“Sounds okay.” Mannerheim shrugged and started up the grated metal steps, slowly, ponderously like an old man of bulk with no energy and very little will.
At the top of the stairs, Mannerheim went to a window, an opening in the brick wall, and stood there. He looked toward where the Cascade Mountains were completely obscured. Adam stepped up to a window on Mannerheim’s left and looked out over the tops of the downtown buildings. The ceiling of cloud sat right on top of them. He looked Mannerheim over: Khaki slacks, blue runner’s jacket, striped shirt loosely tucked in under a black belt, white and sliver running shoes with perky soles. Long fingernails, clean but uncut for months. Adam turned back to the cityscape, wondering what long fingernails on a man like Mannerheim meant. Carelessness? Distractedness? The genius who couldn’t be bothered to take care of himself?
“Technicalities, Mr. Mannerheim,” Adam said. “I can’t print anything until this court order gets through our lawyers, so let’s call this on background with the understanding that we will change it to full attribution in the case of your death or conviction of a crime.”
Mannerheim, looked over at him, pinched his lips up and shrugged one shoulder. In that sighing voice, barely making an echo in the abandoned tower, he said it didn’t matter. He dug through Adam’s logic and pointed out that by the time he got permission to print his stories and photos, the story will have leaked somewhere else from some other source so they might as well just be on the record.
“Besides,” he said, “as you’ve already guessed, this isn’t about me.”
“So who is it about?”
“Might be a what not a who and depends on what it you’re talking about.”
He chuckled oddly. Adam thought it a wet little cackle.
Adam said, “I hope we’re not going to play games until our time is up. It seems to me you’ve got something to say, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. I don’t want to know who’s behind the court order. I want to know what it is you really want to tell me. I’ve got all day.”
Mannerheim narrowed his eyes and tilted his head at Adam, like someone who has been challenged a lot lately and just can’t believe it’s happening again. Adam saw that a lot. He realized then what was up with Mannerheim’s manner: He was fatigued. He’d been embroiled in a conflict that had worn him down. He had that look of fey seen during years of hounding public officials caught up in a scandal or during the election season frenzy. It’s the moment the tide turns and the momentum in the situation, the sense of purpose, shifts from push to drain. I’ll be damned, he thought. Mannerheim’s been getting beaten up.
“You know,” Mannerheim said, staring absently out the window, “I read some of your mother’s work before all this started. I’ve been meaning to read it again, in light of what I’ve experienced and documented in the past twenty or so years.”
“And what was it that brought you to my mother’s work?”
Mannerheim wasn’t the first geek to dig into his mother’s work. Adam brought a cigarette and lighter up to his mouth. His mother’s work on cognitive processes in children was not only pretty narrow in scope but by now had to be out of date, especially since she had been dead from breast cancer for a dozen years. Yet, she had become something of a cult icon to the programing class. Adam’s memories of his mother consisted mostly of her handing him over into the care of some co-ed or other. Her intense, hawk-like brows and thin, strained neck, and the games she would play with him and other kids. One involved a couple of dolls and a piece of chocolate. The other involved a shoebox with a monster inside. Try not to be marked by that, he puffed the cigarette and exhaled over Mannerheim’s head.
“Before I started Beta Launch, my primary research was in user interface in the next generation of computing, one that won’t involve a mouse or a key board. Eye tracking, human autonomic responses, as well as softer sciences like cognitive development. Algorithms that know your next move or desire well before you do. Your mother was one of the first in the field to look at cognitive development within the subconscious or at the level of genetic traits where a lot is going on that makes us who and what we are that we are not aware of. Everyone else was obsessed with behavioral conditioning.”
“These are things I know. Tell me something I don’t know.”
Mannerheim started walking, slowly, clockwise around the circle of the tower. Adam followed and then stepped in beside him because he was mumbling, not egocentrism so much as disinterest in anything but the development of his own thoughts.
Then he said, “We keep moving, and they’ll have a harder time listening in. Not that it really matters. I just enjoy disrupting their work.”
