Magic, Machines and the Awakening of Danny Searle

by John McWilliams

David took out a pack of Bicycle playing cards and fanned them out in front of me. He then scooped them up and stacked them into a nice neat pile.

  “Am I supposed to choose one?”

  “No. At least not yet.” He smiled. “Your father asked me to help out with the A.I. XPRIZE presentation. He wants me to add a little pizazz.”

  “Oh, good idea, a magician at a scientific presentation. When do you have to leave for the airport?”

  “I’m staying the night in one of your father’s guest rooms.”

  “We’re having a Christmas party tonight,” Danny announced from across the kitchen. “Here at the house.”

  “Sounds good,” David said.

  “There will be eggnog,” Ishana added.

  “Sounds even better.”

  It sounded like a disaster. I did the rough calculations: If they were drinking rum eggnog, my father would insist on Danny staying the night, too. Danny and David, former girlfriend and boyfriend, under one roof—drunk?

  “Tyler?” David snapped me out of it. “Do you know what card this is?” He rested a finger on the deck.

  “The top card? Three of clubs,” I said absently.

  “And the second?”

  “Six of hearts.”

  “Third?”

  “Jack of clubs. Three of hearts, two of spades, six of diamonds, ten of clubs. You want me to go through the entire deck?”

  “I only showed you these cards for a second, and I didn’t even ask you to remember them. Why did you?”

  “I remembered their pattern.”

  “Their pattern?”

  “If I showed you a word, would you remember its letters? All you’re doing here is asking me to spell a word or… hum a melody. It’s just a pattern.”

  I glanced over at my father, presently flirting with Danny and Ishana. No doubt he suggested this stunt to David. And David, not unlike every scientist I’ve ever encountered, just had to see if the rat could find the cheese.

  “I’m impressed,” David said.

  “Why?” I stood. “It’s not a trick.”

  10

  Later that day, my father, Ishana, David and Danny left for the Christmas show. Danny had practically begged me to go, but I wasn’t about to be the fifth wheel on her double date to see some sappy musical. Instead, I retrieved my C. F. Martin guitar from my mother’s and sat up in the Turret, working on a classical-blues version of “Stairway to Heaven.”

  By ten o’clock, I could hear them downstairs, Danny going on about a holiday show that David had once produced, undeniable pride in her voice. They made eggnog in the kitchen, then took their conversation into the library. I waited a good ten minutes before sneaking down to steal my own glass of their rum concoction. When I returned to the tower, I stared up at the stars through the panorama of windows, continuing my role as Quasimodo.

  Would Danny and David end up sharing a room tonight? With a good dose of alcohol, past disagreements could easily be forgotten. Or maybe they’d simply slip back into familiar routines. Couples had been known to do that. Sitting on the floor, I slid down the wall and rested my head on the radiator. I was tired, a little drunk—though not drunk enough to try anything foolish tonight. Tomorrow, though, if David wanted a war, then that’s exactly what he was going to get.

  I closed my eyes and awoke what seemed like an instant later. It was morning. My cheek glued to the oak floor, squinting out the corner of my eye at the battleship gray filling the windows above me, I lifted my head and placed it back down. From under the radiator, a reddish-blue dust bunny stared at me.

  “What are you looking at?” I muttered.

  After conjuring the requisite willpower, I pushed myself up, grabbed my shoes and guitar and staggered down the spiral stairs, escaping the Castle into the morning gloom.

  A hot shower, four Advils and a cup of coffee later, I was back at Quantum Bay. It was eight-fifteen by the time I arrived, and my father’s house was still quiet.

  Inside QBL, I turned on the lights and the heat and stared at the pile of Dell Computer boxes. Two of them had large X’s on them: my highly customized machines. My father had no doubt placed them there like that for me to find—my early Christmas presents.

  From the storage room, I dug out three partitions and made a cubicle next to the electronics rack, where I then installed my computers. I found two twenty-four-inch monitors and a toggle box for switching between machines.

