The Espionage Game

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  Madeline stopped next to Reinhardt and placed her notes on the table that Jerry Rodell was using for a desk.

  “Dr. Madeline MacCauley,” Reinhardt said, “may I introduce you to Colonel Jerold Rodell.”

  “Please call me Jerry.” He leaned across the table to shake her hand. Instead of taking his hand, she glared at him as though he’d committed some heinous crime.

  “So you’re the idiot who nearly destroyed five years of work,” she snarled.

  Jerry blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “You’re the one who flew Cleo into the ground the other day, aren’t you?”

  “You mean the simulator?” Jerry watched her cautiously, realizing that she would inflict bodily harm on him if she had the means.

  “Cleo is no simulator, Colonel,” she growled. “She’s a highly sophisticated computer system. She has to be treated with care and respect.”

  “You mean babied?” Jerry Rodell’s face began to flush.

  “Yes,” she snapped.

  “Listen, lady,” Jerry grumbled. “Your precious little computer is part of a military weapons system. My job is to see if it can hack it. I’m just a pilot, just like all the others who will have to risk their lives in that weapons system. As of now, it’s worthless. It got me killed the first time I was in it because it was more concerned about the goddamn regulations than in surviving. The only reason why I’m still here is that I believe it just might be possible to iron the bugs out of that precious little computer of yours. Now, Doctor, either we work together to obtain that goal, or we don’t. The choice is yours. Have I made myself clear?”

  Furious, Madeline MacCauley scowled at Jerry Rodell. He could hear her breathing. Her brown eyes burned into him, reminding him of a cornered animal. Slowly, carefully, he lowered his hand to the table, touching it to reassure himself that it still separated him from her.

  “You arrogant bastard!”

  “I’ve been called that before, Doctor,” he responded. “It comes with the job. It has something to do with almost getting yourself killed on a daily basis. Now are we going to work together, or do I go see General Winslow and tell him that your precious little computer isn’t going to hack it?”

  “You leave me little choice, don’t you? Either I stand by and watch you destroy five years of work, or you simply have it killed.”

  “I have no desire to do either, Doctor,” Jerry announced as he stepped back from the table.

  “Then why did you crash on purpose? It left Cleo confused. It contradicted everything she’d been taught.” Although her breathing had become less labored, anger still flashed in her eyes.

  “It was just a simulator run.”

  “Cleo can’t differentiate between the simulator and the real aircraft. To her, they’re exactly the same.”

  Jerry watched the distraught woman. He found himself feeling sorry for her and, at the same time, strangely drawn to her.Must be my gonads , he groused, fighting to keep from shaking his head in disgust.I must really be getting hard up if I find this bitch attractive .

  “I think you underestimate your own work, Doctor,” he said at last. “Although Cleo may not think ofMary Sue as a simulator, as you or I would, she clearly knows that there is a difference. She told me thatMary Sue can pretend, whileMary Lou , the real aircraft, can’t.”

  “What is he talking about?” Madeline demanded of Daniel Reinhardt.

  “Ah,” Reinhardt responded, “I think he is referring to the comment that Cleo made when we were introducing Colonel Rodell to the visual system with a clip of the Grand Canyon. Cleo told us thatMary Sue , the simulator, could pretend by going anywhere it wanted instantly.”

  “I told Cleo that the crash was just pretend,” Jerry offered. He held his hands out in a gesture of supplication. “She seemed to accept it as part ofMary Sue ’s capabilities.”

  “Fortunately, you’re right,” Madeline agreed with a weak nod. “But why did you do it? It could have destroyed her, literally driven her insane.”

  “Insane?” Jerry glanced at Dr. Reinhardt.

  “If you push humans too hard, too long, they go insane,” Reinhardt answered. “Why not a computer, especially one like Cleo?”

  “All I was trying to do was to find out if Cleo would follow my orders or not. Not five minutes earlier, she refused to take evasive action, saying it was against regulations. It got me killed.”

  “You look alive, unfortunately,” Madeline MacCauley rejoined.

  “Fortunately, Cleo is still sane, Doctor,” Jerry retorted, staring at her. “Now, are we going to get on with the job or not?”