Uh oh, Adam thought. “Whose work? The feds?” He scanned the park’s landscape through a window they had crossed in front of. One thing the Feds hate is someone ignoring their court orders, that and lying to them. But he saw no one. “Seems a bit much. Even in these times,” he said, mostly to himself.
“Not just them.” Mannerheim chimed in and stopped. He glanced out the window and then at Adam. “Her, too. She watches the watchers, though they won’t believe me.” He intoned some vast and limitless meaning.
Geek-profundity bullshit. He wanted to slap Mannerheim. “Her?” he mocked Mannerheim’s tone.
“Celestine Wallace,” he said like Adam should know who that was, scrunching his bushy eyebrows at him.
“And that is?”
He scrunched his eyebrows tighter and snorted in non-surprise surprise. He wrapped his hands together behind his back and started walking, visibly going back into Master of The Universe mode. “Your reporter must have told you about her.”
Adam, intrigued finally at something Mannerheim said, fell in beside him.
“I understand,” he stopped and turned to Adam, “that she went back to the house and saw a bit more than she’d bargained for. I told those bureaucrats their ploy wouldn’t work. She’s done hiding. But I ...”
“Wait a minute.” Adam tilted his head back. “The black woman?”
“Yes, Celestine Wallace is also a black woman.”
Mannerheim was so immersed in whatever the hell was going on in his own life that he couldn’t fathom that the rest of the world wasn’t right there along with him. “Well, you’ve lost me,” Adam said. “But let’s go back to, ‘Who cares what you or I think?’ ”
“She does. They’re following all known associates.”
“Oh, goddamn it. Why? What do you care? Explain yourself! Enough with the mysterious bullshit.”
“Celestine and her team of hacker followers are making advancements in quantum computing …”
“Celestine Wallace? Who is she?”
He snorted in disbelief again.
“Look,” Adam grabbed his arm, briefly. Mannerheim looked down at where Adam had touched him, shocked. Probably hadn’t been touched like that since the school yard. They faced each other across a couple feet of damp air. Adam’s voice echoed. “Talk to me as if to a child.”
“That quantum machine building game Natalie wrote about. She’s really onto something. They don’t believe me …”
Mannerheim had not showered in several days, Adam surmised. His hair all matted in the back, cowlicks flowing up and off his head in divergent directions. Red-rimmed eyes. Heavy bags pulling eyelids down. He clamped has jaws tight to let what he’d said sink in. Another test: Would Adam understand that Mannerheim just said he or someone else had hacked into the Daily-Record’s internal notes system?
“Who cares? Is it an illegal computing system?” A lot of computing potential had been outlawed after the Electric Crash. Those rules were being relaxed again, but illegal computing groups were still being busted fairly regularly.
Mannerheim got that distant look of ridicule again. Adam had to admit he wasn’t asking good questions, but he didn’t know what questions to ask, and Mannerheim clearly had a lot on his mind.
“Look, I know I’m a little dull here, but nothing of what you are saying makes any sense to me.” Adam ran a h
and over his bald head. “And that makes me think it’s just a bunch of horse crap dreamt up by a rich guy and a pack of bored college kids. I must hear a hundred story ideas a month just like this from university professors. They see conspiracies everywhere they look and somehow it all centers around them and their revolutionary work.”
“If that’s what you think, then we have gotten ahead of ourselves. I guess I thought you knew more than you do.”
“Well, shit. But, I actually don’t have all day.” Adam was getting the feeling that Mannerheim had lost his mind over this girl or just lost it period and maybe she had, too. Sexualized pseudo-religious revelations have twisted more minds than drugs and alcohol combined. Wouldn’t be the first time. Just read Revelations. Or hell, just a few summers ago a group of people, all ages, committed murder-suicide because a comet had neared the Earth. That was the second time in twenty or so years that people had killed themselves and their families because a comet, an easily and well-understood astronomical phenomenon, was visible from their backyards. So, people were nuts. Hands down.
