When the rocket was centered directly above the concrete pad and about at eye level with Gray and Laura — its flat sides now lit by large spotlights from the ground — it began to sink in a straight line toward the earth. All was linear, precise, machinelike — clearly the work of a computer. Laura looked up at Gray's face. It was lit in the faint white fire that glinted also in his eyes. There was an expression on his face — contentment, she guessed. She turned back to the pad, thinking, How can I ever know what he thinks or feels? But she would have to learn. That was her job.
The flames beat at the center of the concrete base beside the gantry and spread ever wider as they pounded the earth. White clouds billowed out of the launch pad toward the sea on one side and the wide brown road on the other, boiling furiously like in a time-lapse film of a developing thundercloud. The jungle and ocean around the pad was well lit by tame spotlights. But the fire from the rocket's engines turned night into day and shone brightly on the nearby assembly building, and on a massive slab of concrete that shared the open field with its more impressive neighbor.
The distinct shadows cast across the lawn by the rocket's blaze grew long, and the rocket's descent slowed almost to a complete stop just above the pad. The engines suddenly shut off, and Laura's heart skipped a beat in the surprising silence as she anticipated the stunning explosion from a calamitous failure. But the rocket sat firmly in its place on the pad, the night again enveloping the brief artificial day of its chemical burn.
She looked back up at Gray. He had a smile of satisfaction on his face, which he tried to hide by turning away. "This is a volcanic island," he said in a voice he no longer needed to raise. "The crater was where the Village is now. This whole face of the mountain" — he motioned at the roughly semicircular wall along the middle of [garbled], perched his house—"was the inside of the crater wall. My geologists tell me the opposite wall blew out in a major eruption about two thousand years ago."
Laura imagined a continuation of the walls to form a circle and saw that the island had once been little more than the tip of a volcano protruding from the sea.
"Erosion had leveled most of what was left," Gray continued "although we had more than a year of earth-moving before we ever began construction. The center of the island down there" — he pointed toward the twinkling lights of the Village—"was a small lake that we had to drain. It was a miserable place, thick with mosquitoes."
"Was it inhabited before you bought it?"
"It's rented. I've got a ninety-nine-year lease. I'm the governor general under Fijian law." He had a wry grin on his face when he said it. "And no. No one could live here. There was no fresh water. I built a desalinization plant over there." He pointed into the darkness by the coast — the captain standing on his bridge. He lifted his hand, and where he pointed there sprouted creations of unimagined ingenuity.
The creator. The wellspring. Always "I," the professional in her noted.
Laura raised her hands to rub her upper arms and hug herself to ward off the chill. "Shall we go inside?" Gray asked. He had been watching her out of the corner of his eye.
Gray held the door for her. On the table was an enormous portion of chocolate mousse cake, swirls of dark chocolate forming intricate patterns on the plate around the luscious dessert. Gray walked past his seat without noticing.
"Ready to get started?" he asked.
Laura held the napkin she'd found neatly folded over the arm of her chair but quickly dropped it into the empty seat. "All right," Laura replied in her most assertive tone. "Let's get to it." On Gray's frenetic lead, dinner had taken less than fifteen minutes, but Laura was determined to gain the upper hand once she began the analysis.
There was no other way to guide him gently toward whatever subjects she would find important. "Where would you be most comfortable?" Laura asked.
"Pardon me?"
"Well, analysis can be a fairly grueling process. There really is no shortcut. You'd be surprised how physically draining some patients seem to find it — depending, of course, on the… on the nature of the problem."
Gray's mouth was wide-open in surprise. A grin spread across his face and filled his eyes with its sparkle. He burst out laughing.
"So you think…?" he began, but the question was cut short by still more laughter. Laura tilted her head and knitted her brow in confusion. "I'm sorry," Gray said. "I should've guessed. We haven't really discussed your job. I was going to wait until after dinner, which I guess is now." He cleared his throat, regaining his composure.
