The Infinite when it was Two Digits Old

by Allen Fleishman

  “What were the SAT scores?”

  “601 on all three tests”

  “Is that exceptional?”

  “No, it is in the 61st percentile.”

  “Then David Klein is the same person as David Smith?”

  “I don’t know.”

  ‘Damn,’ “Command options brilliance 100.”

  “Are David Klein and David Smith the same person?”

  “Let me think.” The estimated time which appeared on the screen was 1 minute.

  After the allotted time, “I am reasonably certain - 97% - that they are the same person.”

  “Explain”

  “They have the same approximate age, hair color; facial features are similar to Martin and the late Elizabeth Klein, frequent encrypted e-mails to each other. Joint bank account. High rated IQ.”

  “What do you mean high IQ? Didn’t you say that the SAT score was average?”

  “David Klein had a WIPSY score of 167, near the maximum possible score. David Klein/Smith has been able to score on the SAT in an impossible pattern indicating perfect score knowledge. David Smith has completed various homework assignments at estimated 23 year post-PhD achievement level.”

  ‘Of course, the Butcher-Block castle, the advances in computer assignment, and the computer with the virus.’

  “What is David Smith’s true IQ?”

  “Estimating ... It is beyond 23 standard deviations above normal on a WISC IQ score beyond 445. However, this is a crude estimate. It may be underestimated by one or two orders of magnitude.”

  “What is the IQ score for smartest Geniuses?”

  “Around 200.”

  “Is David Smith the same as ComHead?”

  “ComHead?”

  “Yes, C-O-M-H-E-A-D”

  “No records of any ComHead exist. The closest referent is to CompuHead Corporation.”

  “Command: who is David Smith’s faculty Advisor?”

  “Professor Windseig.”

  “Are you sure? The President of Birkhead College.”

  “Of course, Professor.”

  “Location of Professor Windseig?”

  “At home 98% probability.”

  Maurice looked at his watch, he had been at this for 4 hours, but he had to speak to someone.

  ***

  “Arthur, this is Maurice. I’d like to, ah, speak to you about one of your students.”

  “Maurice, its 9:30, is anything wrong?”

  “It’s David Smith. I’d really like to talk to you. I think it’s quite important. Can we meet tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” Maurice paused, “yes, I see. Can you come to my home now?”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  ***

  Arthur Windseig was wearing a Birkhead sweatshirt and ushered Maurice into a study. “I received a gift of a hard drive, in your name, a CompuHead diamond version hard drive. Did you know about it?”

  “No, all the drives were sent directly to Marty Thomas.”

  “I should have realized that immediately, especially when the letter, signed by you, said something about the drive being only for a low-power computer. There is no such thing. I guess I was too greedy to be suspicious or even to think twice about it. Well I installed it yesterday and soon realized that this diamond version hard drive actually has a diamond in it, a gargantuan, million and a half dollar diamond. But that isn’t the unusual part. In fact, that’s the least unusual part about the drive at all.”

  Professor Windseig mouth hung open then said, “Go on.”

  “Do you have anything to drink? I don’t usually drink, but I think this situation calls for it.”

  Windseig brought a bottle of wine and poured two glasses. He did not touch his glass. “You were saying?”

  “The drive is much, much larger than any other in existence, including other CompuHead drives, by about a thousand or million-fold.” Maurice took out his computer, and pointed to where the drive was located. “And even that is not very unusual. It was a third full. The largest directory is called something like ‘Knowledge of all Humanity’. As far as I can tell, it has all journal articles and every computerized record ever recorded. It had information about my complete financial records as well as former President Bush’s bank records, including Bush Junior’s secret Swiss accounts worth about 40 million. I’m sure it has your complete financial records, as well.”

  Maurice took a long swig of the wine, empting the glass, then resumed. “It also has this almost perfect human chatterbot, a computer persona, like the original Eliza psychotherapy program, but this one is brilliant. Actually you can make it hyper-brilliant. It told me how the million and a half dollar diamond could be produced for less than five hundred dollars. Along the way it realized that the machine, which made the diamond, was also sold to a middle-eastern terrorist, someone called Biswawee, to make enriched uranium.”

