End of the Road
Page 3
That day, she could have never guessed how close she would become with all three of her teammates. Maybe it was living in the same house working on this complex project, eating together—everything together. She imagined it was not all that dissimilar to the intense relationships formed in a combat situation.
Now as Jade and Elias returned to the Compound from their haircut outing in Miranda, Elias parked the company car in the garage and Jade’s stomach started to burble with tension. They walked silently toward the office building. The lab was in the basement—easier to cool all the hundreds of thousands of dollars of computer equipment—and Jade and Elias played their usual game of racing to see who could get out their keycard first—pushing each other, shoving in front of each other—that always left Jade helpless with laughter. Elias got there first today and he opened the lab door for her. The room was always cool, cool enough that both Jade and Olivia wore cardigans most of the day, despite the oven-like heat outside.
Olivia swiveled in her chair when Jade and Elias entered and theatrically eyed her watch. “Where have you two been? Did you forget?” Olivia shook her head, her blue hair fluttering around her face, her expression tense. “We have visitors.”
Elias and Jade both dropped into their desk chairs. Elias began typing furiously and within seconds their phony command prompt screen appeared on Jade’s monitor.
OH SHIT, it said. THEY’RE ALREADY HERE.
When the computer system designer, a stoic military type with thick glasses named Mark, had first introduced them to the lab’s computer system, Elias and Jade had been surprised by the clunky interface they were supposed to use to access the system. The two of them found their way into the back end and made some modifications to streamline access. They installed a back door that could circumvent the interface, although they didn’t tell Berko and Olivia, who weren’t quite as computer literate as they. For what those two needed to do on the system, the interface worked just fine.
In addition to the back door, Elias had installed a basic chat function disguised as a command prompt so the two of them could in effect pass notes to each other.
Jade’s stomach immediately went into acid overload as she turned toward the glassed-in conference room and saw the three men, straight-backed and suited, standing around the refreshments Martin had no doubt laid out.
“Oh, crap,” Jade said.
“Jade! There you are!” Dan’s voice boomed out across the room. No matter how anxious and upset she was, the sound of that voice always cheered her. Colonel Dan Stevenson, USAF retired, was her mentor. The man who’d recommended her for this job so close to home.
He strode toward her as she turned back to Olivia and muttered, “You’re not going to believe what happened to me today.”
Olivia raised her eyebrows and stood, smoothing her skirt and putting on her best ingratiating institutional welcome smile. “Colonel Stevenson,” she said. “It’s so great to see you.”
Dan smothered Jade in a bear hug, his large arms engulfing her, even though he was an inch shorter than she at five foot eleven. Over her shoulder he said, “Hello, Olivia. How’s it going?”
In full faucet mode, Jade’s usual flop sweat made her self-conscious, so she disengaged from Dan as soon as socially acceptable.
He looked her over, and his expression became sympathetic. In a lowered voice, he said, “You ready? Did you do what I told you?”
Jade aspired to keep her expression neutral. He knew public speaking was her bête noire. But he believed in not just facing your fears, but kicking the crap out of them.
Jade just didn’t need this today. Not with the feeding tube. Not with the weirdness in town. Not with the attempted kidnapping . . .
“Yes, sir,” she said. “I’m ready.”
“Great,” Dan said.
“We’re running tests as we speak,” she said.
He looked delighted, his deep brown eyes crinkling. “You think you’ve got it? Does it work?”
Such a simplistic question for such a complex subject. “It’s a little more complicated than does it or does it not work. But I believe we’re coming close to what we talked about.”
She tried to sound self-assured, as if she only added that last part to convey a sense of humility instead of abject fear that the program wouldn’t work at all.
Damn her intellectual overconfidence. How many times in her life had she boasted about the things she could do, having no idea how to actually do them? Her outrageous claims about the Clementine Program might be just that—claims and bravado. If it didn’t create its own culture as she’d predicted it would, she’d be exposed for the fraud she was. She’d have to go back to KU in disgrace, and face that bastard Professor Sauer, the Computer Science Department head who’d nearly ruined this opportunity for her. Sauer, who ridiculed her program in front of her fellow students, called it science fiction. “You need to concentrate on practical applications, not theoretical, nonfunctional programs. We’re not a beard-stroking intellectual group here. We’re the pragmatists. If you want to keep playing around with games, go back to Carnegie Mellon.”
No, she wouldn’t go back there. Maybe she could go ahead and start her company anyway, but where would she get the money if she didn’t earn the substantial, almost embarrassingly large bonus from completing this project? She had to finish, and it had to be successful.
“Wonderful,” Dan said, spinning her 180 degrees, putting his arm around her shoulders and steering her toward the conference room. “My friends would love to hear all about it.”
“Can I go freshen up first?” she asked.
“Quick, quick,” Dan said, and released her. Olivia threw a worried look over her shoulder at Jade, then followed Dan to the conference room.