  All afternoon I kept expecting my father to come in, but he never did. They had to have gotten pretty plastered last night.

  During the next ten hours I worked undisturbed, music in my ears, mapping out some new ideas, until suddenly I realized there was a hand on my shoulder. I nearly leapt out of my chair.

  “What the hell…?” I yanked my earbuds out.

  My father. “Sorry, sorry.”

  “I hate when you do that.”

  “Making headway?”

  “I was…” I rubbed my neck. “I was about to do a little experimenting with the evolutionary compiler on the other computer.” I pointed at the rack. I wanted it established that I had claimed both machines.

  “Good.” He nodded. “When I saw your van outside this morning, I just assumed you went somewhere with José.”

  “Nope—been here all day.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “Where have you been? Where’s David? He leave?”

  “I dropped him off at the airport around noon, and I’ve been at Cobalt since.”

  “And Danny?”

  “She went back to her aunt’s house.”

  “When?”

  “This morning.”

  “So, she stayed the night?”

  “Yes, but don’t worry, she and David were both way too drunk to do anything. Danny passed out on the couch in the library.”

  “And David? He make it to his room?”

  “Well, no, he actually slept on the floor.”

  “In the library? Six guestrooms and they end up sleeping together in the library?”

  “They didn’t sleep ‘together.’ David just didn’t want her to think we’d abandoned her there. But, I’m telling you, nothing happened. Not last night, anyway. Actually, I’m beginning to wonder if anything’s ever happened between those two.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t put my finger on it. There’s just this odd vibe between them.” He shrugged.

  “Maybe he cheated on her or something,” I said.

  “I doubt it. David’s way too disciplined for that. You should see how much work goes into one of his productions. When David wants something, he’s as focused as one of those vampires he plays.”

  “You mean a bloodsucking bat?”

  “Anyway…” My father frowned, looked around the lab. “I’ll let you get back to it. Will it bother you if I work at the electronics bench?”

  “That’s why I have these.” I slapped one of my upholstered walls. “By the way, that brick David supposedly threw through the window. Did you heat it up in the oven for him?”

  “Bricks really do retain their heat.” My father smiled. “But, as a magician’s apprentice, I don’t think I should be giving away any secrets.”

  “David’s teaching you magic now?”

  “He’s trying.”

  “Good God.” I replaced my earbuds.

  Several hours later, I ran into a mathematical problem I thought best suited for my mother. My father was busy with whatever he was doing anyway.

  I went home, hoping to catch my mother before she went to sleep, but missed her. Then missed her again in the morning when I overslept. This left me no choice but to call her secretary and make an appointment.

  At around eleven a.m., I entered the Mathematics Department Building at Cobalt National Laboratory. The institutional-green walls, the traffic-fatigued floors and the rancid waft of heating-duct mustiness brought back a flood of memories: a childhood spent roaming these and similar halls.

  At the end of the hall I knoc
ked on the door of room 110.

  “Just a moment.” My mother halted me with an index finger. She was behind her desk, glasses on, a stack of papers in front of her. “Redundant,” she muttered, making a red hash mark through whatever it was that she was reading.

  I removed the books from the chair next to her desk and sat down.

  My mother’s office was about half the size of my father’s Cobalt office and, although it lacked his macabre collection of robot appendages, it was of the same utilitarian Cold War style—right down to the flower-pot-adorned HP computer. One of the walls was floor-to-ceiling books, and the other three were whiteboards covered in explosions of calculations, annotations and scrawl.

  “Good morning,” she said, slapping her red marker down on the stack of papers as if punishing them for having taken up our time. “I heard you come in last night. How’s Prometheus coming along?”

  “I ran into a problem.”

  “Big problem or little problem?”

  “You tell me.” I took a sheet of graph paper out of my back pocket and handed it to her. She adjusted the collar of her blue knit sweater as if fearing my calculations might find her unkempt. She stared at the paper and, after a minute or two, went up to one of the boards. She examined the mathematical graffiti written there and erased a three-foot section.

