by Marc Cameron
West helped him sign in and introduced him to the rest of the group.
“I’m not Catholic,” Noonan continued, after introductions and Hash business was finished and the run began. He kept checking over his shoulder, addled about something. Burdened. The people who came to Father West were often that way. “I’m not anything, really,” he went on. “I mean, my wife drags me to church, but they don’t do formal confessions there. Still, I got some stuff I really need to get off my chest. It . . . I don’t know . . . It needs a pro. An American pro. You guys are good at confessions. Everybody knows it.”
West heaved a heavy sigh, repenting of his earlier impatience. As odd as this young man was, he’d come for help.
“I found you online,” Noonan continued. “I called this morning. The guy said I’d find you here. Can you do it? Take a confession, I mean.”
“Why don’t we just speak as friends?” West said. “If talking about things that bother you gives you comfort, then that is good enough for the time being. I am happy to listen.”
Noonan gave an emphatic nod. “Yeah,” he said, breathless with worry. “Yeah, I guess that would work.”
He spilled his guts for the next ten minutes, admitting that he’d been weak and slept with a Sundanese woman he’d met in a bar. For some reason, he made a point of saying that the woman wasn’t “all that good-looking,” as if cheating on your wife with a homely girl made it less of a sin. Noonan began to go into explicit detail about what he’d done with the woman. For a moment, West thought he might be one of those people who got some gratification from bragging about their behavior. Then Noonan began to weep in earnest, tears accompanied by the appropriate amount of flowing snot. Perhaps the sorrow was just over being caught, but it was sorrow nonetheless.
“I know I did wrong,” Noonan said, scuffing his feet in the loamy ground as he walked.
Here it comes, West thought. The mitigation. I did wrong, but I’m not to blame, and this is why.
“The thing is,” Noonan continued. “It was all a setup.”
The way he said it made the hair on the back of West’s neck stand on end. “A setup?”
Noonan nodded emphatically. “Yeah. Some guys who said they were Indonesian policemen busted in from the bathroom and caught us in the act. They threatened to tell my wife—”
West stopped on the trail. “They entered from the bathroom?”
“Yes,” Noonan said.
“Does the bathroom have exterior doors?”
“No.”
“Do you think they were waiting in there the entire time?”
“I took a leak before we . . . you know . . . Shower’s pretty small. I didn’t see anybody.” Noonan scratched his head. “I never thought about it like that.”
“Did these men want money?”
“That’s the thing,” Noonan said. “Not at all. I offered to pay them, but they wanted something else.”
West felt himself putting on an old hat that he’d been all too happy to take off. He looked from side to side, instinctively checking over his shoulder. The other Hashers had pulled well ahead, so he was alone now with the newcomer. Somehow he knew that with one more question he’d slip inexorably into his previous life.
“What did these men want?”
“Something from my work.”
The way Noonan glossed over it piqued West’s curiosity. He tipped his head toward the gaudy T-shirt. “I assume you’re in some kind of tech field. Computers?”
“Software,” Noonan said. “I work for Parnassus, a computer game company in Boston.”
West picked up his pace. It was difficult to think about two things at once, and if Noonan had to focus on where to put his feet, he might be more forthcoming.
“That must be an interesting job.”
“I hate it,” Noonan said. “My bosses don’t like me, my coworkers don’t like me . . .”
Imagine that, West thought, but he said nothing.
“Anyway,” Noonan continued. “The engineer I work with set up this deal that made us a shitload of money, but . . .” He paused, peering at West through the dim light filtering down through the jungle canopy. “I really only wanted to tell you about how I messed around on my wife.”
“As you wish,” West said. “I only ask because it seems like something else is troubling you. I can see it in your eyes.”
“You can?”
“I can,” West said honestly.
Noonan walked in silence for two full minutes before glancing sideways at the priest. “It’s just . . . I think I got in way over my head on this. My partner, another software engineer at Parnassus, we developed this software that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s going to revolutionize the industry.”
“So it’s worth a lot of money?”
Noonan took a deep breath. “A shitload . . . sorry, Father.”
“And these Indonesian men who came from your bathroom tricked you into sleeping with a woman in order to get this software?”
“Two Indonesians and a different Asian guy,” Noonan said. “I heard him speak to the woman. I think it might have been Chinese. Pretty sure he was the one in charge.”
West filed that away but didn’t comment.
“Did you give them the software?”
“Hell, yes, I gave it to them! They kind of had me at a disadvantage when they busted in.” Noonan licked his lips. “Man, I’m thirsty.”
“This trail makes a big loop,” West said. “We’re almost back to the cars.”
“Good,” Noonan said. “Listen, Padre, I sure appreciate you lending me your ear.”
“No problem at all,” West said. A few steps later he said, “This software must be very special.”
“Oh, it is. To be honest, I had two copies when I came to Jakarta. My partner set up a deal to sell one of them to another company before the other dudes took one of the drives.” Noonan chuckled.
“Why two copies?”
“I don’t know,” Noonan said. “Insurance, I guess. That Chinese guy is going to be surprised when he finds out someone else has the software.” His head snapped up, coming to a sudden realization before he wilted. “Shit, that means he’ll probably still tell my wife.”
