Zimmerman's Algorithm

by S. Andrew Swann Неизвестный Автор

  Gideon looked at the abstract and thought about what the old guy had told them about Julia's work for the NSA. Information warfare he said, military-grade viruses . . .

  "Maybe this is what she was really working on," Gideon whispered. If it was, he wondered what it meant. Was she actually working on some terrorist weapon? Why?

  On the other end of the secure phone line, Emmit D'Arcy said, "What've you got?"

  Colonel Mecham looked at the papers that'd just been delivered to his desk. "We have a flag from the New York Public Library."

  "The library?"

  "Mother filtered out a keyword search originating from one of the public terminals. About Zimmerman. There's a good chance it's Malcolm." Mecham cleared his throat. "I've ordered a team in to extract him."

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. Eventually D'Arcy said, "Did I hear you right?"

  "This was time sensitive. The search was in progress as Mother flagged it. I had to act immediately."

  "I see." D'Arcy's voice became colder. "When this is over, we'll have a talk about this, Colonel Mecham."

  I'm sure we will, Mecham thought. Probably in front of a Senate hearing. "Yes, sir," he hung up the phone and shook his head. He looked up at the man sitting across from him. "There we go," he said. "That's my career."

  General Adrian Harris shook his head. "It has to be done. This situation is too dangerous to have a loose cannon out there. He's served his purpose, drawing the IUF out of the woodwork." The General stood up and said, "Don't worry, son. You did your duty."

  Mecham watched as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs left his office. The door closed silently behind him.

  He had been on the computer long enough for his eyes to begin to hurt. He leaned back and let his gaze drift.

  "So," Ruth asked, "are you any closer?"

  "I don't know." He had spent hours scanning documents, some of them way beyond his level of understanding. He had even found a description of the program Julia left on her own PC. It was a "game" called Life that seemed to have originated on a checkerboard. It was played on a grid, and each turn, every cell on the grid is turned on or off—lives or dies—based on the number of neighboring living cells. The rules of the game were simple, four lines long, but the complexities of the patterns involved could be astounding.

  The game of life, in the decades since its invention, had spawned a whole mathematical discipline around the study of what was called cellular automata. There were people writing theses on the properties of various arrangement of cells—there were patterns that could "move" across the grid, essentially unchanged in form, there were other patterns that could repeatedly build other patterns. All from a set of rules that could fit on a business card.

  Why leave that behind? Gideon pictured the way the pattern had erupted across the screen of Julia's computer, and then dissolved off into nothing. Why?

  He had found quite a few traces of Julia Zimmerman in articles across the Internet, all predating her work for the government. While there was no question about her mathematical genius, she more often gave talks about the Evolutionary Algorithm than the Theorems she was trying to solve with it. When he first heard about what the ET Lab was doing, he'd thought that the computers were simply a means to work on the problems she was trying to solve.

  More and more, it seemed that those problems were an excuse to work with the computers, and the opportunities that they opened up for her.

  Gideon looked up at one of the chandeliers above the main reading room, watching as the late morning sunlight caught it. "You think she saw the computers as a window on that pure mathematical world she

  believed in?"

  "That's the way she described it to me, back when she was going to college."

  Gideon looked at the description of "Life," and thought of Julia's own computer. Why leave it there unless it was some sort of message? A message to the people she knew would be going over her hard drive with a fine-toothed comb.

  '"This is what I'm doing,'" Gideon said, still staring at the chandelier. '"This is what I'm interested in.'"

  "What?"

  "That's what she was telling them. I have a feeling about this. I think she might have modified her thinking about computers, about the data inside them, at least."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I don't think she sees them as a window on her mathematical world," Gideon turned to face Ruth. Her face was half shadow and half rose from the ambient light reflecting off the woodwork. "I think she might see them as that world."

  Ruth looked at him. "Come on, that's crazy. Julie knew—even when she talked about God in the numbers—that we're only talking about mental constructs here. She knew that there could never be a 'real' physical representation of it. There's even a theorem that proves that we can't have a complete picture of the mathematical world."

  "What's that?"

  "I don't quite understand it, but she told me about it the last time she talked to me about her work. It's called Godel's Incompleteness Theorem—I think it says that it's impossible to prove all true statements in a logical system, even if the system is consistent. Julia thought that it proved that we can only glimpse the perfection of the mathematical."

  Gideon nodded. "What that means is that there's still room for faith in Julia's religion."

  Ruth stopped short. "What do you mean?"

  "What's faith, but the acceptance that some things are true despite lacking the proof for them? Despite the impossibility of proving them . . . When did Julia tell you about this?"

  "Just before she went to MIT. What are you thinking?"

  Gideon looked at the computer in front of him, then past it at the series of terminals ranged along the reading tables. It's gotten to the point where we see them, but we don't see them. The computer was ubiquitous, everywhere . . . and most of them were connected to each other. The space, the environment that existed inside those machines, was just on the edge of comprehension. It was very easy to think of it as another world, an alternate universe.

  And if he was thinking along these lines with just a brush against Julia Zimmerman's ideas, what was the impact of the woman herself? Someone everyone acknowledged as a genius . . .

