Mackey wasn't sure what the proper analogy was, if there in fact was a suitable one. He himself had spent the single hour that qualified as ‘last night' chemically and physically attached to an astronaut-tech dream machine. In his simulated, augmented, drug-induced sleep, he was restored to a level of function necessary to interface with the schedule of the clandestine Orthogonal agent.
Regardless of the significance of the bureaucrats traveling through the P-car system, he had left that previous classification. He had fallen through that system, into the one below. He was the energy of the car system, released from hydrocarbons in the coal and oil fires of the Infrastructure Bureau's more than five thousand power plants, funneled to the grid as invisible electrons, to course through the tracks and into the copper coils of the motors. Mackey had left behind the natural cycles of day and night and joined the technological system, running on its own artificial periods, like a space station in LEO seeing the sunrise every ninety minutes. He had crossed the country twice in the last forty-eight hours, and on this periodic trajectory had witnessed a side of the government that he never would have seen.
This hidden structure stood out in sharp contrast when one looked from the top of the Postal Bureau Tower. Its grooves and circuits loomed into vision when one speculated about satellites from within a secret desert lab. The cryptic codewords pricked the eyes and ears when one was held at gunpoint by federal agents, before an altar covered with blood. But from his office in the nation's capital, it was invisible.
And this life had apparently carried on without him, the sun rising and setting on several million daily routines. But now he was out of balance. He was in another mental orbit. As he chased the artificial satellite of the District of Columbia at 17,000 miles an hour, his old vantage point was revealed in stark contrast as it emerged from the shadow of the earth into the blinding radiation of sun, unrestrained by atmosphere. Returning to the city in the middle of the night was like stepping outside of himself. As if back in the suburbs, another Mackey was asleep in bed, as this one ought to be.
He tried to blink, and clear his head. Such strange thoughts, stampeding over themselves into his mind! No doubt it was a lingering effect of the sleep-inducing tablet.
Thompson was looking over Mackey, out the window as well. "Sometimes I forget. Growing up in Idaho, where the P-car tracks often dead-end in fields, rather than looping back around. And then spending so much of my time out in the National Forest, without any track at all. I forget it can look like this. No trees. Just buildings, as many as if they were trees."
Mackey nodded silently in agreement, although he had never been to Idaho. There were massive regions of land that they had just flown over, which Mackey had never visited. He had seen similar regions from the air, over the Sierras, over the San Gabriels and the Mojave, the various biomes of California.
It was the lack of rainfall, Mackey supposed, that spaced out the trees in the West, defining their shape, their lack of density, their sparse arrangement together into the overwhelming thing that was the western forest lands. Here, it was the placement of the arterials that arranged the buildings, and the density of the traffic passing through the track networks that wove the suburbs into existence. The buildings crowded up to the river on both sides, clinging to the loops and arterials as if the tracks were their roots, their link to solid ground, the only anchor keeping them from tumbling out over the water itself. As if the apartment buildings were the dark, luminescent forest under a waning western moon. Limited by the urban planning version of a timber line, the constraints of the water and temperature in a forest mimicked by the availability of electricity, population, and tower footprint. A forest, a city, or a human body, each constrained by their needs and the system by which the material to satisfy those needs was made available.
He looked out the window at a group of unfamiliar looking low-slung buildings, only single story, no P-car tracks leading up to them. For half a moment he wondered what sort of building wouldn't have tracks or parking areas, before his supersonically jetlagged mind figured it out. It was a Housing Act complex. The people who lived in them couldn't afford cars, and had to take a rail trolley from a nearby station. He had seen them any number of times around the Washington area, but never at night, he realized. At night they appeared darker, when their concrete forms absorbed the light rather than reflected it. Few streetlights, Mackey noticed. They looked hidden, sunk into the ground compared to the larger buildings around them, caught in a shadow, without the bright lights of the cityscape. The world was woven with mysteries and unknowns.
The car traveled in silence, each occupant seemingly lost in their own thoughts, no sound but the constant whir of the electric motors underneath and the gentle rushing of air passing over the curved, swept form, like a pebble in a stream. The after-effects of chemical-induced sleep echoed silently in the car. A silent effervescence. A chemical afterburn lingering in bloodstreams, phase-matched with the jetlagged syncopation of consciousnesses in parallax. Humans and technology, placed at different angles to the target, angles computationally attuned into a range, hovering at the frontier between uncertainty and certainty.
But soon the machinery interrupted the reflective moment. As it was programmed, as it was designed, and therefore as it could not have failed to do. As the humans had indicated they wished it to do, with the information faithfully provided to the machine, as designed, as programmed. The navigational computer detected the signal of the oncoming exit track it had been set to wait for, and its relays began to click, setting in motion a series of responsive actions.