"I'm afraid there has been some misunderstanding. I'm not the one in need of your counseling, Dr. Aldridge."
She shook her head and shrugged, then swiped away the wisp of hair that had fallen loose across her cheek. "Who is it, then?" Gray had followed the movements of her hand as if studying her. He now stood there, staring at her intently. The smile faded.
"Mr. Gray?"
He turned away, and she waited as the last drop of humor drained from the man.
"Who is my patient, Mr. Gray?" she pressed, his behavior disconcerting.
Gray straightened, and as if with effort faced her full-on. "It's the computer," he said, his eyes tracing the line of her hair before darting away.
9
"Computer center, please," Gray said as he settled into the seat beside Laura in the front of the driverless car.
"You can just, like, talk to it?" Laura asked, fumbling with her seatbelt.
"Just tell it where you want to go," he answered as if it were the most mundane feature of his island world. The moment Laura's buckle clacked together, the car began its acceleration. "Voice recognition and synthesis are consumer functions, and they require a surprisingly large amount of processing capacity. But the computer is able to parse sound waves accurately enough to recognize rudimentary commands if spoken clearly and in English." The car picked up speed as it headed out of the courtyard and turned left at the gate.
Laura sat in what would have been the driver's seat of an American car. Her pulse quickened in time with the increasing speed of the vehicle, and she gasped and grabbed the empty dashboard as it sped into the black opening of the tunnel. She leaned toward Gray to peer around the gentle curve for the approaching head lamps with which — she imagined — they would at any moment collide.
"It's okay," Gray said quietly. The gentle tone of his voice — the intimacy it suggested — drew her gaze to his. Their faces were close and Laura shrunk back into her seat. "We've never, not even once had an accident with these cars. Never."
Laura tried to relax, but she could barely avoid cringing again when they burst from the tunnel. Her heart thumped against her ribcage, and she was alert now to two things — the increasing speed of the car as they began their descent from the mountain and the physical proximity of Gray.
"We've… had some problems. With the computer." Laura was too distracted by her fear of the unknown technology to which her life was now entrusted to concentrate fully on what he was saying. "It's been experiencing unexplained errors for months now. The rate of failure has been growing… exponentially. The way things are going, in a week, maybe less…"
Laura was unable to pry her eyes off the streaking blur of the jungle's edge, which was illuminated in the narrow beams of the headlights, but she managed to ask, "In a week, what?"
"The computer is the center of everything we do. Not just on this island, but worldwide. From that satellite coverage pattern I was describing to you earlier to a hundred and fifty million accounts, each of which can log pay-per-view requests, do on-line shopping or banking, answer polls, call plays for high school football teams, download software, play video games, send V-mail, or take advantage of any of the other interactive services we offer. And that's only a small fraction of what we have the computer doing."
The car flew downhill at what had to be close to a hundred miles per hour, veering smoothly one way or the other at forks in the road that were widened and banked like a concrete bobsled course. Laura
was on edge. She had no means of guessing which way the driverless vehicle would turn, and the result was a constant fear of impending demise.
"We use the computer, of course," Gray continued, completely unconcerned, "for our manufacturing. We've been able to build what you see here because the productivity of the fifteen hundred workers on this island is phenomenal. Productivity is a function of capital investment, and I've invested heavily in the island's infrastructure."
Buildings of various sizes and shapes but no discernible purpose flew by in the darkness, but Laura kept her eyes peeled out of the windshield — straight ahead along the road down which they hurtled.
Her ears popped, and the backs of her hands hurt from her grip on the armrests. "The gross product of this island is greater than that of a majority of the members of the United Nations. Mile-per-square-mile and man-for-man, this is the most productive place on the face of the planet. The most productive place in the history of the planet, for that matter."
"What?" Laura asked distractedly, taking her eyes briefly off the road to glance at Gray as he sat there — supremely confident and relaxed in his seat.
"We produce products here every year whose value on the open market, if they were available for sale, would be in the hundreds of billions. Productivity per worker is a deceptive statistic, of course. With such a high degree of automation, it's losing its meaning. A lot of things are losing their meanings," he mumbled.
