by John Fast
“McHenry,” I said to the windbreaker.
“Fast,” McHenry replied.
“Kind of early for a visit from the Turing Institute’s Security Office,” I said, rubbing my eyes.
“This is Agent Torfield,” McHenry announced, ignoring my complaint. “He’s with the Treasury Department.”
I looked at Torfield and wondered if, maybe, his sports jacket was bulletproof.
“I don’t do consulting jobs anymore,” I said, hoping to get rid of them so I could make some coffee.
“I was told to invite you to a meeting on Wall Street,” Torfield stated bluntly.
“I can’t get involved with another project right now,” I insisted. “I’m very busy.”
“Aren’t the Highbrids supposed to help out whenever they can?” McHenry asked.
“Help who? With what?” I replied, feeling increasingly aggravated.
“The Treasury Department. Wall Street,” Torfield repeated.
I looked from one blank face to the other, thought about the social obligations of the Highbrids, and shook my head.
“Give me a minute,” I muttered.
I closed the door, took a starter pill and threw on a rumpled shirt and an old pair of slacks. I found my beat up shoes under the bed.
*************
Torfield drove me into the city and escorted me into a building across the street from The New York Stock Exchange. We rode the elevator up to the fifth floor and entered a posh office suite. The redheaded receptionist ushered us into a wood paneled room where a thin man, hanging inside a dark gray suit, sat behind a massive desk. He had dark eyes, a snub nose, narrow lips and he held a cigarette in his hand. Another man sat in the chair to the right of the desk. He had a bald head and a beefy body that was stuffed into a dark blue suit.
“Thank you, Dorothy,” the thin man said to the receptionist. “Agent Torfield, please wait outside.”
They exited the room.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice, Dr. Fast,” the thin man said. “My name is Steven Rathe. This is Peter Boyle, Chairman of the Board of The New York Stock Exchange. Please have a seat.”
He waved to the plain wooden chair in front of his desk.
I studied their faces for a second and wondered what was going on. Rathe didn’t smile. Boyle didn’t blink. I shrugged and sat down.
“I’ll get right to the point,” Rathe stated. “Since your return from Canada, you’ve been tied up with your research on the Quantum Photo-Sphere. So you may not have heard about the recent fluctuations in the stock market.”
I glanced at Boyle and wondered how they knew about my trip to Loon Lake, and what they knew about the Quantum Photo-Sphere. However, I decided I wasn’t going to be so easily rattled.
“I don’t follow the market,” I said.
“What I’m about to tell you is classified,” Rathe announced abruptly. “It’s a federal crime to disclose it to anyone. The minimum sentence is five years. Do you understand?”
I nodded, stood up and said, “Perfectly. If I don’t know anything, I can’t disclose anything. So I’ll just get on with my work.”
“I’m talking about your work,” Rathe insisted. “Please sign this confidentiality agreement. Chairman Boyle and I will sign as witnesses.”
He extracted a piece of paper from the folder on his desk and held it up. I hesitated, thought again about the social obligations of the Highbrids, and slowly walked over to him.
“I can keep a secret,” I said. “But I can’t help you. I don’t have time, as, apparently, you already know.”
We took turns signing the paper, then Rathe tucked it back into his folder. I sat down and waited.
“The recent fluctuations in the stock market were caused by The New York Stock Exchange’s meta-computer,” Rathe began. “As you know, that computer fills the entire trading floor of the Exchange. In fact, it is the Exchange. And when it has a problem, the global economy has a problem.”
I looked at Boyle and said, “You must have the best technical support team in the world. You don’t need me to fix your computer.”
“You broke it,” Rathe stated.
“That’s absurd,” I replied, turning back to him.
“We’ve told the newstreams it’s just a programming glitch,” Rathe explained. “But it isn’t. So far we’ve been able to catch all the errors, but in another few weeks we won’t be able to keep up. We checked the primary hardware and software, and found nothing. Then we checked the secondary microprocessors.”
He took a long, hard drag on his cigarette.
I glanced at Boyle, who continued to glare at me. Then I glanced at the sleek digital calendar-clock hanging on the wall. It read, “9:14 AM 09/23/44.” I was annoyed by Rathe’s melodramatic style, and Boyle’s hostile silence.
“What did you find?” I finally asked.
“Our engineers call them zebra clams,” Rathe replied. “You’d call them quaticals.”
“But …,” I began.
“They’re yours,” Rathe said, cutting me off. “They have remnants of your ID Codes. It took us several days to piece those remnants together.”
“I haven’t played …”
“I know,” Rathe said, cutting me off again. “You thought your opponent obliterated your first generation of algarithms in the Manhattan Quatix Tournament ten years ago. The fact that some of those algarithms escaped, evolved and migrated to the nearest, richest data feeding ground was an accident.”
Rathe took another long, hard drag on his cigarette and this time the smoke poured out of his mouth with his words.
“A predictable accident: a Highbrid who outsmarted himself, and the safety nets; a Highbrid who evolved quaticals with neo-complex forms.”
A wave of guilt and remorse washed over me as I recalled Paxton's warning about the dangers of my quaticals. Rathe was watching me closely, and I finally realized who he was.
