Society of the Mind

by Eric L. Harry

  But there was only one problem with her fantasy. It didn't involve beating an ignominious retreat from Gray's island — from his society of the mind.

  "Mr. Gray doesn't seem to think the computer's obsolete," Laura said. "I mean" — she fumbled for words—"he did hire me to help fix it."

  Laura had tried not to betray her fear that her marginal role on the "dream team" was fast becoming trivial.

  Griffith shrugged. "But he also shut down production on new boards with the annex only half full."

  Laura watched the concrete slide by under her feet. She had to will her chin up and her shoulders back. "When did he do that?"

  "Gave the order yesterday."

  "Why?"

  Griffith shook his head and shrugged again. "I'm only the head of a twenty-six-billion-dollar division. How the hell would I know?"

  It was an attempt at humor, but the complaint was clear in Griffith's sarcasm. "The future is in mobility, though. That's where we're headed. It's a natural progression, really. In twenty years, there'll be no difference between computers and robots. They'll be one and the same."

  They walked on in silence, Laura pondering the implications of Griffith's comment.

  It boggled her mind, and she heaved a deep sigh. She [garbled] the insecurity — the urge to give up, to admit she was in over her head. She gritted her teeth and resolved to take it slow — one step at a time.

  "Does the computer open the doors automatically or something? Like the door into the conference room where we met, and the one in the gymnasium that guy walked into after having a fight with his wife?"

  "Pneumatic doors are part of my department," Griffith said. "Robotics. But the error was in the computer, I can assure you, not the servo controls in that door."

  "But why go to all the trouble of having the computer open your doors for you? I mean, supermarkets get by with, like, motion detectors or whatever."

  Griffith unexpectedly loosed a hearty laugh, grabbing his paunchy stomach like some slimmed-down version of St. Nick. He was laughing at her joke, but Laura had been serious. Laura's mood was rapidly deteriorating, but she doggedly pursued her question.

  She was determined to understand at least one thing in the first chapter of her instruction manual before rejoining Griffith on page four hundred.

  "So, how does the computer know to open a door? I mean, when Mr. Gray and I walked up to the door of the conference room, it opened before we even got there. Now how did the computer know to open that door, but leave the door across the hall from it closed?"

  "Well," Griffith said with a chuckle that didn't quite materialize — a hint of confusion on his face as if the answer were obvious—"why would it think you were going into a utility room? There's nothing but mops and brooms and buckets in there."

  It was now Laura's turn to be confused. "You mean… the computer knew where we were headed?" she asked, and Griffith nodded and looked at her as if it were the most elementary observation in the world. "But then… it had to know who we were."

  "Well, of course," Griffith said, again turning to look at her, clearly gauging for the first time how truly far behind Laura was.

  How unprepared she was for life in Gray's century… and for the task she'd been assigned on Gray's team. Laura realized just then that Gray had told them nothing about her credentials when she'd been introduced.

  They had no idea how little she knew about computer technology — about any technology, for that matter.

  "The pneumatic doors are for security, not convenience," Griffith said. The tone of his lecture turned suddenly remedial. "If someone who wasn't authorized to interrupt our meeting had walked up to that door, he'd have had to use the intercom to request entry. But if the computer knew why he was headed there — if he was delivering a printed copy of an E-mail or if there was a fire in the control room or something — then it would've opened the door right up. It's very good at guessing. That's why the error in the gym was so hard to fathom. It almost never makes mistakes like that."

  Laura was so filled with questions she didn't know what to ask next. She didn't want to betray her stupidity by asking something that seemed obvious to all but her, and so she chose her next inquiry carefully.

  "Are all the doors controlled by the computer?"

  "In the public buildings, yes," Griffith replied. "Not in people's homes, of course."

  His tone was annoyingly patronizing, as if the answer was so obvious that her question barely merited a response.

  That irritated Laura. "Look, this may all be old hat to you, but in the real world doors don't decide whether or not to open! You have to turn something called a 'knob,' okay?" She made certain she got an apologetic nod of acknowledgment before continuing. "So," she said in a pleasant voice, putting that little episode behind her, "why does the computer open and close doors in public buildings, but not in people's homes?"

  Griffith opened his mouth to speak, but then hesitated — shooting her a look out of the corner of his eyes and clearly rethinking his response.

  "Because," he said in a measured tone, "there is a question of privacy, you see. Gray's a stickler for privacy — it's one of his pet peeves. In order for the computer to open the door for you, it's got to know who you are and what you're doing. To know those things, it maintains a real-time model of the world — who and what everybody and everything is, and what it is that they're doing right at this very moment. It builds that model by processing the data it receives from its sensors. Visual, auditory, thermal, motion — it melds all those senses together to form a picture of the world and everything in it. If we were to allow it to extend that world into people's homes — into their bedrooms and bathrooms and… Well, you get the picture," Griffith snorted, "but the computer doesn't!" He elbowed Laura, winking and laughing. "Get it." Laura nodded. "Do you get it? It was a joke." She nodded again. "It was a pun. Do you get it?"

  "Yes!"

  Griffith winced and made a face like he'd again stumbled innocently into Laura's hair-trigger temper.

