"Are all the doors controlled by the computer?"
"In the public buildings, yes," Griffith replied. "Not in people's homes, of course."
His tone was annoyingly patronizing, as if the answer was so obvious that her question barely merited a response.
That irritated Laura. "Look, this may all be old hat to you, but in the real world doors don't decide whether or not to open! You have to turn something called a 'knob,' okay?" She made certain she got an apologetic nod of acknowledgment before continuing. "So," she said in a pleasant voice, putting that little episode behind her, "why does the computer open and close doors in public buildings, but not in people's homes?"
Griffith opened his mouth to speak, but then hesitated — shooting her a look out of the corner of his eyes and clearly rethinking his response.
"Because," he said in a measured tone, "there is a question of privacy, you see. Gray's a stickler for privacy — it's one of his pet peeves. In order for the computer to open the door for you, it's got to know who you are and what you're doing. To know those things, it maintains a real-time model of the world — who and what everybody and everything is, and what it is that they're doing right at this very moment. It builds that model by processing the data it receives from its sensors. Visual, auditory, thermal, motion — it melds all those senses together to form a picture of the world and everything in it. If we were to allow it to extend that world into people's homes — into their bedrooms and bathrooms and… Well, you get the picture," Griffith snorted, "but the computer doesn't!" He elbowed Laura, winking and laughing. "Get it." Laura nodded. "Do you get it? It was a joke." She nodded again. "It was a pun. Do you get it?"
"Yes!"
Griffith winced and made a face like he'd again stumbled innocently into Laura's hair-trigger temper.
"Sorry," Laura said, and they walked on in silence. Laura looked around the empty lawns — growing increasingly uncomfortable. "So there are cameras constantly watching you when you're in public?" she asked.
"And infrared, thermal, low-light, microphones, ground motion detectors, pressure sensors, feedback from things like light switches—"
"I understand," Laura interrupted.
"That's the only way for the computer to build a world model. It has to use every sensor available to get a feel for the place. If its senses are significantly impeded — if you hide behind a bush or something to scratch yourself, which is sort of the accepted method — then as far as the computer's concerned, it didn't happen. It's outside the computer model. If you live on this island, you learn to figure out where the gaps are. It's no big deal, really."
"And you go to all that trouble just for security? Is Gray that much of a control freak?"
"Oh, no, no, no! It's not just security. The robots use that same world model, for example, to avoid running into things. Those Model Three cars whip down the roads so fast because they can see what's up ahead of them. They know if there's a Model Six crossing the road around the next bend. And a Six would know when to cross because they tap into that same world model and look both ways. That's the beauty of building and maintaining a complete world model. There are so many different uses for it."
Laura couldn't help feeling ill at ease now that she knew they were being watched — constantly. Every movement recorded. She felt a stifling presence, an unblinking eye staring her way.
The unblinking eye of a disturbed presence, she remembered.
"So, Dr. Griffith, what do you think is wrong with the computer?"
Griffith shrugged yet again. "We think maybe it's another virus. The computer is massively interconnected not only internally, but all over the world through the Web. We've had to put up with hackers, corporate espionage, and a whole lot of infections. One of 'em almost took the system down last year, as a matter of fact."
"You mean an infection with an ordinary computer virus almost crashed that entire computer?" Laura asked.
Griffith shook his head. "It was worse than an infection, it was a plague — the Hong Kong 1085. One of our field offices gave Georgi's operators a wrong telephone number, and the computer dialed up a bulletin board in Hong Kong instead of an onboard digital processor we'd leased. The computer wrote a program — a 'gopher'—and zapped it onto the bulletin board. The gopher reproduced itself about a million times and tore through the database in a couple of seconds. It sifted through everything — games, homemade porno stories, classified ads — and reported back using a zippered data stream before self-destructing. That's how the virus slipped through. When the report came back compressed, it went right through the firewall erected by the phase one to screen for viruses. Over the next couple of days, the computer got real sick. We almost had to shut it down to kill the damn bug."
Laura had heard, of course, of computer viruses. They were now quite common news items. But she'd never heard of a plague.
"So what does it mean for the computer to get sick?" she asked.
"Just like for you or me, I suppose. My bet is that's one of the things you're here to find out." Griffith cinched his belt up and jutted his jaw out. "But you never kno-ow with the big cheese." He drew the last words out in what sounded like an impersonation, but it was too poorly rendered to be recognizable.
Laura took a wild guess that Griffith had attempted to be witty, and she smiled up at him politely. "Is that what everybody calls him? 'The big cheese'?"
"That bunch?" Griffith said in a disparaging tone, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder at the computer center. "They're too uptight, man. They need to take it do-o- a [unclear]."
Laura's smile was genuine this time. Griffith smiled back at her, exuding total confidence in who he was. Now, when she looked at Griffith, she didn't see the bushy curls sticking out from the sides but not the top of his head. The crooked teeth and thick glasses and sideburns grown to enormous proportions were gone. Whoever he was — in his head — was different from what appeared on the surface.
They walked along through the quiet night, but her mind remained focused on the plague. "Dr. Griffith…?" she began.
"Phil," he interjected.
"Phil," she repeated, "and please call me Laura."
"Me Phil," Griffith said in a Caveman voice, touching his chest, "you Laura." He laughed and shook his head at the hilarity of his antics.
Laura's smile quickly grew stale, and she cleared her throat "So, Phil, why did the computer even look through that bulletin board in Hong Kong? Surely it realized it had the wrong number Why didn't it just hang up?"
"Curiosity killed the cat. You see, with the exception of the little 'seed' program Mr. Gray installed to get the thing going, the computer's almost entirely self-taught. And there's only one way to motivate self-study, and that's to program it to be curious, which Margaret did with a vengeance."
"You sure seem to minimize Mr. Gray's part in the effort," Laura said — fishing.
"Oh! If I did that, please excuse me. Never does a career much good to talk down the boss. It's just that Mr. Gray's real genius is in robotics. The artificial intelligence side of it isn't really his bag."
Gray, Laura thought, a genius at robotics? She'd been convinced it was Gray's work on neural networks, and not in mechanical engineering, that had achieved the breakthroughs evident on his island.
"Man," Griffith continued, "I remember how the computer used to talk your ears off, so to speak. But only on the shell. Most of my time is spent at lower-level languages, but I would occasionally get stumped and want to ask some questions. On the shell, you see, you can type things in plain English like, 'If the hydraulic drive connects to a linkage with four degrees of freedom but only three boundary constraints, can the control system generate a goal to prevent the mechanism from being underconstrained—"