“Kind of hard to know where to start.”
“Try the beginning.”
“The beginning of what? What beginning?”
Adam didn’t respond. He pushed his sleeve up and checked his watch just to reinforce the idea of running out of time. He didn’t have anywhere to be, and it would be a couple of hours before anyone would begin to wonder why he wasn’t in the office. In fact, what he was running out of was patience, and the wine bottle in his apartment still had a solid glass to donate to the cause.
“Or, well, yeah,” Mannerheim said. Annoyingly, he started walking again. Adam let him collect his thoughts for a half a turn around the big tank.
“The beginning,” Mannerheim sighed. “One of my research arms has been concerned with resurgent community building on the StreamNet, tribalism and so on, because for one, user behavior has from the beginning of the World Wide Web driven the development of its most successful applications, not the least of which are the Social Stream sites and, more importantly, the mechanisms behind them. Facebook was a destination, but Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, these search and network companies had created the mechanism that generated what became the Social Stream infrastructure. They made the medium social, a platform for communal interaction beyond just saying, ‘Hello. I’m eating fish for dinner.’ This is the meta-universe of big data that survived the crash. Our unconscious lives are still mirrored there and new algorithms, some illegal, are again churning through all the interconnects, which is where genetics and my lab come into play. Because, don’t forget, genetics plays a hidden role in all of our activities, not just the color of your hair, as your mother explored. And, for another, the StreamNet is like a petri dish of a medium, an evolution experiment within the raw soup of data, dormant but waking like a beehive warming in the sun. We got a DOD grant and started buying raw tracking data from StreamNet Service Providers and a lot more from the old “Dark Web” still there, like oil under the ground.”
“Well, that’s gotta be all kinds of illegal. Besides you’ve mixed metaphors.” Welcome to a genius’s mind, Adam thought. Scatterbrained one minute and monologuing the mysteries of the universe the next.
“Raw data of billions of connections. You start on StreamNet address X and jump to address Y and we mark it with a code, an identifier and file it in the database. Out of this we can get all kinds of patterns of behaviors and with a big enough dataset, we get patterns of personal behaviors without knowing who the person is. Imagine you always start at X and then typically go to Y. Well, eventually that behavior gets tagged with an identity and, Bob’s your uncle, we have a virtual person who lives and breaths on the StreamNet, but only there. And … ” He stopped to look at Adam. “I think that’s what her trance sessions are about.”
“The Matrix?”
“We’ve been interested in this kind of thing for generations, for sure. When God left the center of our understanding about ourselves, science stepped into the ring to become the favorite way for us to learn about ourselves, our natures, our purpose and what becomes of us when we die. So, we eventually found our way to the genome, and up to now we’ve been figuring out that puzzle of genetic traits, what role a particular trait might play in our current state and why did it come about and how did it survive to become a dominant gene. What’s its evolutionary benefit? Sharper teeth? Thicker hair? More sweat glands? Bigger breasts? Longer, straighter legs? You get the picture?”
“Barely.” Adam took out a cigarette. He’d lost count, so to heck with it. Evidently, Mannerheim was used to taking the long way around to his point and would not be heading down a straight path … even under the lashes of a whip.
“We were looking for patterns of how interaction with the StreamNet might be changing people or if it is changing people. You just wouldn’t believe the amount of data collected on us all before the crash. Endless seas of data.”
“But you have to know the person to do that final step in your analysis, right? Otherwise, it’s all just a fiction.”
“You are paying attention!” He bumped Adam’s upper arm and smiled.
Adam thought of the dozen real stories that would be published in the next day’s paper, and he wanted to have a story among them. This wouldn’t be it.
“You’ve read my mother’s work? Well, most of her insights came from screwing over my childhood, so maybe we should call it a day.”
Whatever that judge’s order was about, Mannerheim didn’t have much if anything to do with it directly. They’d just have to wait it out to find out more, if they ever did. The Feds have a big blackhole most things end up in nowadays.