  "Sorry," Laura said, and they walked on in silence. Laura looked around the empty lawns — growing increasingly uncomfortable. "So there are cameras constantly watching you when you're in public?" she asked.

  "And infrared, thermal, low-light, microphones, ground motion detectors, pressure sensors, feedback from things like light switches—"

  "I understand," Laura interrupted.

  "That's the only way for the computer to build a world model. It has to use every sensor available to get a feel for the place. If its senses are significantly impeded — if you hide behind a bush or something to scratch yourself, which is sort of the accepted method — then as far as the computer's concerned, it didn't happen. It's outside the computer model. If you live on this island, you learn to figure out where the gaps are. It's no big deal, really."

  "And you go to all that trouble just for security? Is Gray that much of a control freak?"

  "Oh, no, no, no! It's not just security. The robots use that same world model, for example, to avoid running into things. Those Model Three cars whip down the roads so fast because they can see what's up ahead of them. They know if there's a Model Six crossing the road around the next bend. And a Six would know when to cross because they tap into that same world model and look both ways. That's the beauty of building and maintaining a complete world model. There are so many different uses for it."

  Laura couldn't help feeling ill at ease now that she knew they were being watched — constantly. Every movement recorded. She felt a stifling presence, an unblinking eye staring her way.

  The unblinking eye of a disturbed presence, she remembered.

  "So, Dr. Griffith, what do you think is wrong with the computer?"

  Griffith shrugged yet again. "We think maybe it's another virus. The computer is massively interconnected not only internally, but all over the world through the Web. We've had to put up with hackers, corporate espionage, and a whole lot of infections. One of 'em almost took the sy
stem down last year, as a matter of fact."

  "You mean an infection with an ordinary computer virus almost crashed that entire computer?" Laura asked.

  Griffith shook his head. "It was worse than an infection, it was a plague — the Hong Kong 1085. One of our field offices gave Georgi's operators a wrong telephone number, and the computer dialed up a bulletin board in Hong Kong instead of an onboard digital processor we'd leased. The computer wrote a program — a 'gopher'—and zapped it onto the bulletin board. The gopher reproduced itself about a million times and tore through the database in a couple of seconds. It sifted through everything — games, homemade porno stories, classified ads — and reported back using a zippered data stream before self-destructing. That's how the virus slipped through. When the report came back compressed, it went right through the firewall erected by the phase one to screen for viruses. Over the next couple of days, the computer got real sick. We almost had to shut it down to kill the damn bug."

  Laura had heard, of course, of computer viruses. They were now quite common news items. But she'd never heard of a plague.

  "So what does it mean for the computer to get sick?" she asked.

  "Just like for you or me, I suppose. My bet is that's one of the things you're here to find out." Griffith cinched his belt up and jutted his jaw out. "But you never kno-ow with the big cheese." He drew the last words out in what sounded like an impersonation, but it was too poorly rendered to be recognizable.

  Laura took a wild guess that Griffith had attempted to be witty, and she smiled up at him politely. "Is that what everybody calls him? 'The big cheese'?"

  "That bunch?" Griffith said in a disparaging tone, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder at the computer center. "They're too uptight, man. They need to take it do-o- a [unclear]."

  Laura's smile was genuine this time. Griffith smiled back at her, exuding total confidence in who he was. Now, when she looked at Griffith, she didn't see the bushy curls sticking out from the sides but not the top of his head. The crooked teeth and thick glasses and sideburns grown to enormous proportions were gone. Whoever he was — in his head — was different from what appeared on the surface.

  They walked along through the quiet night, but her mind remained focused on the plague. "Dr. Griffith…?" she began.

  "Phil," he interjected.

  "Phil," she repeated, "and please call me Laura."

  "Me Phil," Griffith said in a Caveman voice, touching his chest, "you Laura." He laughed and shook his head at the hilarity of his antics.

  Laura's smile quickly grew stale, and she cleared her throat "So, Phil, why did the computer even look through that bulletin board in Hong Kong? Surely it realized it had the wrong number Why didn't it just hang up?"

  "Curiosity killed the cat. You see, with the exception of the little 'seed' program Mr. Gray installed to get the thing going, the computer's almost entirely self-taught. And there's only one way to motivate self-study, and that's to program it to be curious, which Margaret did with a vengeance."

  "You sure seem to minimize Mr. Gray's part in the effort," Laura said — fishing.

  "Oh! If I did that, please excuse me. Never does a career much good to talk down the boss. It's just that Mr. Gray's real genius is in robotics. The artificial intelligence side of it isn't really his bag."

  Gray, Laura thought, a genius at robotics? She'd been convinced it was Gray's work on neural networks, and not in mechanical engineering, that had achieved the breakthroughs evident on his island.

  "Man," Griffith continued, "I remember how the computer used to talk your ears off, so to speak. But only on the shell. Most of my time is spent at lower-level languages, but I would occasionally get stumped and want to ask some questions. On the shell, you see, you can type things in plain English like, 'If the hydraulic drive connects to a linkage with four degrees of freedom but only three boundary constraints, can the control system generate a goal to prevent the mechanism from being underconstrained—"

  Laura's eyes rose to him, a wry smile on her face. "Plain English?" she asked.

