godin. The billionaire.”

  “Godin Supercomputing?”

  Now she’d surprised me. “That’s right.”

  “They have a Godin Four supercomputer in a basement at TUNL, the Duke high-energy lab.”

  “Well, Godin is the man who conceived Project Trinity.”

  Rachel looked as though the accumulating details were starting to persuade her. “What kind of existing technology can copy the brain?”

  “MRI.”

  “Magnetic resonance imaging?”

  “Yes. You order MRI scans every week, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s a lot of information on those scans, isn’t there?”

  “More than I can interpret sometimes.”

  “Rachel, I’ve seen MRI scans that contain a hundred thousand times the information of the ones you see every day. A hundred thousand times the resolution.”

  She blinked. “But how can that be? How much more can you see?”

  “I’ve seen reactions between individual nerve synapses, frozen in time. I’ve seen the human brain working at the molecular level.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Any doctor would have said the same. “No. The machine exists. It’s sitting in a room ten miles away from us right now. Only nobody knows it.”

  She was shaking her head. “That makes no sense. Why would a company keep something like that secret?”

  “Because they’re legally bound to by the government.”

  “But an MRI like that would make whoever developed it hundreds of millions of dollars. It could detect malignant cells long before they even become tumor masses.”

  “You’re right. That’s been my main problem with this project. It’s unethical to keep that machine from cancer patients. But for now, just accept that there’s an MRI machine that can produce three-D models of the brain, with resolution to the molecular level.”

  “Molecular snapshots of the brain.”

  “Basically, yes. Ravi Nara calls them neuromodels.’”

  “Neuromodels. Okay.”

  “Rachel, do you realize what one of those neuromodels is?”

  “I know that a single one of them would revolutionize neuroscience. But I get the feeling that’s not what this is about.”

  “A neuromodel is the person it was taken from. Literally. His thoughts, memories, fears—everything.”

  “But…it’s just a scan, right? A high-resolution map of the brain.”

  “No. It’s a coded facsimile of every molecule in the brain, in perfect spatial and electrochemical relation. Which means that—”

  “Hold on. Are you about to tell me they can load one of these neuromodels into a computer?”

  “No. But that’s what they’ve been working around the clock for two years to achieve. Godin predicted it would take fifteen to twenty years, but they got halfway there in nineteen months. I’ve never seen anything like it. The only historical precedent is the Manhattan Project during World War Two.”

  Rachel started to speak, but I held up my hand. High above us, a pair of headlights was cruising past at less than half the speed of the other cars. They slowed still more, then sped up and disappeared.

  “We need to hurry.”

  “If Trinity is everything you say it is,” she said, “then why in God’s name would it be based in North Carolina?”

  This I hadn’t expected. “Aren’t you the top Jungian analyst in the world?”

  “Well…one of them.”

  “Why are you based in North Carolina?”

  She frowned. “Because Duke University is here. That’s different.”

  “Not so different. Peter Godin wanted Trinity based at his R and D lab in Mountain View, California. The NSA is footing the bill, and they wanted it based at Fort Meade, Maryland. Research Triangle Park was the ultimate compromise. High-tech, but out of the way.”

  “What’s the end point, here? What does the NSA want to do with Trinity?”

  “Our government sees most scientific revolutions in terms of weapons potential. If such a machine can be built, our government wants to be the first to do it.”

  “What kind of weapon can this computer be?”

  “Think Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq. Everything’s computerized in modern war. Code-breaking, nuclear weapons testing, information warfare, battlefield systems. But a Trinity wouldn’t be merely an advance. It would make today’s supercomputers as obsolete as Model Ts. And if Fielding was right about it having quantum capabilities…then present-day encryption is gone. That’s why the NSA has spent close to a billion dollars on Trinity.”

  Rachel processed what I’d said. “But this isn’t just a faster supercomputer. We’re talking about a computer that thinks like a person.”

  I shook my head. “We can’t build a computer that thinks like a person. We’re talking about copying an individual human brain. Creating a digital entity that for all practical purposes is a person. With his or her cognitive functions, memories, hopes, dreams…everything except a body. Only it would run at the speed of a digital computer. One million times faster than biological circuitry.”