“This has to be dealt with now.” Mannerheim fired up a worried look on his face. “In some way. People need to understand.” He sounded panicky about this point.
Weirdly, Adam considered. “What I can’t figure out is whether you know you’re nuts. What do you want from me? From us?”
Mannerheim leaned against the iron-pipe railing. “‘You discourage life.’ That’s what she wrote on the note she left on my desk. She was a Phd student I picked up somewhere along the line, a hand-me-down. A smart, extroverted hand-me-down with a solid aptitude for lab work.” He started walking again. Hands clasped behind his back, professorially. “I didn’t set out to have a relationship with her. She was lonely and had that directionless grad-student ennui, like her life was a thin sheet of fabric, like too little butter spread over too much toast. A lot of doctoral students end up feeling that way after their first few years in the lab. Our experiments were crashing every hypothesis. I thought it was carelessness in the lab and designed an algorithm to look for the errors in the code. Celestine said her work was perfect, and yet she was very agitated, like looking for something she couldn’t quite name or covering up something. I said this was all pretty natural given her experience. Failures happen far more than success and teach us more than success. All of that. She said we weren’t failing. We just didn’t know what we were seeing and we needed to start running even more complex experiments that factor out time. What we needed to have done, I said, was run simpler tests to find the baseline. But I let her go on. I wanted her to stay. What she was proposing could take years to debug. Those would be her years, however, and meanwhile she’d stick around. A decent grad student can be hard to hold onto. We walked through the algorithm design and after several hours of working at the same monitor ...”
“One thing leads to another.” So, this was it. A little tryst had Mannerheim all flustered, and that’s what he wanted to talk about?
“Yes. She wasn’t the first doctoral student to fling herself at distractions when the data started going bad, when the models started falling apart and years of research, years you will never get back, crumbles to dust in your hands. For a few months we acted like it hadn’t happened. Then Beta Launch took off in the Resurgence, and I left the university. She followed me to Beta Launch and helped me set up our Center for Disruptive Id
eas. Those were amazing years. There was so much money flying around. We were able to set up a lab that rivaled anything the university had access to. She helped our teams as a systems analyst while continuing to work on the algorithms to make sense of those uncategorized signals she’d found in the deep data.”
“The data from before The Crash?”
“Yes. The old data.”
“I thought that data had been thoroughly scoured for information that led to the judicial takeover of the old Internet.”
“And the culprits were never identified. No one figured it out.” The way Mannerheim spoke, it seemed like he was suggesting someone had figured it out.
“You’re suggesting Celestine figured it out?”
“At least that much.”
“She would have been a child during the crash.” Adam knew what was coming next: Deflection by declaring the guilt of others, related to the crime or not. Guilty by lifestyle or association. “But then, if my math is correct, that had to have been twenty-seven, twenty-eight years ago, which is impossible.”
“Yes. I didn’t keep tabs on her or what she was working on, that’s just the era we are in. We had capital and market position so our company survived. The board and I hired a CEO and new management team to take us from a startup to a company that could acquire other companies and their patents. All departments were ordered to create budgets, researchers, everyone, including me. That’s when she resurfaced. She’d been using a hell of a lot of resources without documenting what for.”
Mannerheim’s tone had shifted from wonderment at his own story to a somber look of bafflement.
“I wanted to just let her be,” he said, “but our CEO shut her out. Locked her out of the building, everything. She was lucky no one pressed charges, but then that could have dragged us all into court and no one had perfect accounting during the Resurgence. She showed up at my house two nights later, upset and agitated. She said she’d made a lot of progress, but couldn’t tell me what. She needed more computing time and the files from the company’s servers. You could say I let her seduce me into downloading the data to my system at home, which by that time, given the computing advancements, was about twenty times the capacity we had started with at the university. She set up in my home office. We slept together a few more times, but then she just up and left. Put that note on my desk and disappeared. After she was gone, I started recovering my health. It has taken me months to find her and decipher what she had been up to.”
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