"That he'll come out of it? Probably not. It would truly take a miracle, Father. My position here has never allowed me much opportunity for optimism. I care for sick old men who never married, never had children. Most of them have outlived whatever family they may have had. Now they have nothing, no one. They have only the Church, because they have given themselves to the Church. Until their death, I'm afraid this place is for the hopeless."
"How many are here, Father?"
"We have eighteen. Only two are comatose. Two more have Parkinson's, very advanced. And there are five Alzheimer patients, gentle old men with the eyes of children. The rest . . . the rest are. . ."
"Irreversible dementia?"
LeClair lowered his eyes. "Yes, Father Sullivan."
Sullivan walked back to the leather couch and sat down heavily.
Father LeClair returned to his desk.
"Father LeClair . . . ?"
"Yes, Bill?"
"Please. Can you tell me what happened?"
Boston, Massachusetts
"Sooner or later, everyone gets to see the computer," said Ian "Skipp" McCurdy.
Jeff Chandler followed him along a narrow brick-walled corridor toward a green metal door. Above, pale neon tubes cast cold bluish light that emphasized McCurdy's freckled bald spot and the horseshoe of limp, rusty-colored hair surrounding it.
Jeff tore his eyes away, feeling rude and petty. He should make it a point to judge his boss on criteria more substantial than his slightly clownlike appearance.
"Call this your rite de passage, Jeff. I guess you've been with us long enough now so you can see the entire operation. Especially if you're going to be . . . promoted." McCurdy laughed his irritating staccato laugh as he pulled open the green fire door. He held it as Jeff walked through.
The room was large, twenty by thirty feet at the very least. Though brightly lighted and comfortably cool, it felt institutional, alien. Perhaps that was because the room had not been designed to accommodate people. Instead, it was merely functional, containing but two objects: the computer, which was easy to recognize, and the mysterious twelve-by-twelve-foot glass structure beside it, which was a puzzle.
The computer looked about the size of an upright piano. On its front panel, colored lights flashed in seemingly random patterns. A row of five-inch video screens across the console's angled top filled with letters, numbers, and vividly colored graphics. Images appeared and vanished faster than Jeff's eyes could follow.
"What you see before you," McCurdy said grandly, "is the heart of the Academy, our central processor, InfoWork Industries' BLZ-28/22."
Jeff nodded. "It's not as big as I thought it would be."
McCurdy smiled; his cheeks turned into little red balls that supported his eyeglasses. "Amazing, isn't it? A state-of-the-art computer—world class, really—yet not much bigger than a washing machine." He looked directly at Jeff, as if waiting for an "Ooooo" or an "Aaaaaah."
"Amazing," was all Jeff could say.
"But when you stop to think about it," McCurdy continued in his tones of affected informality, "for five bucks you can pick up a pocket calculator at the K-Mart that'll do a whole lot more than the original Univac did back in the fifties. And that monster filled rooms!"
Jeff nodded, trying to look impressed. "Computers have sure come a long way."
McCurdy beamed, proud as a parent. "But this one is special, one of a kind. It's on the cutting edge of computer technology, and frankly, I think it's going to stay there awhile. It'll do tricks you or I could never even imagine. Tell you something, Jeff, even the Japs aren't making anything like this." He winked conspiratorially.
McCurdy looked on proudly as Jeff studied the dancing lights.
"No doubt about it: Bubb puts on an impressive light show," McCurdy beamed, "but to me, quite honestly, the computer's the boring part of this operation."
Jeff looked at him quizzically. "Bubb?"
McCurdy laughed. "That's what we call it, at least those of us on a first-name basis with the thing. Officially, it's InfoWork's BLZ-28/22. We nicknamed it Bubb. Clever if not quite appropriate, don't you think?"