Laura was beginning to calm down — slightly. They had yet to pass another vehicle. Maybe there were only one or two cars on these special roads. Maybe the driverless cars were only for Gray and his top henchmen. That comforting thought was ripped from her when in a blur and a brief buffeting of disturbed air first one, and then several cars identical to theirs rocketed by. Laura noticed that the previously sloppy driving of their vehicle had changed. It had slowed, and they hugged the right-hand side of the road as did the cars they passed headed in the opposite direction. It was all under control, Laura realized. Under the control of the computer. But hadn't Gray said the computer was malfunctioning? She thought.
Laura heaved a deep sigh — exhausted by the return of her anxiety.
Gray had fallen silent — his eyes, reflected in the dark window, looking off into the distance.
"I'm sorry, what did you say?" Laura asked.
"I said a lot of things are losing their meanings."
She turned to him. From the tone of his voice, it appeared, all was not well in the Workers' Paradise. They continued down the mountain in silence.
When the car entered the outskirts of the Village, it slowed to more responsible speeds. "Mr. Gray," Laura said, rolling her [unclear] shoulders and flexing her stiff hands, "you still haven't explained how I can help you with a computer. I'm afraid there might have been some misunderstanding. I'm a psychologist. If someone on your staff has misinformed you about my credentials, I think it would be appropriate for me to return my fee and—"
"The computer is suffering from depression," Gray interrupted, turning from the window to meet her stare and hold it. "At least, that's what it says. Chronic depression."
After letting what he'd said sink in, Laura expelled a short huff that would have been a laugh but for her inability to muster a smile to go along with it. "You've gotta be kidding."
He not only didn't look as though he were kidding, he looked pained. His eyes — the same eyes as in the newspaper photo from his childhood — expressed sadness as conspicuously as any emotion could be conveyed without words.
Laura's head spun with the absurdity of the suggestion. Her eyes drifted off, reporting the sights of Village life to a mind that was lost deep in thought. Despite the absence of any traffic ahead, the car pulled to a full stop at an intersection. The streets of the Village were laid out in a grid like any normal town's. Their driverless car, however, and others like it that they passed seemed to navigate them with the same ease that they handled the banked and gently forking high-speed roads crisscrossing the island.
"What I have built here, Dr. Aldridge, is the first-ever sixth-generation computer. Do you know what that means?"
Laura shrugged, then shook her head. Her attention was drawn to a lone statue on her left, and then to the long boulevard which the statue dominated. The broad street with its grassy median descended gently through the center of the Village away from the mountain. The car turned right onto the boulevard, and Gray craned his neck to look out the clear Plexiglas windshield at the rear. Laura, however, was enthralled with the sights of the bustling Village ahead.
The car proceeded slowly down the well-lit boulevard, which teemed with a vibrant and seemingly well-behaved nightlife. The place really was sort of like a Village, Laura thought. People strolled down paths past street side cafés. There were warmly lit stores filled with luxury goods. A movie theater that was obviously the teen hangout. Some of the island's inhabitants, Laura noticed, saw Gray through the window of the car. There were pointed fingers, nudges of dinner companions in curbside seating, a wave. Gray appeared to be oblivious to such manifestations of his celebrity. He was focused instead on her.
"The first generation," he continued relentlessly, "was made of vacuum-tube switches and mercury delay lines like the Sperry Univac in the early fifties. The second, like the Honeywell 800 in the late fifties and early sixties, used discrete transistors." The road grew darker as the car passed from the Village. "Restricted Area" was clearly marked in large, block letters on a sign beside a raised traffic sign. The jungle closed in, and the car accelerated again through the black canyon of leaves. "The third generation was built around small-scale integrated circuits and dominated the market from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. The IBM System 36 was a third-generation computer. The late seventies brought the large-scale and very-large-scale integrated circuits of the fourth generation."
