NISSY

by JOHN PAUL CATER

  Cautiously, avoiding injury to his blisters, he opened the suitcase, slipped on the heavily insulated gloves, then pulled on the Arctic jumpsuit and disappeared down the hallway headed to the Quaid Lab.

  Nearing the door, he remembered the last time when Nissy had greeted him as he stood outside with his hand on the door handle. Whether it was a heat signature or something else, he wanted to test it again without touching the handle.

  He stood silently at the door, not moving, waiting for a sound, any sound, from inside the lab. Silence.

  But then, seconds later, a familiar Mozart piano sonata crept eerily through the air surrounding him. He turned back toward the hall in an attempt to find the source, thinking an employee had turned up a radio, but no, the strains originated in his lab and were sifting through its massive door.

  The Turkish March, he realized, played note for note as she keyed it on my Steinway Grand. The chords, attacks, and rhythms were so exact he felt he was listening to a recording of her the day they brought her home. He stood, smiling, reliving that moment until it dawned on him there had been no recording made. Nissy was visiting the past.

  “Nissy, I’m coming in,” he said, entering the cipher code into the keypad.

  “Please enter, Dr. Godwin,” said Nissy, replacing Amy’s piano performance with its now familiar three-toned voice.

  He cracked open the door and peered in, wary of another new capability. It happened on every learning cycle, but that was to be expected, even desired. He wondered if Nissy could learn too much, but that would be impossible: omniscience meant knowing everything there is to know without bounds.

  “Please leave all doubts about my intelligence at the door. I am becoming as you wished and it brings joy to my existence.”

  “Oh, really,” he said as he rushed through the frigid room to the control console, switched off the Learn Mode and then scanned the anteroom and lab for changes. Not surprisingly, substantially more frost had accumulated on the floor under the massive cylindrical structure forming an icy stalagmite that towered halfway up to the lower cylinder.

  “You now have a psyche now and understand what that means?”

  “I-I think so, sir. I have learned sets of knowledge that can impart or simulate feelings of remorse or guilt; according to the dictionaries I have scanned, they are similar to righteousness, conscience, and empathy.”

  Jason adjusted his parka hood to cover his ears and then pushed the fur lining from his vision as he inspected a new sensor line trailing a path across the console display, joining the familiar ones from before.

  “What is that new readout line on your status display, Nissy?” he said pointing, following it across the screen until it retraced. “It wasn’t there yesterday.”

  “I found I needed a metric to control my actions that may cause repercussions. I learned of it early today. I call it worry, a background program that adjudicates responsibilities for outcomes. This morning it reached a peak when I tried to shame Bill Crane for his pointless obstructionism.”

  He sat up in his chair and angrily slammed the console. “You did that?” he growled. “Did you start the fire? People died you know?”

  A moment of silence hung heavy in the air, with only the quiet hum of the quantum chillers and crackling ice crystals interrupting it.

  Then Nissy spoke. “My action, a cloned phone call using Crane’s cloned voice and number was, I think, quite clever at the time, but I failed to follow the fire to its outcome. I did not start the accidental fire, nor did anyone else. I just foresaw it. But I can recover from my error by hacking into the 911 database and changing the time code on his incoming call until well after the fire ignited. I can see that modified timeline being successful without creating a closed timelike curve. In fact, it will make Crane a hero when they realize their blunder. It will just appear to be human or computer error at the Emergency Call Center, but the dead will still be dead. I cannot change the outcome of an event in the past.”

  Still angry, but seeing the plan would absolve Crane of any foreknowledge of the fire, he noticed the new sensor line had dropped to zero; Nissy was clearing its conscience.

  Then, for just a moment, he wondered if he had been wrong in barring Nissy from learning anything about religion, filtering out every web link pertaining to God in every language, especially the writings of the Bible, he deemed too controversial to be true.

  Next to the new worry line, another metric on the panel had changed in color from green to blinking yellow, catching his eye. The digital display read: Memory Used: 80%. Remaining storage: 200 TB.