  Madeline glared at him and then shrugged her shoulders. Without further comment, she opened the file folder on the top of her pile of notes. Finally, she turned to the whiteboard and began to draw something next to Dr. Reinhardt’s chart.

  Satisfied that peace had been restored, Jerry sat down and watched Dr. MacCauley work. At first, he paid attention to what she was drawing, but living alone for over three weeks soon compelled him to notice that Dr. MacCauley was indeed an attractive woman. Even the loose lab coat did little to hide her well-proportioned figure.

  Not a bad figure at all, he thought while he undressed her mentally. What he found appealed to him, even to the point of wondering what she must be like in bed. His revelry popped like a pricked balloon.Just my luck that she’s a man-hater , he mused while he continued to study her.And General Winslow has Captain Wilma Korfman engaged on a semi-permanent basis. God, what hell I go through for my country. Ah, just wait until General Winslow’s back is turned! God, I bet that lady is wild in bed! he told himself, imagining being in bed with Wilma. A contented smile came to his lips.

  His imagined revelries with Wilma ended abruptly as Madeline MacCauley faced toward him. She took a step sideways so that he could see what she had drawn on the board. He recognized it immediately: it was a human brain.

  “What are you staring at?” she insisted.

  “Your brain.”

  “Are you intimidated by intelligent women?” she sneered.

  “Not at all, Sweet Pea,” he responded derisively, “my mother has a Ph.D. in theoretical mathematics.”

  “My name isn’t Sweet Pea, Colonel,” Madeline complained angrily.

  “Then stop acting like a fluff brain and start behaving like the intelligent person you’d obviously have to be if you really did invent Cleo. We are here to discuss Cleo and how she works, not to trade insults. The brain I was referring to is the one you just drew on the board. You did a superb job.”

  Confused by the deluge of mixed criticism and praise Madeline MacCauley regarded Colonel Rodell. She glanced over to Dr. Reinhardt, who was sitting quietly at the end of the table, discreetly remaining out of the conversation. Convinced that she would receive no support from him, she looked back toward Jerry and glared at him.

  “You know something about neural anatomy?” she asked.

  “Certainly,” Jerry answered softly. “I took it while studying pre- med at Cornell. I rather enjoyed it, even though I eventually switched to liberal arts.”

  “You must have disappointed your mother,” Madeline said. Her tone was impassive, leaving Jerry Rodell no clue whether her remark was derisive or not. Confused, he scrutinized her and decided that it wasn’t.

  “Yes,” Jerry chuckled, “particularly when I … oh, that’s not important, Dr. MacCauley. Let’s get back to Cleo.”

  Madeline MacCauley checked her notes, then walked over to the whiteboard with startling grace. Jerry had expected a woman who was so indifferent to her appearance to move more like a cow than a fashion model. He watched her while she shuffled her notes and decided that she could be a very attractive, almost pretty woman if she chose to be.

  “Since you have some background in neural anatomy, Colonel,” she began, “I won’t bore you with all of the kindergarten descriptions of how the nerve works. I think it is sufficient to say that one can compare the human brain to the organizational chart that Dan dre
w for you.” She pointed to Dr. Reinhardt’s diagram.

  “Most of the brain works autonomously, that is to say, without us being conscious of it. For example, blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing are all controlled by subconscious centers in the brain stem. Yet, we can override these with higher parts of the brain. Most notably, we can hold our breath. That is to say, our conscious brain can give orders to the lower centers of the brain and modify their activity.”

  Madeline examined Dr. Reinhardt’s diagram for a second and then continued, “This would be akin to the president of the company calling up the head of the manufacturing department and telling him to start making blue widgets instead of red widgets.”

  “I understand,” Jerry complained as boredom overcame him. “You’re saying that Cleo is analogous to the cerebral cortex, the so- called gray matter. And that all of the other computers such as the voice synthesizer and voice recognition units are akin to lower parts of the brain.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then with the obvious out of the way,” Jerry continued, “how does Cleo work? She is unlike any computer I ever studied before.”

