“I don’t think I can be of any more help to you,” Lash continued. “Early on, I thought all I needed was access to your files. I thought I’d find some magic answer in your evaluations of the Thorpes. And after the death of the Wilners, I grew certain it was homicide, not suicide. I’d hunted serial killers before, I was sure I could hunt this one as well. But I’ve come up blank. The profile I’ve drawn up is self-contradictory. Useless. With your help, we’ve now examined all the likely suspects: Eden rejects or employees, the people who could have known both couples. There’s no place else to go. At least, no place I can help with.”
He sighed. “There’s something else. Something I’m not proud to talk about. I’m too close to this case. It was the same in the Bureau, toward the end. I grew too absorbed. And it’s happening again. It’s intruding on my personal life, I brood about it day and night. And look at the result.”
“What result is that?”
“Handerling. I was tired, overeager. And I had a lapse of judgment.”
“If you’re blaming yourself for Handerling’s interrogation, you shouldn’t. The man isn’t a murderer—our tests confirm that. But he abused his position terribly, committed grave offenses. Information can be a dangerous thing in the wrong hands, Christopher. And we’re grateful for your help exposing him.”
“I did very little, Dr. Silver.”
“Didn’t I ask you to call me Richard? You’re selling yourself short.”
Lash shook his head. “I’d suggest you go to the police, but I’m not sure we could convince them a crime’s been committed.” He stood up. “But if this is a serial killer, he’s likely to strike again very soon. Perhaps as soon as today. And I don’t want that to happen on my watch. I don’t want to sit here, looking on helplessly. Waiting.”
Silver watched him rise. And then, unexpectedly, a smile surfaced on the careworn face. “We’re not exactly helpless,” he said. “As you probably know, Mauchly and Tara have security teams running hands-off surveillance on the other supercouples.”
“That might not stop a determined killer.”
“Which is exactly why I’m taking additional steps myself.”
“What do you mean?”
Silver rose himself. “Come with me.”
He led the way to a small door Lash had not noticed before, built cleverly into the wall of bookcases. It opened noiselessly, revealing a narrow staircase, covered in the same rich carpeting. “After you,” Silver said.
Lash climbed at least three dozen steps, emerging at the end of a hallway. After the floor below, almost dizzying in its openness, the long, narrow corridor ahead of him felt cramped. There was no sense of being atop a skyscraper: they could just as easily have been far below the earth. And yet it was decorated just as tastefully: the walls and ceiling were of dark polished wood, and decorative wall sconces of copper and abalone threw off muted light.
Silver motioned him forward. As they walked, Lash looked curiously at the rooms to the left and right. He noticed a large personal gym, complete with exercise flume, weight machines, and treadmill; a spartan dining room. The hallway ended in a black door, a scanner set beside it. Silver put his wrist beneath the scanner, and for the first time Lash noticed that he, too, wore a security bracelet. The door sprang open.
The room beyond was almost as dimly lit as the corridor. Except here, the light came solely from tiny winking lights and dozens of vacuum-fluorescent displays. From all sides came a constant low rush of air: the sound of innumerable fans, breathing in unison. Rack-mounted equipment of all kinds—routers, RAID hard disc arrays, video renderers, countless other exotica unknown to Lash—covered the nearest walls. Opposite them, half a dozen terminals and their keyboards were lined up on a long wooden desk, crowded together. A lone chair sat before them. The only other piece of furniture was in a far corner: a narrow and very curious-looking couch, contoured almost in the fashion of a dentist’s chair, sat behind a screen of Plexiglas. Several leads snaked away from the chair to a nearby rack of diagnostic equipment. A lavalier-style microphone was pinned to the chair by a plastic clip.
“Please excuse the lack of seats,” Silver said. “Nobody but me ever comes here.”
“What is all this?” Lash said, looking around.
“Liza.”
Lash looked at Silver quickly. “But I saw Liza the other day. The small terminal you showed me.”