  "She stopped talking to you about the time she started working at MIT, didn't she?"

  Ruth nodded.

  "You said she took a page from the Greeks . . ."

  "Yes, the Pythagoreans. Where are you going with all this?"

  Gideon pulled a paper out of his pocket. It was the copy of the campus paper he had taken from MIT. He showed it to Ruth, reading the caption, '"Assault on Mt. Riemann; Drs. Nolan and Zimmerman stand with their New Pythagorean Order—members of the ET Lab— show a printout of a possible proof,' have you heard that phrase before? 'New Pythagorean Order?'"

  Ruth shook her head.

  Gideon bent over the computer and called up a new search. The term "Pythagorean Order" brought a series of documents. The content wasn't that surprising. . .

  "According to Aristotle, the Pythagorean Order, first to develop the science of mathematics, revered number as the origin of the cosmos. The Order, a religious cult founded in Croton on the coast of Italy around 530 BC, was founded by Pythagoras of Samos, a mathematician, philosopher, and religious leader."

  Gideon looked at the screen and said, "Nolan said that they were almost a cult."

  "I'm not following you."

  "I'm talking about what every religious leader needs." Gideon turned and looked at Ruth. "Disciples."

  "Are you serious?"

  Gideon took the article back and started hunting down some on-line telephone directories. "She told you her beliefs; she doesn't seem shy about voicing them."

  "Yes, but I mean, they're off the wall. What are you talking about? A cult at MIT?"

  Gideon started getting phone numbers matching the names in the article. He scribbled on the article as he paged through a series of names. "Is it so unlikely that she'd manage to find people who'd give so
me kind of weight to her beliefs? Look at how she left MIT. She erased all the ongoing work at the ET Lab. Could she do it all herself? We're talking about the efforts of a dozen people. Wouldn't that require some complicity from the people who worked in the lab?"

  "I'm certain that a few people supported her . . ."

  "The only member of the ET Lab who's still there was the one tenured professor. Not a one ended up with a teaching position, or even continued their studies there past the demise of the lab." Gideon shook his head. "And I know at least one of those people is helping Zimmerman right now." Gideon scribbled a final number and stood up. "Come on, I need to get to a phone."

  Ruth stood up, and they started heading toward the end of the reading room. They had only gone a few feet when Gideon slowed to a stop. There were two men standing at the end of the room in front of them, both converging on the exit.

  Gideon turned around to head toward the other end of the room, and another set of doors. At that end of the room, there were two others. A pair of guys, one who'd been sitting at a terminal, another who had been reading at a table—both were just standing.

  Gideon had been keeping an eye out for people who were out of place. But these guys hadn't been. They'd been filtering into the reading room, one at a time, over the past half hour. They were all dressed differently, one was in a suit, another in jeans and a flannel shirt, another in Dockers and a turtleneck. Gideon kept turning and Ruth gripped his arm.

  Everyone who had been in the room with them—reading or perusing the computer network—they were all standing, facing the two of them. Gideon put an arm around Ruth, as if he could protect her from the people surrounding them.

  Of the people surrounding them, one of the two or three women stepped up toward them. She wore a navy suit and Gideon found himself looking for where the gun was holstered. She stopped about twenty feet away.

  "Gideon Malcolm, Ruth Zimmerman?" she asked. It was just barely a question.

  "Who are you?" Gideon asked.

  "Tracy Davis, I'm a federal agent. I'm a negotiator."

  "Can I see an ID?"

  Davis obliged by pulling one out and opening it for him. Gideon looked and noted, with some irony, that she was Secret Service.

  "What's to negotiate?" Gideon said. "You have us surrounded."

  "I'm going to try and make sure no one gets hurt." Davis smiled weakly, and Gideon could tell, by looking in her eyes, that she was unsure how this was gong to go down. They were treating this like a hostage situation, which suddenly made Gideon feel very nervous.

  "No one's going to get hurt," Gideon said. He said it to reassure Ruth and himself as much as the folks surrounding them. "I'm letting her go now, okay?"

  He waited for Davis to say, "Okay," before he started moving, very slowly. Right now there was no doubt in his mind that there were snipers in place somewhere beyond the arched windows that overlooked the reading room. None of whom he wanted to spook.

  Once his arm was free and Ruth was standing beside him, he held his hands out in front of him. He said, "I have a gun in my pocket. Are people going to be nervous if I hand it over?"

  Davis pulled out a walkie-talkie that was the size of a small cellular phone. She spoke quietly back and forth for a few moments, then she said, "Is it in your jacket?"

  Gideon nodded.

  "What you want to do is take off the jacket and toss it over here by me."

  At this point, Ruth said, "What's going on?"

  Gideon shook his head as he Slowly began removing his jacket. "You wanted to talk to the Feds? Here they are."

  They were both cuffed by the Feds and led out of the library. As they took him out, Gideon had a good look at how serious they were. As they passed out of the reading room, they entered a hallway that was filled with NYPD guys in ballistic helmets and flak jackets.