  She spoke almost to herself. “This is why Andrew Fielding and Ravi Nara would be working together.”

  “Exactly. Nobel laureates in quantum physics and neuroscience. Peter Godin brought them together.” I checked to see that the spools on the recorder were still turning. “But I’ve only told you part of Trinity’s potential. Once your neuromodel is loaded into the computer as Rachel Weiss, speed isn’t the only advantage it will have over you—the original.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Say I decide to learn to play the piano. It takes me three years of intensive study. You’re impressed by that. You want to learn to play the piano too. It’s going to take you three years as well, give or take. That’s the disadvantage of the human brain. Each one has approximately the same learning curve. But the computer model of your brain doesn’t have that problem. The sum total of music theory can be digitized and downloaded into its memory—your memory—in about three seconds. There’s no learning curve at all.”

  She shook her head. “You’re saying you could download the sum of human knowledge into this computer—into me—all in a few hours?”

  “In theory, yes.”

  “David, you’re talking about something like…like a god, almost.”

  “Not almost. Because that computer model would not only be Rachel Weiss. It would be Rachel Weiss forev
er. It could be backed up and stored, or downloaded into another Trinity computer. It would never have to die.”

  She pursed her lips to speak, but no words emerged.

  “Are you starting to believe me now?”

  “What’s your job at Trinity?”

  “I was appointed by the president to evaluate any ethical dilemmas that might arise. During the Manhattan Project, some scientists turned against the atomic bomb for moral reasons, and they had no real voice. The president wanted to minimize the public controversy that was bound to come if Trinity became a reality. He knew my brother in college, and he’d read my book on medical ethics—or watched the NOVA series based on it, more likely. That’s what made him pick me for the project. It’s really that simple.”

  Rachel looked off into the dark trees. “This sounds anything but simple. In fact, it sounds crazy.” She looked back at me, her eyes glinting. “You said Trinity got halfway to success in nineteen months. What’s holding up the second half?”

  “Building a computer powerful enough to hold a complete neuromodel in its circuitry. The human brain is fairly slow in terms of speed, but it’s massively parallel. It contains over a hundred trillion possible connections, all capable of simultaneous calculation, and that’s just for processing. It also holds the equivalent of twelve hundred terabytes of computer memory.”

  She shrugged. “That means nothing to me.”

  “Six million years of The Wall Street Journal.”

  Her mouth fell open.

  “When Trinity began, no computer on the planet had that kind of capacity. The Internet as a whole does, but it’s far too dispersed and unreliable to be controllable.”

  “And now?”

  “IBM is building a computer called Blue Gene that will rival the processing power of the brain, but it’ll still be unable to do things any five-year-old child can.”

  “And Trinity is different?”

  “You could say that. Blue Gene will fill a fifty-by-fifty-foot room and need three hundred tons of air-conditioning just to function. Trinity will be about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. And Godin thinks that’s still too big. He’s always saying that the human brain weighs three pounds and uses only ten watts of electricity. He believes the solutions to great problems must be beautiful. Elegant.”

  Rachel gazed up the incline of stone seats, trying to grasp a future that was crashing headlong into the present. “How close is Trinity to becoming a reality?”

  I thought of the black mass of carbon and crystal growing almost like a life-form in the basement lab of the Trinity building. “There’s a prototype sitting in our lab right now with one hundred and twenty trillion connections and practically unlimited memory.”

  “Does it work?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because even if you succeed in loading a neuromodel into the computer, how do you talk to it? The human brain interacts with the world through a biological body with five senses. Imagine your brain downloaded into a box. It’s deaf, dumb, blind, and paralyzed. A quivering mass of fear. And thank God for it. Because once a machine like that can talk—and listen and act—there’s no telling what it might do.”

  Rachel looked up at me with interest. “What could it do?”

  “Do you remember HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey?”

  “Sure. The most reliable computer ever made. Urbana, Illinois, right?”

  I chuckled softly. “He was until he murdered the crew of his spaceship. Well, imagine what HAL could do if he were connected to the Internet.”

  “Tell me.”