The P-car slowed, and the formation ahead of it continued onward. The deceleration occurred smoothly, bringing the vehicle down to a speed at which it could engage the switch from the main travel track and slide over to an exit siding track. The deceleration continued, bringing the velocity down to a point at which the car could comfortably make the curved loop of the exit, passing out over the bank of the river before circling back down and under the main track course. Aware that it had successfully maneuvered the exit, the computer began looking for the next expected signal on its internal maps, and found it—the entrance track for the Fairbanks Track Research Center. Equipped with Hopper's radio credentials, the car proceeded through the gate as the guard waved to the occupants inside.
Descending to the parking structure, the P-car's motor tone dropped to a low hum, and finally, gently, came to a stop outside the underground entrance to the main building. It had never really occurred before to Mackey how when arriving at a federal building via car, one never saw the architecture. One had to arrive by aircraft to get the full view.
The door popped open with a pneumatic hiss. And only then did the passengers have to once again act for themselves, collecting their various accoutrements and sliding out onto the steel pedestrian passage. The Assistant Secretary assumed the lead, taking them through a warren of corridors and offices, down escalators and stairs, descending into the complex. Until, after nearly fifteen minutes, they arrived at a lab secured by a thick set of double doors, marked with a handwritten sign reading only "Eliza." Hopper produced a thin plastic card and waved it in front of a console. To Mackey's surprise, the console light turned a pale green without even being touched, and the door popped open. The team trooped inside.
The room was bright red on floor, walls, and ceiling, with a geometric grid in thin white lines embedded on all surfaces. This grid was used to position the room's contents in a rectilinear manner, in rows, aisles, racks and towers. These contents were a vast amount of computer equipment, against the walls and pushed together in islands, some as tall as twenty feet, transforming the room into a thin maze of corridors one grid square across. It was as if a winding limestone cavern had been abstracted into cubes. A technician in a lab coat was working off of a clipboard at one of the many machines. She looked at the arrivals, and stood up straighter when she saw the Assistant Secretary.
"Assistant Secretary Hopper! You should have told me you were coming, I would have—"
"Not to worry, not to worry. We have some information, and some important questions to ask."
"I'm just running diagnostics right now, you picked a good time." The technician looked at the odd group, not sure what to make of them.
"You must be Eliza," said Parsons to the technician, offering his hand. She took it, and was preparing to say something, but Hopper pre-empted her. "This is Dr. Emily Willamette, Eliza's technician. This—" waving her hand at the computer equipment, "is Eliza."
"More accurately," said Willamette, "Eliza is inside of all this. On the magnetic tape, loaded in the memory. Eliza is an artificial intelligence program, and she is currently substantiated on this equipment."
The team looked around the room, seeing reels of tape, punch card feeders, dials and knobs, and row after row of indicator lights. It was difficult to know where to direct one's attention, as the room was simply filled with machinery, warm, echoing with the hum of fans and motors, chittering with the sound of relays scattered underneath the many housings and cabinets.
"Eliza is an advanced research project, housed here at NATSB," Hopper explained. "It began as a natural language processor, meant to simulate conversations, invented by Joseph Weizenbaum at Vail Labs. We acquired that program, and have wrapped it over a series of parallel learning algorithms. The goal was to create a computerized engineer that could analyze information fed from P-car accidents and other technological mishaps, and then generate specific queries in response to generalized queries, until it had enough information to present a full report."
Willamette nodded. "Eliza isn't as quick as human beings with general information. If you ask her whether ketchup goes best with hamburgers or ice cream, she cannot answer. No one has ever told her the answer, and because she doesn't have a sensory system or data on human taste buds, she can't answer questions based on what we would call ‘opinion' or ‘common impressions.' She lacks the ability to form a ‘hunch,' because she doesn't have the history of unspoken inputs that a human being has, such as long-term memory, and the resulting inclinations. She can only work with the data she is provided. But she is very good at asking questions, to try and get the information she needs."
"What we're going to do is give Eliza some information," Hopper announced. "And we're going to see what it wants to know."
Willamette showed them to a number of desks with punch card machines. Hopper divided up the information they had, and the team began writing card sets with the information. Parsons typed up the astrological diagrams from the dossiers, while Ross began readying a set of all known orbital telemetries from ASTB databases. Mackey prepared several sets of cards containing reference information on Department of Transportation employees mentioned in the dossiers, while Thompson helped him collate. Meanwhile, Hopper and Willamette began preparing an ARPNET interface message processor, along with the commands for accessing it, in a form Eliza could understand. Every reference database in the entire Department that was linked into the ARPNET, Eliza would be able to search for information.
