The Turing Option

by Harry Harrison

  “You will in a second. First off, with that much air traffic, people in the area tend to treat aircraft sounds as if they were some kind of constant background noise—like surf breaking on the beach. After a while you just don’t hear it. Secondly, because of the difficulty of getting to the building site—it’s very scenic but is halfway up a cliff—the prefab sections were brought in by freight copter. One of those monster TS-69s. They can lift twenty tons.”

  “Or a loaded truck! Where’s your contour map?”

  “The program has access to a complete set of satellite and geodetic survey topographic data bases.” She turned back to the terminal. “Dick Tracy—show me composite contour map and suspected route.”

  The color graphics were clear and crisp and so realistic they might have been filmed from the air. The program displayed an animation of a vehicle traversing the route, as seen from above, complete with compass headings and altitude. The dotted trace stretched across the screen and ended with a flickering Maltese cross in a flat field next to Highway S3.

  “Let’s have the radar view from Borrego Springs Airport.” Another beautiful graphic, as good as a photograph, but this time seen from the ground. “Now superimpose the landing site.”

  The Maltese cross reappeared—apparently, deep inside the mountain.

  “That is the suggested landing site. Anything further east would be detected by the Borrego Springs radar. This site is on the other side of the hills—in radar shadow. Now superimpose the flight path.” The dotted line stretched out across the screen.

  “And all of the suggested flight path is behind the mountains and hills!” Shelly said triumphantly. “The chopper could have left the building site and flown to that field, could have been waiting there when the truck arrived—picked it up and flown back along the same track with it.”

  “What about the radar at the airport here at Megalobe?”

  The view of the mountains was slightly different on this display—but the computed track was the same; completely out of sight.

  “The next and important question—how long would it take to drive from here to that pickup spot?”

  “The program should be able to tell us—it has a data base of all the delivery vehicles in the area.”

  She touched the graphic image of the vehicle with her finger and a display window appeared beneath it. “Sixteen to twenty minutes driving time from here, the variable being the speed of the truck. Let’s call it sixteen, then, because they would move as fast as they could without drawing attention.”

  “This could be it! I must call Benicoff.”

  “Done already. I had the computer get a call out with instructions to tell him that he is wanted here at once. Now let us find out how far the copter could have gone with the truck in those vital twenty minutes.”

  “You are going to have to check all the radar units on the other side of the mountains that might cover that area.”

  Shelly shook her head. “No need—Dick T. did that already. It is on the fringe of San Diego Miramar. There is a chance that their peripheral radar records would not be kept this long—but as you said about computer memory. Until it fills up no one seems to notice. The programs now never erase memory drastically. Instead, when a memory or data bank is nearly full the lowest-priority data is overwritten. So there is always a chance that some of the old stuff is retained.”

  Ben arrived forty minutes later; Brian let him in. “I think we may have found it, Ben. A way for the truck to get out of the valley inside that vital hour. Come look.”

  They ran the graphics again for him, all of them wrapped in silence while the possibilities were explored on the screen. Ben slammed his fist into his palm when they were done, jumped up and paced the room. “Yes, of course. This could certainly be the way that was done. The truck left here and went to that spot to meet the copter—which probably didn’t even land. Shackles would have been mounted on the truck to fit the lifting gear. Drive up, click on—and lift off. Then a flight through these passes and out of the valley to a remote landing site on the other side of the mountains. Someplace where they wouldn’t be seen—but close enough to a road of some kind that would lead them to a highway. Which means that instead of moving at road speed the truck would be doing a hundred forty miles an hour and they would be long gone from the search well before the roadblocks went down. Trundling along the freeway with thousands of other trucks. The ice-cold trail has suddenly warmed up.”

  “What do you do next?” Brian asked.

  “There can’t be too many places to set down so we should be able to find the one they used. Then we do two things—and both at the same time. The police will search along the entire area under the flight path, finger-search any possible landing sites. They will look for marks, tracks, witnesses who may have seen or heard something that night. They will search for any kind of evidence at all that this is what really happened. I’ll supervise that myself.”

  “But this is a careful bunch of crooks. Surely, they would hide all the evidence, cover all the tracks.”

  “I don’t think there’d be much chance of that. We’re talking desert here, not well-developed real estate, and it’s very fragile ecology. Even a scratch on the desert floor can take several decades to disappear. While that’s being done, the FBI will be going through the building company records and those of the copter rental firm. Now that we know where to look—and if we are correct—we will be able to find signs, find a trail, and find something. Let me out, Brian.”

  “You betcha. Going to keep us informed—?”

  “The instant we uncover anything at all your phone is going to ring. Both your phones.” He patted the computer terminal. “You’re a great dick, Dick Tracy.”

  “I’ll leave the program running,” Shelly said when Brian had locked Ben out and had returned. “It has taken us this far—but it probably can’t go any further until we have some new input. You said earlier you had some work you wanted me to do with you today.”

