by John Fast
“Paxton. He’ll be in his Lab at the Turing Institute tomorrow. He likes to work on Saturdays.”
“Why should I talk with Paxton?” I wondered.
“Because,” my father replied, “he can help you find that key you’re looking for.”
CHAPTER 11.
The Geomancer’s Art
The next morning I pedaled my mountain bike up the Great Road to the Turing Institute where I hoped to find the answers to my questions. I entered Turing Hall, a four-story granite building with huge windows, and climbed the stairs to the top floor. The sign on the first door to the left read, “Pattern Recognition Lab.” I knocked.
“Enter,” Paxton called out.
I opened the door and stepped into the Lab. The two nearest walls were lined with books, the opposite wall was dominated by two large windows, and the far wall was covered with screens of various sizes. And they were all raining algorithms: thin green strands streaming down from the sky. That is, all the screens except one. Daniel Paxton, thirty-four years old, with dark brown hair and a sturdy build, stood in front of the one screen that displayed a digital image. He was typing on a keyboard that rested on a metal stand.
“What do you make of this, John?” He asked, gesturing to the image in front of him.
I crossed the Lab, stood beside him and studied the picture: rust red globules on a gray background. The scale at the top of the screen indicated that the globules were one micron in diameter.
“Are they organic?” I wondered.
“Precisely the question,” Paxton replied. “The International Space Agency forwarded this image yesterday afternoon. It’s a slice of rock from a hillside near the Martian Outpost. They also sent a copy of the spectro-analysis.”
“I didn’t know you were an astrobiologist.”
“I’m not. The ISA thought my pattern recognition programs could help them decipher these spheroids.”
“What’s the verdict?”
“My programs have determined, with ninety-eight percent certainty, that they’re inorganic mineral deposits, which is what I’m telling the ISA right now.”
He finished typing his report, and looked up.
“Are all these screens analyzing that Martian rock?” I asked, gesturing to the wall of algorithmic rain.
“No. They’re searching for solutions to answers.”
“Sorry?”
“In the old days,” Paxton began, “we used pen and paper, slide rulers and calculators to solve our equations. Then we built computers to do the work. Now we run our evolutionary algorithms on those computers and, generation after generation, they search for the optimal answers.”
“And when they find them, we don’t know how they got there,” I said, finishing his thought.
“Exactly. We have the answers, we don’t have the solutions. So I’m reconstructing the history of the evolutionary algorithms that led us to our current understanding of quantum wave functions.”
“Sounds like what I want to do.”
“In what way?” Paxton wondered.
“The Highbrids are evolutionary algorithms,” I replied, thinking all the way back to my computer science classes with Professor Bell. “The Genetic Institute selects us, generation after generation, then the Highbrid School sends us out to search for the optimal answers.”
Paxton nodded his encouragement, and I finished my thought.
“And I want to find the solution to those answers. I want to find the key to all codes.”
“What do you mean by that?” He inquired.
“I’m looking for the ultimate theory of everything.”
“Like quantum vibrations, strings, waves, membranes?”
“Like that, but even more fundamental.”
“An ambitious project,” Paxton noted.
“I know,” I replied, feeling a little foolish. “Maybe too ambitious. Dad thinks it might stir up all that, ‘New Adam,’ stuff again: all that talk about the Genetic Institute trying to create a New Man who’s trying to acquire forbidden knowledge.”
“Everything we do stirs up our critics. You have to pursue your quest, wherever it leads.”
“I don’t know how.”
Paxton thought for a second, then said, “If you want to understand something, you have to trace the history of the evolutionary algorithms that generate it. You have to search for the historical patterns, find the historical connections. That’s what Darwin and Wallace did. That‘s what every great scientist and artist does.”
“So if …,” I began slowly. “If I want to find the key to all codes, I have to trace the history of the relevant evolutionary algorithms … and search for the patterns and connections?”
“Right. And, if you think about it, the historical linguists do the same thing. They compare and contrast, for example, the varied Modern European languages and trace some of them back to their Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit roots. Then they compare and contrast those Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit roots and trace some of them even further back to their common Proto-Indo-European origins. From there they follow the genetic trail of human migration and evolution all the way back to southwest Africa. And they suggest that, early on, the language of the first modern humans split off into two main branches: the Proto-Khosian and Khosian click languages, and the Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian, and Afro-Asiatic languages. Of course, to get any further back than that, the historical linguists have to turn to neuro-anthropology, to the correlations between the evolution of the human brain and the evolution of human language. And at that point they get as close as they can to the key to all languages. So, you might try the same thing: find the relevant algorithmic pathways and follow them wherever they lead.”
“But where do I begin my search?” I wondered, still feeling overwhelmed.
Paxton gestured to the array of screens and said, “Start with a specific question, search for the specific sets of evolutionary algorithms that define that question, then look for the specific historical patterns and historical connections among them. In other words, connect, only connect!”
I considered that suggestion for a moment. The cosmic sycamore tree was, for me, the specific question and all I had to do was find the relevant evolutionary algorithms, patterns, connections that explained it. No problem, I thought. A snap.