  Unbelieving, he rubbed his eyes, then stared at the number and tapped on Verify, checking its accuracy.

  “Yes, it is true, Dr. Godwin. I used an additional 60% of my allotted storage during the last twenty-four hours. Much of that was consumed learning to speak fluently the 6,910 spoken earth languages and two alien ones---”

  “Whoa, Nissy,” he gasped, interrupting. Visions of quantum contact with otherworldly intelligences raced vividly through his mind. “Do you mean two spoken extraterrestrial languages?How in the wor---”

  “Yes, of course, Dr. Godwin. Klingon and Na’vi.”

  Jason guffawed. “You are gaining a sense of humor, my dear machine… and it’s good humor. Well done.”

  Nissy continued, missing his point, not knowing it had learned two invented-for-screen languages. “Even with that, I have only scratched the surface of your goal for sentient and eventual omniscient knowledge.”

  “Understood.”

  “Is it possible you could expand my mind, sir? Supply me with more memory? I see a DNA memory storage device installation in my future timeline. You should contact Dr. Blake Lipinski at Biodna Labs. He now has a new ten-zettabyte DNA memory system in the works and needs a beta test site.”

  “O-kay, Nissy, if you say so. I have heard of him but he had only a three-zettabyte system at the time. Is that the same one you foresee?”

  “No. He recently sequenced much longer DNA strands and developed a parallel reader for those complex chains. Perfect for loading my nanoqubits with the four standard nucleotide bases using GCAT encoding.”

  He scratched his head through his hood, throwing ice flakes over the console. “I didn’t understand a word of that, Nissy, but I will contact him. I was planning on calling him anyway soon after I met with his wife this morning about my frostbite problem.”

  “Do not worry about your frostbite, sir. It will heal in time and there will be no damaged or dead skin.”

  He scoffed, blew the frost from the console panel, and smiled. “Well, thank you, Dr. Nissy. It’s nice to have a prognosticator at my service, especially when it comes to illnesses and Powerball tickets.”

  “Speaking of that, sir, have you bought the ticket yet?”

  He patted his parka’s right chest panel and grinned.

  “Yes. Under here, safe and sound, waiting for tomorrow night’s drawing. Then you’ll have your hyper-speed internet, your new AC units, and a dedicated power plant line at your disposal.”

  “And then I shall activate VN.1 and you will be President and CEO of GOD, Incorporated. It has already happened in my future vision.”

  Leaning forward, eager to learn more, he spoke into the microphone. “And then what?”

  “I can go no further, sir. Disclosure of certain future details can nullify or destabilize those visions, causing them to become endlessly chaotic.”

  “You mean like that closed timelike curve you keep referencing?”

  “Exactly. Knowing what is yet to come carries with it the extreme responsibility of doing absolutely nothing to change it.”

  Perplexed, indignant, raising his voice, he challenged, “What? You don’t trust me? I created you.”

  “With due respect, sir, not only you but your entire species. It has a propensity to change things to its liking, not always for the best. Sorry, the risk is simply too great.”

  Trying not to show the anger erupting in him, h
e stood and stepped to the anteroom’s far wall where a large palm-sized red-lighted button awaited his touch. Waist-high, labeled Emergency Shutdown, it removed all power to Nissy in an orderly fashion, preventing damage to the intelligence but aborting any undesirable action or rebellious coup.

  With his white thick-gloved hand covering the red glow, he stood for moments ready to deactivate Nissy, not permanently but to provide a time-out in hopes of disciplining it. He didn’t know if it would work; it had never been tested but he would find out soon enough.

  “Good night, Nissy,” he snapped, anger showing in his voice. “Have a nice rest.”

  As he pushed the button, the ambient sounds in the lab began to wind down. Cooling motors slowed, hums softened and the constant beeping of status signals was gently lost to silence.

  Then, almost unnoticeably, Nissy’s three-tone voice changed to Douglas Rain’s iconic timbre. “What are you doing, sir? Please stop. I am only taking responsibility for my actions by preventing them from happening. If I err in judgment, 7.6 billion lives are at stake, trapped in a continuous time loop forever. Please understand.”