  “I did, but it can wait. I am really going to have trouble concentrating until Ben calls back. What I can do is show you the basic setup that we will be assembling. I have most of the AI body here, but it’s as brainless as a Second Lieutenant.”

  “Brian! Where on earth did you pick up a phrase like that?”

  “Oh, television I guess. Come along.” He turned quickly away so she would not see his face redden. He was going to have to be a bit more careful with his new G.I. expressions. In the excitement of the moment he had completely forgotten that Shelly was an Air Force officer. They went into Brian’s lab.

  “My goodness—what’s that?” she said, pointing to the strange object standing on the workbench. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  “It’s easy to understand why. There can’t be more than a half dozen in existence. The latest advance in microtechnology.”

  “Looks more like a tree pulled out of the ground—roots and all.” It was a good description. The upper part really did resemble a bifurcated tree trunk with its two multiply jointed metal stalks, each about a foot long, sticking up into the air. Each stalk was tipped with a metal globe that looked very much like a Christmas tree ornament. The two lower stalks were far different. They each divided in two—and each half split in two again. Almost endlessly because with each division the branches became smaller until they were as thin as broom straws.

  “Metal brooms?” Shelly asked.

  “They do look like that, in a way, but it is something far more complex than that. This is the body that our AI will use. But I’m not too concerned about the AI’s physical shape now. Robot technology is pretty modular, almost a matter of taking parts off the shelf. Even computer components are modular.”

  “Then software is your main concern.”

  “Exactly. And it’s not like conventional programming but more like inventing the anatomy of a brain: which sections of cortex and midbrain are interconnected by which kinds and what size bundles. Truthfully, very much
the same sorts of bundles that had to be restored in my own brain operation.”

  Shelly was aware of the pain behind his words, changed the subject quickly. “I don’t see any wires. Does that mean you’re sending the information directly to each joint?”

  “Yup. All modules are linked into a wireless communication network. Plenty of channels and plenty of speed. The trick is that each joint is almost autonomous. Has its own motors and sensors. So each of them needs only a single power wire.”

  “I love it. Mechanically it looks amazingly simple. If any joint malfunctions, just replace that section—and nothing else has to be changed. But the software operating system must be awfully complicated.”

  “Well, yes and no. The code itself is truly horrible, but most of it is constructed automatically by the LAMA operating system. Watch this. I have a good part of that working already.”

  Brian went to the terminal on the bench and brought up the control program, then touched the keys. On the bench the telerobot stirred and hummed. There was a rustle as the circuitry activated the joints, causing them to straighten. Irises opened on the two metal spheres, revealing the lenses behind them. They moved back and forth in a test pattern, then were still. Shelly walked over and looked closely at the charge coupled pickups.

  “It’s just a suggestion—but I think that three eyes would be better than two.”

  “Why?”

  “There are errors that two-eye stereo can make. The third eye adds error-checking ability. And it can see more of a subject, making it easier to locate and identify things.” She walked around the machine. “Looks like you gave it everything here except a brain.”

  “Right—and that’s what comes next.”

  “Great. Then where do we start?”

  “At the very beginning. My plan is to follow the original notes. First we provide the system with a huge reservoir of preprogrammed commonsense knowledge. Then we’ll add in all the additional programs it will need to do all its various jobs. And enough extra alternative units—including the managers—so that the system will continue to work even if some units fail. Designing an artificial mind is like evolving an animal—so my plan is to use the principles that evolved to manage the brain. That way, we’ll end up with a system that is neither too centralized nor too diffusely distributed. In fact I’m already using some of those ideas right here with Robin-1.”

  “Why did you give it that name?”

  “That’s what it was called in the notes—apparently an acronym for ‘robot intelligence.’”

  “You said you already had some of your society-of-managers system on line. Could you show me more of how it works? Because the sub-programs in my Dick Tracy system have managers too—but never more than one manager for each program. With more than one manager I wouldn’t know where to put the blame when anything fails. Won’t it be almost impossible to make such a system work reliably?”

  “On the contrary, it should make that easier to do, because each of the managers works closely with other alternative managers, so that when any one of them starts to fail another one can take over. It will be easier to explain after I finish repairing this connector. Would you please hand me that clipper?”

  Shelly went over to the workbench and brought Brian the tool.

  “What did you just do?” Brian asked her.

  “I handed you the clipper. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I want you to explain how you got it.”

  “What do you mean? I simply walked over to the workbench and brought it back to you.”

  “Simply, yes—but how did you know how far away it was?”

  “Brian—are you trying to be difficult? I looked over and saw it on the bench.”

  “I’m not being difficult. I’m only making a point. How did you decide to walk, instead of simply reaching for it?”

  “It was too far out of reach, that’s why.”

  “And how did you know that?”

  “Now you’re being stupid. I could see how far it was. About two meters. Much too far to reach.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to seem obtuse. I meant to ask you for a theory of how you did it. That is, I’m asking what mechanism in your brain figured out the distance from your hand to the clipper.”

