The Terminal Experiment

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Or even think about?” asked Sandra.

  Peter spread his arms. “Well, we all think about things. But there’s a world of difference between an idle fantasy and reality.” If there weren’t, thought Peter, I’d have had you and my secretary and a hundred other women right on this very desktop.

  Sandra rearranged herself slightly in her chair. “I don’t normally talk about my personal life while on the job, but I went through something very similar to what you did, Peter. My husband—my ex-husband, as of a few months ago—cheated as well. I’m not a violent person, either. I know some would consider that an unlikely thing for a police officer to say, but it’s true. But when I found out what Walter had done—well, I wanted him dead, and I wanted her dead. I’m not given to throwing things, but when I found out I threw the remote control for our TV across the room. It smashed into the wall, and the case broke open; you can still see the spot on the wall where it hit. So I know, Peter, I know that people have violent reactions when this sort of thing happens.”

  Peter nodded slowly. “But I did not kill Hans Larsen.”

  “We believe it was a professional murder.”

  “I didn’t arrange for his killing, either.”

  “Let me tell you exactly what my problem is here,” said Sandra. “As I said, we’re looking at a professional hit. Frankly, that sort of thing costs a lot of money— especially with the, ah, extra work this one involved. You and Cathy are better off than most of her coworkers; if anyone could have afforded this sort of thing, it would have been you or her.”

  “But we didn’t do it,” said Peter. “Look, I’d be glad to take a lie-detector test.”

  Sandra smiled sweetly. “How thoughtful of you to volunteer. I have portable equipment with me.”

  Peter felt his stomach muscles tighten. “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. In fact, it’s a Veriscan Plus—that’s made by your company, isn’t it?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Yes.”

  “So I’m sure you have a lot of faith in its abilities. Would you really be willing to take such a test?”

  He hesitated. “With my legal counsel present, of course.”

  “Legal counsel?” Sandra smiled again. “You haven’t been charged with anything.”

  Peter considered. “All right,” he said. “If it will put an end to all this, yes, I’ll agree to a test, here and now. But in the absence of counsel, you may ask three questions only—did I kill Hans Larsen? Did I kill Rod Churchill? Did I arrange their deaths?”

  “I have to ask more than three questions—calibrating the machine requires it; you know that.”

  “All right,” said Peter. “Presumably you have a script of calibration questions. I’ll agree to the test so long as you don’t deviate from that script.”

  “Very well.” Sandra opened her attaché case, revealing the polygraph equipment within. Peter peered at the device. “Don’t you have to be a specialist to operate those machines?”

  “You should read your own product brochures, Peter. There’s an expert-system AI chip inside. Anyone can operate one these days.”

  Peter grunted. Sandra affixed small sensors to Peter’s forearm and wrist. A flat-panel screen popped up from the attaché case, and Sandra angled it so that only she could see it. She touched a few controls, then began to ask questions. “What’s your name?”

  “Peter Hobson.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Forty-two.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “North Battleford, Saskatchewan.”

  “Now lie to me. Tell me again where you were born.”

  “Scotland.”

  “Tell the truth: What is your wife’s first name?”

  “Catherine.”

  “Now lie: what is your wife’s middle name?”

  “Ah—T’Pring.”

  “Did you kill Hans Larsen?”

  Peter watched Sandra carefully. “No.”

  “Did you kill Rod Churchill?”

  “No.”

  “Did you arrange the killing of either of them?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any idea who killed them?”

  Peter held up a hand. “We agreed only three questions, Inspector.”

  “I’m sorry. Surely you don’t mind answering one more, though?” She smiled. “I no more like having to be suspicious of you than you like being a suspect. It would be nice to be able to scratch you off my list.”

  Peter thought. Dammit. “All right,” he said slowly. “I don’t know any person who might have killed them.”

  Sandra looked up. “I’m sorry—I guess I upset you when I went beyond what we’d agreed. There was some very strange activity when you said ‘person.’ Would you please bear with me for just one moment more and repeat your last answer?”

