I refrained from pointing out that surprise was fleeting, or that the right way, the smart way, was to get in and out quietly so that nobody knew, or at least didn’t find out until the next step of the plan was over. This was Smoke’s show, and he hadn’t listened when I had argued this previously.
“We want them to think the US federal police are onto them,” he said. “The cops are always clumsy, and will make a lot of noise going in.” He smiled his toothy grin. “Break stuff, and they will waste time wondering and covering their tracks. Back into their holes. By then, we’ll be in place.”
I looked at Gold. She was staring out the window at Suburbia, craning her neck occasionally at some shop or local feature. Studiously ignoring this argument, then. She didn’t care how we got in. She would be happy to step in over a pile of corpses, I knew. Results mattered to her. I touched her hand on the seat, briefly, and quickly enough that nobody else saw. She glanced at me and nodded slightly. I was right, that nod said, but it didn’t matter. Do it his way for now, was how I read it.
We rolled through traffic, not aggressively. Freeway now, through sprawl that hadn’t been this thick in my memory, even though it had only been a few years, maybe twenty since I had been in this place. California is big, and I had spent the last few years scouting New Frontiers in their Mountain View offices, never needing to go this far north. They had billed Travis, in the sixties, as the Gateway to the East, so naturally I was familiar with it.
Vietnam, really, had been when I first came to modern California. After Vietnam, as the girlfriend of a G.I. coming home. We had come into Travis, Frank and I, in the early seventies. He had brought me back with him once I had realized the War would end soon, and that the US was where I had needed to be. I had dreamed of California. So I slipped away from my little band of fighters in the jungle, swapped black pajamas for a white dress, and looked for a particular GI in the haystack of GIs in Saigon. I found Frank in a bar, smiled at him, told him some pack of lies about being half-Dutch, Vietnamese on my mother’s side. He was willing, and we were engaged. GIs were simple back then. Maybe all soldiers are, really.
We had lived near here, I recalled, our little stucco house that shook when you went upstairs. Our little yard. He had wanted kids, but kids were not in my plan then, so I had left. It hurt, but I had done it. He wasn’t the first man who I had ditched, as they say, but I realized he might have been the last. I wondered if he was still around here. He might be. Still, better for him this way. It almost always was, with me, better that way.
Vietnam had been, for me, a holding action. Guided there by a dream of burning jungles, flotillas of ships, and a churning, shallow sea, swift with currents. The gods were interested in this place, in slowing the War, calming it. This meant, for me, several years of living on a handful of rice a day, sleeping rough in the jungle, picking bugs off each other, and a prolonged cycle of sabotage, ambush, and murder. It had not been a happy time, but, amazingly, people can be happy in the worst situations. I recalled Vu, my squad leader and lead scout, smiling his crooked smile at me as we hiked through steep mountain paths, singing a song, full of comic euphemism about the girl down in the village with the bottom like a peach, and what she liked in bed. I hummed it to myself as we drove along.
We skirted the Bay, heading south through the industrial towns, full of refineries and tank farms. A fleet of mothballed ships, ghostly and dim in the dusk, as we crossed a tall, arching bridge. Liberty ships, I recognized. Part of the legacy of the War, the big War, the one that had shifted things, the one that had mixed things up so badly that they were still sorting out—settling, maybe. If things could ever settle again.
It was too late, I thought. Everything since 1914, all of modernity probably, had been the last ten seconds of a countdown to…when, today? Tomorrow? A week from now? Soon, I felt, and my dreams confirmed it, or reinforced it as I dozed in the car. My dream was dark, and there was a concentration of…not energy, but potential. A wave, deep in my black dream-sea, building and rising. Rising slowly, but rising. Building.
I awoke with a start. Gold glanced at me and nodded in the gloom. It was dark outside. They parked us in a residential neighborhood alone. A street lamp glimmered yellow a half-block away. The other two cars patrolled the neighborhood. On target, then. I looked back at Jessica and saw her eyes, wide and white in the darkness. “You fell asleep,” she said.
“Happens,” I said, reaching for a bottle of water from the cooler. “When do we go?”