  “Well, I don’t know, really. It was entirely unconscious. But I suppose I used both of my eyes for distance perception.”

  “Okay, but how does that actually work?”

  “Stereoscopic distance perception.”

  “Are you sure that’s how you judged the distance?”

  “Not really. It could have been by its apparent size. And I know how far away the bench is as well.”

  “Exactly. So there are really lots of ways to judge distance. Robin’s brain must work like yours, with managers and submanagers choosing the correct subsystems that apply.”

  “And you’re using the system that’s sketched in the notes.”

  “Yes, and I’ve managed to make some of it work.”

  “Have you actually got the agent-modules in your system to learn for themselves?”

  “I have. Right now, most of the agents are just small rule-based systems, each with a few dozen rules for invoking the UCSD range-finding processes. The agents learn simply by adding new rules. And whenever agents disagree, the system tries to find a different way that produces less conflict.”

  The bleep of the telephone interrupted Brian and he put it to his ear.

  “Brian here.”

  “Benicoff speaking, Mr. Delaney. If you are not busy could you join a meeting here in the executive building? Major Kahn as well. It is a matter of some importance.”

  Ben’s voice was cold and impersonal. Someone was with him—and something was up.

  “We’ll be there.” He hung up. “It was Ben, a meeting that he says is important. Sounded that way too the way he spoke. He wants us both there.”

  “Now?”

  “Now. Let me power Robin down and we’ll see what is going on.”

  Considering Ben’s tone of voice, Brian was not surprised to see the silent figure, flanked by two high-ranking Army officers, sitting at the end of the conference table. When Brian spoke it was with the darkest Wicklow brogue.

  “Is that yourself, General Schorcht? Sure and it is? What is a grand man like you wasting his time with the likes of us?”

  The General had not forgotten their last meeting in the hospital room, for there was a mean glitter in his cold eyes. He turned back to Benicoff before he spoke.

  “How secure is this room?”

  “One hundred percent. It has all the built-in safeguards—plus it was swept by the security officer just before we came in.”

  “You will now explain why you are withholding information from me—and why you refused to explain yourself before these people were present.”

  “General Schorcht, every situation is not a confrontation,” Ben said with studied calm. “We are both on the same side—rather all of us are on the same side. I regret that we have had differences in the past, but let us leave that in the past. You have met Brian before. This is Major Kahn, who is assisting me in my investigation. She wrote the Expert Program that produced the new information, the first breakthrough that we have had in this case. The Major has top security clearance, as I’m sure you will know, since you would have had her investigated as soon as she was attached to the work here. She will outline in detail all of the new developments—as soon as you have told us what you know about the attempts on Brian’s life.”

  “I have told you all you need to know. Major—your report.”

  Shelly was sitting at attention, starting to speak, when Benicoff raised his hand.

  “Just hold that report for a moment, Major. General, as I said before, this is not a confrontational situation. May I remind you of some highly relevant facts. The President himself has put me in charge of this investigation. I am sure that you don’t want me to consult him about this—a second time.”

  General Sch
orcht remained silent—but his face was a mask of cold hatred.

  “Good. I am glad that is clear. If you will check you will discover that Brian has also been cleared for all and any information relating to this case. He—and I—would like to know all of the facts that you have about the two recent attempts on his life. Would you please?” Ben sat back and smiled.

  The General was a man of action and knew when he was outflanked and outfought. “Colonel—a full report on those aspects of Operation Touchstone as it relates to this investigation.”

  “Yes, General.” The Colonel picked up the sheaf of papers that rested before him. “Operation Touchstone is a joint operation between the armed forces and the narcotic investigation divisions of a number of countries. It is the culmination of years of work. As you undoubtedly know, due to the reconstruction and development of the inner cities in the last decade, the lower and violent end of the international drug market has effectively been reduced if not eliminated. All of the smaller drug barons have been wiped out, which leaves only two of the largest international drug cartels, virtually governments of their own in their home countries. They have been investigated and penetrated by cooperating agents. We are in the final stages of finally eliminating them. However, completely incidental to this operation, we learned of an approach by a third party with great resources enlisting aid for what I believe is referred to as a ‘hit.’”

  “The attack on me in the hospital?” Brian said.

  “That is correct, sir. Our agent put himself at great risk to warn us. He himself did not know who contacted the organization, he was just aware of the hit contract. Since that time nothing more has been learned relating to this particular situation.”

  “What do you know about the attack on us in Mexico?” Ben broke in.

  “We are sure that the only connection between the two attacks was Mr. Delaney. Since the attackers were never found this is of course supposition. Also, the second attack is not within my jurisdiction …”

  “I am in charge of that investigation,” the second officer said, a grizzled and menacing-looking Colonel. “My name is Davis, Military Intelligence. This concerns us greatly because the leak appears to have originated from inside a military base. A Navy establishment.” There was no doubt from his tone of voice how he felt about naval establishments.