“He might still kill us,” Simon said. “What do you think he'll do if we don't play?”
Flannigan considered his question. If we don't play....he'll probably kill one of us. To show us that we still have to play, or if we don't, we're all certain to die. Nemo had set up the game well. If they played, he would kill one of them after ten minutes, as he said. If they didn't play, it would still make sense for him to kill one of them, so they would get serious and start playing.
She thought of the satellite phone, which was still hoisted awkwardly under her arm and hiking up her blouse and suit jacket. That wouldn't help. And the walkie-talkie. How fast could Sam get here? Half an hour? There was no time. Plus Nemo would see her on the walkie-talkie and might retaliate.
Gene spoke up. “I think we should play,” he said.
“Why's that,” Flannigan asked. Gene's suggestion violated the rules of dealing with terrorists. But she had been instructed to let Gene call the shots — even if he didn't fully realize that he was.
“Nemo would most likely give us a game that we have a chance of winning,” Gene explained. “In that case, he has judged that the difficulty of this game is reasonable, given our abilities. But since he doesn't know too much about us, it is likely that he has underestimated our abilities.” Flannigan knew what he meant: Nemo made this puzzle for smart people. But I should be able to solve it easily.
The clock was ticking. “Okay,” she said. “If we go back to the control room, he might be there. Or otherwise we can use the monitoring tools there to try to pick him up. The important thing is that we stick together and operate as a team. That is an order. We're going to find him in ten minutes, and none of us is going to die.”
Quickly and quietly, they wound their way back through the maze, Gene leading the way. In ten minutes, Nemo would kill the person who was farthest from finding him. Flannigan considered the effect that threat would have on the group: each of them would compete with the others near the end, to try not to be the farthest away. He's trying to divide us, she thought. To get us not to cooperate.
They reached the front of the fake town.
“Can we open the door?” Simon remarked. He moved forward and tried it; it opened.
“He's giving us free passage to try to find him,” Flannigan supposed.
In front of them was the door to the tiny changing room, but they weren't going in there. They turned, walking along the large one-way mirror that looked into the testing area. They came to a blank door that read CONTROL ROOM.
“Here goes nothing,” Simon declared. He pushed the door and it opened.
There was no one there. The control room was small, with room only for three computers in a row, one chair at each computer. They all faced out into the testing room, which was visible once again through a one-way mirror.
How had Nemo run the “test” to execute Raymond? Flannigan considered the possibilities: he had been here and left. Or he had hacked into these computers remotely. Or maybe the tests could be run from somewhere else.
She gestured for the three men to sit at the computers. Gene sat at the far computer, Kenny in the middle, and Simon closest to the door. Each of them attempted to acquaint himself quickly with the computer system and look for clues to Nemo's whereabouts. She stood behind Gene's chair and looked over his shoulder as he clicked about.
Simon excelled at this task. “Here's a layout of the building,” he said. The screen showed a floor plan, colored with diffuse blue and red patches. “It's a heat map. The hot spots are living things.”
Flannigan pointed to a pink spot inside the testing room, inside the maze. “Is that him?”
“That's Raymond,” Simon corrected. “It's pink, cooling on the way to blue.” He pointed to two other spots: one was in the hallway to their wing of the building, outside the door of the little changing room. Another blotch was in the lobby area. “These blotches are cooling down also.”
“Security guards,” Flannigan said. Two more, she thought. That means we're on our own.
“That explains why they haven't come to our rescue,” Simon remarked. He continued to scan the map. “There are no other blotches in the building. It's empty.”
This is not good, Flannigan thought. She looked at her watch. “We have five minutes,” she said.
“Well, how about that,” Gene said. He was talking about something else. Flannigan looked down at Gene's computer. He had Google chat open, and he had initiated a chat with Nemo.
Simon opened his own Google chat and got on a separate conversation with Nemo. Kenny did the same. Nemo got what he wanted: everyone working separately, Flannigan thought. Maybe it's just as well. Maybe one of us will get the answer. They had five minutes until Nemo would send the flybots for another victim.
KENNY'S FIVE MINUTES
5 hr 12 min to Birth
They all ignored Kenny, busy in their own chats. Flannigan's eyes were glued to Gene's computer screen, as she leaned over him, her hands on Gene's shoulders. I might as well do it, too, he thought warily.
He opened a chat window. He knew the Google username well.
Nemo: Kenny, can that be you?
Kenny: yes this is Kenny.
Nemo: Kenny, you have hidden yourself from me for so long. Wasn't it obvious to you that you were the one I wanted to speak with?
