Catalyst (Breakthrough Book 3)

by Michael C. Grumley

  DeeAnn sat in her black chair and scanned the room, now wishing she’d made a little more of an effort to decorate. But then again, maybe this would make things easier.

  She glanced up at the sound of a soft knock on the door.

  “Come in.”

  The door opened just far enough to allow Lee Kenwood’s young and somewhat handsome face to peek in.

  “Oh good, you’re still here. I saw your light on and thought I’d check.”

  DeeAnn grinned. “Yep. Still here. Unfortunately.”

  “You got a sec?”

  “Sure.”

  With that, Lee pushed the door open and stepped inside. He was holding the latest vest he and Juan had just built. “Good news, the new vest is ready.”

  DeeAnn stood up, grabbing one side of it. “Lee! You’re not supposed to be lifting anything heavy.”

  “It’s okay,” he shrugged. “They’re feeling a lot better.”

  DeeAnn gave him a dubious frown. “Ribs don’t heal that fast.” Together they sat it down onto the other half of her desk. She ran her fingers over the dark nylon and the two large Velcro pockets that wrapped around the waist. “I’m sorry I broke the last one.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. Besides, it gave us a chance to tweak a few things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Nothing major. Just some slight improvements. More padding around the motherboard.” He tapped a portion lightly to show her. “And we also removed some of the material on the back, which should improve the airflow a little.”

  “Music to my ears.” DeeAnn stood the contraption on end and turned it around. The vest was amazing technologically, but from a non-geek standpoint it was a burden to wear in hot weather. The humidity in Puerto Rico was already more than she was used to, but it had been almost suffocating in Brazil. “It feels lighter,” she observed.

  “The old one had heavier batteries.”

  The original vest had been a big step forward. Being allowed to remain in the habitat and still have it transmit back and forth to IMIS was huge. But when Lee and Juan made better versions and included a camera, it was a game changer.

  “Thank you, Lee. I really appreciate it.”

  DeeAnn laid the vest back down and noticed he hadn’t said anything. She looked back up to find him silently staring down at the vest.

  “Something on your mind?”

  After a moment, he looked back at her. “Do you have time to talk about something?”

  She folded her arms in front of herself. “Of course. Is this about that problem with the logs?”

  Lee nodded. “We were talking to Chris about it earlier today and I had a thought. Something I wanted to ask you about.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, we’ve talked about the whole communication problem with the speaker.”

  “The nonverbal problem.”

  “Right. The system doesn’t have the ability to translate nonverbal communication back through the speaker. At least it shouldn’t. So instead of trying to troubleshoot that, it occurred to me that maybe there’s a different answer. Something that we’re not considering.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, initially I thought the log problem existed because IMIS wasn’t translating correctly. I’m a believer in the fallibility of computers, so I assumed it was a fault somewhere. But it was translating correctly, and it took me a long time to understand it.” He blinked, thinking as he spoke. “What I’m wondering now is whether I’ve made the wrong assumption again.”

  “About the speaker?”

  “Yes. I’ve been trying to figure out what happens to the nonverbal cues when they reach the speaker. The one thing I’ve learned is that language is really kind of…intangible. And today it suddenly hit me. What if I’m looking for the wrong thing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, assuming this is all still measurable somehow, it would mean that we’re missing something. Maybe our idea of nonverbal is not correct. Maybe incomplete.” Lee took a breath. “What if IMIS isn’t missing anything…and we are?”

  DeeAnn peered at him curiously. “I get the impression you have a question coming.”

  “Yes, I do.” He grinned again. “You said yourself that primates, particularly gorillas, are very nonverbal communicators. But to us that usually means physical movement of some kind. But what if we’re wrong? What if the nonverbal stuff only explains part of the missing exchange? What if there is still more verbal communication taking place that we’re not hearing?”

  DeeAnn was fascinated. She remained still, staring at him over the desk. “You’re talking about frequencies.”

  Lee nodded.

  “So, you want to know if gorillas can hear frequencies that we can’t.”

  “Correct.”

  “Something tells me you’ve already done some research.”

  “A little.”

  DeeAnn smiled broadly. She was really going to miss these talks with Lee. “Then you probably know the jury is still out. A lot of the older research suggests that gorillas and humans share the same audio frequencies But after the gorilla genome was successfully mapped, it revealed differences in the genes tied to hearing, and therefore to communication.”

  “So the answer is yes?”

  She shook her head. “Not necessarily. But it’s widely accepted that humans and gorillas have very different aural environments…so the answer isn’t no, but it also isn’t yes.”

  “So nobody knows.”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “So then…what is your opinion?”

  “My opinion?” She frowned, considering the question. “Is it possible they can hear things we can’t? Of course. A lot of animals can do that. Are gorillas doing it? I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “It could explain a lot. Like how IMIS is able to communicate so well with Dulce through just a speaker.”

  DeeAnn glanced down at the vest, her arms still folded in front of her. “Well, there’s only one way to find out.”