"Ah . . . yeah, I guess . . . ." Transfixed, Jeff watched fluid, undulating designs on a liquid crystal display screen. He had to wrench his eyes away from the choreography of hypnotic patterns, shifting his interest to the room-sized structure beside the CPU. It looked a bit like one of those aluminum and glass filling stations he'd often seen tucked away in the corners of so many shopping plazas. Nestled within it was a smaller glass cube about the size of a walk-in closet. Within that, positioned on a stainless-steel laboratory table, he saw what appeared to be a fifty-five-gallon aquarium filled with crimson liquid. Bundled wire and clear plastic hoses were embedded in the aquarium's cover. Mystified, Jeff waited for his tour guide's explanation.
"Ah-ha!" said McCurdy, noticing Jeff's bewilderment, "this is a nifty little item. Watch." His palm flattened against a dark amethyst panel on the Plexiglas partition. A door hissed open. "See that? Recognizes my palm print," he said proudly, and winked.
Jeff looked away, put off by the repeated winking.
The electronically opened door admitted them to the glass corridor formed between the outer and inner aquarium walls. It hissed shut. Jeff noticed how much colder it was in the passageway.
Examining the transparent wall that separated the men from the innermost and smallest aquarium, Jeff asked, "How do you get in there?"
"You don't." McCurdy clicked his tongue as if Jeff had said something naughty. ''"That's a sterile environment. Technicians have to suit up and go through decontamination in this passageway before they can go inside." Holding his finger as if it were a pistol, McCurdy mimed shooting at a series of nozzles recessed almost invisibly in the ceiling.
Jeff understood the nozzles were gas jets.
"See," McCurdy explained, "this corridor is also a security device. It's fully capable of decontaminating intruders far larger and more threatening than bacteria."
Jeff shivered, but not from the cold; it was McCurdy' matter-of-fact reference to killing. He wondered—and not for the first time since he'd joined the Academy—just what he had gotten himself into. "'The security measures I can understand," he said. "I can even appreciate the dust-free environment; I know airborne particles can wreak havoc on electronic components. But you said sterile? A sterile environment?"
"That's right."
"Why's that? Why sterile?"
McCurdy chuckled, tossing his head to the side. Obviously he thought Jeff was joking. When he saw his error, he sobered. "What do you mean?"
"Well, dust-free and sterile aren't the same thing."
"Oh. Right. Okay." McCurdy pursed his lips, looking momentarily puzzled. '"To tell you the truth, it's a little out of my line, but as best I understand it, this computer uses an experimental kind of bioelectroriic circuitry. It's some kind of . . . well, quite simply, it's synthesized organic material. That's what the tank in there is holding."
Jeff studied the aquarium.
"You can't see them, but inside that tank there is a series of glass plates, upright, side by side, almost like the plates in a car battery." Jeff nodded.
"Each plate is coated with the artificial tissue just one cell deep. The system contains a layer of input units, and a layer of output units. Between them, the intermediate 'hidden' units are capable of assessing data and directing the various electrical responses. In effect, the only thing this experimental unit does is channel data. All the information it recognizes, it passes along to the CPU, if useful. Or it eliminates the information if irrelevant. If it doesn't recognize a piece of data, it spits it out and lets a human being evaluate it. The more data it ingests, the more it learns to recognize, and ultimately the 'smarter' it becomes."
"Which is essentially the way a human brain works."
"Right, Jeff. That's just exactly right. The psych folks tell me it's called 'associative learning,' and it's identical to the way a human being learns. I
n fact, they say the synthetic material used here is very much like the composition of our own brains."
Jeff shook his head slowly. "Laboratory-produced brains. Wow! So what you're telling me, really, is that this thing's alive?"
McCurdy clicked his tongue, looking thoughtful. "Well, no. I mean, that would be stretching it some—"
"It's all fascinating, Dr. McCurdy, but I don't get it. I mean, what's the point of synthetic tissue? Why not simply use conventional hardware and software? Why this experimental stuff, this—what would you call it?—wetware?"
McCurdy smiled benignly and shrugged. "Hey! Nobody tells me nothin'. Just because I'm project designer and executive director doesn't mean I can explain everything that's going on in my shop. Fact is, Jeff, we're just test driving the thing, not manufacturing it. We try it out, InfoWork lets us use the whole computer free of charge. Hey, in the government biz, that's called fiscal responsibility."
