Why sad.
DeeAnn looked at Alison. “It’s a long story.”
A loud buzz sounded from a monitor on the main desk. On the screen, a red error message displayed “unable to translate — story.”
“It’s all right,” Alison said. She changed the subject. “Are you ready for food?”
Dirk became noticeably excited once Alison’s words were translated into a series of clicks and whistles. Yes, food now.
Alison turned to Sally, who was hovering slightly closer than Dirk. “How about you, Sally? Are you hungry?”
The women heard their translation emitted from the underwater speaker, but Sally did not answer. Instead, she simply stared at them with her dolphin’s perpetual smile.
“Sally?”
Again the speaker sounded. After a long silence Sally finally replied.
You leaving.
Both Alison and DeeAnn’s eyes widened in surprise.
“That’s… right, Sally.” DeeAnn answered. “How did you know that?”
Why you leave?
She frowned. How could she explain human emotion to a dolphin? It was a lot of things. Depression. Grief. Fear. Fear of somehow losing the purest thing she had ever known. And the love of finally feeling like a mother.
“It’s… complicated.”
The translation system buzzed again, unable to translate “complicated.”
DeeAnn tried again. “It’s hard to tell you.”
Her response was successful, but Sally didn’t answer. DeeAnn wasn’t sure whether that meant Sally was satisfied with the answer or not. Dolphins were not human, but even with her limited time speaking with Dirk and Sally, she was surprised at how human-like some of the communication felt. She wondered if much of what we considered unique human communication actually had more underlying commonalities with other forms than we knew.
How you Alison?
“I’m good,” she smiled. “How are you?”
How you hurt?
Alison glanced down at her bandage. “I’m getting better. Thank you.” Since they had returned, both Dirk and Sally were surprisingly curious of their injuries, including those of Chris and Lee. In fact, curious wasn’t quite the right term. They were more “attentive.” She was very touched by their concern and wondered if they were somehow feeling responsible. They may have been there when it happened, but they certainly were in no way responsible. Still, at times it left her with a distinct feeling of not only sympathy from the dolphins but a sense of empathy. It prompted her to ask them on multiple occasions if they had been hurt by the explosion. They insisted they hadn’t, but she wasn’t so sure.
Where man?
Alison gave Sally a sly grin. The dolphin was asking about John. He had spent a few days with her on the island after their return and spent some time talking to Dirk and Sally. Being an expert in technology, he continued to marvel at what they had done with IMIS. He was particularly impressed with the vests Lee and Juan designed. Clay warned her that it was just a matter of time before the world truly understood what she and her team had achieved. He warned her to prepare for that. The wave of publicity they’d received in Miami after the first breakthrough would be nothing compared to what was coming.
Alison brushed her dark brown hair back behind an ear and answered Sally with a girlish chuckle. “John had to leave. He had to go home.”
Sally made the familiar sound that IMIS had long ago identified as laughter. He come back.
Alison sure hoped so. And maybe one day he’d be back to stay.
Upstairs, Chris was sitting with Lee Kenwood and Juan Diaz in the computer lab. It was comfortably sized and well organized with metal tables along the wall. Neatly stacked shelves hung above them, filled with books, a wide range of computer parts, and mounds of magnetic backup tapes. Another larger table rested in the center of the room, illuminated by a bright lamp overhead. On the table lay a new vest with various cables strung to a nearby computer.
Positioned in the middle of the vest was a large speaker with a much smaller microphone and digital camera embedded just a few inches above it. It was a replacement for the damaged unit that DeeAnn had brought back from South America. The system data had still been intact, but the small motherboard and processor were not worth salvaging.
Chris watched Lee and Juan, patiently waiting for an answer on lunch. Both were distracted and staring intently at the monitor atop Lee’s desk.
“I take it you’re still looking for the ghost in the system.”
“It’s not a ghost,” Lee mumbled, moving the mouse and scrolling down.
“Sorry, I mean “anomaly.”
“It’s not an anomaly either.”
“Riddle?”
Juan turned and rolled his eyes while Lee, still facing forward, shook his head.
“Come on! I’m joking.” Chris reached down and picked up a thick textbook from Lee’s desk. He thumbed through it. It advertised itself as the bible of computer algorithms. He believed it. The contents looked completely unreadable. “So what’s wrong exactly?”
Lee took a break and turned his chair around. “It’s not that something is necessarily wrong. It’s more that something isn’t right.”
“Is it part of the log problem?”
“I think so.”
The log problem to which Chris referred had in fact been a serious problem. Before their harrowing trip to the Caribbean, Lee discovered that the IMIS translations and the related video feeds were falling increasingly out of sync. The logs on the servers showed the frequency of errors to be increasing rapidly, leaving Lee worrying that thousands of new lines of computer code had seriously broken something.
But after several sleepless nights, they discovered that IMIS was actually picking up on very subtle cues outside commonly recognized audible patterns. In other words, IMIS, a machine, was literally learning “nonverbal” communication.
However, Lee and Juan couldn’t figure out how it was doing it. The vests were working almost too well.
Chris listened as Lee explained what they were looking for. “So, you’re saying IMIS shouldn’t be as effective as it is?”
“More or less.” Lee walked over to the table and held up their new vest. “When IMIS detects speech patterns from Dirk and Sally, it digitizes the signal and compares it to the database of words it has identified. When it has a match, it sends those translated words back through the speaker.”
“And then in reverse order when we speak, right?”
“Exactly. It works as expected with the dolphins because their language is mostly verbal. But that changes with a primate. Remember, DeeAnn says primate communication involves a lot of nonverbal communication like gestures and facial expressions.”
“Right.”
“Well, that’s where it’s not making sense,” Lee shrugged, looking at Juan. “IMIS is now picking up on nonverbal cues — we’ve already established that. We’re not exactly sure on how that’s happening. But the more obvious problem is that while IMIS is picking up on those nonverbal cues, it has no way to convey them.”
“That we can see,” corrected Juan.
Chris squinted. “I’m not sure I’m following.”
Lee thought for a moment. “Let’s say, for example, that a nonverbal cue IMIS picks up from Dulce is a shrug. It sees that from the video feed and matches it with the audio. But how does it convey that?”