  Griffith just cocked his head — perplexed by her question. "Or Japanese, or German, or French, or whatever you speak," he said, misunderstanding. "Anyway, halfway into your session, the computer would start asking 'Is that all you wanted to know?' or something like that. If you said, 'Yes,' then it'd say, 'Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?'" Griffith laughed. "You could see it coming a mile away. And it would wear your fingers to the bone typing out your answers. Back then, you understand, it was socially immature. If you typed something like, 'Boy, look at the time. It's midnight already,' it would say, 'I show nothing on your calendar for midnight.'"

  Laura laughed and asked, "So why didn't you just log off?"

  "Well…" Griffith began, but then seemed to struggle to find the right words. "You know, that wouldn't have been very… nice, would it?"

  13

  "Just don't look up," Griffith said helpfully as Laura clung to the cool metal railing. They headed down the steps leading to the assembly building entrance, which — like its counterpart at the computer center — was sunk slightly below ground level. Laura had looked up at the sixteen-story wall that ran almost half a mile in either direction.

  It was as if seeing the unexpected plane rising perpendicular to the earth caused her brain to question which was the true horizon. She'd almost instantly grown dizzy and faintly nauseated. "That happens more often than you'd think," Griffith said. "Let's get inside. It'll be better in there."

  She edged her way down the steps, grasping the rail hand over hand and keeping her head bowed. Passing through a thick vault door, they entered yet another of the infernal "dusters." This time, however, she knew to hold on to her skirt. Again her hair lashed wildly at her face, but again the gale dissipated quickly.

  "Maybe I should just shave my head," Laura said as she raked the hair off her face.

  Griffith seemed totally unbothered by the experience. "Oh, look," he said, pointing to a small black marble [missing] mounted on the wall beside the door. "That's a wide-angle retinal chip. You'll see them all over the place." He mugged for the camera, sticking his thumbs in his ears and his tongue from his mouth.

  The inner door glided open, and the sound of activity echoed through the enclosed space ahead. She followed Griffith into a small, well-lit room — touching the antistatic pad, and receiving the expected snap on her fingertips. Laura looked but didn't find a vanity or brush beside this door. What she found was another black eyeball staring out at the room.

  "Here," Griffith said, holding goggles with large, clear lenses and ear protectors that looked like ancient stereo headphones.

  Laura put the goggles on — the soft plastic wrapping around her eyes and fitting tightly against her face. The ear protectors dampened the sound from outside the room to a mere hum. Griffith then handed her a white hard hat, which fit snugly over her gear and mercifully covered the tortured mess of her hair.

  "It gets a little loud in there," Griffith shouted once his equipment was on, and they headed for the inner door.

  It disappeared into the wall as they approached, revealing the brilliant light of an artificial day just beyond. The massive [unclear] world of the assembly building was bathed in that remarkably white illumination, and it was alive with movement and activity. As they passed through the door, which was at least a foot thick and looked like an airlock, Laura couldn't shake the feeling they were entering a well-built vessel of some sort. Like the computer center, everything was solid and sealed tight — designed and constructed with a quality usually reserved for submarines or spacecraft. And like the computer center, it was all so new, so pristine.

  Laura wandered into the factory like a tourist, her eyes wide and her mouth agape. The mostly hollow building was of a scale that was experienced more physically than through sight or sound.

  It was a sensation she'd felt previously only in the largest indoor sports arenas. But this arena was filled not with people but with
hundreds upon hundreds of moving machines.

  High above it all, giant cranes glided smoothly along rails crisscrossing the ceiling. As the carriages passed overhead, they eclipsed thick tubes that ran the length of the building. The tubes glowed so brightly Laura had to shield her eyes.

  "Light pipes!" Griffith said in a raised voice that barely carried over the din of the busy plant. He pointed to the ceiling — to the thick tubes of light. "Microwave generators shoot beams through the pipes from both ends of the building! The energy excites sulfur elements, which produce the same full-spectrum light as the sun!"

  Laura couldn't care less about the lights in the building. It was like the tour guide at Hoover Dam pointing out the portrait of Herbert Hoover on first entering the room with the mammoth turbines.

  A Model Six like the lawnmower from before trundled by, towing a trailer loaded with machine parts of various shapes and sizes. It wove its way around another Model Six, which was headed in the opposite direction with a rotary sander mounted at the end of its arm. A massive conveyer belt down the center of the building sent scattered objects past manipulator arms permanently mounted along the side of the line. From up and down the long belt, sparks flew or drills whined or the searing sound of fusing heat crackled in the air. It was unlike anything she'd ever seen. It was unlike anything she'd ever even imagined.

  "Pretty rad, eh?" Griffith said, grinning. Laura started to walk out onto the dark concrete floor for a better view, but Griffith reached out and grabbed her arm to restrain her. "Sorry!" he said, pointing down at a bright yellow line about three feet wide painted just in front of her toes. Regularly stenciled down the line's length were the words "WORK ENVELOPE — No humans beyond this point!" Laura read and reread the warning. It had some deeper significance, she felt, but couldn't quite decide what that was.