  When they stepped out on to Fifth Avenue, the street had turned into a parking lot for cop cars, sedans, and two SWAT team vans. Gideon saw press crews, but they were so far away that he doubted that they could see anything.

  Davis handed him off to a dark guy in a suit, and he hustled him into one of the sedans. The last Gideon saw of Ruth, she was shoved into the back of a different sedan. Gideon asked the driver, "So, what federal agency are you with?"

  The guy didn't answer him. He stared straight ahead, and Gideon could only get a good view of his crew cut and a strip of his face in the rearview mirror. Gideon looked over the man's shoulder, at his hands. He saw an academy ring.

  "Marine, huh?"

  "I'm not permitted to speak with you, sir."

  Gideon kept trying to get the guy to talk, but true to his word, the Marine didn't say a single word more. Eventually, he drove off, following two other sedans down Fifth. They were the first cars to leave the scene.

  Gideon expected the reporters to converge, but the cops held the press, and everyone else, away from the small motorcade. As they left, Gideon looked back and saw what had to be a staged disturbance at the front of the library. Several men were being escorted by the NYPD cops, kicking and struggling, despite being chained and carried between four cops in riot gear. Designed to draw attention away from the anonymous sedans.

  3.00 Mon. Mar. 22

  COLONEL Mecham was glad to get out of Washington. The wrath of Emmit D'Arcy was not something that he wanted to face. He was fortunate in that D'Arcy, at the moment, was embroiled in a feud with the other members of the National Security Council, the ones who'd made the decision to pull the plug on Detective Gideon Malcolm, D'Arcy's loose cannon.

  Mecham agreed that the plug needed to be pulled. It was pretty obvious that, due to the IUF's involvement, they'd already lost three people that could have been some source of intelligence. Mecham was certain that they could get more information from Detective Gideon Malcolm by bringing him in than by allowing him to stir things up.

  Mecham landed at JFK at six in the morning. He walked off the plane, through the airport, and straight to the lobby where the car was waiting for him. The man waiting for him came to attention. Mecham nodded acknowledgement to the young Marine and said, "At ease, soldier."

  "Yes, sir."

  The kid looked as if he'd be more comfortable in a uniform. He took Mecham's overnight bag and led him out to a waiting car.

  They hadn't taken him to a police station or a federal building. Gideon wasn't exactly sure where this building was. He knew it had to be an office building east of Central Park, but he couldn't be sure which one. The car had turned off the street and had entered an underground garage, and they had taken an elevator up ten stories and led him through a suite of offices that was nearly empty of furniture. Even the windows were covered, making the only light the stark white of the fluorescents.

  He tried a few times, in vain, to get them to allow him to call a lawyer. Apparently he had fallen into the same black hole that the original Daedalus thieves had fallen into—a place where the Bill of Rights was conveniently overlooked.

  They kept him in a small room that had a cot, a small television, and an adjoining bathroom. Because of the cabinets, Gideon supposed that, at one point, this was supposed to be some sort" of lounge. They locked the door and left him there, occasionally bringing in food from Taco Bell or McDonald's. He only found a change of clothes—two pairs ofjeans and a couple of T-shirts—by accident when he was rummaging around bored. They hadn't even bothered to take the tags off.

  Despite lack of a shower, it still felt good to change out of clothes that still smelled faintly of smoke.

  For two days, they'd left him in there. The Marines wouldn't talk to him, and—more annoying—they refused to listen to him. He was beginning to wonder if this was it, all there was to everything, just an

  anonymous dull captivity. . .

  Then, on the morning of day three, he walked out of the bathroom and saw a trio of the plainclothes Marines in his room, waiting for him. The lead one said, "Would you please come with us, sir?"

  "As if I have a choice."
Gideon rubbed his chin, where four days of stubble itched.

  They took him—one on either side, one behind him— down an empty hallway and into an office. The Marines stopped with Gideon standing in front of a closed door. The lead Marine said, "The Colonel is waiting for you."

  "I'm sure he is," Gideon said. He really had nowhere to go except through the door. He sighed and pushed his way through. He had barely taken five steps into the office when one of the Marines reached in and closed the door behind him.

  The office was mostly empty, like the rest of this place. It was one of the smaller offices, without any windows. There was a battered green metal desk sitting in the center of the room. Sitting on the desk was a small tape recorder attached by a cord to a microphone sitting on the center of the desk. On Gideon's side of the desk was a folding metal chair, and opposite him sat a man in late middle age, with hair that wasn't quite as short as the Marines'.

  "Have a seat, Mr. Malcolm." He gestured to the folding chair.

  Gideon sat, and as he sat, he looked behind him and saw, in one corner of the room, a camcorder on a tripod, pointed at the desk.

  "Where's Ruth?" Gideon asked. "I've been trying to ask, but none of these people will even talk to me. What happened to the Secret Service?" If there ever was any Secret Service.

  "Those men have very explicit orders not to communicate with you. I can assure you that Ruth Zimmerman is safe, apparently much safer than she'd be on the streets with you."

  "What do you want from me?"

  "I want to hear about everything that's happened to you since the incident where your partner was shot."