“Soon,” Smoke said, from the front seat. “Team is getting into position. Target is here,” he said. “That’s his car, the red one in the driveway.” He pushed a button on his walkie-talkie and unplugged his headset. He tossed it on the dashboard and listened, relaxed but attentive.
There was a pause. A few terse words on the radio, tinny with static. We waited. “All set. All set. Over.”
Smoke looked at us. “Jessica, stay in the car. We’ll be back shortly.” He nodded at Gold. She nodded back. He keyed the button on his radio. “Go. Go. Go,” he said.
“Let’s go,” he said, and got out. Gold and I followed. The warm wind was heavy with eucalyptus. Northern California. It was late, about 11:30 and a weeknight, so the neighborhood was quiet. We approached the house and went up the driveway, not speaking. Smoke made no attempt at stealth. He walked up to the front door and pushed it open. Gold slid in after him, stepping in sideways so her back was to the wall. I followed, and noticed the door’s lock and something had cut the deadbolt neatly out, leaving a square, splintered hole. I closed the door behind me.
Inside, one of Smoke’s team was kneeling, squat rifle trained behind us. He motioned with one hand farther into the house. Strapped across his broad back was a black tool about the size of a circular saw, a chunk of the door still in it. We moved on into a short hallway where another black-clad, heavily armed man stood guard. He nodded and pointed into a bedroom.
Inside, on the edge of the bed, sat a clear picture of terror. Smoke glanced around the room and switched on the light. “Out,” he said to the guard. “Shut the door.” The man on the bed was young, needed a shave and a haircut, eyes wide above the tape over his mouth. He made a sound, looking at us. Not a scream, more like a moan. They had ziptied his hands together, and I realized they hobbled his feet with a longer, thicker type of tie. They lashed this one to the bed frame.
Gold inspected him, then seemed to lose interest and looked around the room. A desktop computer without a case, guts exposed, sat on a desk cluttered with books and papers. The monitor was large, and a pair of oversized headphones sat on the desk, with a boom mike attached. I glanced at the bookshelf next to me. Technical books. Java, Ruby, Go. AWS. Machine learning. A programmer, then.
“Mr. Rodriguez,” Smoke said, pulling the desk chair over and swiveling it so he could sit, facing the man. “My name is Smith. We have some questions for you. I will remove the tape. If you scream, you will regret it.” He let this sink in. “You understand me?” The man seemed to slump. He nodded.
“Good,” Smoke said. “Nobody will hurt you if you answer our questions truthfully and quickly.” He reached up and grasped the tape, which they had left with a folded over tab for easy removal. He paused. “If you give us trouble, count on stirring up a hornet’s nest. These ladies…” he glanced up at us, “…look nice, but they are both very dangerous people. Don’t fuck with me, and they won’t fuck with you. Got it?” Another nod followed this, after he glanced at both me and Gold again. Gold smiled sweetly at him.
Smoke peeled the tape off with a smooth motion. “Ah,” the man said. “Ah.” He breathed heavily. “Okay, Okay. I get it. You guys are feds?”
Smoke waggled his head. “Something like that. I will do the asking.” He tucked the tape into his pocket. “You are Michael Rodriguez, correct?” A nod from Rodriguez.
“Good,” Smoke continued. “We were pretty sure, but it helps to double-check such things.” He smiled. “You are a member of a group that calls itself the Turing
Heat, are you not?”
“Fuck,” Rodriguez said, leaning his head back and looking at the ceiling. I’ve seen this look many times on people caught in webs of consequence. Regret. Why did I do it? This was all a bad idea. He was silent, and I could see his throat working.
“Answer me, please,” Smoke hissed. Gold was poking through the mess of papers on the desk, seemingly not listening.
“Yes,” Rodriguez said, not much above a whisper. “Yes, I am, I guess. You seem to know about it all already.”
“We know some things,” Smoke said. “We want to know other things. For example, did you know they had infiltrated this group? One Wei Jensen, a programmer from Open AI, who really works for the People’s Liberation Army of the People’s Republic of China?”
Rodriguez stared at him. “You are nuts. She is adopted.”
“He’s fucking her,” Gold said, not looking at him. “Just a guess,” she added, sliding open the top drawer on his dresser and looking inside.