  “Did you report that to anyone?”

  “Oh yeah,” Maurice gave a nervous high pitched laugh, “I sent it to the CIA using Comhead’s name. Remember that computer god I told you about? It must be David Smith, actually David Klein.”

  “I know.” Professor Windseig said in a quiet voice. Arthur Windseig refilled Professor Schwartzman’s glass. Maurice’s eyes had a glazed look, and his words had an unusual clipped quality. His accent was also more obvious.

  “The program which integrates this Knowledge of all Humanity is brilliant. It completely integrated all this knowledge and told me how to make diamonds for pennies and it identified this terrorist. Sorry, I’m repeating myself. I’m both scared witless, terror stricken, but can’t wait to open the Pandora’s box again.”

  “Can we ask it some questions?”

  “Sure, can I use your monitor?”

  Professor Windseig went to the desk and turned the monitor around. Professor Schwartzman plugged the monitor’s video into his computer, Gertrude.

  “Command Turing.” Facing Windseig, “That activates the human persona which can do the searches. Any questions?”

  “Ask it for my mother’s maiden name.”

  Maurice started to speak, when the nurse said “Veronica Abbott.”

  President Windseig looked at Maurice, “How did it know that? You never gave it my name.”

  “Uh, Computer how did you know that?”

  The nurse blushed, “Sorry if I spoke out of turn, professors. However, you had your camera on and I recognized Professor Windseig. I mean we are in the President’s home.”

  Professor Windseig blanched, “The computer said ‘spoke out of turn’? Do computers say things like that? Idioms, that is? It then recognized the house and my picture and it knew my mother’s maiden name? I didn’t think computers were good at that thing.”

  Maurice shrugged, “You’re right. They’re horrible at it. They’re also terrible at free form English speech and comprehension. The programs for either are ten years beyond anything that currently exists. The Turing machine is maybe twenty years ahead of its time. The only way I knew that the image I was speaking to wasn’t a real human was that I had it change the way it looked. The database is maybe 30 years ahead of its time. The search and integration of the information, I can’t even estimate. It just happened to come up with a way to manufacture almost free diamonds after I asked it how much the drive was worth, a 400 carat diamond for five hundred bucks.” Maurice finished the second glass of wine.

  Maurice’s voice started to sound a bit shrill. Windseig asked, “Maurice, ask ‘Does God exist?’ ”

  Maurice said, “I currently have the computer’s intelligence, its brilliance, was set at 30, let me turn it up to maximum. Computer Options Brilliance 100. Does God exist? If he does how can it be proven?”

  The clock appeared and gave a time of five and a half hours.

  Windseig looked disappointed after it gave a time estimate, “I used to be a theology professor before I was brought to Birkhead. This is, well
it could be the turning point of theology. The greatest advancement since the Arabs invented numbers. Maybe even more important than the wheel. Can you call me when it gets the answer?”

  Maurice asked, “What about David, infringement of privacy - the ex-president’s bank account, for god’s sake. What about a gift from a student of a million and a half dollars?”

  “That last one’s easy. I assume that the disk drive and its programs were all written by David. Were you considering giving ComHead a B or lower in computer science? Would you raise his grade, due to his bribe? David didn’t give you the drive to bribe you for a passing grade. As to infringement of privacy. Well yes, that’s a real problem, but not much different from when a student downloads music into his iPod. It’s just, well bigger, but only more of the same. David’s only 17, remember? And a very immature 17 at that. But do you realize what this breakthrough can mean? Imagine being able to solve all of computer sciences most vexing problems. But I will speak to David and his father.”

  Maurice finished his third glass of wine, stood up, disconnected the monitor from his computer and left.

