“It’s worse.” Dar spoke up at least. “Someone trying to make their mark made some changes, and it went very south.”
“That so?” Bridges mused. “So it was stupid rather than treason?”
“Far as we know, yes.” Kerry said, in a quiet voice.
He got up. “Go on and give your talk, Roberts. I’ll be back shortly. Everyone take notes.” He waved a hand at the room. “There’ll be a test later on.”
He motioned the two aides, who had stayed standing near the door out ahead of him like he was shooing chickens and followed them out, slamming the door behind him.
Kerry let out an audible sigh.
“Who in the hell are you people?” Paul finally asked, with a touch of awe in his voice. “Do you know who that guy is? He could have you sent to Mars.”
Dar switched the screen to her output. “Who are we.” She said. “Well, I’m Thor, God of the Internet and this is She Ra. So I guess Mars doesn’t scare us much.” She got her remote out and moved to one side. “And on that note, let’s get this started. “
Kerry was busy typing a message into her Handspring, shaking her head repeatedly.
**
“That’s how the algorithm works.” Dar clicked to a new screen. “What we did was tried to write the front end to the enterprise service bus so that it was a more natural way for people to interact with the data.”
“What does that mean?” One of the women in the back spoke up. “Do they talk to it?”
Dar brought up the very basic, simple input screen. “I can write a plug in that’ll take voice commands. But right now it’s just keyboard.” She pointed at the woman. “C’mon up here and ask it something.”
The woman hopped right up and came forward. She put her hands on the keyboard as Dar took a step back. “Ask it.. what do I ask it?” She looked up at Dar.
“If you were an analyst, and your job was to find something wrong, what would you ask?” Dar had one hand on the back of Kerry’s chair. “Don’t look at me. I don’t know what to ask. I’m a systems architect.”
The woman thought for a moment, then started typing. “Okay. Tell me about anyone who wants to shoot the President.”
She hit enter, and straightened, looking first at Dar, then at the screen.
A spinning star took over the middle of it, and twinkled for about thirty seconds. Then typing started to fill the screen, plain white on black, san serif font.
Email ; Parsed header returns ‘He makes me so mad I want to kill him.” Content contains keywords: hate, revenge, under the radar, politician, POTUS. Return extended header?
The people in the room stared at it “Is that real?” Paul asked.
“It’s real in the sense that, I created a database that had random records in it, with different source types.” Dar said. “Its not real in the sense that the thing you’re looking at is a real threat to the President.”
“But.. that’s the kind of thing it would come back with?” The woman asked. “Really?”
“Really.” Dar smiled a little at the reaction. “The information I used to make this test database is a dump from the actual Internet, scrubbed to remove personal information and then mixed to provide you with some hits to questions.”
“So it wouldn’t really say whose email that was?”
“It would come back with a fictitious name.” Dar confirmed. “But since it’s a fictitious email, that would be appropriate. It could have originally been an email from someone who was pissed of at their SO, and the keywords could be from six different other emails.”
The woman stepped back to the keyboard. “Tell me about anything threatening Yankee’s Stadium.” She hit enter, and they all looked at the screen expectantly.
The machine chewed over that for a bit, then started spewing out listings.
1.) Invoice: Industriaclass="underline" Phosphorous, Deliver to Yankee Stadium, volume plus 1,000 lbs.
2.) Legaclass="underline" Resident: Lawsuit filed against Yankee Stadium over parking fees.
3.) Emaiclass="underline" Parsed. Text includes ‘going to make a killing at Yankee Stadium’
Enter item to retrieve additional data.
There was a moment of silence. Then they all exhaled at once. “Holy shit.” The oldest man, who had been standing in the back of the room spoke up. “So that thing can just read all that stuff on the Internet and it’ll know all this?”
Dar seemed pleased. “It will.” She said. “This is, of course, a test database. It’s only half a terabyte in size, and this demo program is a very simple model. The real system will be a lot bigger, a lot more powerful, distributed, and it’ll probably take longer to return a response because it will be looking at a hell of a lot more raw data.”
She regarded the screen. “But that’s the idea. It also will employ a flexible heuristic framework that will learn over time to know what to look for - so – eventually it will start suggesting things rather than wait to be asked.”
Dead silence. “W.. what?” Paul stuttered. “You mean.. it has artificial intelligence?”
Dar nodded. “It continually parses data, so it will start looking for connections.” She said, her voice getting a touch more animated. “So if it sees, for instance, a pattern of telephone calls between places that also show deliveries of gunpowder, that’s something it will bring up as part of a generated briefing. Could mean something, might not mean anything, but the operators will have the choice to follow up or not.”
“Humans have to make the real connections.” Kerry spoke up after being silent for a very long time. “But they can’t look at all this data – it’s like a firehose. But a computer can, and it just tries to find patterns and that’s what it returns to us.”
“Oh my god.” The woman sat down. “I thought this was just an intelligence budget scam. You actually made this.”
“In two weeks.” Paul said. “You really are Thor God of the Internet.”
“Have at it.” Dar sat down next to Kerry and waved them towards the laptop. “But remember, it’s just a demo system. I just wanted to give you all an idea of where we were going with it.”
She slid backwards out of the way and watched in contentment as they all gathered around her machine and started peppering it with questions, the woman finally ending up being the typist.
“Rock star.” Kerry smiled.
“Meh.” Dar shrugged. “It’s just a test system with a lot of spaghetti code and duct tape in there. They ask it the wrong thing it’ll probably croak.”
“Dar, stuff a sock in it. I know how long you worked on that. “ Kerry poked her in the ribs. “You’re a rock star.”
Her partner shrugged modestly, but smiled.
The door opened and Bridges came back in, pausing as he saw the crowd at the head of the table.
“Sir!” Paul turned and spotted him. “You should come see this! It’s boss!”
“Whoop de fucking hoo.” Bridges said. “You and you, come with me.” He pointed at Dar and Kerry. “The rest of you stay in nerdgasm.” He turned and headed back out, waving them after him. “Let’s go people.”
“Why do I suddenly wish I was an actual rock star?” Dar sighed as she and Kerry followed him out and the door shut behind them. “And all I had to worry about was tuning my guitar?”
“What?” Bridges glanced at her. “Never mind. You two are going to help me solve this problem here and then we can go back to talking about whatever the hell it is that has those goops so excited.”
“This doesn’t sound good.” Kerry muttered.
“No.” Dar agreed.
Bridges led them through two hallways, and up a staircase, then through a padded door and down another hallway, stiff arming everything out of his way until he got to pair of double doors that he grabbed the knobs to and shoved them open.