Jeff nodded.
"But I'll take a stab at answering, just so nobody gets his feelings hurt." McCurdy winked.
Jeff watched McCurdy frown and become more serious. "Okay, we know that even the most sophisticated computers, including Bubb here, cannot replicate the speed at which the human brain is capable of accessing information. Heck, we're accessing information all the time and we don't even know it! And when we access information, we learn, am I right?"
Jeff nodded cautiously.
"Okay. And once we've learned something, we are then capable of using the new information intellectually and intuitively, right? But the computer has no intellect, it has no intuition. And certainly—at least from my point of view as a Christian—it has no soul. So, by extension, we can accurately say the computer is a brain, but we can't say it's a mind. Simply put: it can't make sense of the world and it can't generate complex thoughts.
"The relatively new field of Computational Neuroscience tries to analyze and explain how the human brain uses electrical and chemical signals to represent and process information. Mainstream computer scientists are approaching the problem by trying to design software that will mimic the way the brain works. It's an unmanageably big project. In fact, many scientists think it's impossible."
"Yes, I've read something about that," Jeff mumbled.
"The approach here is radically different. This 'wetware'—as you call it—doesn't try to imitate the human brain. Instead, it's being developed to replicate the brain, to work exactly the way the brain works. It's cellular engineering, and it's working with a limited degree of success right here. This unit is the proof of the proverbial pudding."
Jeff reflected for a moment. "I don't mean to be obtuse, Dr. McCurdy, but you still haven't answered my question."
"How's that?"
McCurdy rolled his eyes and clicked his tongue. "I guess I did sort of tap-dance around that, didn't I. That's 'cause I don't really know. Tell you the truth, I suspect it's all working toward programmable human beings. But, hey"—he winked—"don't tell anyone I said so, okay? Maybe in the not-too-distant future some descendant of this machine will be able to transfer information directly into a human brain. Imagine going to sleep in English, and waking up in Russian, or French, or German!"
Jeff shook his head, more overwhelmed than ever. "So you keep the synthetic tissue in a sterile environment because you're afraid your staff could actually . . . infect the machine?"
"That's right. This computer has no immune system. And I don't know what kind of job performance we can expect from Bubb if it catches a cold or something. There's nothing about sick days in its contract."
This time both men laughed, Jeff a bit uneasily.
McCurdy turned away as if to say, Let's get on with the tour. But Jeff lingered a moment, entranced by the rusty-looking fluid flowing into and out of the aquarium. At that moment he knew he was completely out of his league; he had no hope of understanding anything that he was seeing. "I'm curious," he said, "how much do you suppose it cost to develop something like this?"'
"The 'wetware'? Beats me. Like I said, DWI is developing it for the Defense Department, so various subcontractors—and we're among them—get to try it out for free. We haven't had to worry about cost."
Still smiling like a first-time home owner, McCurdy tugged Jeff's sleeve, coaxing him to follow. Magically, another sliding door opened and they left the glass enclosure.
"Wetware," McCurdy chuckled, shaking his head with amusement, "that's pretty good . . . ."
Jeff gawked as McCurdy led him through another basement corridor. "I had no idea there was so much space down here," Jeff said. "It's like another complete building below ground."
"Alh, yes. Well, appearances are deliberately deceiving. From outside, the Academy looks exactly like all its neighbors. Just another unremarkable three-story brownstone. But!"—he raised his index finger dramatically,—"this one used to be owned by one of the scientists involved with the Manhattan Project, an MIT man. I guess the work he did scared the poor fella so bad he had this palatial bomb shelter constructed in complete secrecy during the nuclear terror of the early fifties. All the work was done at government expense, too, which I can understand. But I'll tell you the one thing I can't figure out . . ."
"What's that?"
"How did they get all the dirt out of here without the neighbors realizing something was going on?"
Jeff smiled. "Good question."
"So," McCurdy chuckled, his cheeks glowing like ripe apples, "the place saw weapons development. In the early fifties, and in a sense, that's what it's seeing now. A completed cycle. And a perfect home for Bubb, don't you think?"
