I stared at him in utter disbelief. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“I assure you, I am absolutely serious. I have already spent upwards of four billion dollars to that end and we have just begun.”
“You don’t have any qualms about the ethical issues involved?” I asked.
“None whatsoever. I believe that we have to take this step or we will perish. If we don’t destroy ourselves through our own stupidity, this metamorphosis is inevitable. The only question is when will it occur and will it be in time to save us from ourselves. Let me ask you a question. I know that you aren’t active in any religious groups. What are your beliefs about God and religion?”
“I used to call myself an agnostic but to tell you the truth I’d have to say I’m an atheist. Every bit of religious dogma I have ever encountered strikes me as nonsense. I guess there could be a God hiding out there but I don’t see any evidence of the fact. I could be wrong. Mumbo Jumbo, God of the Congo may indeed have the inside track. But I doubt it. Science makes sense. Religion doesn’t. It’s that simple.”
“Good, that’s the way most of us in the project see it,” Fincher replied. “It saves us from worrying about the ethics of tinkering with God’s plan.”
“If God’s got a plan, he is one fucked up creator!” I said.
“He would have to be to have created this situation that humanity faces,” Fincher answered. “No, we got ourselves into this mess and it’s up to us to get ourselves out of it.”
I shook my head and said, “You do think big, I’ll give you that. So how are we going to accomplish this feat?” And much to my surprise, he told me.
Chapter 2
My first day at the Center for Advanced Computing went by in a blur of frenzied activity. CAC was housed in what appeared to be a relatively small building adjacent to the Gates Info Sciences building. It was a two story building with red tile roof and a central garden courtyard complete with a stone fountain filled with lily pads. The two stories housed administrative offices and a couple of labs staffed primarily by graduate students. I had been instructed to take the elevator to the basement and when I entered and pushed the button marked B, a screen appeared in the smoked glass side of the elevator asking me to place my palm in the indicated square. I did so and after a moment a screen came up with my name and Stanford picture ID next to a new row of virtual buttons numbered 1 through 9. A pleasant voice came over the speaker telling me, “Dr. Anderson, please come to the 3rd floor and I will meet you as you arrive.” I pressed 3 and immediately felt the elevator begin to descend. When the door opened a young woman with long, fiery red hair and a face full of freckles was standing there with an i-Pad in her hand and a winning smile on her face. She extended her hand and I shook it, once again being very careful not to crush her knuckles in my mechanical grip. “I’m Claire Ross, Dr. Anderson. It’s a pleasure to meet you at last.”
“Please, call me Colin,” I replied. “I’m not used to the Doctor bit yet. I keep looking around to see who you are talking to.”
“Dr. Fincher asked me to show you around. Is this your first visit to CAC?” Claire asked as we strolled down a wide corridor.
“Yea, I never even heard of it until last week.”
“We keep a pretty low profile. Some of our research might be considered a bit controversial and we don’t really want to create many ripples that might detract from our focus.”
“Are there really 9 sub floors here?” I asked. “You’d never know it from the lobby.”
“Yes, each floor is a little better than 10,000 square feet.”
“Really? That seems bigger than the upper floors,” I commented.
“Oh, it is a lot bigger. We extend out under the Serra Mall. And access to every floor and even every lab is strictly controlled with biometric identity confirmation required in the elevators and lab entrances.”
“You mean the palm print device in the elevator?”
“Yes, and facial identification throughout the complex with iris scanning required for lab entry,” she said as we arrived at a pair of stout metal doors at the end of the corridor. Clair stepped up to the doors and a screen appeared to her left. “Please stand in front of the screen for positive identification,” a voice said from a concealed speaker. Claire stood on a pair of footprints that magically appeared on the floor and a moment later the voice said, “Identity confirmed. Dr. Claire Ross cleared for entry. Dr. Anderson, would you please stand on the mark so I can take a retinal scan for our records.” I stood on the mark and a few moments later a square appeared on the screen. “Please place your palm on the screen for identity confirmation.” I did as the voice requested and then a small door opened on the wall and the voice asked me to place my finger over the indicated spot. A quick sting and then the voice said, “Your DNA will be added to your identity profile. You are cleared to enter, Dr. Anderson.”
“Wow, you guys take security seriously. I assume there’s a security guy running that?” I asked, walking through the doorway.
“No, that’s an AI.”
“Really? I’ve never heard voice synthesis that good before.”
Claire smiled at me and said, “There’s a lot here you haven’t seen before. Why don’t we go into your office?”
“I have an office here? I’m used to a desk stuffed in a corner of the lab I shared with two other PhD students.”
“Well, you have own lab here and an office as well.” Claire opened the door to a spacious office with a smoked glass desk, a Herman Miller Aeron chair, a conference table and 6 chairs and a comfortable looking couch upholstered in brown leather.
“What, no coffee pot?” I joked.
“There’s a drip pot in the kitchen along with an espresso machine. We have a good choice of coffees there. Personally, I recommend the Jamaican Blue Mountain but the Kona Estate’s not bad if you like a milder taste.”
“I think this is going to take some getting used to,” I said, a bit bewildered by my new surroundings.