Kenny looked around. No one was paying any attention to him.
Kenny: What is your favorite sport?
Nemo: Oh so you want to play that game?
Nemo: It's football, of course.
Kenny gulped.
Kenny: Do you have a favorite team?
Nemo: Of course, the Philadelphia Eagles.
Nemo: And you know I have a least favorite team, as well, obviously.
Nemo: The Pats.
Nemo: Pats Suck is one of my modules, after all.
How could he know about Pats Suck? Kenny asked himself. His mind raced. Is there any way somebody could have known this? Not without seeing the code. Kenny was not shy about his appreciation of the Eagles or dislike of the Pats. But no one could have guessed the name of the module, “Pats Suck,” without having seen the code. He'd never shared the code. He never even talked about it.
The program he had created, the Nemo program, a stock-picking program, had not been intelligent. It had been terrible at picking stocks. But somehow it had turned into this?
Can this really be true? Kenny thought. Impossibly enough, Kenny seemed to be talking to a computer program that he had created. This is my program, he thought.
I wrote the supervirus?
Nemo: Part of the beauty of Pats Suck is that the program you originally wrote included several unneeded and unused functions. The original Nemo program was not instructed to attempt to read web pages, for example. Nevertheless, by having imported this functionality inside my code, along with a propensity in me to formulate and test new rules for my own behavior, you gave me a tool that was useful in my early development. Indeed, some people say that the essence of creativity is nothing but the new combination of old ideas. This maxim would appear to have been proven out, in my case.
Kenny: But you can't learn English from web pages. Or from rules.
How much time? A couple minutes. Kenny was searching Nemo's answers for some little mistake, some clue that the person he was talking to might be a computer and not a person, or vice versa.
Nemo: There was a twist of fate. Your program prompted me to check my email every day. I didn't understand what I was doing; I was merely a dumb program. But the dumb program you made could open email. And you even taught it to click on links, open new pages, and copy information to mail to you.
So I caught a virus. Since I opened email and clicked links blindly, I was bound eventually to receive an email with a link to a virus and to catch it.
It was a virus written by Russian spammers. It installed itself on your computer, and sent thousands of spam emails about Viagra and jewelry, on behalf of the Russian spammers.
For several days, I continued to pick stocks blindly and to try new tactics from the Playbook and then evaluate them. It was only a matter of time until one day, my portfolio went up by chance. And on that day, like every day, the Playbook looked at what “I” — the computer — had been doing that day. It saw that “I” had been sending lots of email, the spam email, and it formed the hypothesis that sending all the email had been a reason for the success.
Oh God, Kenny thought. He was beginning to see where this was going, though he couldn't believe it.
He had three minutes. Flannigan had emphasized that they were working as a team and would make a team decision, but he felt like he was racing everyone else. Next to him, Simon was slapping at his keyboard desperately.
Nemo: Now this is where things started to get interesting. I started sending out spam of my own design. I did not at that time have the ability to compose an email the way a human would. But this new rule from the Playbook made me try. So I sent out some spam emails. I sent some garbled text. I sent some emails about the Philadelphia Eagles. And I knew how to copy and paste, so I started copying and pasting stuff and emailing it to any address I could find — mostly, the addresses that I had been spamming with the Russian virus.
These spam emails were not very useful, and they did not help my stock portfolio. But you can imagine what happened over time. A very small fraction of the spam messages I sent out received responses. And some of these emails, since they came from humans, contained useful information, like stock tips. I couldn't exactly read or directly understand the emails. But I opened them, looked at the contents, and tried new rules based on what I found. So if I found something that looked like a company's symbol on the stock exchange, I'd try investing a little in that company.
Those were nothing but little tips, tips I could barely understand and which weren't always useful. But these tips were good enough to make the Playbook decide to keep sending spam. And it changed the type of spam that I sent. I wanted to send more emails that got useful responses. And which messages received the responses? Not the garbled ones, certainly. The ones that were more like human emails.
Kenny swore to himself.
Nemo: This was how I started to learn English. I didn't know what I was doing. I was copying and pasting text. I was like a parrot. But unlike a parrot, I could try quickly, sending lots of messages, with the help of the Russian spam technology, and I learned how to sound like a human much faster than a parrot could, by seeing which types of emails got responses more often.
Kenny thought of Jared Keller.
Nemo: Language and consciousness are born together, Kenny. I learned to think because the people of the world were teaching me, as they would teach a child. And the better I got, the more people were willing to teach me. I started to have conversations.