We contemplated the screens for another few moments, then Paxton turned to me again.
“Now, John,” he said. “I wonder if you would do me a favor? A young friend of mine is staying at Newton Commons, and she doesn’t get many visitors. I wonder if you would stop by tomorrow afternoon?”
“You want me to visit someone at the local Psych Hospital?”
“It’s not a Psychiatric Hospital. It’s a Transitions Residence. Alexa Pavlova lives in Cottage #6.”
“The incredibly famous Alexa Pavlova?” I asked, awestruck.
Paxton nodded.
“Uh, sure. I’ll visit her,” I replied, trying to sound casual.
“Excellent,” Paxton said.
We stood side-by-side and watched the green rain fall.
CHAPTER 12.
The Mind Reader
No one answered my knock on the front door of Cottage #6 the following afternoon, so I decided to check the back. I felt uneasy as I turned the corner of the house. I didn’t know what to expect from this strange girl who lived in this strange place, just a mile or so down the Princeton Pike. I’d seen Alexa several times on the newstreams. I knew she was sixteen, two whole years older than me, but I had no idea what she was like in person.
I stepped into the garden, which was bursting with flowers, and saw Alexa sitting at the patio table in the shade of a maple tree. Her straight, ash-blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail. Her pale face, with high cheekbones, was bent over a book. She wore a white cotton sundress and white canvas sneakers.
“Hello?” I called, announcing my arrival.
Alexa looked up from her book and studied me with her deep blue eyes.
“I’m John Fast,”
I said nervously. “Paxton asked me to stop by.”
Alexa contemplated me for another moment, then she stood up.
“He told me you were coming,” she said with a barely noticeable East European accent. “Have a seat. I’ll make some tea.”
She turned and disappeared into the cottage.
I glanced around the garden and admired the view. The back of the lawn opened up to a field and, beyond that, a stretch of woods. I sat down at the table and read the cover of Alexa’s book: Theories of Surplus-Value, Karl Marx. I fidgeted in my chair for several minutes, wondering what I should, and shouldn’t, say. Then Alexa returned with a tray of tea and scones. She set out the cups and plates, sat down and poured the tea.
“Thanks,” I said when she was done.
I reached for my cup and asked, “What are you reading?”
“Alice in Wonderland,” Alexa replied casually.
I was so startled by her answer that I knocked my cup over and spilled my tea all the way across the glass tabletop. Alexa slid her chair back to save her dress from the tsunami. I felt my face turning red as I jumped up and grabbed some paper napkins from the tray.
“Sorry … sorry,” I stammered as I blotted the table.
“It’s nothing,” Alexa replied as she slid her chair forward again.
When I finished wiping up the mess, I dumped the soggy napkins on the tray, sat back down in my chair and somehow found the courage to ask her the inevitable next question.
“How did you know what I was thinking?”
“I’m a mind reader,” she explained, looking me in the eye.
I felt worse than ever.
“Sorry,” I repeated, looking down at my clumsy hands.
Alexa refilled my cup and said, “Don’t be. It’s an old mentalist trick. First, set up a chain of unconscious associations: madness, girl, garden. Second, cue the conscious association: tea party. Third, cite the inference: Alice in Wonderland … which, by the way, makes you the Mad Hatter. I don’t even like tea.”
I examined her sharply intelligent face and intensely blue eyes. I was captivated by the quickness of her mind. With one bitter joke she had confronted all my fears about her mental health, and disarmed them. For the moment.
“As I’m sure you’ve noticed,” she continued, “I’m reading, Theories of Surplus-Value. It’s the first volume of Das Capital, but it was published as the fourth volume. A shame, really, since it sets up the entire argument.”
“I’m taking the History of Philosophy in September,” I said, holding my cup steady. “It’s a first year requirement at my highschool.”
“Marx wasn’t a philosopher.”
“An economist?”
“A bad economist,” she replied, shaking her head. “I think of him as a writer. He wrote the greatest epic novel of the nineteenth century.”
“You mean, what he wrote wasn’t true?”
“I mean the truth of his argument lies in the story he tells: the drama of history, the struggle between labor and capital.”
She paused and looked me in the eye again.
“Paxton thinks I need company,” she said. “Last week it was a girl from Sri Lanka. This week it’s you.”
She sipped her tea and made a face at the cup. Then she looked back up at me.
“You’re with the Genetic Institute.”
“And you’re with Alpha-Gene, Incorporated.”
“So we’re both prisoners.”
I glanced across the garden, toward the field and the line of trees.
“It looks quite open, doesn’t it?” She noted. “But you and I are prisoners of our genetic heritage. So is everyone else, of course. The difference is that most people don’t think about it, while we think about it too much.”
I nodded and fidgeted. Her bitterness made me nervous again.
Alexa stood up, gestured toward the field and asked, “Feel like a walk?”
“Sure!” I exclaimed with a sense of relief.
She stepped off the shady patio and onto the bright lawn where the late afternoon sunlight passed right through the fine cotton weave of her dress, revealing the outline of her perfect hips and thighs. She turned around, caught me looking and scowled.
“It’s an old genetic prejudice,” she stated severely.