  Peter yanked the sensor from his arm, and threw it on the desktop. “I’ve already put up with more than we agreed,” he said, an edge in his voice. He knew he was making matters worse, and he fought to keep panic from overwhelming him. He pulled the second sensor off his wrist. “I’m through answering questions.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Sandra. “Forgive me.”

  Peter made an effort to calm himself. “That’s all right,” he said. “I hope you got what you were looking for.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sandra, closing her case. “Yes, indeed.”

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Spirit’s artificial lifeforms to develop multicellularism: chains of distinct units, attached together into simple rows. Eventually, the lifeforms stumbled onto the trick of doubling up into two rows: twice as many cells, but each one still exposed on at least one side to the nutrient soup of Spirit’s simulated sea. And then the long rows of cells began to double back on themselves, forming U shapes. And, eventually, the U shapes closed over on the bottom, forming bags. Then, at last, the great breakthrough: the bottom and top of the bag opened up, resulting in a cylinder made of a double layer of cells, open at both ends: the basic body plan of all animal life on Earth, with an eating orifice at the front end an excretory one at the rear.

  Generations were born. Generations died.

  And Spirit kept selecting.

  CHAPTER 40

  It had taken some work, but on December 4 Sandra Philo had gotten the monitoring warrant she’d requested, allowing her to place a transponder inside the rear bumper of Peter Hobson’s car. She’d been given a ten-day permit by the judge. The transponder had a timing chip in it: it had operated for precisely the period authorized, and not a second longer. The ten days were now up, and Sandra was analyzing the collected data.

  Peter drove to his office a lot, and also went frequently to several restaurants, including Sonny Gotlieb’s, a place Sandra quite liked herself; to North York General Hospital (he was on their board of directors); and elsewhere. But there was one address that kept appearing over and over in the logs: 88 Connie Crescent in Concord. That was an industrial unit that housed four different businesses. She cross-referenced the address with Peter’s telephone records, obtained under the same warrant. He’d repeatedly called a number registered to Mirror Image, 88 Connie Crescent.

  Sandra called up InfoGlobe and got screens full of data about that company: Mirror Image Ltd., founded in 2001 by wunderkind Sarkar Muhammed, a firm specializing in expert systems and artificial-intelligence applications. Big contracts with the Ontario government and several Financial Post 100 corporations.

  Sandra thought back to the lie-detector test Peter Hobson had taken. “I don’t know any person who might have killed them,” he’d said—and his vital signs had been agitated when he said the word “person.”

  And now he was spending time at an artificial-intelligence lab.

  It was almost too wild, too crazy.

  And yet Hobson himself hadn’t committed the murders. The lie detector had shown that.

  It was the kind of thing the law-enforcement journals had been warning was coming down the pike.

  Perhaps, now, at
last, it was here.

  Here.

  Sandra leaned back in her chair, trying to absorb it all.

  It certainly wasn’t enough to get an arrest warrant.

  Not an arrest warrant, no. But maybe a search warrant …

  She saved her research files, logged off, and headed out the door.

  IT TOOK FIVE VEHICLES to get them all there: two patrol cars with a pair of uniformed officers apiece; a York Region squad car with the liaison officer from that police force—the raid would be conducted on York’s turf; Sandra Philo’s unmarked car, carrying herself and Jorgenson, head of the computer-crimes division; and the blue CCD van, carrying five analysts and their equipment.

  The convoy pulled up outside 88 Connie Crescent at 10:17 a.m. Sandra and the four uniformed officers went directly inside; Jorgenson went over to the CCD van to confer with his team.

  The receptionist at Mirror Image—an elderly Asian man—looked up in shock as Sandra and the uniforms entered. “Can I help you?” he said.

  “Please move away from your computer terminal,” said Sandra. “We have a warrant to search these premises.” She held up the document.

  “I think I better call Dr. Muhammed,” said the man.