  “One Trinity computer connected to a phone line could hold the industrialized world hostage. It could disrupt power grids, rail lines, air traffic control, missile systems, NORAD, Wall Street. It could demand whatever it wanted.”

  She shook her head in confusion. “But what would it want?”

  “What does any intelligent entity want? Especially one that’s essentially human?”

  “Power?”

  “Exactly.” I jumped as my cell phone rang. The ID said “Andrew Fielding.” I pressed SEND. “Lu Li? Has something happened?”

  “Nothing happen,” Lu Li replied in a shaky voice. “I worry about Maya. I think I hear noises outside. You bring her back, Dr. David.”

  The bichon stopped sniffing the ground, looked up at me, and cocked its head as though listening.

  “We’re coming. Right now.”

  “Is she all right?” Rachel asked as I ended the call.

  “Yes. She wants us to come back, but we’re going to wait a bit.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the NSA heard that call. If they have people in the woods, they’ll probably move now. And we’ll hear them.”

  Rachel glanced anxiously at the wall that separated us from the trees. “Do you really think there’s someone out there?”

  “That’s not what scares you,” I said. “What scares you is that now you think there might be.”

  She slid off the stage and looked at the door we’d passed through. It was easy to imagine someone waiting behind it.

  “You said Fielding was murdered because you and he resisted the project. How exactly did you resist it?”

  “We didn’t just resist it. We stopped it cold. Suspended it, anyway. Fielding was the driving force, but it took me interceding with the president to accomplish it. It was like trying to stop the work on the atomic bomb during World War Two.”

  “Why did you want to stop it?”

  “I’m not completely sure about Fielding’s reasons. I think he kept a lot from me—to protect me, I mean. But my reasons were simple.

  “Six months ago, we tested the Super-MRI machine. We used animals first, and there were no problems. The first humans to be scanned were the six of us in the inner circle. Within a week, we all developed strange neurological symptoms. Side effects from exposure to the machine. Fielding believed—”

  “MRI doesn’t cause side effects,” Rachel broke in.

  “Not the machines you use. But the magnetic fields generated by the Trinity MRI are exponentially more intense than those in present-day machines. They use superconducting materials that allow massive pulses—”

  Maya was growling deep in her throat and looking up the slope of stone seats. I hadn’t heard anything in the woods, but maybe the dog had. I put the tape recorder in my pocket, picked up Maya, then drew my gun and pulled Rachel through the stage door.

  Darkness enveloped us.

  “Stay right behind me,” I said, ducking under a branch.

  “Did you hear something?”

  “No.”

  If I hadn’t had Rachel with me, I would have used stealth to safely reach the house. But speed was the only option now. I plowed through the underbrush, warning Rachel whenever I hit branches likely to whip back into her face. She cried out twice and stumbled once, but she got back up and somehow managed to stay on my heels. As we neared the house, I saw the yellow square of Fielding’s patio doors. Lu Li stood silhouetted inside them, a perfect target. The image made me shiver.

  When she slid open the door, I pulled her deep into the room. Maya barked wildly until Lu Li bent and held out her arms. The dog leapt into them as Rachel closed the glass door.

  “Call a taxi,” I whispered over my shoulder.

  Rachel went to the phone.

  Lu Li’s eyes were wet. I touched her elbow, and the dog snapped at me. “I wish I could stay the night with you,” I said quietly, “but that would look more suspicious than my going home. I’m going to go to work tomorrow and try to get some answers, so I want everything to look as normal as possible. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll take Andrew’s box of toys with me. I don’t want anyone to find it here. Is that all right?”

  Lu Li nodded, stroking the bichon as lovingly as she would a child.

  “I’m going to pull into the garage when I leave, so no one sees me take the box. If anyone asks you what
I was doing here, tell them it was a sympathy visit. If they somehow overheard some of our conversation, just act like what you are. A distraught widow.”

  “What means distraught?”

  “Grief-stricken. Grieving.”

  She smiled bravely. “I no need to act this.”

  I laid my hands on her shoulders and squeezed, then spoke almost inaudibly. “In the FedEx letter Andy sent me, there was some white powder. Almost like sand. It’s in those plastic bags on the couch. Do you know anything about that?”