  “I can’t tell you how this will affect your upper-level agent formation,” she said, rewriting my formulas, “but if we use tensors to derive your reactive agent arrays, we can eliminate the coordinate system references and that’ll make your later transforms a breeze.” She looked at me over her glasses. “This next part’s going to get a little dicey.”

  For the next two hours, she and I debated the most efficient ways of coaxing the desired behavior out of my agents, while our three-foot section of board expanded into a ten-foot solution of symbolic logic and grand sweeping arrows.

  “You do that so easily,” I said, taking a moment to appreciate the symphony of logic before me. “Perfect. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. But you’re the one who has to make those upper levels sing.”

  “They already are.” I pointed to my temple.

  “I don’t suppose you need to jot any of this down? No, I suppose not.” She returned to her desk. “Just remember, you need to take a step back sometimes and let your subconscious do the heavy lifting. Remember the story of Sir Isaac Newton and how he worked and worked until he finally decided to sit under an apple tree?”

  “Sure, and he got hit on the head with an apple.”

  “Yes, and he discovered gravity and all that, but…” My mother placed her glasses on her desk and leaned toward me conspiratorially. “What most people don’t know is that after he was hit by the apple, he moved over to a fig tree. And that’s where he made his most monumental discovery.”

  I stared at her, rolled my eyes. “Fig Newtons?”

  “You want one?” She removed a baggie-full from her desk. “You can’t think about your problems if you’re chewing a Newton.” She handed me one.

  “You know, you’re a little weird.”

  “I know.”

  “By the way—” I bit into my cookie. “You should see the dataset for this project. It’s a mess. Why does Dad always have to do things the most difficult way?”

  “There’s a method to his madness. You know that.”

  “Sure, his method is maximizing my suffering.”

  “He just wants to see you challenged so you’ll push yourself. The mind is healthiest and happiest when challenged. I think Nietzsche said something like that.” She removed another cookie from the bag and handed it to me. “Life is a struggle. But that’s also what makes it worthwhile. The ancient Greeks actually believed that tragedy was a thing of beauty. They embraced it.”

  “Sure, in their plays. But who would really want to be one of those characters?”

  “You don’t like the idea of being part of an immortal, four-dimensional work of art?”

  “Not if it’s a tragedy.”

  “Well, then you’re not going to like this next bit of news.”

  My mother informed me that Danny would be working for the next eight weeks with Dr. Holstein’s group at Cobalt. Holstein needed someone who was smart and who could do data entry, and as it so happened, there also seemed to be a bit of a problem between Peter and Danny. Peter had been complaining that Danny had taken over too much of the business side of Quantum Bay.

  “Danny is getting punished because she’s better than Peter at business administration?”

  “She’s not getting punished. And as soon as we get the N5s from Nano Memory, your father will sit down with Nate Landenberg and get the Peter situation straightened out. Remember, Nate’s Peter’s grandfather, and he and his company are spending a great deal of money on these devices.”

  “It still sucks.”

  “It won’t be that bad—you can visit her any time you want. I’m sure Holstein would love to have you stop by for a visit.”

  “You mean he’d love to put me to work.”

  “Just keep doing what you’re doing on Prometheus and I’m sure this’ll all work out.”

  “Says the woman who ranks the law of universal gravitation below a cookie recipe.”

  I stared at my hands. Day Two in my war with David and I’d already lost a major strategic advantage: access to Danny. Well, there was nothing I could do about it now but get back to the trenches.

  I walked to the door. My mother joined me.

  “Girls are a struggle,” I said prophetically.

  “Trust me.” She kissed me on the cheek. “So are boys.”

  11

  “If we look up at the night sky, would we ever say that we see the Big Dipper—if we haven’t yet identified it?”

  It was nearly three months after my motorcycle ride with Danny, and I was at another of my father’s dinner meetings. Tonight he was lecturing us on how the subconscious mind enables the conscious mind to see.