“You should tell your wife,” West said.
“Yeah, maybe,” Noonan said. “But that’s not happening. At least not until I tell her about the money I got from selling Calliope. She might be more forgiving when she’s a millionaire.”
“Calliope,” West mused. “Can I ask what makes it so special?”
“You know what an NPC is?”
West shook his head. “Afraid not.”
“Non-player character,” Noonan said. “You play Ghost Recon or Halo?”
“No,” West said. “But I’ve seen them played.”
“Well, the guys onscreen who are reacting to you as the player—bad guys, fellow good guys, bystanders—those are all NPCs.”
“Okay.”
“The industry uses deep learning, you know, AI, to help these NPCs make their decisions more lifelike.”
“Artificial intelligence?”
“Exactly,” Noonan said, with the exuberance of someone talking about his life’s work. “We add actions to make the NPCs more realistic, you know, rolling off a roof when they come on scene, jumping out of an open Jeep instead of opening the door. But sometimes the NPCs pick up these actions by themselves. Like they’re learning from the players. It drives the compulsion loop like crazy.”
“Compulsion loop?”
“You know,” Noonan said. “The thing that makes a player keep playing, gets them hooked on the game, so to speak.”
“You actually call it that? The compulsion loop?”
“Oh, yeah,” Noonan said. “It’s a vital part of the game. Otherwise, everyone might just go outside and play soccer.”
Father Pat gave a resigned sigh. That was a discussion for another time. “So your software has something to do with artificial intelligence?”
“That’s exactly what it is. To be honest, we didn’t develop it. We developed the computer that developed it. The idea is to give the NPC—your partner in the video game, if you will—some kind of reward for moving forward.”
“And your Calliope goes beyond that?”
“There’ve been a hell of a . . . sorry, a heck of a lot of advancements into AI, but this is beyond the next big thing.” Noonan became more animated as he spoke, absent the plodding fatigue that he’d arrived with, now that he was talking about something important to him. “As it is, once a game learns how to play, say, chess, the computer is pretty much unstoppable when you tell it to play. NPCs in modern video games can seem pretty lifelike in their actions.”
“Okay . . .” West said, prodding gently.
“The thing is,” Noonan said, “up to now, NPCs . . . have been reactive.”
“But your software is different?”
“Oh, yeah,” Noonan said. “We built off a Fristonian theory called Free Energy. Our software, our NPC, explores the boundaries. It’s inquisitive, behaving very much like a human player—and a shit-hot human player at that.”
Noonan continued into the intricacies of Karl Friston’s theories, but West’s brain was already looking at a larger picture. Completely engrossed in thoughts of what China could do with this kind of artificial intelligence, he was more than a little startled to find that the trail had already looped back around and they were just a few hundred feet from the cars.
“A breakthrough, then?” West slowed to negotiate the sloppy scree and rotting vegetation as they worked their way downhill.
“I’m here to tell you it’s worth millions.”
It’s worth more than that, West thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he asked: “Humor an unlearned priest for a moment. In one sentence, what makes it so unique?”
Noonan nodded emphatically. “One sentence?”
“As best you can.”
“Simple,” Noonan said. “You assign Calliope a mission, and she heads off to solve the problem. Turn her loose in the game and she will perform whatever mission you ask.”
“Without you?” West tried to wrap his head around that.
“Yep,” Noonan said.
“Would this Calliope perform the same way in the Cloud?”
“I think so,” Noonan said. “She wants to play. Where isn’t the issue with her.”
“That sounds like—”
A withered woman who looked seventy but was likely in her late forties shuffled out of the jungle on the trail ahead, making a beeline for Noonan. She was dressed in rags. Mud and soot smudged her sunken cheeks. The old woman proved amazingly nimble on the switchbacks, considering how bent she was. To Noonan’s horror, she grabbed him by the arm with gnarled hands and tried to drag him back into the undergrowth toward her small hovel. Her animated chatter might make anyone not fluent in Sundanese think she was extremely angry.
Noonan yielded when she first touched him, going along with her a few steps before finally coming to his senses and digging his heels into the dirt. The old woman looked too light to keep her feet in a strong wind, let alone pull a stocky man anywhere he did not want to go. Unable to move him, she turned up the volume of her pleas, giving him toothless smiles and pointing toward the shadows while she chattered.
Father West took a wad of several thousand rupiah from the pocket of his running shorts—it took fourteen thousand to make one U.S. dollar.
“She wants you to visit her home,” he explained to Noonan. “She believes the gesture will demonstrate her poor circumstance and hopefully convince you she is not tricking you into giving her a handout.”
West pressed the money into the old woman’s hands, trying gently to send her on her way.
She took the money but did not leave, continuing to yank Noonan’s arm, glancing behind her as if she had an audience in the trees.
West felt the desperate urge to make a call, to give someone the intelligence that he’d heard. He kept one eye on the old woman while he checked his phone. No signal. None of this felt right. There was no doubt in his mind that young Noonan’s honey trap was engineered by a foreign government. But if that were the case, why had they let him live after he’d turned over such valuable software?