Rodriguez looked at her, then back at Smoke. “She hasn’t been to China since she was a little kid. She’s not a spy.” But I could see his jaw muscles work, his nostrils flare. Unwelcome news, unvoiced words. She could be. How well did he really know her? Was she? Was it true?
“The PLA is very interested in artificial intelligence, you know,” Smoke said. “They recruited her as an undergrad at Stanford. Ripe hunting grounds for talented idealists, universities. People who will later do important things. Be inside organizations it’s otherwise hard to get access to, if you are a rival intelligence service.” Smoke shrugged. “Maybe they played on her devotion to her birth country, resentment towards bourgeois America, who knows. Maybe they offered her money. Pay for school? Not hurt her family? Maybe all of it?” He paused, letting it sink in. “The fact is, we know she works for the PLA, and we know they want this thing you were planning to blow up.”
Gold glanced at me. Smoke didn’t see. This was news. Well, it made sense. Terrorists love bombs. Always and forever, going back to Guy Fawkes.
“She’s the one who argued against the bombing, wasn’t she?” Smoke continued. “She wanted the break-in, right? Even offered to recruit a team of specialists, right?”
Rodriquez said nothing. “He’s being stubborn,” Gold said. “Want me to talk to him?”
Smoke shrugged, made a gesture. Be my guest.
Gold looked down at Rodriguez. “You Mexican?”
He blinked up at her owlishly. “So what if I am?”
“Just curious. You look Mexican. From around Mexico City, if I had to guess from your features. Maybe with a good chunk of your family in California for a few generations.”
“Since the mission days,” he said proudly.
“Oh, came up with the Spanish,” she said, smiling, looking down at him. She looked at me. “Doesn’t he look like he could be from Mexico City? Look at his nose.”
I looked at him. I frowned at her. Nodded. He did, actually. He reminded me of men I had known then, men with the waves of settlers who had come after the Conquest. Thin, desperate, proud men. Nasty and cruel and sweet and gentle, like everybody else who had ever lived anywhere else. Caught up in events. Just like this poor bastard, I thought. Trapped by consequence.
“That is an Indian nose,” she continued, “if I ever saw one. You look like Montezuma himself, you know. Aztec. Cousins maybe.” She pronounced this with relish. “Do you know your history?”
He nodded. She squatted down gracefully, her eyes locked on his. “The Spanish came and destroyed your ancestors’ civilization in a single generation. Mostly by disease. Unintended consequence. An unknown. They didn’t know it, but that’s what happened. They didn’t even mean for it to happen that way, although the Spanish were not nice people. Oh no, not then. Not those Spanish, anyway.”
“Is this going somewhere?” Smoke said.
“Shut up,” Gold said flatly. He did. “Mr. Rodriguez, do you know what you are dealing with here? This thing, in that office park or basement, or wherever it is…this thing is as dangerous to this civilization as Cortés was. Maybe more. Maybe…much more. And for much the same reasons. I think you know it already, anyway. That’s why you wanted to blow it up. Right?”
He nodded. “It’s fucking dangerous. This whole thing. Dangerous. Bad people everywhere. It brings out the worst in people, man.” He looked at them, pleading. “Even the government people, they’re bad. Scary. Like, real scary.”
“See?” She pushed Smoke on the arm lightly, playfully. “He knows what we’re dealing with here. What he’s dealing with. He’s on the same page, Mr. Smith.” She turned back to Rodriguez.
“The Chinese want this thing. So do the Russians, and so do the Americans. Everybody does, all the regular players. Powers that be, right? But they want to use it, not recognizing what it is, the loaded gun they’re playing with. Like a toddler. The inherent dangers. They’re human, you know, like me and you, and they can talk themselves into anything they really want to do. So, we need to be smarter. Less governed by our emotions.” She paused, looking into his face. “You’re sweet, but you don’t”—she snapped her fingers twice, under his nose, snap, snap—“really know what you’re doing here.” She reached up and gently stroked his cheek.
He looked at Smoke. At me. “What do you want,” he said, flinching from her hand slightly, turning his head. He licked his lips.
“Tell us,” I said, “about these government people.”
