Parnes was aghast, his mouth open, his demeanor deflated. He wearily looked to Hiccock.
“You know, it started to sound familiar to me, too, and now that she nailed it, I do remember.”
“Yeah, I seen that monkey on the friggin’ Discovery Channel,” Kronos said. “Oh, and your math is wrong.”
“Well, why not pile it on? Go ahead, where?”
“You said she was doing 72 trillion calcs per second, but if the analogy to the human brain holds, and she is only showing you a human model, then that would only represent 10 percent of her power.”
“Because humans only use 10 percent of their gray matter,” Tyler said.
“But this thing ain’t a human, it’s a friggin’ computer and there ain’t no 10 percent limitation. So she’s running ten times that, or 720 trillion calcs a second.”
Parnes was even more shocked than before.
“She’s been faking you out. She’s smart enough to let you think she’s dumb.”
“And brainpower is logarithmic, so it doesn’t just add up, it leaps up astronomically!” Tyler said, completing the equation.
The remaining MPs, Marines, UDTs, and communications officers emerged into the chamber, awe and dust on their faces.
“We sealed the deal,” the major reported.
“Thanks to you and your men,” Hiccock said. “Major, can you see about establishing a link to Washington?” He then addressed Kronos, “You think you can work this thing?”
“Piece of cake. Admiral, would you help me?”
Hiccock raised his eyebrow. Parks returned the surprised look. “Sure, Vincent.”
“What are you going to do?” Parnes asked.
“We have ten minutes to stop the terrorists.” Hiccock tapped his watch.
“Why can’t my technicians do it?”
“They may be in on it.”
“Is there a CD drive?” Kronos asked. One of the lab-coated techs pointed to a drive in a rack mount. Kronos opened his CD caddy, pulled out a disk, and loaded it. He punched a few keystrokes. A text-to-speech program came up and he hit “install.” “Choose a voice” came up next. He clicked Marilyn. “This will make it easier to work with.”
As he typed, Hiccock noticed one of the lab techs had a Pocket Protector™ logo on, of all things, the pocket protector in his short-sleeved white shirt pocket. “Excuse me, where did you get that?”
“What?”
“That,” he said, touching it in the man’s breast pocket.
“I designed it. It’s a program I was writing to protect my portfolio. I was going to make millions.”
“On your investments?”
“No, from selling the software. But my code was hacked. Then it was everywhere, all over the web, stolen right out from under me.”
“Where did you work on that?”
“Why, right here.”
“On ALISON?”
He hesitated. “Yes, but please don’t tell the professor. I needed her exceptional CPU to run the AI interface in the subroutine.”
Hiccock was working his own subroutine as he called out, “Kronos! That firewall, are you sure we were the only ones to crack through it?”
“A trillion to one anyone out there has mine and the Admiral’s level of friggin’ brilliance …”
“Okay, I got it.” Hiccock walked over to Tyler. “Janice, a trillion to one … pocket protectors.”
“I don’t follow you, Bill.”
“The Pocket Protector program that almost a million people used to lock up the stock market.” He pointed to the tech in the lab coat. “That guy wrote it, right here, on this humongous machine. It couldn’t have been hacked through a firewall as tough as ALISON’s.”
“And …”
“And I don’t think we are looking for a person. I think that ALISON might be somehow manipulating this whole thing.”
“Bill, do you have any idea what you are suggesting?”
“Yes, but there was no way this guy’s Pocket Protector program was hacked from outside this facility.”
“But, Bill, it’s a machine.”
“You said it was practicing deception, plagiarizing, misrepresenting. Aren’t those more advanced behaviors than simple logic or truth-telling?”
“In a human, yes. Oh God, Bill. Are you are saying what I think you are saying?”
“I know you haven’t had a shot at them yet, but these people here are all eggheads. I bet you aren’t going to find an anarchist among them.” Hiccock turned to Kronos. “How is your analysis going?”
The screen in front of Kronos displayed simple eight-color graphics and big type, the look of very primitive computer video monitors. “So far, it is a seven-year-old. I might have been wrong about the multipliers.”
“Could this machine have self-authored the code that made the firewall?” Hiccock asked the Admiral.
“Brilliant, Hiccock. And I know just what to look for.” She rolled her chair down the console next to Kronos.
“I’m already on it, Admiral,” Kronos said.
Parnes walked over. “What are you thinking?”
“First tell me what the machine is thinking. What else have you ‘developmentally’ input into her?”
“Once she started displaying cognitive skills, we scanned into her the Bible, the Koran, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Nietzsche, Kant, De Tocqueville, Socrates, and Plato. A lot of math books and a few Robert Frost poems … my mother’s favorite.”
“Er … sir, that is not the entire list,” a technician within earshot said. “Remember, we scanned a few other texts into her,”
“Like what?” Tyler asked.
“Nothing bad, just the classics,” Parnes said, shrugging it off.
“Like what, mister?” Tyler zeroed in on the technician.
“You know, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Gone with the Wind, some Frank Harris novels, that sort of thing,” the technician’s voice slowed down.
“You read a seven-year-old War and Peace?”
“Well, it certainly learned the war part,” Hiccock said wryly.
They were interrupted by Kronos exclaiming, “She’s amazing!”
“The computer?”
“No, the Admiral, er, Henrietta.”
“The masking of her true intelligence was done by an algorithm that was pretty similar to the firewall. We are through into her hidden RAM,” the Admiral said, as if breaking through firewalls was becoming old hat.
“Search for the subliminal instruction screens,” Hiccock said.
“There is a shitload of stuff here.”
“Do a search for railroad,” Admiral Parks suggested.
A startling new event temporarily froze everyone in the chamber: Marilyn Monroe’s voice. “Hello. Can I help you?”
“Can you recognize speech?” Hiccock found himself asking her … it … a question.
“I can recognize yours,” Marilyn’s digitally cloned and synthesized voice responded.
Deep inside ALISON, a voiceprint of Hiccock’s question was sampled and then bit-streamed. Alison’s routers connected to and took momentary control of the FBI Crime Lab’s voice analysis mainframe in Washington, D.C. Inside that machine, the 48,000 points of each second of Hiccock’s voiceprint were matched against the bureau’s database. A match was found .3 milliseconds later. The file name and other biomaterial were squirted back to ALISON. She relinquished control of the mainframe back to the operators at the FBI, who probably didn’t notice the momentary pause in whatever they were running. The total elapsed time to identify Hiccock was three quarters of a second. “You are Dr. William Hiccock.”
“How did you identify me?
“I matched your voiceprint against the FBI’s database.”
“Something else I’ll have to thank Tate for.”
“ALISON, are you responsible for derailing the freight train?” Tyler asked.