  “You do that,” said Sandra. She snapped her fingers, indicating that one of the uniforms should stay here, preventing the receptionist from using his terminal. Sandra and the other three headed inside.

  A thin dark-skinned man appeared at the far end of the corridor.

  “May I help you?” he said, his voice full of concern.

  “Are you Sarkar Muhammed?” asked Sandra, closing the distance between them.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Detective Inspector Philo, Toronto Police Service.” She handed him the warrant. “We have reason to believe that computer-related crimes have been committed from this establishment. This warrant gives us authority to search not just your offices, but your computer systems as well.”

  At that moment, the door to the reception area burst open and Jorgenson and the five analysts came in. “Make sure none of the employees touch any computer equipment,” Jorgensen said to the senior uniformed officer. The cops started fanning out into the building. One of the corridor walls was largely glass, overlooking a big data-processing facility. Jorgenson pointed to two of the analysts. “Davis, Kato—you’re in there.” The two analysts went to the door, but it had a separate FILE lock.

  “Dr. Muhammed,” said Sandra, “our warrant gives us the right to break any locks we deem necessary. If you prefer we not do that, please unlock that door.”

  “Look,” said Sarkar, “we’ve done nothing wrong here.”

  “Open the door, please,” Sandra said firmly.

  “I want to review this warrant with my attorney.”

  “Fine,” said Sandra. “Jones, kick it.”

  “No!” said Sarkar. “All right, all right.” He moved to the side of the door and pressed his thumb against the blue scanner. The deadbolt popped aside and the door slid open. Davis and Kato went in, the former going straight for the master console, the latter starting an inventory of the DASD tape and optical-drive units.

  Jorgenson turned to Sarkar. “You have an AI lab here. Where is it?”

  “We’ve done nothing wrong,” said Sarkar again.

  One of the uniforms re-appeared at the far end of the corridor. “It’s down here, Karl!”

  Jorgenson jogged down the hall, the three remaining members of his team following. Sandra walked in that direction, too, checking the signs on each door as she went.

  The Asian receptionist had appeared at the other end of the corridor, looking worried. Sarkar shouted, “Call Kejavee, my attorney—tell him what’s happening.” He then hurried off to follow Jorgenson.

  Sarkar had been working in the AI lab when the receptionist had called him. He’d left the door open. By the time he got back there, Jorgenson was looming over the main console, unplugging the keyboard. He motioned to one of his associates who handed him another keyboard with a glossy black housing and silver keys. A diagnostic unit: every keystroke typed, every response from the computer, every disk-access delay would be recorded.

  “Hey!” shouted Sarkar. “These are delicate systems. Be careful.”

  Jorgenson ignored him. He sat on the barstool and pulled a vinyl folder out of his briefcase. It contained an assortment of diskettes, CDs, and PCMCIA cards. He selected a card that would fit the drive on the console, inserted it, then hit some keys on his keyboard.

  The computer’s monitor cleared, then filled with diagnostic information about the system.

  “Top of the line,” said Jorgenson, impressed. “Fully populated with 512 gigabytes of RAM, five parallel math co-processors, self-referential-bus architecture.” He tapped the spacebar; another screen came up. “Latest firmware revision, too. Nice.”

  He exited his program and began listing directories at the system prompt.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Sarkar.

  “Anything,” said Sandra, entering the room. “Everything.” Then, to Jorgenson: “Any problems?”

  “Not so far. He was already logged in, so we didn’t need to crack the password file.”

  Sarkar was edging away from the group toward a console on the other side of the room—a console with a microphone stalk sticking up from it.

  “Login,” said Sarkar in a low voice, then, without waiting for the prompt, “Login name Sarkar.”

  “Hello, Sarkar,” said the computer. “Shall I terminate your other session?”

  Sandra Philo had come up behind him, the rounded front of her stunner pressing into the small of his back. “Don’t do that,” she said simply. She reached over to the console and flicked off the switch marked “Voice Input.”