“You’re Cyber-Police,” I said.
“And yes,” he replied without missing a beat. “We do sweep those microprocessors on a regular basis. And no, it doesn’t seem possible that your quaticals could’ve remained hidden there all these years. They must have been hibernating. And now they’ve become active again. And I need to know how to kill them.”
I thought fast.
“I could write some new Flashout Commands,” I suggested. “Then I could target the remnants of my ID Codes, and zap them.”
“Our experts tried that several times last week. The zebra clams seem to have established a feedback loop with the meta-computer, and so far we’ve only succeeded in speeding up their adaptive cycles.”
“Have you found them anywhere else in the global stream?”
“Not so far.”
“Then you have to disconnect the meta-computer, chop it up into small pieces and bury the whole thing in a landfill.”
“We were hoping for a more elegant solution, a less expensive solution.”
I shook my head and said, “I’m sorry. If there’s any way I can make this right …”
“I want you to think about the damage you’ve done to national security,” Rathe said, cutting me off yet again. ”I want you to think about the debt you owe your country. Contact us immediately if you come up with a better solution. We’re going to disconnect the meta-computer in 24 hours. And we’re going to re-distribute the workload, temporarily, to the other meta-computers in the stream.”
I didn’t know what else to say, so I stood up and walked to the door.
“And remember,” Rathe added. “Everything about this meeting is classified. You can’t tell your colleagues, your family, your lovers.”
I swung around to face him.
“My lovers?” I said. “How long have you been watching me?”
Rathe didn’t respond to my question.
“How long?” I repeated.
He extracted an 8 x 11 photograph from his folder, and held it up. I walked back to his desk and snatched the picture out of
his hand. It looked like a fuzzy enlargement of a gray cell with an orange-dyed nucleus. The image confused me and I stared at him, demanding an explanation.
“It’s a thermal image of you, floating on your back, in the middle of Loon Lake, at night.”
I trembled with amphetamine-fueled rage.
“You’re tracking me with satellites?” I said.
“We keep an eye on all the Highbrids.”
“Did you break into my old apartment? And steal my algarithms?”
“That wasn’t us.”
“Do you have pictures of me with Takla? And Alexa?”
“We have higher priorities.”
“You have no right!” I shouted, tearing the photograph into several pieces.
“Ten years ago,” Rathe began in an icy tone, “you engineered the neo-evolutionary algarithms that are now disrupting The New York Stock Exchange and threatening the entire global economy. Since then you have conspired with a Chinese physicist to stage a robbery of your algarithms; you have collaborated with a Tibetan nationalist to create even more powerful and more dangerous versions of these same algarithms; you have consorted with a Czech socialist who wants to overthrow the capitalist system; and you have traveled to China and held secret meetings with their scientists. Did you really think we wouldn’t notice what you were doing? Did you really think we wouldn’t recognize the pattern?”
I tried to make sense of Rathe’s accusations as they rushed and tumbled through my hyperactive brain. Chinese physicist? Xi Zhu? What? We‘d stolen my own algarithms? Why would we do that? Tibetan nationalist? Takla? Czech socialist? Alexa? Secret meetings? In China? With those polytechnic students? What the hell?
“You’re seeing patterns where there aren’t any!” I shouted. “And your paranoia doesn’t give you the right to spy on me!”
I tossed the shreds of the photograph onto his desk and stormed toward the door.
“In the age of cyber-terrorism,” Rathe said to my back, “privacy is a luxury we can no longer afford.”
CHAPTER 45.
Shadow Worlds
I stomped around the Financial District in a rage, talking to myself like a psychotic street person. And I looked like one too, in my old clothes and battered shoes. A couple of policemen stopped me on the sidewalk and demanded some identification. If I hadn’t remembered my wallet earlier that morning, I probably would’ve been arrested on a vagrancy charge. Instead, the policemen put me in a cab and told me to take my head problems back to Princeton. I called my father from the train station and told him what I could: that Rathe and Boyle had wanted me to work on the Exchange’s meta-computer, and that they’d accused me of conspiring with the Chinese. André asked how he could help, but I said I had to figure it out for myself.
*************
I sat in my dark house that evening in a dark mood. I felt guilty when I thought about the damage I’d done to the Stock Exchange’s meta-computer, and I felt angry when I recalled Rathe’s accusations. I typed a long note in my journal, then I viewphoned Alexa. It took a moment for her beautiful, tired, dirt-smeared face to appear on my screen. She was sitting in a small, sparsely furnished, cinder block shack. Her ash-blonde hair was, as usual, tied back in a ponytail. The morning sun was pouring through the unglazed window behind her.
“I’m glad I caught you, Alexa,” I said.
“How are you, John?” She asked, referring, I presumed, to my psychological breakdown.
“I’ve been better,” I replied, referring to my meeting that morning. “Can you talk? Can you switch to encrypted mode?”
Alexa hit a few keys on her keypad.
“Done,” she said.
“You’re being watched,” I said.
“I know,” she replied angrily. “We were thrown out of China last week.”
“You were? Where are you?”
“Bangladesh. We’re working with some organic farming cooperatives here. They’ve been very successful, ever since the government banned the multinational agrivaders.”
