Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  “Wonderful, you may say. So all the people in AI, as it’s called—artificial intelligence—are quick to yell. But it seems a little odd that we should be so quick to embrace an intelligence utterly different from our own—exclusively left-hemisphere intelligence, if you will—and an intelligence we have no way to check on. Nearly all our existing programs, and especially the largest and most important ones, are patchworks of the kind I’ve somewhat metaphorically described. They’re heuristic in the sense that their construction is based on rules of thumb—stratagems that appear to ‘work’ under most foreseen circumstances—and ad hoc mechanisms patched in from time to time. The gigantic programs that run business and industry and, above all, government have almost all been put together—one can’t even say ‘designed’—by teams of programmers whose work has been spread over many years. By the time these systems are put on line, most of the original programmers have left or turned their attentions to other pursuits. A man named Marvin Minsky’s found a very good way of expressing it: a large computer program, he says, is like an intricately connected network of courts of law, that is, of subroutines, to which evidence is submitted by other subroutines. These courts weigh (evaluate) the data given them and then transmit their judgments to still other courts. The verdicts rendered by these courts may—indeed, often do—involve decisions about what court has ‘jurisdiction’ over the intermediate results then being manipulated. The programmer thus cannot even know the path of decision making within his own program, let alone what intermediate or final results it will produce.”

  “Like Darwin’s universe,” Craine said, thinking aloud.

  “Yes, very much like that,” Weintraub said. “Geological-time strata—layers on layers of program evolution; chance combinations and recombinations; occasional freak occurrences, as when some teenaged computer nut interfaces his Radio Shack with the monster and starts moving things around. And above all, of course—you’re right—no Programmer, pure blind mechanical survival of the fittest.”

  “Interesting, all this,” Craine said.

  There was a knock on the door. It opened two inches and, the same moment, Professor Weintraub called, “Come in!”

  The door opened more and an intense, wild-looking man poked his head in. His hair and beard were red, as unwashed as Craine’s and vastly more tangled. One of the lenses in his round, steel-framed glasses had a crack with Scotch tape over it. His clothes were army surplus, or maybe the real thing—patches and stripes had been torn off the arms. He was carrying, clamped under his right arm, a large messy roll of printout. “You going to lunch, Murray?” he asked, hardly noticing Craine. His voice was oddly hoarse, and he at once cleared his throat.

  Professor Weintraub raised his left arm, pushed the cuff back, and looked at his watch. With a leap of guilt, Craine looked at his own. “It’s nearly quarter to three, Frank. I ate hours ago,” Weintraub said.

  “Oh,” the young man said, not surprised, exactly, not even quite registering. “Oh,” he said again; then, abruptly, “Listen, I got an incredible new feature—”

  “Later,” Weintraub said with a smile, raising his hand like a policeman.

  “Oh, sorry,” the red-head said. Now he turned to look at Craine, his expression like that of a man looking at a chimp at the zoo. “Sorry,” he said. He gave a little wave and backed out, closing the door.

  Craine said, shifting his weight forward, preparing to rise, “I hadn’t realized how late it was getting. I’ve got to run. I want to thank you, Professor Weintraub. You have no idea—”

  “Don’t mention it,” Weintraub said. “I hope it helps somehow. It’s been a pleasure, actually.”

  “One thing,” Craine said, on his feet now. “Who was that fellow?” He aimed a thumb at the door.

  “That was Britt—Frank Britt,” Weintraub said, and gave a just perceptible headshake, perhaps embarrassment.

  “He’s a programmer?”

  “Very much so.” He pushed back his desk chair and got to his feet, then came around to accompany Craine out. “He’s what you might call a computer bum—very special modern breed.” He laughed.

  Though it was later than he’d thought—even if he left right now he couldn’t reach Elaine Glass by quarter to three, as he’d promised—Craine hesitated. “What do they do?” he asked.

