Nanotime

by Bart Kosko

  *

  WNN Channel 64: Dhahran. A large white polymer tent serves as an emergency ward. Soldiers tend to bleeding blast victims who lie facing Mecca on the bumpy floor. The soldiers do not have alcohol or morphine or medical training. A bloodstained and bearded father holds up his armless baby son and screams for the death of all Israelis.…

  *

  WNN Channel 96: The United Nations. The Israeli ambassador stands as he demands that Saudi Arabia pay Israel for all damage to the Eilat desalination plant and that the UN approve oil sanctions against the Saudis. The Iranian ambassador stands to protest the call for oil sanctions. He threatens Israel with war.…

  *

  WNN Channel 809: Split screen of the 24-hour London and New York stock exchanges. Both markets have dropped over 4% of their value through e-money transfers as the bond market has fallen. The United States no longer offers a 30-year bond but its 10-year bond has lost 6% of its value. The dollar has jumped from 24 yen to 30 yen in panic buying from central banks in Europe and Asia. The largest gainers are the private currencies Daiwa metal and Zurich fiat.…

  *

  WNN Channel 810: The Shanghai Stock Exchange. Chinese pit traders stand in crowds and wave their black handheld wireless transactors at a clear crystal spike. The Thailand and Hong Kong exchanges are up over 2%. The Tokyo Stock Exchange has fallen almost 1%. A large red wall display shows that the Shanghai exchange all-stock index has just gone up from 5% to 6%.…

  Chapter 6

  Mojave Desert

  Nevada

  “Goddamn Arabs.”

  John Grant spoke to his windshield.

  “I can’t believe they bombed my desalination plant. What are the odds of that happening? One in how many billion? Jism. What are the odds?”

  The odds are slight.

  “ ‘Slight?’ I know they are ‘slight.’ You can do better than that. You wrote that big thick book on causal inference. You know how many hours it took me to scan in that wordy shit? Too bad you never learned to speak in math like we do now. But go ahead and take a chance. Make a causal guess. Explain.”

  Eilat was the closest city in Israel at which the Saudis could hope to strike with impunity. They chose a retaliatory path which was both swift and secure.

  “Jism. I know that. But why did they choose the water plant? Why my plant? Why my atomic laser?”

  John. Do not despair. Eytan will call soon and no doubt assure you that you shall still supply their demand. The Saudis saw the desalination plant as both a close government structure of the Israelis and one which the Greens had put forth to the world as an emblem of the new postoil era they hope to achieve.

  “So you believe the news?”

  So far the news is the only evidence we have and—

  “Jesus. I know the line. Always proportion your belief to the evidence.”

  John Grant now watched six WNN channels on his windshield in a holographic heads-up display. The thin shield of doped diamond housed massive computer and communication networks. The Jism he spoke to was as much in the windshield or dashboard as it was in the small brown “raisin” he wore just inside his left ear.

  Jism was the name John used for the nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill.

  Sometimes a Jism image would flash on the windshield. John could glimpse the thin Englishman in his frock coat and see his bald forehead and blue eyes and thick dark sideburns. The tera-flop image still was not perfect on the windshield. And John did not like to think of Jism sitting apart from him or dangling above the Jeep on the highway.

  John liked to think of Jism as in the raisin. Then Jism lived with John in John’s mind. The raisin talked to John and he could still talk to it when he left his Jeep or his desert home. The voice of Jism was always with him. John kept extra raisins in his pocket and wallet and in his desert trailer. He had buried two sets of them in the Nevada Mojave Desert that he now drove through on his way to Los Angeles.

  John had trained his intelligent agent on the works of John Stuart Mill. The training began when John was a graduate student in molecular engineering at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.

  John had found John Stuart Mill the smartest man he had ever read. John had always searched for a personal advisor and knew he had found him when he read Mill’s System of Logic and his On Liberty. John agreed with Mill on science and politics to a very high degree. Then John read Mill’s Biography and knew that they agreed on religion and life as well.

