Skaka unlocked a door and led Allan onto a catwalk overlooking the second enclosure. Identical to the first, it also contained eight painted robots, this group all motionless.
“Watch,” Skaka said.
She pressed a button. A shower of gray-green chips fell from the ceiling, landing in holes, on railings, between walkways, under ramps. Immediately the robots sprang to life. They marched, clambered, searched. Allan’s watch tingled on his wrist; and his tie twitched. Even outside the enclosure, his electrical biofield registered the enormous amount of data surging through the air as the robots communicated with each other. Within minutes all the chips had been gathered into a pile and shoved through a slit in the enclosure. They fell in a shower onto the corridor floor.
“Jesus Turing Christ,” Allen said, inadequately. “Are you telling me this batch of robots learned to do that by themselves? That they had no additional programming over the first biobots?”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” Skaka said, in triumph. “Six minutes, forty-nine seconds. They keep beating their own record as they get more and more efficient at the task. This batch has been learning for five weeks, two days.”
“Let me see it again.”
Skaka pressed the button to release more chips, which fell onto different places than before. The eight robots sprang into action. Allan noted that instead of each robot searching a discrete area of the enclosure, each seemed to go for a chip according to complex factors of proximity, relative altitude, difficulty of retrieval, and even, it seemed to him, differences in agility that must have stemmed from the different fetal neurons in their processors. More than once, he saw a robot start toward a chip, then veer off to go for a different one, while another robot seized the first chip.
“That’s right,” Skaka said, eyeing Allan. “They’ve learned to increase efficiency by sharing knowledge. And they make cooperative decisions based, according to the mathematical analyses we’ve done, on a very detailed knowledge of their differences in capability. And they evolved all those techniques by themselves.”
Allan watched Hot Bytes Salsa race on its spindly legs to the slit in the wall and shove the chips through.
“Six minutes, thirty-four seconds,” Skaka said. “Allan, I’m sure somebody like you can see the breakthrough this represents in autonomous computer learning. It makes artificial intelligence—with everything that implies in terms of corporate or military systems—nearly within our grasp. Now, doesn’t that seem a potentially profitable investment for your venture capital firm?”
Allan watched the plastic chips shower over Skaka’s feet. To the victor belong the spoils.
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s talk.”
After that, Figgy Pudding and Morrison Telecommunications were both anticlimactic. Figgy might be worth a small investment, just to establish a beachhead, but nothing major. Morrison Telecommunications was stodgy. Not anywhere near the front, not even really in the war zone. Same old, same old.
Allan flew to D.C. and spent the night at the newly renovated Watergate. Jon had booked him into two skirmishes tomorrow with labs doing government work, and Patti had added two briefing sessions with firms already using Haller Ventures money. While he was at dinner, he studied the info on each that she sent him. By dessert, the figures had changed once and the meetings for tomorrow changed twice.
Upstairs, Allan felt restless. There was nothing good on TV, not even with 240 channels. He couldn’t seem to concentrate on his favorite Net game, Battle Chess. Every time he moved a piece, the computer countered him with blinding speed. When he lost his lieutenant to the computer’s tank, which could move any number of squares through all three dimensions, Allan surrendered. It was a relief when Cathy called.
“Allan? How’d it go today?”
He told her about Novation—there was nothing he kept from Cathy. She was impressed, which cheered him a little. But then she said, “Listen, love, I’m going to have to reschedule our Wednesday rendezvous. I have the chance to go to Hong Kong after all.”
“On the Burdette case? Great!” he forced himself to say. Cathy had worked for this for a long time.
“I’m thrilled, of course. Lane is reworking my schedule. We’ll send it as soon as the snafus are out. Did you call Charlie?”
“Yeah. He’s still just sitting a lot. Honey, do you think we should get him, well, help?”
Cathy’s voice changed. “You know, I’ve been thinking that myself. Not that there’s anything really wrong with him, but just as a precaution…”
“I’ll have Jon research psychologists,” Charlie said heavily. “Listen, do you think we could reschedule our rendezvous to—”
“Oops, gotta go, there’s Lane with another update on the Burdette case. God, me and international policy making! I can hardly believe it. Love you.” The Cathy icon vanished.
“Love you, too,” Allan said to the blank meshNet.
But there was no reason to wallow in gloom. He would call Suzette; his daughter was always a delight. Suzette, however, was not taking calls. Neither was Allan’s brother in Florida. His mother, her system informed him, was sailing in the Aegean and would return his call when she returned, unless it was an emergency. It was not an emergency. The icons on his PID all vibrated and shimmered, even Charlie’s, thank heavens.
Allan went to bed.
The next day, he felt fine. Meetings, the schedule, the flow of data and money and possibility. God, he loved it. A prosthetic device, almost invisible, to enhance human hearing through 30,000 cps. A significant gain in surveillance-satellite image resolution. Another of the endless small advances in nanotech, rearranging atoms in what would someday be the genie-in-the-bottle of the telecommunications and every other industry.
At 6:18, while he was wrapping up the nanotech briefing, Skaka Gupta called. “Allan, I’m sorry to interrupt your day, but could you fly back here tonight? There’s something you should see.”
Her voice sang with excitement. Allan felt it leap over the netlink, electrifying his own nerves. And it would avoid another empty evening in a hotel room. But he said with cool professionalism, “My schedule is rather full, Skaka. Are you sure the flying back to Boston will be worth my time?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, and at the tone in her voice, he called Jon to rearrange the schedule.
The robots in Prime-Eight One still struggled to find and retrieve chips. Chef-Boy-R&D lay on its cylindrical side like an overturned beetle, spindly legs waving desperately to right itself. Skaka, practically running toward Prime-Eight Two, didn’t even glance through the plastic fence.
“Look,” she said, outside the second enclosure. “Watch.”
But there was nothing to see. The eight robots stood motionless around the uneven terrain. A minute passed, then another. Allan started to feel impatient. After all, his time was valuable. He could be checking in with Jon, receiving information updates, finding help for Charlie, even playing Battle Chess—
All of a sudden, the robots began to move. They lumbered to roughly equidistant positions within the enclosure. A brief pause, and then the chips rained down from the ceiling. Immediately the robots swung into action. Within minutes, the chips had all been gathered. Unsweetened Intelsauce deposited them through the slit.
“Six minutes, fourteen seconds,” Skaka breathed. “The physical limitations will eventually limit any more gains in efficiency. But that’s not the point anymore. Allan, they’ve learned to anticipate when chips will fall, before they do. They anticipate tasks that haven’t yet been signaled!”
“On a regular schedule, you mean. The chips fall, say, every two hours—”
“No! That’s what’s so amazing! The chips don’t fall at completely random times, there’s a schedule, the same one we’ve used since the beginning, although I admit we interrupted it yesterday for your visit. The usual schedule has built-in variations around human factors like work shifts, staff meeting, lunch breaks. The bots have apparently learned it over time and are now anticipating with 100% accuracy when chips will be released. They’re also anticipating the most probable places for the rolling and ricocheting chips to come to rest, given that the terrain changes daily but the chip-release points are fixed in the ceiling. Ever since last night, they’ve moved into max-effish gathering positions a few minutes before the chips fall!”