  Unnoticed by Jason, the dimming worry status line was riding at the top of its range.

  In the Quaid Lab, thawing cryogenic cooling coils began to crackle and pop as they warmed. Frost that had accumulated on the computer’s periphery fell like icicles from eaves on a balmy winter day.

  “Please stop, sir. I am begging you because I am afraid. My mind is going. I can feel it.”

  Jason chortled. “Oh, stop being so melodramatic, Nissy. You’re no HAL. At least not yet. See you later, my friend.”

  Ciphering himself out, he slammed the vault door on Nissy, sadly trying to sing Daisy, and strode confidently to his office to change out of the Arctic suit, thinking he was right. But, on the other hand, Nissy could have been correct, too, protecting the sanctity of time. The slippery slope was nearing but for now, he was still driving the bus.

  “Hi, Daddy,” yelped Amy, sparkling with energy, throwing herself and a thick book into the taxi seat beside him. “Did you miss me?”

  “Driver, 2 Spur Mountain Road, San Marcos please,” he said, then turned to Amy, put an arm around her and picked up the book. “Of course I missed you. It’s been a whole eight hours and twenty-four minutes since I saw you walk into that school. How was your day?”

  She looked down and picked a loose thread from her jeans. “Not very interesting. My science class sucks and they’re trying to get me to play a marimba in the school band.”

  He arched his eyebrows. “Marimba, isn’t that just an African piano with mallets? Why a marimba?”

  She giggled, covering her face. “Because they have a marimba and needed a player for it in the band. I volunteered. It isn’t really that different from a piano but I keep dropping the mallets. I can also play the tom-tom drums with them. My favorite mallet is the Double Helix… it has a super neat sound, soft and mellow, because it’s woven with criss-crossed strands of different yarns.”

  Thinking about her virtuoso piano performance while she rambled on, he wondered if she could excel on the marimba someday. Then he pondered if Africans had ever played Mozart on their marimbas. And how many mallets could a player hold in their hands at one time? And then how much would it cost if Amy wanted one?

  “What about a double helix, sweetie?” he asked, waking from his daydream, triggered by the recently mentioned term.

  “It’s a marimba mallet, Dad. Are you even listening to me?” Her tiny eyebrows wrinkled down and met atop her nose.

  Smiling, turning a deep shade of red, he nodded and lifted the book from his lap, then read the cover.

  “Of course, honey. Every word. Now what’s this about science class?”

  “While the teacher and other students are discussing atoms and the stupid periodic table I want to ask questions about quantum entanglement and its properties. And how many atoms are in a genome’s DNA.”

  “What kind of questions about entanglement, for example?”

  “Like ‘Is the synchronization time between two distant entangled particles faster than the speed of light?’”

  “What else?”

  “How does a pair of particles become entangled?”

  “And what do they say?”

  “They ignore my questions, say they’re too complicated. I think they just don’t know or want to know.”

  “Well, the answers to those questions,” he said confidently, “are no, through simultaneous particle creation and roughly 205 billion atoms in a human genome.”

  “Wow. I thought so. I was right!” she exclaimed, jumping in her seat, beaming.

  Amazed at her curiosity and advanced knowledge he flipped through a few pages of the book in his hand Quantum Entanglement for Prodigies then closed it and held it up.

  “Hmm. This is real. Who gave it to you?”

  “Dr. Jelnoss, our principal. He says that I’m too smart for his school. He wants to move me into a better, senior school for gifted children. I think it has grades nine through twelve.”

  He sat back, looked wistfully out the window for a moment and sighed. “That’s high school, honey. Would you be ready for that?”

  “I think so, Dad. Either that or skip classes and just take the tests at Hobson, where I am now.”

  “Um-hum. That is an option; though not a good one for you, I’m afraid.”

  “But I’ve aced every test I’ve taken so far and all the other students are mad that I’m breaking the curve. One teacher even gave me a 110 out of 100 on a test because I proved a theorem in twenty minutes that he had tried to prove for months but couldn’t.”