  “Why, they play with computers. That’s all they live for.” He made a vague, airy gesture with his plump right hand. “Dreamers—mathematical loonies.” When Craine went on waiting, his look still questioning, Professor Weintraub cocked his head, thought for an instant, then said: “When you talk about an ordinary engineer you’re talking about a man who’s, so to speak, impacted in the physical universe. What he does is ruled by its physical laws; in the end he can do only what may be lawfully done. When some device he creates doesn’t work, he can’t always know by his own reasoning alone whether he’s on the verge of success—some small adjustment—or hopelessly lost, wandered into some closet from which there’s no exit. He has to turn to his teachers, his colleagues, his books—appeal to real experience for some clue to what’s gone wrong. But the computer programmer is in a different situation. He creates a universe for which he alone is the lawgiver—or at least that’s his aim. And of course on a computer, it’s possible to create universes of almost unlimited complexity. One may create, for example, worlds in which there’s no gravity, or in which two bodies attract each other, not by Newton’s inverse-square law, but by an inverse-cube law, or in which time dances forward and backward in obedience to a choreography as simple or complex as one wills. Moreover, and this is the crucial point, systems programmed in this way can act out their scripts. They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behavior. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor has ever exercised such absolute authority or commanded such unswervingly dutiful troops. Obviously, power like that can be addictive.” Professor Weintraub shook his head again, at once quizzical and sad, and opened the door. “I’ll lead you to the front office,” he said. “Believe me, you’d never find it.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Craine said. “You’re right, it’s quite a maze.” Looking down the sterile hallway, leading to other hallways at either end, he had no idea which direction he had to go. As Weintraub turned to the right, then hesitated, waiting for him, Craine said, “So this Britt’s one of the addicts.”

  “Very much so. They’re everywhere, you know—wherever you find computer centers, which is to say in countless places in the United States and in virtually every other industrial region of the world … bright young men like Frank, there, of dishevelled appearance, usually with sunken, glowing eyes. They sit there at their consoles, arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, watching the typewriter ball, staring like the gambler who keeps his eyes riveted on the dice. When he’s not sitting there at the console, transfixed, the hacker—that’s what they call themselves, ‘hackers’—the hacker sits at a table strewn with computer printouts, poring over them like a rabbi demonically possessed by some cabalistic text. They work till they drop—twenty, thirty hours at a time. If they can arrange it, they have their food brought in to them—coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If you let them, they sleep on cots or bedrolls near the computer—but only a few hours, then back to the console or the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all show plainly how little they care about our so-called reality. They exist only through and for the computers. Compulsive programmers. Hackers, they call themselves. They’re an international phenomenon.” He caught Craine’s elbow as he started to turn left where they had to continue straight. “This way.”

  “Ah, yes.” Quickly he asked, “Why do computer centers put up with them? They’re not working on real projects, if I understand what you’ve said—”

  “They’re useful, that’s all. They’re like the ‘friendly’ parasites in the human body: they’re not part of us, exactly, but we can’t live without them. Th
e hacker is usually a superb technician. He knows every detail of the computer he works on, its peripheral equipment, the computer’s operating system, and so on. He’s tolerated around the center because of what he knows and because he can write small subsystem programs very fast, that is, in one or two sessions of, say, twenty hours each. Before long, in fact, the center may find itself using any number of his programs. The trouble is—as you can guess from what I’ve said—a hacker will almost never document his programs once he stops working on them, with the result that a center may come to depend on him to teach the use of the programs, how to maintain them, and so on—programs whose structure only he—if anyone—understands.”

  “I’m beginning to understand why you called this operation what you did at the start,” Craine said. “Bedlam.” They were now in the first room Weintraub had brought him into. He recognized the door that led to the reception room, the secretaries’ desks.

  Weintraub smiled back a little distantly; Craine could feel the man withdrawing to whatever complex thought Craine’s arrival had interrupted. “I suppose I haven’t given you a very favorable impression of our work,” he said. “The other side, of course, is that for some of us it’s extremely exciting work—I can no more tell you how exciting it is, to a man like myself, to say nothing of a man like Frank Britt …” He reached for the doorknob but then hesitated before turning it, wanting to finish his thought. “I’ve told you how things can go wrong in computer work. But believe me, when they go right—” He opened the door and bowed, letting Craine go first.

