by F X Holden
Click. The light finally comes on. Chuck can see the flashbulb going off in my head. “That’s right Ms. O’Hare. IBM created WATSON, but we at the NSA now have HOLMES.”
I make myself another coffee (espresso this time, one teaspoon of condensed milk) but Jenno just wants water and Chuck wants another Americano. It’s actually just a delaying tactic while I’m digesting the whole NSA on my doorstep, letter from the NSA Director, WATSON and HOLMES scenario and trying to work out what the hell NSA wants with me. They must have a bazillion employees and about half of them must be agents who are probably both physically and mentally healthier than me and most of whom probably do up to date with what natural language memory neural networks can actually do these days. So I give up and just dump the drinks on my coffee table.
“OK, I give up,” I tell Chuck. “Why are you here?”
“My turn for a spoiler alert. This is the part that will freak you out O’Hare,” Jenno warns. “Maybe you want to take an extra shot of Pippyzolafeen or whatever happy pill you take these days.”
“I’m good,” I tell him. “Caffeine is kicking in just fine. Go ahead,” I say to Chuck.
He pushes some magazines out from under his feet, pulls one leg up onto the couch, making himself right at home. Takes a pull on his coffee. “HOLMES has been in beta the last three years. Gradually ramping up his ability to take inputs, refining his natural language interface, increasing the complexity of the tasks he’s being given.”
“He?”
“It, he, her, whatever you want. Sherlock HOLMES was a man, so I call the system ‘he’,” he shrugs. “Whatever. Anyway, he’s being doing mundane pattern analysis, signals traffic and intel analysis, stuff we could pull out of most any mainframe with a bit of clever Apache UIMA III programming. In the last year though, we’ve had him doing predictive analyses.”
“Fortune telling?”
“Weather forecasting, actually. He seems to like it. And he’s good at it, better than the National Weather Service.”
“Stop,” Jenno says. “You’re creeping me out. Talking about this computer like it’s a living thing.”
“System, not computer,” he says with his patient voice again. “And no, I’m not sentimental, it isn’t a living thing. This isn’t ‘Deus X’ territory. But HOLMES has been taught the concepts of ‘like/not like’, ‘happy/unhappy’’ and he uses them exactly the same way we do, when he speaks.”
“HOLMES has emotions?” I’m getting creeped out too.
“No. But he understands the concepts; anyway forget that. For the last six months, HOLMES has been chugging through every single intel report we have on likely terrorist targets. Ours, CIA, FBI, DoD, the works.”
“Shut up,” I say. “Going back how far?”
“Uh, mid 1970s I think,” he says. “That’s as far back as we go, digitally.”
“Shut the hell up. That would be bazillions of reports,” I say.
“Several bazillions,” he smiles. “1970s to 2030s, from the Cold War to the first Cyber World War and right up to today.”
I have this image in my head of one of those old computers with the reel to reel tapes, or floppy disks, clunking away for months and months feeding stuff in and HOLMES sitting there like a little toaster, ready to go ‘ping’. I’m afraid to ask, but of course I have to.
“Why?”
“Well, about a week ago, we put a very important question to HOLMES.”
“Who killed JFK?” I ask.
“That is a good question, but no. We asked HOLMES to identify the most likely target for the next major terrorist attack on US interests.”
I thought that saying about your blood going cold was just a saying. But it isn’t. It’s a thing. And mine does. I don’t even have to ask him, because Chuck is already answering my question.
“His answer was a lot more specific than we expected. He said Within the next two weeks there will be a catastrophic attack against US interests in Darwin, Australia,” he says, and pauses. “In Homeland Security threat assessment language, ‘catastrophic’ means an attack causing at least 10,000 deaths. And that was yesterday morning. So if he’s right we have a max of 13 days left.”
“Told you to hurry up,” Jenno grumbles.
I need more than a single espresso now, I want a bourbon, but I’m not standing up to get one. Wrong. Actually I am standing up and I stood up without even realizing it. I’m standing up, staring at Chuck like he’s the one who has mental health issues.
“This is where you come in,” Jenno says. “Sit down again O’Hare.”
I sit.
“This is very much where you come in,” Chuck says. “Obviously, things got a bit pointy when HOLMES threw that out there. There’s people who think everything HOLMES says is gospel, but not everyone thinks HOLMES could even win Jeopardy, let alone predict a terrorist attack. There are plenty of people who want to see HOLMES get it wrong so they can pull the plug on him and just go back to sucking intel out of people’s social media posts.”
“I’m with them,” I say. “I want your creepy computer to be wrong too.”
“Anyway,” he goes on. “HOLMES can receive input in natural language, and he responds in natural language. So we asked him for detail on the attack. I mean, we wanted geotags, target names, suspects, IDs, phone numbers, lists of associates, known addresses, voice signatures, biometrics…”
“I’m guessing HOLMES came up empty,” I say.
“Not completely. We asked for a download on the threat but HOLMES replied: First, I need to speak with Karen ‘Bunny’ O’Hare.”
END PREVIEW
‘Liaoning’, the new future war thriller from FX Holden, will be released in 2019.