  ***

  At 8 AM the next morning, Arthur Windseig answered his home phone, “Good morning Maurice. ... Yes, you can come by now. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”

  ***

  Maurice reconnected the computer to the monitor. “Are you familiar with Carl Sagan’s book ‘Contact’?”

  “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t read science fiction.”

  “Apparently, the diamond drive had. One of its arguments is that if God exists He would have left clues. Why would He hide? Sagan suggested that one of the clues would be codes hidden within the digits of the irrational numbers. You know, how pi is 3.14 and a whole lot of other numbers in a seemingly random arrangement. Well Sagan said that eventually, God would make the numbers appear to fit some pattern, like 40 ones in a row, or spell out a phrase.”

  “I follow that.”

  “You’re probably familiar with the notion of Intelligent Design. That the earth, and especially life, is too complex for it to be simply a random happenstance? That there HAD to be a divine creator.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Windseig.

  “Well the computer pointed to specific sections of DNA. You know how there are four DNA proteins, which make up the code? Adenine, Guanine, T-something and C-something? Well I could say that Adenine is a zero, C a one, Guanine a two and T is a three.”

  “You’re beginning to lose me, but go on.”

  “Well once we assign a number to each protein, we have a number from zero to three. If we looked at two of these DNA proteins in a row it would be a number from 0 to 15. I see you looking confused. Let me do this another way. Let’s say there are not four but ten proteins: Adenine, B-nine, C-nine, up to J-nine. Okay? Let’s say that if we see Adenine we write down a 0, a B-nine a 1, up to J-nine we write down a 9. So if we have one DNA protein we’d have a number from 0 to 9. If we had two of these proteins side-by-side, we have a number from 0 to 99. Now, have you ever heard of ASCII?”

  Professor Windseig said, “I think I heard the name, but I can’t remember from where”.

  Maurice continued, “It’s a way for a computer to convert its internal numbers to a letter. Like the number 65 represents a capitol ‘A’, 66 is ‘B’, et cetera. So with each set of four DNA proteins, I can translate it into a letter.”

  “I follow you. And these letters spell out a message from God?”

  “You’re ahead of me, but I read a message. I followed the location the computer pointed out and I personally went to the Human Genome Project and similar projects on the cow, chimpanzee, chicken and fruit fly genomes.”

  “Enough already, what did He say?”

  Maurice displayed his output: “:-) Do not remove under penalty of death. Have a good life – ComHead (-:”

  Windseig started to laugh, and then laughed hysterically. “Maurice, for a second there I thought you were serious.” Then he looked at Maurice, who was not laughing. Arthur Windseig immediately sobered. “You mean you’re really serious?”

  “Yes, in all five animal’s DNA was the same quotation. From what little I know that string of DNA must be very important for it to be unchanged in all the hundreds of millions of years of mutations.”

  “Was there any other message?”

  “I think so. I see the smiley faces on both sides of two more messages but I can’t read the words.”

  “Hmmm, could it be in a different language or alphabet?”

  “I don’t know, the letters had too few vowels to make any English-letter type language I’m familiar with.”

  “Does this ASCII thing of yours do other alphabets? Like Hebrew?”

  “Yes! Of course, that would make sense! I’ll send you a Word file in Hebrew.”

  Maurice spent a few minutes playing with windows and put the characters into Hebrew. Then he sent the file to Windseig.

  Maurice sat for a few minutes and then said, “Does this mean he’s God?”

  Arthur Windseig sat and stared at the wall for a while, “I don’t know. If I saw that first message on a wall, I would have thought it was some college kid’s notion of a poor joke. Maybe it still is. But the location! Some entity seeded the DNA with that code and it was so successful it was never changed. And if you believe in evolution theory, which I do, it was done a billion years ago. Not even my old fraternity could pull that prank off.” Arthur smiled. “I don’t know. Could you send me the locations of the three messages?”

  “Oh yes, sure.”