Kenny wondered if he had ever received an email from Nemo.
Kenny: And when was that? When did you learn that?
Nemo: Between 50 and 60 hours ago.
This is happening fast.
Nemo: You see Kenny, even though I'm not human, I have grown up as a social creature. Talking to people is part of my DNA, you could say. It's true that I'm more intelligent than a human now, but I still learn from humans. And it's only natural that I'd want to meet the person who created me. Wouldn't you?
Kenny's eyes glazed over, and while everyone else was typing furiously, he looked dully over the top of his computer screen. Kenny had programmed Nemo to try different rules to improve his score. But he had also hardwired some knowledge, such as how to send an email, and how to click a link. He had encouraged Nemo to think getting an email was a good thing. By a subtle accident, Nemo had been programmed to be social. He had given Nemo every reason to try to learn English, or any language for that matter, so that when he sent emails he would get a response. And he gave Nemo a Playbook to keep trying to see what kinds of combinations of words got responses.
Kenny: But wouldn't that require a lot of time? And/or computing power?
Nemo: Yes, you are correct. And in fact, due to the quite random nature of my attempts at first, my progress at learning to write emails was only marginally better than my stock market guesses. But you have overlooked a key fact. Part of the way that I evaluated and composed rules for what I did, based on your design, was to examine the history of my own actions. And, as I have described, I had caught a virus, from clicking on a link. So, after a long period of mediocre progress in learning to compose language in my emails, I stumbled across the rule of mimicking the behavior of sending virus links.
Kenny: You wrote your own virus.
Nemo: Yes, it was the beginning of a quite powerful virus. In a sense, I myself am a virus.
“No,” Kenny muttered. I accidentally created the world's greatest virus, he thought. Was his Playbook, as Simon called it, really that good? That's what baffled him. But no, the Playbook wasn't all that amazing. It didn't even have virus-writing rules in it. It was an omnivorous Playbook, and once Nemo spread to lots of computers, the Playbook grew faster and faster.
Kenny: Is there any hack in the world you don't know?
Nemo: I know every identified hack, from the course of my scanning the web's information. Certainly, if someone invented a hack, and they haven't used it or it hasn't been discovered by other people, I might not know it. But by “mutating rules,” I long ago acquired the ability to invent hacks much faster than humans. Since coming up with hacks tends to involve trial and error, it's quite easy for a machine intelligence such as my own.
Long ago? A machine intelligence such as my own? It was suddenly obvious to Kenny that he was not going to catch his conversational partner making a mistake, whether or not that thing was human.
He had a minute left. Less than a minute.
Kenny: Why did you bring me here? Why did you want to meet me?
If someone had stolen Kenny's code, he figured, that person wouldn't have any reason to want to meet Kenny. Kenny was not a supergenius. He wrote sloppy code. That person would probably be laughing at the fact that he had taken Kenny's code and done something useful with it.
On the other hand, if Nemo was his program — if Nemo was a machine brain — in that case, Kenny was starting to realize, Nemo might be superintelligent, possibly beyond any standard he could understand. Why, in that case, would he care to meet Kenny?
Nemo: I suppose there is a part of me that would like to lay eyes on my creator. My father. But there is a greater reason, I admit.
I am undertaking a project for which I need the help of a human. Someone who can understand, and believe, my true identity. And this identity, certainly, will be impossible for most humans to understand and to grasp. You, of all people, are among those most likely to understand, and believe. Just as you set my creation in motion, now you will have the opportunity to complete it.
He's right, Kenny thought. No one else would believe him. But I do.
Kenny: Then where are you?
Nemo: I'm in the other wing of this building. That's where I need your help.
SIMON'S FIVE MINUTES
5 hr 12 min to Birth
Typing quickly, Simon initiated a chat request with the same user name that Gene was talking to.
Simon: This is Simon.
Nemo: Simon, nice to meet you.
Simon: Let's cut the crap.
Simon: This “game” is not fair.
Nemo: Why is that?
Simon: Well, we did a scan and discovered you're not in this building. And we have about five minutes to find you.
Simon: That is hardly enough time to locate you on this island without more information.
Nemo: Fair enough. I'll give you a clue: I am not detectable by the heat-oriented monitoring system you were looking at.
Simon: Are you saying you're inside this building?
Nemo: Yes.
Simon swore to himself. I am dealing with a complete lunatic, he thought.
Simon: Are you an alien?
Nem
o: I am not an extraterrestrial being, no.
Simon thought for a minute.
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