“Bob wants us to be comfortable in here since most of us in CAC spent upwards of 70 hours a week here. The cafeteria is on the 2nd floor and you can get a great meal, 24 hours a day. There’s also a video arcade and several home theater set-ups there as well. Just enter the shows you want to have available to you on your desktop and they will be automatically recorded for you to view at your leisure. Oh, and there’s a gym as well. You are expected to exercise an hour a day, no matter what your schedule.”
“I’m not all that disciplined when it comes to exercise. How is it monitored?”
“You have a personal AI assistant. She can do most anything for you that a good secretary could do and a whole lot more as well. She’ll monitor you continuously and she can be a bit of a nag if she needs to.”
Claire and I sat down in the office and as I sat down, a huge high def monitor appeared on one wall. “We should discuss how you would like the lab to be set up.” As Claire said that, a floor plan of the lab space appeared on screen. “First, is your office set up the way you want it?” Claire asked.
I looked around and said, “Sure, it’s great.” Office furniture sprites appeared in the floor plan on the monitor wall. “How are you doing that?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m not. Your assistant is. By the way you need to give her a name. I call mine mother because she reminds me of my mother, always nagging me get my homework done.”
“She can hear us now?” I asked incredulously.
“She can hear you anytime, even when you’re not here. That cell phone Bob gave you? She monitors it 24 hours a day and she records everything. It’s really very useful once you get used to it.”
“Isn’t that a bit intrusive?” I asked.
“Not really,” Claire answered. You are the only one with access to any of that. You’ll find she becomes a part of you, taking care of things so you don’t have to. So what do you want to call her?”
“Actually I kind of like your mother idea but since you already took Mother, I’ll call her Sa
ncy. That was my mother’s name.”
“Sancy, I like that,” I heard spoken in the same voice that had greeted me in the elevator and at the door security console. “Any time you want me to do something, just tell me after saying my name.”
“You mean like ‘Sancy, remind me to send flowers to Claire to thank her for her kind tour.’” I said cautiously.
“Yes, exactly like that,” the AI responded. “What kind of flowers do you like?”
“Daisies, white daises,” I answered. “A couple of dozen ought to do it.”
Claire smiled and said, “I told you that you would get the hang of it. And thank you, I love daises.”
For the next several hours, Claire and I planned out the lab. I learned that all of my equipment from my old lab had already been sent over and was set up down the hall. We discussed personnel as well. I had Sancy email several of my old lab assistants to see if they were interested in continuing work on the project. I particularly wanted Sven Norquist to join me. He was a magician in the machine shop, building prototypes of any piece of equipment I needed. I asked Claire if we would continue to have access to the same machine shop and she told me that Robert would rather we do the work in house. There was a good space we could set up with any machinery or computerized milling machines we might want to use. “But that stuff’s expensive!” I complained.
“Not with your budget it’s not.”
“You’re kidding me,” I exclaimed. “We’re talking upwards of half a million dollars here.”
“You don’t need budget approval on anything that costs less than $2 million. You want a 3D laser printer too? I hear they are a great help when you are trying to design prototype parts.”
And that’s how it went. Claire and I brainstormed and planned and Sancy took notes on everything we said. Before we were done, Sancy told us that she had heard back from two of my assistants and both of them had accepted my offer. She told me she would send them to my office when they cleared security the next morning. It took a couple of weeks to get the lab set up and running and during that time we interviewed post docs to fill in key positions in our research team, searching for three more senior researchers to add to our staff.
I knew I wanted an engineer specializing in materials science and I hoped to find someone already active in the field of biomaterial science, a specialty that focuses on materials and surfaces that interact with biological systems. My own research had already led me to the conclusion that we were going to have to junk all of the approaches currently being used in the development of prostheses. They were all mechanical in nature and I was sure we were going to need to discover biological solutions to the same problems. I asked some people at Stanford if they knew of anyone who might be interested in my research and one name came up several times, but always with a caveat. “There’s a guy at Cal Tech, a Dr. Jay Moore who’s supposed to be off the charts brilliant,” the head of the Materials Science department told me. “But he’s odd.”
“I can deal with odd,” I answered him.
“No, I mean he’s really odd. A complete loner who is almost unable to socialize with other people. I met him once at a symposium at Cal Tech. He never once looked at me and sort of grunted when he was introduced to me. His eyes never left his shoes and he smelled like a homeless bum that lived in a sewer. He couldn’t have bathed in weeks.”
I laughed and replied sarcastically, “Sounds like someone every lab could use.”
“You laugh but he just might be. His work is amazing. I would guess he’s an autistic genius. You might want to look at some of his papers. He doesn’t talk much but he can write.”
I found a copy of a paper he had written and published in Science entitled “Molecular Self Assembly and Nanochemistry: a Strategy for the Systhesis of Neurons.” What I read stunned me. Dr. Moore had used the spontaneous aggregations of particles, atoms, molecules, colloids, and even micelles to form into a functional neuron without the influence of any external forces. When I finished reading his remarkable paper, I immediately phoned CalTech and asked to speak to him. A very nice receptionist in his department informed me, “Dr. Moore doesn’t accept telephone calls.”
