“A dog whistle?”
Juan grinned. “It’s my little sister’s, but it should work.”
“We need to verify this first before we do any tests with Dulce.” Lee raised the lid on his laptop and opened another audio program. It looked different, but DeeAnn recognized the familiar meter running from left to right. After waiting for the program to initialize, Lee spoke into the small microphone located just above his laptop keyboard. “Testing, testing.”
A yellow line danced up and down as it moved across the screen, showing the waves picked up through the microphone. “Okay, here’s my voice. You can see the ranges here, including inflection and volume. We can also see the wider frequency range here, which is between one thousand and five thousand hertz. Give or take. This is the range where human speech is centered.” Lee backed up his chair. “Ready, Juan?”
“Yep.”
Lee restarted the recording again and moved out of the way to allow Juan to lean in closer. He blew through the dog whistle, making a quiet hissing sound. This time, the sound waves on the graph jumped dramatically. The peaks and valleys were sharper and traveled well beyond the frequency ranges that Lee had pointed out. Both the top and bottom areas outside the human ranges displayed colors of yellow, orange, and red, showing the progression away from the narrower human range.
“Wow. Big difference.”
“And this is what you think IMIS is picking up?”
“Maybe,” Lee shrugged. “But even if we find it’s picking up a fraction of the extra frequencies, it could be significant.”
“So, now what?”
“Now we need to wait for the compiling to finish. This was just a simple test through my laptop. When the code is done, we’ll need to upgrade the monitoring software on IMIS. Then we give it a whirl.”
DeeAnn smiled excitedly. She grabbed the new vest and slung it over her shoulder. “I’ll go get breakfast.”
Breakfast was a four-pound box of celery, kale, and apples. Dulce had developed a real affinity for apples. DeeAnn suspected the higher sugar content made apples taste like a dessert to the young gorilla. In fact, she had become so excited, they were the first thing she searched for in the box of food. And this morning was no different.
Once DeeAnn was inside the habitat, the three-year-old gorilla came running across a small grassy hill at which point she stopped and hugged the top of DeeAnn’s legs.
Apples apples.
DeeAnn smiled, setting the box down with a thud and standing up. She watched as Dulce reached in with her lanky brown arms and brought out two apples, one in each hand. She smiled broadly at DeeAnn with a toothy grin.
“Dessert is last.”
Dulce stopped with a frown before placing them back into the box and picking up a stalk of celery.
The Puerto Rican mornings were gorgeous. With temperatures routinely in the high sixties and low seventies, the air felt cool and refreshing, offsetting the island’s high humidity. But the best part was the smell. Tropical islands had an unmistakable smell of dew in the morning, brought on by overnight moisture on the lush foliage. With the lightest of breezes, the combination made the mornings smell like dewy sweetness — it was a smell DeeAnn was going to miss.
Of course, sweetness had another presence in DeeAnn’s mornings which made Dulce’s name so fitting. She was the most loving, kind creature DeeAnn had ever known, and certainly that she had ever worked with. She had saved the gorilla at a young age from a horrible existence in Mexico, and they had been inseparable ever since.
Me love mommy.
DeeAnn grinned and playfully ruffled the fur on the back of her neck. “Mommy loves Dulce.”
She barely noticed anymore as the vest picked up her words, and in less than a second, sent the data to IMIS and back where the large speaker emanated a series of squeals and soft grunts for Dulce.
DeeAnn watched Dulce quickly devour her breakfast, yet when she reached the apples, she purposely slowed down as if savoring them. A sweet tooth seemed just as popular in gorillas as they were in humans. DeeAnn was dreading the day Dulce discovered chocolate.
She sat back and continued watching Dulce, then turned and looked up at one of the high-resolution cameras overhead, surrounding the habitat. She wondered if IMIS was revealing anything interesting to Lee and Juan upstairs.
As expected, Lee and Juan were monitoring all of DeeAnn’s translations with Dulce. But it took almost a full minute for IMIS to display the frequency data used during the translations. When the first feedback finally came across Lee’s screen, it did so in a flood of colors.
“Whoa!”
6
Alison Shaw burst into the computer lab and found them all huddled around Lee’s desk. “Okay, I’m here. What is it?”
DeeAnn, dressed in khaki shorts and a matching shirt, turned around. “Lee’s a genius, that’s what!”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
He motioned Alison over and pulled out his chair for her. She crossed the room and sat down, examining the screen.
“Is this audio?”
“It sure is.”
“What does it mean?”
Lee smiled at DeeAnn.
“It’s the problem they’ve been working on. Lee came to me last night with an idea that we were missing something.”
“It was a problem we couldn’t figure out,” he added. “No matter how much we dug into the code. Then it occurred to me that maybe there are more complexities going on that we still don’t know about.”
Alison turned back. “So, what is this?”
“It’s what IMIS is really hearing.”
“More sounds?”
“More frequencies. The colors represent the wider bands, much wider than we can hear.”
“What does that mean? It hears more words than we thought?”
“Maybe. But I suspect it may be more about tones or inflections.” He looked to DeeAnn.
“I’m sure it is. In a lot of languages it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. We should expect the same pattern with gorillas and other primates. We knew some of that was in the gesturing and expressions, but I certainly never expected the rest to be in sounds we couldn’t hear.”
Alison looked at her curiously. “So, primates can hear sounds that we can’t?”
“The designs of our auditory systems are very similar, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they work exactly the same. Some researchers have suggested that having more advanced brains may have caused us to devolve out of certain basic abilities. Like the range of our hearing.”
The room fell silent. It was a powerful thought. Devolution and evolution happening together. On a certain level, it made sense. Everything in life had a balance to it. Few things could be gained without something also being lost.
“Not to take away from the moment,” Lee said, “but there’s something even more interesting about this.”
“Like what?”
“Well, we think we know how IMIS is truly communicating with Dulce now. Which is big. But…” He looked at them with excitement. “This is not something we programmed IMIS to do — to listen to such a broad frequency range.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that no one told IMIS to do it.” Lee smiled, waiting for them to pick up on his suggestion. Finally, he said it. “IMIS made the decision.”
At that moment, they all could have heard a pin drop.
“Whoaaa,” Juan whispered.
DeeAnn looked at Lee with wide eyes and tilted her head. “Are you saying that IMIS is thinking?”
He grinned. “Thinking, no. At least not as we understand it. But the system does employ several algorithms that give it a certain capacity for artificial intelligence. It’s not thinking… but it is getting smarter at solving problems.”