  As soon as they entered the reception room, they both knew in an instant that something was wrong. The secretaries both looked up at once, with an expression Craine knew but could not place, one that froze him where he stood. In Professor Furth’s office—the door stood open—the young man Craine had seen before somewhere, Dennis Reed, was hunting for something in the books and papers on Furth’s desk, his face solemn, squeezed shut with concentration. There was another man at his left, a gaunt, dishevelled black in glasses and fatigue cap. The minute Dennis Reed saw Craine watching him he jumped to the door and swung it shut. Something in the look of alarm, the way the boy’s head jerked back, the eyes black and beady as a groundhog’s switched on the lost connection. It was the boy who’d been watching him at Tully’s Tome Shop—the frightened fat boy in the oversized red sweater who had been following him later in the street. He felt an impulse to rush to Furth’s door right now and get to the bottom of this, but by the clock on the wall it was nearly five to three, much too late already; he couldn’t get back to Elaine’s even now before three, and he’d said two forty-five. And there was, anyway, this other business, the stillness in the room, like mourning.

  “Professor Weintraub,” the blondish secretary was saying, “have you heard?”

  “Heard what?” Professor Weintraub asked. He was as still and lightly balanced as if with fright held in as when Craine had first met him.

  “Professor Furth’s had an accident, he’s been killed,” she said. “He ran his van over a cliff.”

  Weintraub turned his head to look at Craine, then looked past him, hardly registering that Craine was there.

  “I’ve got to go,” Craine whispered. “I’m sorry, I’m very sorry.”

  Weintraub, deep in thought, seemed not to notice.

  Fragment Three

  They had come to a gray metal door at the rear of the stacks. Weintraub opened it and waved Craine through. Ahead of them lay a seemingly endless corridor, offices on each side. Craine could not remember later who the offices belonged to. He could remember, in fact, almost none of it, only the powerful visual effects, the strangeness of it all. He was seeing with innocent eyes, like a child: an office where three men—two blacks and an Oriental—sat poring over a printout with the intense concentration of Chicago anarchists, all three of them wearing hats, on the table all around them coffee cups, pink plastic spoons, and sandwich crusts. Another room, later, high ceilings, flickering fluorescent lights, immense computers humming and pinging, typewriters clattering, on the floor in a corner a bearded young man on an army cot, asleep.

  “You’ve no idea where Professor Furth is today?” Craine asked.

  “None. I’m sorry. He’s away a lot of course, hunting bugs and glitches in various people’s software, or giving lectures at one university or another. Spends half his time on airplanes, that man, but usually he tells us in advance when he’ll be gone.”

  “He’s the general boss here?”

  “Technically, yes.”

  He’d hit a sensitive spot, he saw, though when he looked Weintraub’s face was as expressionless as ever—slightly bug-eyed, pallid as a professional chess player’s, his curly hair floating along around his balding dome as if the hair and head were of a different dimension from the world they momentarily occupied. “What does he lecture on?” Craine asked.

  “Doom, for the most part,” Weintraub said, and smiled. “One of the two favorite subjects of computer men. The other one being how we and only we, by our magic and clearheadedness, are destined to save the world.” He raised one forearm just enough to allow himself to raise an index finger as a beacon. Craine glimpsed for the first time, despite the unearthly, expressionless face—perhaps it was only the shyness of an egghead—that the man had humor in him. Craine chuckled, encouraging, and put his hat on to free himself to work with his pipe.

  “Furth, I take it, doesn’t believe that only computer men can save the world.”

  “No.”

  “And yourself?” Lighting his pipe, Craine slid his eyes at the man.

  “Sometimes I’m a little optimistic—usually on Thursdays. For the most part, no.” The hand with which he’d made the beacon went to his belt buckle, caught hold like a bat, and hung there.