Jeff raised his eyebrows noncommittally. McCurdy led him through another green metal door that opened on a strangely barren room with cinder-block walls. The men crossed the brown carpeted floor to one of a hall-dozen modular carrels lining the western wall.
"This is what happens to the data Bubb doesn't recognize," McCurdy explained. "He kicks it out and real human beings work with it here."
Jeff's eyes came to rest on a woman he had never seen before. Her brown hair was primly balled in a tight bun, her eyes, behind thick, dark-tinted glasses studied one of the terminals. Beside her keyboard she had a pile of color photocopies depicting pages of what Jeff took to be an ancient manuscript. He saw some kind of medieval script accompanied by pictures of flowers and plants.
"And speaking of real human beings," McCurdy said, "this is Yonna Keel. Doctor Yonna Keel. She's on loan from the CIA. Speaks ancient Greek and Latin like a native and is probably the most accomplished cryptanalyst in the country."
"Hello, Yonna," Jeff said, but she paid no attention. The screen before her was filled with tiny words that Jeff could not read.
"She's trying to decipher the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. The cipher is so clever it's eluded translation for—we guess—six or seven hundred years. Most likely it was written in the thirteenth century, but no one knows for sure. We also don't know who wrote it, or why. We don't even know what language it's in. With its drawings of plants, one might mistake it for an ordinary medieval herbal. That is, until you realize all the plants depicted here don't exist anywhere in nature!
"One thing we do know is that for a while it was in the possession of Dr. John Dee, the infamous Elizabethan magician. And as recently as 1912 it was kept in a Jesuit monastery in Frascati, Italy. So I guess we can't say for sure if it belongs in Heaven or in Hell . . . ."
Jeff shook his head. "Good luck, Yonna," he mumbled.
McCurdy lowered his voice. "We have researchers like you and Yonna on payroll all over the world. The full-timers are directly under contract to the Academy. Part-timers get their salaries laundered through educational grants and university work-study programs. All are assigned to libraries, museums, even monasteries and private collections. They use keyboards and scanners to collect vast quantities of raw data. Of course, no one doing fieldwork knows what the data gathering's all about. The cover is they're assembling reference information for an experimental
hypertext program for Bubb—a huge interactive encyclopedia. We see to it they keep inputting a fair amount of worthless information, red herrings designed to keep folks from getting too close to what's really going on. They send it along, Bubb kicks it out, and we forget it."
The four unused monitors danced with color and moving designs. To Jeff, the screens looked like windows opening on to an unfamiliar dimension or an alien world. Shapes in space whirled and shifted in ultra rainbow colors. Points of light—amber, red, and gold—pulsed brightly and vanished.
"This is the stuff that's really exciting to me." said McCurdy, "the stuff that's right here in this room—the keyboard, the screen." He rested his hand on the top of a monitor like a doting father with his arm around a favorite son. "This is the spot where human meets computer, where man and machine come together in a wildly unprecedented way. It's here, you might say, that they mate and marry."
"So what's the punchline?" Jeff asked. "Do I have to keep guessing, or are you going to tell me what all this is about?"
McCurdy clicked his tongue and patted Jeff on the shoulder. "Time's up for today, my friend. But I won't keep you in suspense forever. Think about it. See what you make of all this. Then we'll continue with some clarifications first thing next week."
The Widening Gyre
Boston, Massachusetts
Karen decided to wait outside the restaurant for exactly fifteen minutes. If Jeff Chandler hadn't appeared by then, she would leave. Period. End of discussion.
She had been foolish to accept this dinner invitation. Well, maybe not foolish exactly, but certainly careless. After all, she didn't even know the man. Why, he could be anybody, even some kind of . . . well, she'd definitely been too quick to trust him.
But then again, he seemed nice.
And what was wrong with a little adventure?
Another glance at her watch.
It probably didn't look good for her to be hanging around, lurking, outside this Commercial Street restaurant. She should go inside, maybe have a glass of wine. She could use the waiting time to calm down.
The Reality Conspiracy Page 5