In a couple hours, they began feeding information into the computers—the equivalent of spreading information on Eliza's desk. The card readers clicked and whirred as the small cards flew through, their arrangement of punch holes activating or blocking switches, which then converted the marks into digitally stored data. Willamette loaded several new reels of magnetic tape, running the tape through the heads, and then letting them fly, the tape whizzing back and forth at a rate of meters per second, as the computer accessed and organized the information according to Eliza's whim. From the interface message processor, the shrouded sound of a dial tone was heard, followed by a sequence of beeps and clicks, as Eliza began dialing different computers across the country and asking them for information in a tongue provided to her by the IMP.
Finally, after another hour, the machine quieted, the magnetic tapes moving more slowly. The punch card machines stopped. They gathered around a console with a text input screen. Willamette sat in the chair and turned on the monitor, which flickered into life with a dull green glow. A small rectangle flashed at a regular rate in the top left of the display.
Willamette used a keyboard, and as she pressed each letter, the letter appeared where the rectangle had been as it moved across the screen to the right until a sentence was displayed. It was a novel interface, thought Mackey. Like a live sheet of paper.
"Good morning Eliza. Have you reviewed the information?"
Willamette looked up at Hopper, standing over her shoulder. Hopper nodded, and Willamette tapped the ‘enter' key. The green rectangle jumped down to the next line, and this time, without any input from Willamette, text printed across the screen.
"Good morning, Emily. Yes, I have reviewed the information. This does not appear to be information regarding a transportation accident. Please let me know your general line of inquiry."
"A future Department of Transportation accident, perhaps," Parsons quipped.
Hopper considered her words carefully, and then spoke. "We want to know the best target for a raid on Commerce, for the purpose of gaining further evidence."
Willamette looked away from the screen, but did not turn around to look at the Assistant Secretary. She thought for a moment, and then began typing.
"What Department of Commerce location would be most likely to hold significant evidence on the subject at hand?"
The green rectangle blinked in the same place. Then it skipped a line, and Eliza's answer came.
"The subject at hand is obscure, and not well identified. Do you agree?"
Now Willamette turned to look at Hopper. The Assistant Secretary nodded.
"I agree," Willamette responded.
Eliza asked another question. "Do you think past events are more relevant, or are events in the future more relevant?"
"The future," Hopper said, and Willamette transcribed.
The rectangle paused.
"Do you think it is more difficult to predict the future, or the past?" Eliza asked.
The humans gathered around the screen looked at each other. "Is that an error, or is it philosophical?" Mackey asked.
Willamette shrugged. "If there's a programming error, we get an error code. But some of her questions do come off as spurious."
"It depends," said Ross, slowly, "whether one wants to be limited to definite truths, or open to potentiality."
Hopper looked at Ross over her glasses. "Are you saying that about Eliza, or is that your answer to her question?"
"You mean like the difference between what exists, versus what might exist?" asked Thompson.
"Sure, I guess. If you are open to a wide range of potentialities, you can say anything about the future. But describing every potentiality of the past is difficult. On the other hand, if you simply want make a definitive, true statement, making pronouncements about the past is easy. You can say just about anything with generalizations. But saying anything with definite certainty about the future is hard."
They thought about that while Willamette typed it out.
Eliza responded with another question. "Are you more interested in actuality or potentiality?"
"Well, she flipped that one right back at us," Mackey noted.
"Serves me right for trying to engage in philosophy with an artificial intelligence." Ross shrugged.
"Potentiality," said Parsons. "We should be open to anything."
"But we do need one specific location to raid," Hopper cautioned. "We can't invade every Commerce facility."
"I think we can say both," Willamette said, as she typed. "Eliza likes multiple variables, even if they can contradict, as they help her focus on a line of inquiry."
The sentence she typed read, "Potentiality, but we need a single answer to our query."
Eliza paused, and then aske
d another question. "I cannot find the technical specifications documents for the database operations programs involving Postal Identification Number location distancing sequences. Where are they?"
"Well, at least that question isn't philosophical," Thompson mused.
"Anyone have any idea?" Hopper asked.
"We can give her a rough guess even if we don't know for sure," Willamette suggested.
"Most database technical specifications are kept in the Section manuals of those employees who do data entry," Mackey said. "But as far as which Section of what Bureau does location distancing, I have no idea. I'm not even sure what that means."
"I'll try telling her that," Willamette said, and transcribed Mackey's response as best she could.
Eliza seemed to accept it, and asked a new question. "Do prediction models show potential civil unrest for the greater Detroit area during the period of 1972 through 1976?"
"Is that the sort of thing you can model?" Ross asked.
Hopper shrugged. "I'm sure someone has tried, but I have no idea what Bureau or Section, what they might have found, or how accurate it is."
"We can tell her we don't know," Willamette suggested. Hopper acquiesced.
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