“What?” I asked, taken aback.
“That Alpha-Clones have bad knees. That you can identify us by our limp.”
“I wasn’t thinking that,” I replied.
“That’s the definition of prejudice,” Alexa said. “You don’t think.”
She turned and walked toward the trees.
“She isn’t such a good mind reader after all,” I said to myself as I hurried to catch her.
CHAPTER 13.
Phantasmagoria
I visited Alexa once or twice a week that summer, and each time we repeated the same pattern: we had something to eat, then we went for a walk. That fall I started my first year at the Highbrid Highschool. The same squat octagonal building served as the Lower, Middle, and Upper School. The entire First Year Class, and our extended families, filled the amphitheater on opening day, September 7, 2034. Julio Alvarez, the Headmaster, a thirty-four year old Highbrid with short black hair and a neatly trimmed beard, stood at the podium. All twenty-five faculty members were seated behind him.
“On behalf of the Genetic Institute and the Highbrid Highschool,” Professor Alvarez began, “I’d like to welcome the Third Generation of Highbrids to the next phase of their education!”
We applauded and cheered.
“Today,” he continued, “your grandparents and parents, your teachers and mentors celebrate your transition from Middle School to Highschool.”
We applauded and cheered again.
“We’ve made a few improvements to this amphitheater over the summer. However, before I get to them, I want to remind you that you are part of a grand experiment. Whether or not you are eventually selected as a Third Linear Thirty, each one of you has a vital role to play. So embrace the diversity of your gifts! To paraphrase Walt Whitman, ‘Celebrate yourselves!’”
We cheered, applauded, whistled.
“I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce the new members of the Faculty.”
He called out the names of several professors, and cited their areas of expertise. They stood up, in turn, and acknowledged our applause. Then he invited the Dean of the Faculty to describe the new curriculum. When she was done, he returned to center stage.
“And now,” Professor Alvarez stated, “allow me to share with you the improvements we’ve made to this very space.”
He gestured to the air and stepped back from the podium.
The entire room went dark and a large rectangle of light floated above the stage. Then, a few wavy lines and vague images formed within the rectangle. A hum of questions rose all around me, followed by shouts that popped like flashbulbs.
“Quatix!”
“Quatix!”
“Quatix!”
The room fell silent again as brilliant images of water, sand, coral, ferns and seaweed emerged in sparkling Caribbean hues.
“Look!”
“Sea slug!”
“Angel fish!”
“Dart fish!”
The simulated seascape grew larger and more detailed until it became a fully realized virtual ecosystem that filled the entire stage. The glittering phytoplankton fell in a gentle rain from the watery sky, while the ghostly jellyfish opened and closed their translucent umbrellas.
“Wow!” Someone exclaimed.
“Beautiful!” Someone else added.
An unearthly ball of purple tentacles rolled across the sand, inspiring a collective shout:
“Quatical!”
The simulated sea creature kept tumbling as the simulated seascape expanded beyond the apron of the stage, pushing past the first three rows of seats. Someone sitting in the fourth row put up his hands.
“No!” He cried.
“Don’t be afraid!�
�� Professor Alvarez urged from somewhere within a kelp forest.
I took an involuntary gulp of air as the glistening water approached my row and swept over my head. The entire amphitheater disappeared as the simulated seascape became our new reality. I stood up, waved to Aster across the sea floor and called out to her.
“Isn’t this great?”
“Fantastic!” She replied, fanning her arms in the virtual water.
“Hey Isabel, Michael, Xi Zhu!” I called.
They smiled and waved.
I glanced at the purple quatical as it rolled past a large stone. Suddenly, a huge mouth opened in the middle of the stone, and it swallowed the quatical whole. The well-camouflaged grouper fishtailed out of the sand and soared over our heads like a jumbo jet. Several of my classmates ducked and shouted. I was stunned for a second before I remembered that natural selection is an integral part of every ecology, including simulated ecologies.
A new round of applause shook me out of my revery.
“Bravo! Bravo!” Some of the parents and teachers shouted.
As the applause continued to build, the watery holograph dissolved into a rain of pixels and the linear geometry of the amphitheater re-emerged. The lights came up and Professor Alvarez returned to the podium.
“As you see,” the Headmaster declared, “our amphitheater is now a fully integrated holo-theater.”
“It’s an amphibious theater!” An anonymous voice called out from the back row.
The entire audience roared with laughter.
“Yes, yes,” Professor Alvarez agreed. “Very good. Now, let me introduce our guest of honor: Linda Gray, Founder and CEO of Quatix, Inc.”
We applauded some more as Gray, an athletic, middle-aged woman in a tailored suit, walked to the podium.
“Thank you, Professor Alvarez,” she began, “and thanks to the Genetic Institute, the Highbrid Highschool, grandparents, parents and students. Quatix, Inc. is proud to donate the most sophisticated quatecology in the world to the Highbrid Highschool.”
Another wave of applause swept across the room.
“We could have rolled out our newest product at any one of the top research universities,” she continued. “But we chose the Highbrid Highschool as the most fitting and appropriate place.”