  “Nevertheless,” Craine said, “you take all this very seriously, I can see.”

  “Oh yes, it’s serious. Far more serious than most things—which is not to say better.” He added, as if giving the wrong impression were unethical, “I love it.”

  “Tell me, Professor,” Craine said, waving his pipe as if in apology, “were Professor Furth and April Vaught at all close?”

  They were passing a bank of computer screens like large television sets, consoles below them, men and women looking up, each at his own screen, with sunken, glowing eyes. There was a curious scent of sweat and raw nerves, also burnt coffee and old hamburger. Panel lights flicked on and off in seemingly meaningless patterns. Weintraub, without Craine’s noticing it, had stopped and stood watching one of the screens, his body as still as some queerly bland figure from a wax museum. The woman at the console below the screen was smoking a cigarette, never touching it with her fingers, her hands poised over the typewriter keys, her eyes narrowed as if with bitchy rage. Clearly she did not know they were there—know any of them were there. “Come on, baby,” she whispered, “you’re in! you’re in!”

  Delicately, Weintraub stepped away. “Furth and April Vaught,” he said, picking up the phrase as if from some old, old memory bank. He turned and studied Craine critically, and shook his head. “So far as I know they never spoke to each other. He knew who she was of course; and of course Furth knew Ira …”

  “They’re friends, Professor Furth and Ira?”

  “Not precisely. When you meet John Furth you’ll see why. He has enemies and allies, not friends.” He smiled dimly. “But they talked some; they had certain common interests. I remember they once had a long discussion on, so to speak, computer poetry—very heated, both on the same side.” He smiled more brightly, recalling it. “Ira took the position that the ‘experience’ communicated in true poetry is unavailable to the computer. I forget his examples—the remembered anguish of adolescent love, that may have been one of them. Or the parent’s feeling when he watches his sleeping child. Furth was delighted. I think he quite literally hit the desk with his fist, he was so pleased with Ira’s argument.”

  Craine stood puffing at his pipe, waiti
ng for more. No more came. “What was it about it that pleased him?” he asked at last.

  Professor Weintraub glanced at him, then looked at the floor. “Your question’s more complicated than you realize,” he said. He opened another door, nodding Craine through, then came through himself just in time to catch a blond, sallow-looking man in a light blue frock, a sort of lab coat. “Petersen!” Weintraub called. The man stopped abruptly, and Weintraub went up to him, four quick steps, asking some question Craine didn’t hear. They looked together at the blond man’s clipboard, then Weintraub nodded and the man hurried off in the direction he’d been headed before.

  “Well,” Weintraub said. He was about to say, “That’s about it,” and get back to his work.

  “Look,” Craine broke in, grabbing Weintraub’s elbow. “I know you’re busy, and I know it seems a waste of your valuable time, my asking all these questions, but we’re dealing with a murder and the possible involvement of a personal friend of mine—Ira Katz, I mean, a man I’m sure you have some feeling for yourself. Go along with me just a little longer. All I want is to get the feel of this place.”

  “In half an hour?” Professor Weintraub asked mildly.

  “I know, I know.” He thought of the whiskey in the truck—his chest full of pressure, something twisting in his stomach. He was so tense, so crowded by time and the befuddling complexity of things—he must meet Elaine Glass—how much time left, half an hour?—and he must get over to Carnac—if McClaren was right he should have gone there right off—and tense for more reasons than those, of course—McClaren’s suspicions, damn near had a case piled up, or so it seemed right now; Craine couldn’t be sure, couldn’t seem to think worth crap without that whiskey ’ He stood clinging to Weintraub’s elbow, bent forward as if ready to tighten to a crouch. “Just humor me! Believe me, I know what I’m doing! Where were we? Furth?” He began to move, pulling Weintraub along with him, half forcing him down the hallway as if he, Craine, had taken over as guide. “So why is it he hates computer poetry?”