  At that point, Kawalski, the liaison officer from York, appeared at the entrance to the room. “They’ve got a barber’s chair upstairs,” he said generally to the group, then, looking at Sarkar, “You give haircuts here?”

  Sarkar shook his head. “It’s actually a dentist’s chair.”

  Jorgenson spoke without looking up. “Scanning room, no doubt,” he said. Then, to Sarkar: “I enjoyed your paper in last month’s Journal of AI Studies. I’ll want to search that room next.” He went back to typing commands on his black-and-silver keyboard.

  Sarkar sounded exasperated. “If you would just tell me what you’re looking for …”

  “Damn,” said Jorgenson. “There are several encrypted banks here.”

  Sandra looked at Sarkar. “What’s the decryption key?”

  Sarkar, feeling perhaps that he had some measure of control at last, said, “I do not believe I’m obligated to tell you.”

  Jorgenson got up from the stool. Without a word, a second analyst sat down on it and began typing commands.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Jorgenson with a shrug. “Valentina was with the KGB, back when there was such a thing. There’s not much she can’t crack.”

  Valentina popped a new datacard into the card slot, and typed furiously with two fingers. After several minutes, she looked at Sarkar, her face full of disappointment. Sarkar brightened visibly—perhaps she wasn’t as good as Jorgenson had said. But then Sarkar’s heart fell. The disappointment on her face was simply that of someone who’d been hoping for a good challenge, and had failed to find it. “The Hunsacker algorithm?” she said in a heavily accented voice, shaking her head. “You could have done better than that.” Valentina pressed a few more keys and the screen, which to this point had been filled with gibberish, was replaced with English source-code listings.

  She got up, and Jorgenson went back to work. He cleared the screen, then replaced Valentina’s datacard with another of his own. “Initiating search,” he said. The screen filled with a multi-column list of two hundred or so terms in alphabetical order.

  “There’s massive storage online here,” said Jorgenson, “under a variety of compression schemes. It’ll take a while to hunt through it all.” He got up.
“I’m going up to look at that scanning room.”

  PETER HAD AN EVENING BOARD MEETING at North York General today, and rather than waste the morning fighting the telephones at the office he decided to do some work from home. But he was having trouble concentrating. Sarkar had said he’d have the virus finished today, but Peter still felt he should be doing something himself. Around 10:30, he logged into Mirror Image, hoping to see if he could fathom how the sims had gotten outside.

  After dialing in, he issued the WHO command to see whether Sarkar was also online—Peter wanted to send him an email hello. He was indeed. Peter then issued WHAT to see what sort of activity Sarkar was doing; if it was a background task, he probably wasn’t actually sitting at the terminal, and so the email would be a waste of time.

  WHAT reported the following:

  Well, a text search could be either background or foreground. Peter had high-level supervisory privileges on Sarkar’s systems. He called for an echoing of the task at node 002 on his own monitor. The screen filled with a list of search terms, and a constantly updated tally of hits. Some, such as Toronto, had hundreds of hits so far, but others …

  Christ, thought Peter. Look at that …

  Sarkar was searching for “Hobson” and “Pete*” and “Cath*” and …

  Peter tapped out an email message: “Nosy, aren’t we?” He was about to send it when he noticed the full search parameters in the status line: “Search all systems; within each system, search all online and offline storage and all working memory.”

  A search like that could take hours. Sarkar would never order something like that—he was too well organized not to have at least some idea how to narrow the search.

  Peter glanced at the other search terms.

  Oh, shit.

  “Larsen,” “Hans,” “adultery,” “affair.”

  Shit. Shit. Shit. No way Sarkar would be doing a search like that. Someone else was inside the system.

  Node 002 was the AI lab at Mirror Image. Peter swung his chair to face his phone and hit the speed-dialer key for there.

  THE PHONE RANG in the AI lab. “May I get that?” asked Sarkar.