  John viewed himself as something of an elitist among his peers for even reading nonmath books. He took pride in how he had sculpted this English gentleman in his ear. Most people bought packaged versions of Jesus or pop stars or sports figures or motivational speakers and used them to exalt their diaries.

  John had scanned in all of JSM’s published books and essays and letters he could find. It had taken years and he once went to London to copy 200-year-old issues of The Westminster Review. The JSM text streams served as training data for vast networks of neural filters and fuzzy rule banks. These plastic systems learned the patterns of JSM’s thought and writing.

  John had also fed the intelligent agent each book he could recall reading and had shared with it his secrets and vital statistics. He made sure his Jism had access to the latest science disks and stores of social and legal and medical data.

  Correct. Proportion your belief to the evidence.

  Jism knew John liked to hear the line. It was a principle that summed up over 2,000 years of Western philosophy. It had special force in the extreme case when there was no evidence. Then it said believe nothing. That extreme case laid waste to many of the belief structures of Western and Eastern man. It abolished gods and souls and public wills and all the other unseen creatures of religion and folk wisdom.

  Jism’s principle also cast doubt on the claims of many power institutions. It shaved the claims of the church from its bloody track record of group control and bad predictions. It reduced states and governments to mere force monopolies and so reduced them to pools of waste and fraud and group control and warfare. The principle reduced the press to media power. It applied to media-bite reporting and saw only how units of the press compete to share power with states by how the press units shine their spotlights on some agenda items and not on others.

  John had lost belief in the lot of them. Now all he had was Jism.

  “Try Richard again,” John said.

  John watched a new blue window form on his windshield. The other windows shrank and shifted from curved 2-D to full 3-D. The windows looked like paintings hanging in a hallway with the new blue window at the end of the hallway. John stretched his legs as best he could in the front seat but still had to bend them down with his bare feet on the floor on the passenger side. He had the car on full autopilot so he could focus on the gallery of screens and windows in the heads-up-display windshield.

  John broke off half a gingersnap and sucked at its dry spicy surface. The gingersnap made him think of Ramachandra and all the work he had left to do at home and at the Hoover Dam and how little time he had left to do it. He swished the sparkling river water in its Hoover Dam bottle and gulped down the cool bubbly fluid.

  Richard Cheng appeared on what had just been the blue window and it grew in size.

  Richard was not 30 yet and sat at his multimedia console in Los Angeles. The smooth chrome device could produce more images than an entire film studio could a century before. Richard spoke so fast that sometimes Jism had to whisper to John and repeat what Richard had just said.

  “Have you heard from Eytan?” John said.

  “No word. I’ve almost got the film made for the site visit. It still needs to adapt on a good-looking woman.”

  “How about your sister?”

  “Fuck you. I’m thinking about scanning some old film of gospel singers or cabaret dancers.”

  “Sounds too cute for the Israelis. And it doesn’t sound legal. Richard. Please don’t forget that this is a full-blown site v
isit. It has to impress a lot of people. Let’s don’t risk anything on dancing girls.”

  “We’ll talk about it when you get here. Adios.”

  The windshield went back to full view of the purple and gray Mojave Desert.

  “Jism. Smart search on the Eilat bombing from the Arab point of view. I don’t trust the Israelis. I want to hear what the other side has to say.”

  Fine idea. Forty programs so far.

  “Let’s see them.”

  The windshield display split into two rows of five windows each. All showed video clips and some showed them as holographs.

  “Jism! You fuck! Translate!”

  English captions appeared at the base of each window image. The system tracked John’s eye movements and gave the most sound to the image he looked at. Then the Arabic turned to English and the captions popped off that window.

  John could hear the image windows next to the one he had focused on. The display damped and filtered their sounds to keep them within John’s preferred signal-to-noise ratio. John squeezed his right hand around the small rubber spikes of his green porky ball as he watched.