The car broke out onto an open field, the massive assembly building dominating the scene ahead filling the windshield. Laura was awestruck by the size of it. "In the early eighties, experimental work began on fifth-generation computers, and the first came on line in the mid-nineties. They're massively parallel — thousands of digital processors crushing data all at once."
The car slowed and turned into a circular drive. All around lay the treeless lawns she had seen from high above. The quiet electric car pulled to a stop in front of a mammoth bunker. Both Gray's and Laura's doors opened automatically, rising straight into the air with their faint whoosh.
Once they were outside, the doors closed and the car headed off.
Gray led Laura along a path toward the low-slung concrete structure that looked to be half buried in the flat and open fields.
The humid air was thick with the foul, acrid smell from some chemical.
Laura crinkled her nose. "Exhaust fumes," Gray said, "from Launchpad A."
She realized he'd been watching her again.
Laura paused atop steps that led deep into the ground. At the bottom lay a heavy metal door to the subterranean entrance. She didn't want to go down those steps without knowing more. She had an unsettled feeling in her stomach and couldn't tell whether it was from the ride or from something else. From something vaguely… sinister.
Suddenly, the series of decisions she'd made to coming to Gray's island seemed flawed. What was she doing there — what was Gray doing there? She wanted to know, to learn, to sate her natural curiosity, especially after the small glimpse she'd got of his island. But Laura's rising sense of foreboding evoked in some saner corner of her mind the desire instead to go home, return to the comfortable confines of her prior life.
"I have built a sixth-generation computer," Gray said, standing beside Laura at the top of the steps. The tone of his voice indicated a degree of importance that was lost on Laura. "It's a fully functional, massively parallel neural network." She looked up at him.
He was gauging the effects his words had on her. "The world's first true neurocomputer."
And those words did have an e
ffect. "Are you serious?" He remained silent, his face devoid of expression. "I mean, pardon me, but… but a truly high-speed, highly distributed neurocomputer is a technological impossibility. It was a red herring. They tried it in the fifties, and it didn't work."
A smile — that self-satisfied look from before — spread across his face. "That was before fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, and me."
Laura didn't know how to respond. On its face, his statement was rife with egotism. But he didn't seem egotistical. Then again, she didn't want to believe him to be an egotist. She had come here to help Joseph Gray, the misunderstood orphan, not Joseph Gray, the egomaniac.
She knew she should be on guard against projecting — against imagining in this strange and intriguing man those traits she desired to find. She was left not knowing what to think about Gray.
But she had not been brought there for judgments about Gray's mental condition. He'd brought her there for something else — for something else. Laura looked down into the dark, foreboding hollows at the bottom of the steps. She didn't want to go downtown to meet what the creator had encased in a heavy tomb of concrete.
Obviously sensing her hesitation, Gray turned from the steps.
"Let's take a walk," he said, touching Laura's elbow lightly and leading her away. They strolled alongside the roadbed that led across the great lawn to the assembly building. The enormous structure at the other end of the road formed a man-made wall stretching from one side of the field to the other. A gentle breeze rid the air of the noxious fumes. Laura breathed deeply of the smell of the ocean, slowly feeling cleansed of her earlier apprehension.
"We didn't know what we'd end up with," Gray continued as they strolled, "but we knew that we needed extraordinary computational power. You see, we wanted automation, but the main limitation on robotics was not the hardware of the robots themselves, but the horsepower of the computers that operated them. Take just the vision system. We use retinal chips in the robotics instead of cameras. They're particularly good at adjusting for both light and shade — which is a big problem — and in tracking objects across their field of view. But even with the advantage that retinal chips gives you, the processing demands are tremendous. Simply discerning edges — identifying the visual cues that tell where the boundaries of objects are — could take minutes for even the world's fastest supercomputers. Add hearing, touch, kinesthesia, problem solving, goal constraints — everything else that's required to actually function in the real world — and the processing needs of the system vastly exceeded capacities."
Society of the Mind Page 7