  The programming took almost eleven hours to write and test, leaving Lee precious few hours to rest. It didn’t matter. He was too excited to sleep. IMIS was hiding a secret and he was determined to find out what it was.

  The problem was that IMIS wasn’t programmed to process communication beyond the frequencies of human hearing. However, IMIS was programmed to learn artificially; so if it was processing other frequencies, it was doing so by a mandate other than the one laid out in the original computer code.

  This also meant that all of the analytical tools were set between twenty hertz to twenty thousand hertz, the range of human hearing. The dolphin language was similar, except at a very high end where their echolocation was used. What Lee had spent the night programming was a new instruction set for IMIS, instructing it to include a wider range of speech frequencies in its analytics. If there was something there, IMIS was now instructed to show it.

  DeeAnn was back early in the morning, at a little past six a.m. She returned with two tall cups of coffee and a bag of donuts, which she wouldn’t touch but Lee loved.

  He thanked her and bit into one. “I think we should be ready soon.”

  “Good. Dulce should be up pretty soon.” She lowered the cardboard carrier down next to Lee and withdrew one of the cups. Behind them, Juan burst into the room, causing DeeAnn to jump and nearly spill her coffee.

  “What did I miss?!”

  “Geez, Juan!” DeeAnn checked her shirt for any dark spots. “Some of us are a little on edge here!”

  “Sorry.”

  Lee grinned behind his own cup. He set it down and returned to his keyboard. “Not too much yet. I’m still compiling. Did you bring it?”

  “Yep.” Juan reached into his pants pocket and retrieved a long silver tube.

  “What is that?”

  “A dog whistle.”

  “A dog whistle?”

  Juan grinned. “It’s my little sister’s, but it should work.”

  “We need to
verify this first before we do any tests with Dulce.” Lee raised the lid on his laptop and opened another audio program. It looked different, but DeeAnn recognized the familiar meter running from left to right. After waiting for the program to initialize, Lee spoke into the small microphone located just above his laptop keyboard. “Testing, testing.”

  A yellow line danced up and down as it moved across the screen, showing the waves picked up through the microphone. “Okay, here’s my voice. You can see the ranges here, including inflection and volume. We can also see the wider frequency range here, which is between one thousand and five thousand hertz. Give or take. This is the range where human speech is centered.” Lee backed up his chair. “Ready, Juan?”

  “Yep.”

  Lee restarted the recording again and moved out of the way to allow Juan to lean in closer. He blew through the dog whistle, making a quiet hissing sound. This time, the sound waves on the graph jumped dramatically. The peaks and valleys were sharper and traveled well beyond the frequency ranges that Lee had pointed out. Both the top and bottom areas outside the human ranges displayed colors of yellow, orange, and red, showing the progression away from the narrower human range.

  “Wow. Big difference.”

  “And this is what you think IMIS is picking up?”

  “Maybe,” Lee shrugged. “But even if we find it’s picking up a fraction of the extra frequencies, it could be significant.”

  “So, now what?”

  “Now we need to wait for the compiling to finish. This was just a simple test through my laptop. When the code is done, we’ll need to upgrade the monitoring software on IMIS. Then we give it a whirl.”

  DeeAnn smiled excitedly. She grabbed the new vest and slung it over her shoulder. “I’ll go get breakfast.”

  Breakfast was a four-pound box of celery, kale, and apples. Dulce had developed a real affinity for apples. DeeAnn suspected the higher sugar content made apples taste like a dessert to the young gorilla. In fact, she had become so excited, they were the first thing she searched for in the box of food. And this morning was no different.

  Once DeeAnn was inside the habitat, the three-year-old gorilla came running across a small grassy hill at which point she stopped and hugged the top of DeeAnn’s legs.

  Apples apples.

  DeeAnn smiled, setting the box down with a thud and standing up. She watched as Dulce reached in with her lanky brown arms and brought out two apples, one in each hand. She smiled broadly at DeeAnn with a toothy grin.

  “Dessert is last.”

  Dulce stopped with a frown before placing them back into the box and picking up a stalk of celery.

  The Puerto Rican mornings were gorgeous. With temperatures routinely in the high sixties and low seventies, the air felt cool and refreshing, offsetting the island’s high humidity. But the best part was the smell. Tropical islands had an unmistakable smell of dew in the morning, brought on by overnight moisture on the lush foliage. With the lightest of breezes, the combination made the mornings smell like dewy sweetness –– it was a smell DeeAnn was going to miss.

  Of course, sweetness had another presence in DeeAnn’s mornings which made Dulce’s name so fitting. She was the most loving, kind creature DeeAnn had ever known, and certainly that she had ever worked with. She had saved the gorilla at a young age from a horrible existence in Mexico, and they had been inseparable ever since.

  Me love mommy.

  DeeAnn grinned and playfully ruffled the fur on the back of her neck. “Mommy loves Dulce.”

  She barely noticed anymore as the vest picked up her words, and in less than a second, sent the data to IMIS and back where the large speaker emanated a series of squeals and soft grunts for Dulce.