  Many men owned land in the world. Few owned his own blend of diamond and graphite in a patented carbon molecule.

  *

  Window 1: A shirtless scuba diver in the Red Sea points to brown broken stalks of coral. The coral surrounds a twisted chunk of surface-to-air missile. The diver points to the black Hebrew letters on its side. The voice says this smart minicruise missile was the dumbest of the lot and attacked the reef on its own instructions.…

  *

  Window 4: Orthodox Jews beat an old bearded Palestinian man when he pushes them from his spot near the Al Aqsa Mosque across from the Wailing Wall. A later segment shows the same Jews in a rock fight with Palestinian children.…

  *

  Window 5: A dark-eyed woman from the Arab Antidefamation League graphs the amount of Israeli versus Saudi damage coverage in the world media. She then graphs the latest numbers of Jews versus Arabs in U.S. and European broadcasting.…

  *

  Window 7: A Green Senator argues on a U.S. talk show that Congress should ban sales of smart weapons to the Saudis and ban all oil imports from them as well. Her Libertarian colleague in the Senate disagrees. Her colleague claims that both moves would be pointless symbolism and bad economics in the global economy. A weapon ban would just raise the price of weapons and increase the odds that U.S. allies or enemies would supply them. A U.S. oil embargo would make Americans pay more for gas and oil. It would in the end just transfer more wealth from the United States to the Arab states and to Russia and Venezuela.…

  *

  Window 9: President Ibn Aminzadeh of Azerbaijan addresses his country through the state-run cable TV network. Aminzadeh demands that Israel pay the Saudi government for the billions of dollars lost in oil reserves in Dhahran. He says the Muslim nations should discuss whether to impose an oil embargo on Israel.…

  *

  “Jism. This is just Arab bellyaching. Find something on my desalination plant. Find something on the technology. Associative search on Black Sun. Hell. Find something on me!”

  John. Relax. There is no evidence that anyone wants to harm you.

  “Look. These Saudi bastards just harmed me. They blew up my water plant for Christ’s sake! That was my laboratory. I knew they would try to get at me through that atomic laser from Weizmann. Big Oil. Big Arab Oil with Allah on top. I never wanted to get mixed up in the old Arab-Jew pissing match. How long will that go on? Another century? I thought science was supposed to kill off religion. What happened? Now look at those Muslims waving guns at that mosque. You have to give them credit for their skill in geometry. But what does waving those guns prove?”

  They are the sentimental enemies of political economy.

  “Those sentimental enemies blew up the only water plant in the world smart enough to license my patent. So they are my enemies too. Like they say: Even paranoids have enemies.”

  Jism laughed at that and so did John.

  I can find only one match to your technical work and to Arab extremists. The associative link has a near-random connection strength.

  “Fine. What is it?”

  It is a recent program on Israeli public television called “The New Varieties of Religious Experience.” The program compared Jewish kabbalahism to Islamic Sufism.

  “That does sound like noise. I bet the show didn’t come up with one claim that you could test. Christ. My faith in cartoons versus yours. They should have called the program ‘How to Kill a Man for the Sake of Unobservable Fictions.’ No. That’s too Western for the Mideastern mind. It lacks a sense of the tribe. Lacks a sense of the all-loving omnipotent community. It needs the taste of what they used to call the czar’s cake in the first Russian Revolution. Remember that? Yeah. How about ‘How We Fool You as We Rule You’?”

  The program mentions a Sufi mystic in Iran who once worked on the mathematics of brain function.

  “Really? What does he look like?”

  The windshield cleared and then one window opened in the center from a small blue dot. The grainy image quickly grew sharp as the car net performed trillions of pixel computations. A pale man with a black beard and white turban walked into a rocky cave. The narrator claimed this was secret footage of a Sufi brotherhood in Turkey on the border with Iran.

  “Can you slow down and contrast enhance this guy’s voice? I can’t make out his name.”

  The name of the man in the image is Hamid Tabriz.