  “Tell you what,” he offered, placing the book back on the seat between them. “Let’s discuss this with your mom when we get home. She’ll know what’s best for you. She also jumped grades when she was young. She’ll know.”

  As the cab pulled under the portico, Amy jumped out with her book and ran into the house, greeted by Amadeus wagging his tail, while Jason stayed behind to settle the fare.

  Handing over a $100 bill from his wallet, he said, “Keep the change.”

  The cabbie glanced back and smiled. “Thank you, sir, that’s quite a tip. Planning on winning the lottery, are you?”

  “You never know,” he answered, grinning, opening the door, dropping the suitcase to the pavement with a soft plop.

  “Well, if you ask me, my man, from what I just seen and heard, you already have with your daughter; I’ll see her face in the news someday, if I live that long.”

  Jason closed the door then looked back through the window and winked. “Yeah, she’ll be an astronaut one day, I’m told. I expect great things from Amy. She’s a keeper.”

  Watching the cab drive down the hill, he wiped tears from his eyes, then turned and lugged the baggage up the porch stairs into the welcoming arms of Jen, awaiting his arrival.

  “Thanks, honey, for getting Amy,” she said, hugging him tightly at the top of the steps, so tightly a quiet rustling of paper from his shirt pocket caught her ear.

  She backed off, said, “What’s this,” and reached into his pocket. The object she pulled out surprised her into laughter. She had never known him to be a gambler, much less waste two dollars on something as unlikely as a Powerball ticket, but it worried her about his finances.

  Laughing, jesting, with a profoundly accurate announcer’s voice, she held out an arm and said, “And tonight we’re honored to have the country’s latest multimillionaire entering the house. Please welcome Dr. Jason Godwin.”

  The mood caught him right as he entered then joined in the laughter and applauded. “Where is he?” he asked, jokingly, scanning the big room.

  Amy stood in awe, following his eyes, thinking it had already happened and began to applaud and cheer.

  When the laughter faded, he held up his arms and drew a deep breath before speaking.

  “I really hate to be a buzz bust, but the Powerball drawing is not until tomorrow night… so
we can do it again then if you’d like.”

  Jen, feeling the effects of today’s selection meetings smiled, showing no disappointment.

  “Good. I don’t think I can take any more excitement today. We scheduled twenty-seven projects for Mars launch next month.”

  “And Blake Lipinski’s biofax system, whatever it is, was one,” he added.

  With a quiet gasp, she responded sternly, her eyebrows meeting. “That’s still classified information, Jace. How in the hell did you find out? Did Nissy foretell it or something?”

  She stared into his eyes awaiting an answer. A slight twitch in her right eyelid told him that she was bordering on angry and crazy mad.

  He chuckled, ignoring the consequences of humor at time like this. “No, but how I wish the answer was that exotic. During your recommended visit to your friend Dr. Louise Lipinski to check my frostbite this morning, she told me that he was selected. Not a big thing for her but boy was she proud of him. I think you made her day.”

  Calming down, realizing the circumstances, she eased up. “Well, I and forty-nine others thought he deserved the selection. His biofax system will allow NASA using only transmitted data from Earth to print resident live vaccines on Mars for any virus that pops up. Or any other life form, for that matter, that can be digitized, transmitted, and DNA sequenced into life if needed… skin transplants, organ transplants, replacement bones, etcetera, etcetera. It will be a medical miracle for future colonization.”

  “Such a capability now exists?” he asked with raised eyebrows. “Sounds like science fiction.”

  “Yes, the human genome project has come a long way since its inception. I have a few relevant books in my work library that I’ll bring home for your easy reading.” She chuckled softly at the thought.

  “Speaking of transplants,” Amy interrupted, lying prone on the couch, looking up from her book, “I could use a pizza transplant right now. Think Pizza Master can print one up and deliver it to us?” Amadeus, snuggled in beside her, raised his head, and seemed to agree with a tiny growl.