Chapter Three
Jade ran to the restroom, where she splashed water on her face and cursed her lack of a hairbrush. Her red, blotchy face looked like it did after every football practice in high school, and she resembled anything but a team leader. Oh, well.
She scanned the gleaming bathroom and remembered that every time she’d come in here, she’d thought they should stock the place with deodorant, toothbrushes, and other grooming items. And then she remembered the toothpaste sticking out of her shirt pocket. She cracked it open and rubbed it on her teeth and gums with her finger and then rinsed her mouth.
And the toothpaste made her think of the grocery store, and the man. And that her mom was going to die.
Crap. Maybe Professor Sauer was right. Maybe women were too emotional, scattered, and distractible to be relied upon in high-pressure situations, or to even get their code right.
But she’d come through. She’d never cried in front of Sauer, never pitched a foot-stomping tantrum at him, unlike some of her diva classmates like Nishant Sharma. And neither Sauer nor Nishant had ever in their lives devised as potentially powerful a program as she had.
Screw Sauer. He was jealous, a cynical, disappointed old man at forty-five. Those who can’t do, teach.
She left the toothpaste on the counter and strode out of the restroom, feeling a little better.
Back in the conference room, she took her seat, the only one left, next to Olivia, across from Elias and Berko, who scowled at her from behind his horn-rimmed glasses. She shrugged at him.
Then she glanced around, and all eyes were on her.
“The floor is yours,” Dan said.
She stood and walked to the head of the table in front of the 48-inch monitor mounted to the back wall. What she wanted to say was get the hell out of my lab, but she’d learned. She smiled around at the suits and cleared her throat.
Olivia sat with her laptop open in front of her, ready to run the slides.
The conference room door flew open and Martin Felix stumbled in, running into a chair. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I thought you said the presentation would be at three.” He shot Dan an accusing look.
“We bumped it up,” Dan said. “This is the project supervisor, every
body. Martin Felix.”
Martin waved, sat in the chair he’d run into, and pulled himself toward the table, knocking what sounded like his knee into the table base with a loud thwack.
“You all right?” Dan said. Without waiting for an answer, he turned to Jade, and said in his loud clear voice, “Why don’t you explain the genesis of your program.” She could imagine him barking orders that compelled people to obey.
“I’d like to introduce my team first,” Jade said, even more rattled now by Martin’s scattered presence.
Dan gave her an approving nod.
She gestured. “Berko Deloatch, our linguistics and cryptology expert, comes to us from the PhD program at Stanford. He grew up in Atlanta and earned his BS from Purdue, where he competed on the fencing team.”
Berko pushed up his glasses and nodded around the table at the expectant faces.
Without looking, Jade knew the slide behind her portrayed Berko in his cap and gown at college graduation, flanked by his beaming mother and sister.
“Next to him is Elias Palomo, who’s from Reno, Nevada, and graduated with a double BS in Information Warfare and IT from the US Naval Academy. Elias played fullback for the Midshipmen.”
As always, Elias sat ramrod straight with his hands folded in front of him on the table and continued looking in her direction. His slide was the photo of him in his dress whites, his cap square on his square forehead, his dark eyes flinty, his expression proud and stern.
“And Olivia Harman, from New York, who received her MD and is pursuing a PhD in clinical research from Johns Hopkins University.” Jade turned slightly to see what photo Olivia had used of herself this time. Once it had been of her face Photoshopped onto the iconic still from Aliens where Ripley is wearing the giant mechanical suit, about to take on the monster. Another time it was Olivia at graduation, a bottle of tequila in one hand and her middle finger extended from the other. This time, to Jade’s relief, it was a straight shot of her shaking hands with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Jade conjectured that if any of Dan’s guests were of the conservative persuasion, they would sour at the liberal justice’s image. But even they would have to admit it was an impressive one.
“Hi, everybody,” Olivia said, making eye contact around the table. She’d seen, as always, the looks of befuddlement on the faces surrounding her when they’d heard her surname. “I know what you’re thinking—the last name doesn’t quite fit, right? So I’ll answer your unasked question: yes, I am a Jew.”
Jade laughed every single time Olivia did this, her embarrassing, booming laugh that was off-putting to so many people. Berko and Elias smirked too.
Uncomfortable laughter rumbled around the table, and Jade had to smile at her newest and fastest female friend.
“Actually,” Olivia said, “my parents adopted me from China when I was eighteen months old.”
This always brought on a round of “Ahs” and head nods from visitors.
Then all eyes fixed on the screen behind Jade, where her homecoming photo blazed, Jade riding on the back of a ’62 Cadillac convertible in her muddy football uniform, a tiara on her head, sash across her chest and an armful of roses.
“And my name is Jade Veverka, and I’m from Ephesus, Kansas. I got an academic scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh because of the program I’m about to explain to you. I thought I might earn a football scholarship since I was an all-state punter/kicker in high school. Imagine my shock when I found out they don’t hand those out to girls.”
Appreciative laughter.
She and her four teammates had worked on an easy shtick just to liven up these repetitive proceedings early on.