  “Tabriz? H. Tabriz? Jesus! You know who he is? I based my learning scheme on his gradient-projection algorithm. Half the field has stolen from this guy.”

  I see you referenced him twice in your master’s thesis.

  “Had to. That guy is pure structure. They say he got out of Tokyo University with just a 20-page dissertation. He published only two letters in the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks. Read them.”

  I just did.

  “See? They’re not even full journal articles. And no coauthorship with his Ph.D. advisor. They’re beautiful papers. No tech talk or grant talk or any of that bullshit. Just straight theorem and proof. Theorem and proof. Wham bam fuck you ma’am. No one ever met him at a workshop or heard from him on the net. Yeah. I remember now. I did hear that Tabriz was some kind of religious nut like Pascal was. The Muslims get them when they’re young. I sure thought he was too smart to believe in cartoons.”

  A Jism image flashed on the windshield and stayed there. Jism’s thin mouth was firm and did not move. His blue eyes looked above John and his forehead wrinkled.

  “Hey. Why do we keep watching this pillowhead walk into a cave? I admit I’m a fan but so what? I don’t think his ass is cute. What are you doing? Thinking? You think he had something to do with my water plant?”

  He is the only tie I could find between neural engineering and the Saudi bombing.

  “I see the neural tie. And I don’t need you to make it. How big a machine IQ does that take?”

  The same Israeli program says Israeli intelligence has linked Sufism to Islamic militants.

  “Sure it does. The Israelis link all Arabs to Islamic militants. They’ve got whole rooms full of computers that do nothing but test combinations of people for ill intent. You remember. Eytan even bragged about it the first time we met in Vegas. The Israelis run half the planet through their machines. They’re more paranoid than I am.”

  Jism smiled slightly and his blue eyes sparkled.

  Tabriz is a Persian and not an Arab.

  “Jism. Don’t logic chop. You’re the guru on cause and effect. Tell me what you base the link on.”

  John. You know that the known laws of pattern recognition are model-free. We can recognize a pattern far more easily than we can explain how we recognize it. We do not even have reliable numerical confidence measures of the patterns we think we recognize.

  “I know that but try anyway. A tie to Dr. H.-fucking-Tabriz is too far off even a
thick-tailed bell curve to treat it like it’s off the curve. Like you said or you should have said: There is no such thing as a statistical outlier. Didn’t you say that?”

  Words to that effect.

  “You said that all right. Listen to the data. Don’t tell the data where they belong. Let them tell you. Each datum belongs to at least one pattern. Try to explain the facts and not just explain them away. That’s the core of your whole empiricist world view. So tell me: What makes you think Tabriz and these Sufi men of the woolen cloth somewhere out in a desert cave give a spiritual shit about whether the Saudis blew up my water plant? What do you base that on?”

  My neural-network intuition.

  “Christ.”

  Chapter 7

  Kirovabad

  Azerbaijan

  The skinny gangster called the Sturgeon sat down at the same table with Joel Davis. The Azer gangster was young enough to still have purple acne splotches on his tanned high cheekbones.

  He smiled as he picked up Davis’s vodka and sipped it.

  “Tell me,” the Sturgeon said in perfect English over the loud Turkish rock music. “What is a German doing taking pictures of our esteemed national oil pipeline?”

  “Fuck off punk. You need a bath.”

  Joel Davis watched the man’s dark eyes as the man reached in his yellow silk suit and pulled out a flat palm screen. Davis could see himself on the screen. It was footage from this morning. He sat in his brown Honda rental car on a dirt road and held a small clear tube to his eye. Below him lay the sleek olive Tamraz pipeline as it snaked through a red rocky valley. The tube took the light that bounced off the pipeline and valley and burned it into a volume hologram as a sequence of diffraction patterns.

  Later tiny chemical robots would convert the doped lithium jelly of the hologram into a 3-D strike point for an Israeli cruise missile.

  “Sightseeing?” the Sturgeon said.

  “Who wants to know?”