“Agri … who?”
“Agrivaders: the super-seed, super-fertilizer, super-pesticide corporations,” she explained. “The Green Revolution people who think the color green refers to dollar bills, billions of dollar bills.”
“I get it, but I meant you’re being watched from over here. The Cyber-Police have their own satellites. In fact, they’re probably decrypting this call right now.”
“First the Chinese, now the Cyber-Police. It’s unbelievable. Why is everyone so scared of a few organic farmers? Anyway, I’d like to hear the rest of the story, but maybe we should …?”
“Right. I’ll call you in a couple of days. On a different link.”
“Good.”
“I love you, Alexa.”
“I love you too, John. Take care of yourself.”
I tried to reach Takla at the People’s University of Tibet, but failed. So I left her a short, encrypted, text message warning her that she was being watched. Then I sat back in my chair.
“Bangladesh and Tibet,” I muttered to myself. “Perfect data points for the paranoid mind of Stephen Rathe.”
I switched off my screen and stared into the darkness.
*************
A knock on the front door of my house a few minutes later interrupted my sullen revery. I thought McHenry and Torfield had returned, so I marched down the hall and yanked open the door.
“It’s just me,” Aster said, tilting her head sideways and giving me a puzzled look.
“Let’s sit in my study,” I replied, not happy to see her.
Aster flipped on the overhead light when she entered my workroom. We stood side-by-side and surveyed the mess: pizza boxes, takeout containers, coffee mugs, juice glasses, dinner plates.
“Maid run off again?” She asked as she gathered the dishes.
She carried everything to the kitchen and stacked the dishwasher. I followed her and paced the floor.
“It’s a coping mechanism,” she said.
“What?” I replied sharply, in no mood to be psychoanalyzed.
“Overwork. The last time it landed you in the hospital.”
I scowled.
“I hear you spent your entire so called vacation designing a new kind of quantum computer. And Dad said something about a meeting in New York this morning that really ticked you off. And I’m guessing you never went to your follow-up sessions at Newton Commons. When was the last time you took a real break, John? When was the last time you saw a play at McCarter Theater? Or visited your kids?”
Her last question cut me like a knife, but I checked my anger.
“I’m not overworking,” I said evenly. “I’m in the flow. It’s how Csikszentmihalyi, one of your colleagues, once defined happiness. And if that means that I hole up in my dark, messy house and work night after night on my screen, then so be it.”
“In other words,” Aster said, “your attempt to build a stable quantum computer that will q-flow the entire global stream of information has nothing to do with overcompensation for the death of your son?”
I stopped pacing and shouted, “What right do you have to barge in here and tell me how to live my life?”
“I’m worried about you, and so is Dad,” Aster replied quietly. “He asked me to stop by tonight and see how you’re doing.”
Once again I heard that faint echo of Jena’s voice in Aster’s words and realized she was only trying to help. I took off my glasses and massaged my eyes. I felt tired, beat up.
“You want to see a movie?” I asked.
Aster smiled and nodded.
I slipped into the bathroom and took a pill.
CHAPTER 46.
Witch Tales
Aster and I were sitting in the Garden Theater a half-hour later, watching the opening credits of a movie: “Machine Dreams.” The film began with a bright stream of sunlight pouring through the open window of a contemporary living room. The camera followed the stream of light to a burnished writing table where an old b
ook lay open. The camera zoomed in on the first page, filling the entire screen with words, then it passed through the page to the first scene.
After the movie Aster and I headed up Nassau Ave, toward Palmer Square, to buy some ice cream. To my surprise, the film had succeeded in distracting me.
“So …,” I began. “A meta-computer made a movie about a mad scientist who’s searching for the ultimate theory of everything?”
“Right,” Aster nodded.
“And the film we just saw really was made by a meta-computer?”
“You haven’t heard about this?” Aster asked, incredulous. “It’s been hyped for weeks. You really should get out more often. According to the trailers, the meta-computer is linked to every public video archive on the planet. It sorts through the files and assembles different bits and pieces into a movie.”
“Amazing. But why did that book keep showing up?”
“Morphology of the Folktale? Do you know it?” Aster asked.
I shook my head.
“Written by Vladimir Propp, in Russia, and published in 1928,” she explained. “In the book, Propp works out the logic of the natural language algorithm that underwrites the traditional Russian Wonder Tales.”
“You mean like the stories about Baba Yaga, the witch, and her hut in the forest that turns around and around on four chicken legs?”
“Among others.”
“What kind of natural language algorithm are we talking about?”
“A set of thirty-one sequential actions, like, the hero wants, or lacks, something; he goes on a quest to find it; he meets helpers and villains; he finds magic objects which slow him down or speed him on his way; he succeeds or fails; he returns home or never returns. Of course, not all the actions appear in all the tales, but those that do appear always follow the same sequential order.”
“I don’t get it. What’s the point?”
“If you were a meta-computer trying to figure out how to assemble a story from billions of different images, wouldn’t you look for a basic narrative algorithm to guide you?”
“You mean the meta-computer used Propp’s algorithm to structure the film? And you know this, how?”