  “We may see the stars that comprise the Big Dipper, but the Big Dipper isn’t its stars, it’s a pattern—a pattern that remains invisible to us until we recognize it. And what is recognition but a cue? A sensation brought forth by the subconscious mind that says, ‘yes, I have detected this pattern.’

  “You see, all recognizable patterns, and therefore all objects—from this teacup to a grizzly bear—are represented as sensations activated by the subconscious mind. You might even say that that’s all our conscious minds are: melting pots of sensations.

  “This teacup, for example—I don’t happen to have a grizzly bear—is represented in our minds as an icon of sensation that has either borrowed from, or is associated with, other such icons. For example: the icon for drinking and fragile and ceramic and cup.

  “So, immediately upon recognition, though we may have never seen this particular cup before, we know all about it. It has a familiar feel.” He held it up. “We don’t bring up an encyclopedia entry in our mind’s eye. We simply recognize it. And how do we recognize it? We feel we recognize it.”

  He paused to refill his wine glass.

  During the past three months, I had made significant progress on the Prometheus project. The A.I. XPRIZE board had informed us that our presentation date was now set for March seventh of the following year. But overall we were still running behind. Nano Memory was having production problems with our N5 nano-nodes, and that in turn was delaying the second phase of my work.

  The problem at Nano Memory was also responsible for another setback—for me. When QBL’s financial resources had started to run low, David had stepped in with a five-hundred-thousand-dollar check—handed to my father over lunch—making him now a vested partner in Quantum Bay Labs. I tried not to think about it, just concentrated on Prometheus, my pathway to winning over Danny—Danny, who, still working for Dr. Holstein at Cobalt, only came in to QBL once a week to do payroll.

  For tonight’s dinner meeting, everyone was here: Mohamed and his wife on my left,
my mother and the twins on my right; and, across the table, Danny, Peter, Stewart, David and Ishana. My father, looking ridiculous in his magician’s cape, stood at the head of the table.

  He snapped his fingers, and an index card with a solid black square on it appeared. The card’s glossy surface shimmered in the light of the two candelabras at the center of the table. Apparently, David’s lessons were paying off.

  “Can anyone tell me what this is?” he asked.

  “A square,” Tara and Jasmine called out.

  “That’s correct.” My father looked at the card. “Can anyone not see the square? I mean, can anyone look at this card and purposefully not see a square? Let me save you the trouble. You can’t. And that, my friends, is a form of blindness. You cannot not see this square.”

  “But it is a square,” Tara said.

  “Only because you’ve been trained to identify squares.” My father halted Tara with his index finger. “And how about this?” He snapped his fingers, and the card he was holding fell to the floor. He looked at David. “Oops.”

  David shrugged.

  The twins howled with laughter.

  “All right, I guess we’ll just have to do this the old fashioned way.” He turned so we couldn’t see what he was doing, then: “Ta-dah.” He showed us another card.

  “What is that, a Rorschach test?” my mother asked.

  “It looks like an anteater,” Peter said.

  “An anteater?” My father looked at the card. “Ah, I see the problem. Perhaps this will help.” He rotated the card one hundred and eighty degrees.

  It was a silhouette of the United States.

  “Your recognition of this shape is almost palpable,” my father said. “But all I did was turn the card right side up. It’s the same card, the same shape. So what happened? You recognized it. That’s it. Now you can see the United States. And you are all now blind to this blob being anything else. Even if I turn it upside down again. You see? Now it’s just the United States upside down.”

  “Isn’t that more like the opposite of blindness?” my mother asked.

  “Recognition—the sensation we feel when we recognize an object—is precisely how we see. If we didn’t ‘feel’ we recognized an object, we wouldn’t see it. And this sensation of recognition can be as faint as a whisper”—he showed us the card with the square on it—“or as loud as a shout.” He showed us a card with a swastika on it. “Well, that’s as loud as I thought I should get in present company. But you get the idea.