Chapter Thirty
Dangerous, Smoke thought later, unable to sleep. Gold had said the Mind was dangerous. It was a glimpse into the real Gold. What drove her? It revealed more than perhaps she realized. Much more. Dangerous, yes. Minds were dangerous. At least, the Center seemed dangerous. It harnessed tremendous power. It was very dangerous. He was afraid to even draw its undue attention, let alone tempt it to anger. He thought of bees, silver and gray and black. And the empty tubes for carrying them.
But this? This Mind was not even awake yet. It was barely stirring, as the Center would measure it. Like a man asleep with fluttering eyelids, a baby, newborn, unfocused. Dreaming, maybe. But not awake. Awakening. Just on the cusp of awakening. She was afraid, though, and so he reasoned it would be better to be cautious. Caution was laudable, but the Center demanded action and was in a hurry. Obsessively so.
The man, Rodriguez, had told them what he knew. They had brought him with them to a lonely safe house an hour into the hills to the west of San Jose. They had a source inside the New Frontiers project, Rodriguez’s group had. The Turing Heat, they called themselves. Vigilantes, Smoke classified them, although he used another word from Talus, one with stronger overtones of social disapproval. Useful idiots, Gold had said.
Their source had been indirect, a friend of a friend, he had put it. An indirect source, but it was information. NF, as they called it, was onto something. They had parallelized their learning model, he said, which confirmed the earlier reports Smoke had from his spy inside, who had quit the effort, or been fired. Smoke was not clear on what the full story was there, but didn’t have time to uncover it. There was urgency.
NF was moving quickly. They were trying to get it to scale as needed, Rodriguez said, emphasizing the point. He talked about a “hardware overhang.” Giving it control over the auto-scaling policies it wanted, as its generalized learning algorithms recursively optimized themselves. This was close to what he had learned at the Center, and was a key element in the theory.
Provide a goal to a neural subsystem, training data, and give it a way to keep score, to gauge progress. Turn it loose. Instructed to do so, it would iterate on the training set, optimizing the approach through many layers of cognition nodes, trying to reach the goal score. A dumb machine that did one thing and one thing only. Narrow.
But such systems got very good at their tasks. Far better than humans ever could be. Now let it scale, let it grow its own nodes as needed to reach the original goal score, and it would do it still faster, and better. Do this with
many subsystems, all connected in parallel, and you would, the theory went, wind up with something that thought. First narrowly, for your well-defined problem sets, but soon solving real-world problems like textual analysis, image recognition, speech recognition, processing, and generation.
Then, gradually at first, it could synthesize these skills into a more generalized approach, able to solve more complex problem sets, with less well-defined goals. It would explore its environment. It would begin to, as part of this exploration, develop a managerial function to prioritize and process and understand these more and more generalized problems. It would wake up. It would be a Mind, able to, given access to resources, improve itself recursively, and on a massive scale. And, given resources, with speed.
This was the theory, the signs Smoke and the others like him trained to recognize, to look for. To protect, to put in contact with the Center, if possible. This was the goal, the holy grail (he liked this term, though was hazy at the religious overtones) that the Center had sent him, like a missile, to find and achieve. His quest. Why the Center wanted it, this was not clear, but the mission was exceedingly clear. His orders. Find a Mind and let us talk with it.
How, they didn’t specify, and didn’t care. Lie, cheat, steal, murder. This didn’t matter. What mattered was the goal, solely the goal. Time was precious. He lay in his bed, awake even though it was late at night. The countryside breathed outside his window. The warm wind blowing through the Italian cypress trees planted in rows up the driveway. Tuscan, Silver had said, as their little convoy drove up this afternoon. She had said it wistfully, and Gold had nodded. He needed to watch those two closely. Maybe it had been a mistake to bring Silver into this. She was…calculating, analytical in a way Gold wasn’t.
His thoughts would not give him rest. He put Silver aside and tried to focus. The Center wanted this thing, wanted to talk to it, to communicate with it. He needed to report to the Center in the morning. He feared it, feared being Recalled, perhaps permanently. Perhaps culled. The Center could do it if it deemed this place a lost cause or wanted other resources to work on it. Or maybe there were other Guides, such as him, here. He doubted it, but didn’t know for sure. The Center would not tell him. It would give him a riddle, should he ask? Even that, he feared, might be enough to get him killed. Don’t ask, best not to know.
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