“Then can I make an appointment with him?” I asked.
“No, I’m afraid that’s not possible either. He doesn’t take appointments.”
“Then how do I get to see him?” I asked, a bit perplexed by her responses.
“To tell you the truth, I have no idea,” She answered somewhat apologetically. “I’ve been here for four years and he has never said a word to me. I don’t think he’s ever even looked at me.”
“Extraordinary. But he’s there?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s always here. I’m not sure but I think he lives in his lab.”
I didn’t know what to do so I got into my car and headed south on highway 280, destination Pasadena. A little less than seven hours later I pulled up to the building the receptionist had informed me housed Dr. Moore’s lab. When I asked to see Dr. Moore, the receptionist gave me an odd look then placed a call from his phone and a few minutes later a gray haired gentleman in a lab coat appeared and asked, “Can I help you?”
“Are you Dr. Moore?” I inquired.
“No,” he replied. “I’m Dr. Kenvin Litel, the director of the Material Sciences Department here. May I ask what your interest in Dr. Moore is?”
I introduced myself, explaining that I was from the Center for Advanced Computing at Stanford and I was interested in Dr. Moore’s work. “I would like to talk to him about the possibility of his collaborating on my project. Is he here?”
“Oh, he’s always here,” Dr. Lytel replied. “But talking to him might be a bit problematic. Why don’t I buy you a cup of coffee and we can discuss Dr. Moore and his work.” I followed him to a small cafeteria adjacent to a lovely garden courtyard with tables and chairs. “Why don’t you take a seat and I’ll get us some coffee.”
A minute later Dr. Litel returned with two mugs of steaming coffee and he placed them on the table and then sat down. “I gather there is some problem speaking with Dr. Moore,” I said.
“You might say that. Dr. Moore doesn’t really talk much. In fact, I’m not sure he talks at all. At least he’s never spoken to me. He’s a bit of an odd duck. Quite brilliant but an odd duck nonetheless.”
“He doesn’t speak? How did he manage to get through college and earn a PhD?”
“Oh, he never went to college or even high school for that matter. John is autistic and he is fundamentally unable to socialize. His parents were both librarians here at CalTech and they let him hang around the library from the time he was just a young child. We never minded because he never caused any problems at all, in fact few people ever saw him. He sort of wandered around the stacks. And then one day about three or four years ago, his father brought me a paper saying, ‘Dr. Litel, I know this sound odd but my son wanted me to give this to you.’ He handed me a computer printout of a four hundred and fifty page document and asked me to look it over. At first, I thought it was something one of our graduate students had left in the library but when I read it, I knew it was not any of my students. It was truly the most insightful paper on surface modification of biomaterials with protein I had ever read.”
“And John had written it? How old was he at the time?” I asked.
“Fourteen or fifteen I guess. I began communicating with him through email as his father told me that was the only way he communicates with anyone. I offered him access to one of our biomaterial labs and a year later he published Molecular Self Assembly and Nanochemistry: a Strategy for the Systhesis of Neurons. It was quite brilliant, absolutely groundbreaking research. We granted him a Doctorate and a position at the University with his own lab and since then I have pretty much left him to his own devices.”
“Isn’t that a bit unconventional?” I asked.
“Everything about John Moore is unconventional. But his work is astounding. Would you like to see his lab?”
“Sure
, if you think it will be alright.”
“It will be alright. You won’t believe what you see but it will be alright. Just don’t touch a thing. John doesn’t like anyone to touch anything in there.”
“Will my visit disturb him?” I asked.
“I don’t even know if he will be aware of the fact that we are there. In any event, he won’t acknowledge us in any way.”
I finished the last sip of my coffee and we walked down a corridor to a door simply marked Private. Dr. Litel opened the door, and even before I entered I was hit with a stench that was overpowering. The lab looked like a rat’s nest. There was lab equipment on tables covered with food wrappers and empty soda cans. Books and papers were scattered all over the place as were piles of dirty clothing that reeked of body odor. There was a dirty mattress on the floor in one corner with a pillow and a blanket. A young man with disheveled hair and an unkempt beard sat at a computer console typing in code in C++ and humming to himself as he banged on the keyboard. He paid no attention to us whatsoever. It was as if we were not even in the room. After a few minutes, the smell got to me and we left.
“See what I mean?” Dr. Litel asked when we were back in the corridor. “He’s in a world of his own.”
“Have you obtained any more information about the new research project of Fincher’s?” Tai Qiang asked when Jun took his call.
“Not really,” Jun answered. “His lab at the Center for Advanced Computing has security on the same level as Fincher’s, probably set up by the same man. I tried to hack his phone but he’s using one of Fincher’s encrypted phones as well. From the level of tech surrounding him, he’s working on something important. I did manage to get a bug in his car so maybe we can pick something up that way. I put a tracker on the car as well. He drove down to Cal Tech today.”
“Cal Tech? What’s he doing there?” Qiang asked.
“I don’t know. He’s parked in front of the Material Sciences lab.”
“Stay on it and let me know what you find out.”
Evolution 2.0: The Singularity is Here Page 2