  Madeline MacCauley contemplated him for a moment. He had proven to be far more complex than the brutish animal she had originally expected. Puzzled, she let her guard slip for an instant and realized that he was not only intelligent, but handsome as well. Stirrings that she hadn’t felt for months awoke, and she permitted herself to wonder what it would be like to sleep with him.

  No, Maddy!she warned herself.He’s as bad as the others. All that bastard would want is to screw you—sexually and emotionally .

  “You study computers?” she asked, regaining her original train of thought.

  “Intellectually,” he answered.

  “What does that mean?”

  Jerry laughed, pleasantly so, she thought.

  “I’m no electrical engineer,” he told her, “but I’ve always been intrigued by computer architecture, particularly parallel computers. It might be a holdover from when I studied neural anatomy. Had I gone into medicine, I probably would have gone into neurology.”

  Madeline pondered the enigma that sat before her. He was just a fighter jock, yet he could obviously have done just about anything he chose. Finally, she suppressed her curiosity and returned to her explanation of Cleo.

  “Cleo is a neural network made up of electronically rewritable gate array logic chips, or ERGALs. She has about eight thousand of them. Each array has over one million elements on it, and each element can be dynamically interconnected to any other element.”

  “Just how many of these active elements did you say there are in Cleo?”

  “There are over eight thousand chips, each with a million or so active elements,” Madeline answered. “That’s eight billion.”

  Jerry whistled aloud. “That’s almost as many as a human brain, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Colonel,” she replied, “but we are still orders of magnitude away from the complexity of the human brain’s interconnections. Also, Cleo weighs almost one hundred pounds, not the nine or ten of the average human brain.”

  “Still, it’s phenomenal. How come I never heard about it before?” Jerry leaned back in his chair.

  “Well, you see, Colonel,” she smirked, “it’s a secret. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? We invented secrets thousands of years ago to keep people like you from knowing about things they shouldn’t know.”

  Miffed, Jerry Rodell’s face flushed. He raised his forefinger high over his head. “One point for Sweet Pea,” he growled while he made an imaginary tick mark with his finger.

  “You asked for it, Colonel,” she responded haughtily.

  “What’s with you, lady?” Jerry protested. “I’ve never laid eyes on you before, and you treat me like scum the instant you walked into the room.”

  She gave him an icy glare.

  “Colonel! Madeline!” Dan Reinhardt yelled as he hurried to his feet to get between them. “I think this has gone far enough!”

  He glanced at Jerry, who was still seated, although Jerry’s face was flushed and his hands were knotted into fists. Madeline was trembling slightly, but not from fear; she was ready to take on Jerry Rodell and make a good account of herself.

  “I think we ought to break this off for a while,” he suggested. He glanced back and forth nervously between the two belligerents. Jerry Rodell shook his head in disagreement.

  “No, Doctor,” he answered gruffly, “we don’t have time. I have a mission to fly in the ATASF simulator tomorrow, and I want to be prepared. We don’t have time to permit personal differences to interfere. Let’s simply can the bullshit and get on with this briefing.”

  Dan Reinhardt studied Jerry Rodell and then Madeline, who was staring at the floor.

  “Madeline,” he inquired gently, “what do you think?”

  She slowly looked up at Reinhardt. Her face was filled with remorse.

  “I agree with the colonel,” she said weakly, “and I apologize for my behavior. Perhaps I’ve been working too hard. I certainly have been irritable.”

  “Good,” he uttered. “I think you should sit down and rest, Madeline. I quite agree that you’ve been working yourself too hard. You should take a couple of days off and go to somewhere—a holiday.”

  Madeline sat in a chair on the far side of the table from Colonel Rodell. She carefully avoided looking at him.

  “For what good it will do, Dr. MacCauley,” Jerry offered, “please accept my apology for calling you Sweet Pea. It was wrong and demeaning.”

  Madeline turned her head very slowly toward Jerry Rodell and acknowledged his apology with a weak nod. He felt sorry for her; her face had the look of defeat, as though she’d failed in some gallant effort.

  “If we can get back to the briefing?” Dr. Reinhardt begged.

  “Could we go into how you program something like Cleo?” Jerry asked. “I mean she’s not like most computers, is she?”