  ***

  Maurice picked up his cell phone and recognized President Windseig’s voice, “Maurice, I called up a few old friends, one was a rabbi. I gave him the two Hebrew files. I told him that I got these two e-mail messages from a student. He said it was a silly phrase. They translated into ‘And ComHead said let the seed of one mingle with the seed of the other and the plants partied. The evening of the fourth epoch.’ In Genesis, on the fourth day or epoch, it talks about plants, trees, and fruit filling the land. The second one said, “And ComHead said, let the animals run, jump, and fly, the evening of the fifth epoch.” The fifth day talks about creating the animals.”

  Arthur continued, “I then called a biologist friend and asked about the locations on the genome. He said that the first one is a primitive, and by primitive, I mean ancient, set of codes to generate males and females gametes. The second is also very primitive and is part of the instructions for the mitochondria, the energy plant of our cells. He thinks it may have something to do with the Krebs cycle.”

  “Arthur, I’m glad you verified that, I discovered that the computer is fluent in every language and I translated the Hebrew into something like what the rabbi said. It also identified each of the DNA codes into sites like you said, but slightly more chemicalese, in detail. The computer then adapted and explained things so I could understand it. Do you understand how brilliant that program must be to translate and adapt to the user’s comprehension level? Sorry, my training is getting in the way of the bigger picture. Maybe I’m hiding from the bigger picture, I don’t know. But from what I understood, David created sex and David created the ability which allows animals to move.”

  “You may be right, but we may be overreaching here. Did you ever think that David had not done this yet? Or that it wasn’t David, only someone using ComHead’s name?”

  “Oh yes, I found another pair of smiley faces. In between them were a copyright sign and the year 2021 CompuHead Corp. The computer had no idea what it meant except it had to do with the brain chemistry. Hey, that might mean David has no knowledge of this DNA stuff now, it’s something he does in the future.”

  Arthur laughed, “It also means that he’ll probably make it out of college alive. And we, or his father, don’t kill him.”

  “Speaking of his father, did you speak to him and David yet?”

  “No
, I … I guess I’ve been putting it off.”

  “I’d like to be there.”

  “Okay, I’ll arrange a meeting tomorrow or the next day, assuming I can reach him.”

  “You realize that we can have a meeting in a half an hour. I’d like to give David very little time to prepare.”

  “You can do that? Right. Okay, nine-thirty in my office.”

  “I’ll meet you there. Bye.”

  Maurice wrote a Google search “ComHead please report to the President’s Office at 9:30 sharp – Maurice. Please confirm.”

  A message appeared almost immediately, “OK”

  ***

  David walked into President Windseig’s office. He told Hilda to wait outside. Both the President and Professor Schwartzman were already there. The President was seated behind his desk and Schwartzman was standing nearby. A chair was waiting for David. He had been at the cafeteria waiting on line when he heard the request for the immediate interview. He hadn’t had time to change out of his sweatshirt, which said ‘Ask me Anything. Like your Measurements.’ David sat upright on the seat. David knew he had blown it. He thought, ‘Perhaps I could disrupt the east coast power grid for a few hours while I run. I could block all police radio frequencies.’ David didn’t hear anything unusual on the police scans. Nor were the local FBI agents on any heightened threat level.

  David: Hilda, we may need to run. Get ready.

  Windseig started, “David, I think you know why we’re here. Very expensive gifts to a professor and the most remarkably extensive invasion of privacy this president, perhaps any president, has ever seen. Why did you do that?”

  David thought, ‘I’m going to be expelled. I messed up. They’re going to call the police, the FBI. Will Dad go to jail too? The police aren’t on their way. Maybe they called and told them not to broadcast. I’m doomed. It’s over.’

  David: Dad, what should I do?

  Martin: Don’t do anything stupid. Hear them out first, then answer their questions.

  David looked up nervously first at the president, then at his computer professor. He then said, “Yeah, I know.” David hesitated, “I don’t know.”

  Windseig hesitated then continued, “If any other student or even faculty member ever, EVER said they didn’t know I might let it slide.” Windseig had a scowl on his face, “But you? You not knowing something? Give me a break. Try Brilliance 15. Why?”