  DeeAnn watched Dulce quickly devour her breakfast, yet when she reached the apples, she purposely slowed down as if savoring them. A sweet tooth seemed just as popular in gorillas as they were in humans. DeeAnn was dreading the day Dulce discovered chocolate.

  She sat back and continued watching Dulce, then turned and looked up at one of the high-resolution cameras overhead, surrounding the habitat. She wondered if IMIS was revealing anything interesting to Lee and Juan upstairs.

  As expected, Lee and Juan were monitoring all of DeeAnn’s translations with Dulce. But it took almost a full minute for IMIS to display the frequency data used during the translations. When the first feedback finally came across Lee’s screen, it did so in a flood of colors.

  “Whoa!”

  6

  Alison Shaw burst into the computer lab and found them all huddled around Lee’s desk. “Okay, I’m here. What is it?”

  DeeAnn, dressed in khaki shorts and a matching shirt, turned around. “Lee’s a genius, that’s what!”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  He motioned Alison over and pulled out his chair for her. She crossed the room and sat down, examining the screen.

  “Is this audio?”

  “It sure is.”

  “What does it mean?”

  Lee smiled at DeeAnn.

  “It’s the problem they’ve been working on. Lee came to me last night with an idea that we were missing something.”

  “It was a problem we couldn’t figure out,” he added. “No matter how much we dug into the code. Then it occurred to me that maybe there are more complexities going on that we still don’t know about.”

  Alison turned back. “So, what is this?”

  “It’s what IMIS is really hearing.”

  “More sounds?”

  “More frequencies. The colors represent the wider bands, much wider than we can hear.”

  “What does that mean? It hears more words than we thought?”

  “Maybe. But I suspect it may be more about tones or inflections.” He looked to DeeAnn.

  “I’m sure it is. In a lot of languages it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. We should expect the same pattern with gorillas and other primates. We knew some of that was in the gesturing and expressions, but I certainly never expected the rest to be in sounds we couldn’t hear.”

  Alison looked at her curiously. “So, primates can hear sounds that we can’t?”

  “The designs of our auditory systems are very similar, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they work exactly the same. Some researchers have suggested that having more advanced brains may have caused us to devolve out of certain basic abilities. Like the range of our hearing.”

  The room fell silent. It was a powerful thought. Devolution and evolution happening together. On a certain level, it made sense. Everything in life had a balance to it. Few things could be gained without something also being lost.

  “Not to take away from the moment,” Lee said, “but there’s something even more interesting about this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, we think we know how IMIS is truly communicating with Dulce now. Which is big. But…” He looked at them with excitement. “This is not something we programmed IMIS to do –– to listen to such a broad frequency range.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that no one told IMIS to do it.” Lee smiled, waiting for them to pick up on his suggestion. Finally, he said it. “IMIS made the decision.”

  At that moment, they all could have heard a pin drop.

  “Whoaaa,” Juan whispered.

  DeeAnn looked at Lee with wide eyes and tilted her head. “Are you saying that IMIS is thinking?”

  He grinned. “Thinking, no. At least not as we understand it. But the system does employ several algorithms that give it a certain capacity for artificial intelligence. It’s not thinking…but it is getting smarter at solving problems.”

  One floor below, the heavy figure of Bruna Lopez, the Center’s administrative assistant, hurried over the dark tiles which lined the ground floor. When she reached the bottom of the wide staircase, the admin grasped the railing with her right hand and continued her rush up the stairs.

  Once at the top, she immediately covered the short dist
ance to the double metal doors and pushed them open, looking around the room.

  “Miss…Alison…”

  Alison turned away from the others at Lee’s desk and spotted Bruna in the doorway, breathing heavily.

  “Yes, Bruna. What is it?”

  “Someone…is here to see you. She said…it was urgent.”

  Alison turned to DeeAnn with a concerned look. The last time someone came to see them unannounced things ended very badly. “Who is it?”

  “A woman. From San Juan. A Boricua.”

  Both women quickly followed Bruna. She led them back downstairs but stopped short upon reaching the bottom step where they spotted a middle-aged woman curiously looking around their observation area.

  When the woman saw Bruna returning, she appeared relieved and quickly closed the distance between herself and the women, staring intently at Alison as she did so.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “’I’m sorry. I was just-”

  Bruna was breathing hard again but still managed an irritated glare. “I told you I would get her.”

  “It’s fine, it’s fine.” Alison could see puffiness around the woman’s eyes. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m very sorry. I don’t mean any disrespect, but I have to speak with you.”

  “About what?”

  The woman took a deep breath. “My name is Lara Santiago. I've come to ask you for help. Not for me, for my daughter.”

  “Your daughter?”

  “Sofia. She’s eight. Her class came here recently on a field trip.” The woman frowned before continuing. “My daughter couldn’t come. She…she hasn’t been to school for a long time. She’s very sick.”

  All three women’s faces softened.