  Dr. Reinhardt glanced at Madeline briefly. “I think I can handle that, Madeline.” Exhausted, she nodded faintly.

  “You’re quite right, Colonel,” Reinhardt said, responding to Jerry Rodell’s last question. “Although all of the support computers are more or less conventional and are programmed in a conventional manner, Cleo has to be trained.”

  “Trained?” Jerry queried.

  “Yes, trained,” Dr. Reinhardt repeated. “She’s a heuristic computer. She learns. Madeline has spent nearly five years teaching Cleo to speak and to understand the simplest commands.”

  “You make it sound like raising a baby,” Jerry suggested. He contemplated Madeline.

  “That’s exactly what it was like, Colonel,” Dr. Reinhardt said. “Except you don’t have to change its diapers or feed it.”

  Jerry Rodell’s face flushed with embarrassment when he recognized the obvious.No wonder she attacked me like an enraged grizzly bear— I got between mama bear and her cub .

  “Ah, Dr. Reinhardt,” he replied, pausing to consider the situation, “isn’t it going to be awfully expensive to make dozens of Cleos. I mean training each one for years will cost millions.”

  “Ah-ha,” Dan Reinhardt exclaimed brightly, “that’s the beauty of Cleo. We can clone her. Once we get Cleo fully trained as a combat copilot, we can copy her programming out and record it into another unit.a ll we would have to do is cross-train the new Cleo with her human pilot, implant the neural nexus into the pilot and.…”

  “Implant the neural nexus?” Jerry interrupted. Madeline’s head snapped around as though she had just received an electric shock.

  “He hasn’t been told?” she asked Reinhardt. He shrugged.

  “What are you two talking about?” Jerry demanded.

  Panic showed on Reinhardt’s face as he glanced anxiously back and forth between Jerry Rodell and Madeline MacCauley, uncertain what to do.

  “What is this neural nexus?” Jerry insisted. “You indicated that it was to be implanted into the pilot. I assume that me
ans me.”

  “General Winslow hasn’t informed you about it? I thought that he briefed you about it before you signed up for the job,” Dr. Reinhardt responded warily.

  “NO, GODDAMNIT!” Jerry bellowed loud enough for his voice to echo off the walls. “WHAT THE HELL IS A NEURAL NEXUS?”

  “I think,” Reinhardt replied cautiously, “the general should explain.”

  “Answer me now, Dr. Reinhardt,” Jerry insisted angrily, “before I show you what a neural nexus is with my right fist.”

  Dr. Reinhardt swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbed down and then up his throat until he found the courage to answer, “I think the best way of explaining it is that they want to rewire you.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Dr. Fred Kelder sat quietly behind his cluttered desk, watching Colonel Jerry Rodell pace angrily back and forth. Madeline MacCauley and Dan Reinhardt hovered near the door, not wishing to become directly involved in the dispute.

  “What the hell is this ‘neural nexus’? And why the hell wasn’t I told that you guys were going to hack up my body as part of the deal?” Jerry Rodell challenged. He came to a stop in front of Fred Kelder’s desk and shuddered, remembering a decades-old TV adventure show in which a severely injured pilot was rebuilt with bionic parts—all supplied by the lowest bidder. That TV show was make-believe—this wasn’t.

  Fred Kelder picked up his coffee mug and took a sip. “General Winslow hasn’t discussed this with you?”

  “NO, GODDAMNIT!” Jerry snarled. Then in a lower tone, he added, “The first I heard about this was just five minutes ago when Dr. Reinhardt causally mentioned it.”

  “I thought he knew,” Reinhardt declared in his own defense.

  Fred raised his hand to forestall further debate. “Okay,” he said with a sigh of resignation, “I guess the general has better things to do. Sit down, Jerry, and I’ll explain.”

  “I’d rather stand,” Jerry replied angrily.

  Fred smashed his fist down on his desk and glared up at Jerry. “Goddamnit, Colonel,” he growled. “When I say ‘sit,’ I mean ‘sit.’ Sit down and cool off. Nobody is going to touch your precious body without your consent. Have I made myself clear?”