“I began working on computers when I was six years old, around the time my sister Clementine was born. But it wasn’t until she was diagnosed with autism when I was ten that I became interested in using computers to communicate in unconventional ways.”
The photo of Clem in her fox-ear headband sitting behind her music keyboard setup loomed behind her now.
“Although Clementine started talking at an early age—which is unusual for autistic people—she didn’t use language in the same way other people do, and so no one could understand her. We went through all kinds of drama with doctors who thought she had infantile schizophrenia, a brain tumor . . . I’m not going to go into the details of this, because it’ll bore you, but the upshot is I discovered Clementine used a tonal mode of communication, similar to the tonality of the Chinese language.”
As usually happened, everyone glanced in Olivia’s direction, and Jade nearly laughed again. Olivia waved at everyone, enduring their veiled stereotyping with long-suffering humor the way she normally did.
“I swear I had nothing to do with it,” Olivia said. “I can’t even speak Chinese.”
“I can, though,” Berko said, adding his bit to the comedy routine.
“My parents bought her a keyboard,” Jade went on, “and the two of us worked out a system via music to communicate. Clementine has since learned to speak English, but her musical virtuosity has led her to compose several symphonies, cantatas, and operas. We hope one day she’ll be able to attend a music school like Juilliard.”
Jade always said this, but she knew Clem would never be independent enough to fulfill that dream. Jade forged on.
Now came the tricky part of the presentation. Jade had learned most people think they’re a lot smarter than they actually are, and it was important not to talk down to them. But she also wanted to head off the predictable and endless questions that would add no clarity or understanding to a complex subject.
“I programmed her tonal language into computer language—Python, specifically—and, as is usually the case, happened upon something by accident. The computer used the data I put into it to begin to form its own language.”
And here came the questions. “Computer language? Like FORTRAN or BASIC?” one suit asked, obvious pride at knowing these technological terms.
“No,” Jade said. “The closest analog is . . . human language.”
“But don’t programs that generate new languages already exist?” one of the suits said.
“Yes,” Jade said. “But the difference is that we didn’t code our program to do that. It generated the language spontaneously. And now that SiPraTech’s supercomputer—”
“Did you design the system?” one of the potential investors asked Martin. All heads swiveled toward him.
Naturally they thought this, since Martin was the “adult” member of the team.
“No,” Martin said. “Mark Bowen did.”
“Can we talk to him?”
“He’s not on-site,” Martin said. “I oversee the team.”
“Our supercomputer is one of the fastest and most powerful in the world,” Jade continued, “almost equal to the record-holder, the Sunway TaihuLight in mainland China, with a LINPACK benchmark of eighty PFLOPS—”
“PFLOPS?” another suit said.
“It’s a measure of a computer’s processing speed. Peta floating-point operations per second. It equals one quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or one thousand teraflops. In other words, it can do a lot with thirty-thousand 64-bit RISC processors.”
Dan enjoyed the audience’s confused mutterings. He loved this part of the presentation as much as Jade hated it.
“The exact specs are in the prospectuses in front of you,” he said. “How much power it uses, et cetera. But we’re getting off track. We’re not trying to sell you a computer system. We’re talking about the Clementine Program. Jade was explaining the spontaneous generation of language.”
“What does this mean?” another man in a suit asked.
“Berko?” Jade said.
The heads now turned Berko’s way.
“Linguistically, it’s significant,” he told them. “Tracking how and why the computer interprets the information and synthesizes its own language tells us a lot about the origins of language itself, back to the dawn of Homo sapiens.”
The confusion on the investors’ faces was typical.
“And what are the applications of such a program?” a suit asked. “In other words, why should we invest in something like this? I understand the money sunk into the massive computer system you have here is significant. How can the program be monetized?”
“We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of what Clementine can do,” Elias said. “We’re interested in investing the time and money in research and development.”
He couldn’t help being deliberately vague, teasing them, even though he knew what the applications were, and how it could revolutionize the way corporations, governments, and other groups organized data, even without access to a massive supercomputer.
Elias was not their strongest fund-raising asset, and Dan had actually requested that he not attend presentations. Jade said absolutely not. He was part of the team.
“Our goal is to advance our understanding of this planet, this universe,” Elias said, “and in fact plenty of moneymaking opportunities have arisen out of pure research. As you are no doubt aware.”
“We don’t have the luxury of funding ‘pure research’ anymore, son,” one of the men said.
Jade, Olivia, and Berko all traded glances that said, Oh, no. They called him son.
As she knew it would, this made Elias’s face glow red. “All right,” he said. “Then let’s shut down the universities, although you might as well anyway, the way they’ve been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator since—”
“Thank you, Elias,” Jade said.
Dan laughed. “This is not the crew you want to debate academic pursuits with,” he told the men. “Jade, please explain some of the medical benefits.”
“If we can use the program to trace how language develops not only in social usage but at the cerebral level, we may be able to unlock the mysteries of brain trauma and neurological disorders.”