West’s previous training, long subdued by meditation and study, kicked into high gear. The jungle shadows suddenly took on an electric feel, charged with static and danger. The priest hadn’t felt this exposed since . . . well, since he’d been on the job, running operations in far-flung corners of the world where discovery would have meant certain death.
Noonan had described the men who’d surprised him in his room as Indonesians and an Asian. Chinese? Maybe. Ethnic Chinese got blamed for everything here, like some countries used Jews as scapegoats, blaming them for their woes—because they were generally prosperous and owned so many businesses. Still, Indonesia did a lot of business with mainland China. Mistrusted or not, they had a real presence in the country. West nodded absentmindedly to himself—a subconscious trait his instructors at The Farm had trained out of him decades before. China was the real threat. The Chicoms—Did anyone call them that anymore?—were all over artificial intelligence. He’d read somewhere that they were supposed to be the world leader in AI by 2025. They would certainly want to get their hands on the kind of next-level tech Noonan’s software apparently provided.
West groaned, repenting for letting himself get caught up in the game again. That life was behind him. He needed to get off this mountain. The moment he got a signal, he’d make a call to tell someone with the authority to follow up. Maybe it was nothing. Either way, he’d do his duty and make the call—then wash his hands of the entire thing.
The old woman finally gave up and shuffled sullenly back to the shadows, squatting down in front of her shack—like a spider, situating herself to rush out and meet the next passerby.
“I gotta hit the crapper, Padre,” Noonan said, looking around.
West really hated when people called him that. “There’s an outhouse of sorts just beyond your car.”
He didn’t have the heart or patience to explain that there wouldn’t be any toilet paper, just a bucket of water and a dipper.
Other Hashers mingled slightly uphill for down-downs—punishments for bad behavior or “crimes” during the run. It involved a toilet seat and chugged alcohol—all in good fun, but West refused to get too crazy doing something that could end up on social media, so he was generally immune. He could push it only so far, though, and ignoring the closing ceremony to make a phone call was a sure way to get called out—even as a priest.
He chanced it and moved down the hill with Noonan, stopping halfway to check his phone again. Two bars. He stopped and tried to make a call, but it didn’t connect. West stared at the cell phone, watched Noonan trot toward the wooden structure. Two Indonesian men got out of a battered Toyota that was parked beside Noonan’s car. Then two more, probably Chinese, got out of the same car. Seemingly oblivious to them in his urgent condition, Noonan ducked around the outhouse to locate the door.
Keeping his phone low, West began to type a text message with his thumb. His stomach fell as the taller of the two Asians left the car and disappeared around the outhouse after Noonan. The stockier of the two, with thinning hair and a quiet demeanor, remained by the vehicle. Certainly Chinese, he was probably from the Ministry of State Security, the MSS, China’s version of the old KGB. West had a knack for spotting intelligence officers. The stocky man said something to the two Indonesians and nodded up the hill toward West. They’d obviously seen Noonan speaking with him. West typed faster, surely misspelling words, but not taking time to edit. He hit send when the men were twenty feet away. Still no signal. He hit
the send key again, then held down the power button to turn off the device.
Both men began shouting at once; one of them flashed a badge and produced a large Glock, which he began brandishing at the end of a noodle arm. The rank-and-file Indonesian police officers carried Taurus revolvers, so these had to be from a special unit—not tactical, just special.
They reached him quickly. The one without the gun snatched his phone away.
“What did that man tell you?” he asked in clipped, accented English, pointing to the outhouse. He held the phone aloft next to his face, a parent looking for an explanation. “Did you make a call?”
West shook his head, hands up, putting on his naïve-bystander act. Pretending to be incredulous would only infuriate men like this. Citizens often called the police crocodiles—buaya—and referred to themselves as geckos—cikak—a David-and-Goliath thing. It did no good to anger the crocodile.
“I never met him before this morning,” West said. “He’s here for the Hash run. That’s all.”
The man who’d taken his phone slapped West hard, his voice rising an octave. “You lie! You were on the phone!”
The priest flushed, white-hot anger welling up in his gut. He bit his lip in an effort to control himself. Even at his age, he could have killed these two before they realized they were in well over their officious heads. But the Chinese man with thinning hair had already started uphill. He was the one in charge, and he would surely have a gun. The taller one had yet to emerge from behind the outhouse. Geoff Noonan was in serious trouble.
Hands raised in defeat, West blinked. He took stock of where both policemen stood, their backs downhill, slightly off balance. Amateurs. The one with his phone struck him again. He was ready this time, and recoiled with the blow, robbing it of any real power.
“What do you want from me?”
“Your friend,” the policeman barked. “What did he tell you?”
“He’s not my friend,” West said, rubbing his face. “I said that already. Now please stop hitting me. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
The policemen looked at each other, then down the hill for guidance. They appeared to have no plan beyond yelling and hitting. The tall Chinese man emerged from behind the outhouse—wiping blood off his hands on a white handkerchief. Noonan was nowhere to be seen. West took a half-step forward, as if to go investigate, but the bullish policeman cuffed him in the back of his head.