“That’s Liza, too. Liza’s everywhere in this penthouse. For some things I use that terminal you saw. This is for more complicated matters. When I need to access her directly.”
Lash remembered what Tara Stapleton had said over lunch in the cafeteria: We never get near the core routines or intelligence. Only Silver has access. Everybody else uses the corporate computer grid. He looked around at the electronics surrounding them on all sides. “Why don’t you tell me a little more about Liza?”
“What would you like to know?”
“You could start with the name.”
“Of course.” Silver paused. “By the way, speaking of names, I finally remembered where I saw yours.”
Lash raised his eyebrows.
“It was in the Times a couple years back. Weren’t you an intended victim in that string of—”
“That’s right.” Lash realized immediately he’d interrupted too quickly. “Remarkable memory.”
There was a brief silence.
“Anyway, about Liza’s name. It’s a nod to ‘Eliza,’ a famous piece of software from the early sixties. Eliza simulated a dialogue between a person and the computer, in which the program seized on words typed in by the person running it. ‘How are you feeling?’ the program would start out asking. ‘I feel lousy,’ you might type in. ‘Why do you think you feel lousy?’ the program would respond. ‘Because my father is ill,’ you’d type. ‘Why do you say that about your father?’ comes the reply. It was very primitive, and it often gave ludicrous responses, but it showed me what I needed to do.”
“And what was that?”
“To accomplish what Eliza only pretended to do. To create a program—‘program’ isn’t really the right word—a data construct that could interact flawlessly with a human being. That could, at some level, think.”
“That’s all?” Lash said.
It was meant as a joke, but Silver’s response was serious. “It’s still a work in progress. I’ll probably devote the rest of my life to perfecting it. But once the intelligence models were fully functional within a computational hyperspace—”
“A what?”
Silver smiled shyly. “Sorry. In the early days of AI, everybody thought it was just a matter of time until the machines would be able to think for themselves. But it turned out the littlest things were the hardest to implement. How can you program a computer to understand how somebody is feeling? So in graduate school I proposed a two-fold solution. Give a computer access to a huge amount of information—a knowledge base—along with the tools to search that knowledge base intelligently. Second, model as real a personality as possible within silicon and binary code, because human curiosity would be necessary to make use of all that information. I felt if I could synthesize these two elements, I’d create a computer that could teach itself to learn. And if it could learn, it could learn to respond like a human. Not to feel, of course. But it would understand what feeling was.”
Silver spoke quietly, but his voice carried the conviction of a preacher at a camp meeting.
“I guess, since we’re standing here atop your private skyscraper, you succeeded,” Lash replied.
Silver smiled again. “For years I was stymied. It seemed I could take machine learning only so far and no farther. It turned out I was just too impatient. The program was learning, only very slowly in the beginning. And I needed more horsepower than the old mainframes I could afford in those days. Suddenly, computers got cheaper. And then came the ARPAnet. That’s when her learning really accelerated.” He shook his head. “I’ll never forget watching as she made her first forays
over the ’Net, searching—without any help from me—for answers to a problem set. I think she was as proud as I was.”
“Proud,” Lash repeated. “Do you mean to say that it’s conscious? Self-aware?”
“She’s definitely self-aware. Whether she’s conscious or not gets into a philosophical area I’m not prepared to address.”
“But she is self-aware. So what, exactly, is she aware of? She knows she’s a computer, that she’s different. Right?”
Silver shook his head. “I never added any module of code to that effect.”
“What?” Lash said in surprise.
“Why should she think she’s any different than us?”
“I just assumed—”
“Does a child, no matter how precocious, ever doubt the reality of its existence? Do you?”
Lash shook his head. “But we’re talking about software and hardware here. That sounds like a false syllogism to me.”
“There’s no such thing in AI. Who’s to say when programming stops and consciousness begins? A famous scientist once referred to humans as ‘meat machines.’ Are we the better for it? Besides, there’s no test you can take to prove you’re not a program, wandering around in cyberspace. What’s your proof?”
Silver had been speaking with a passion Lash hadn’t seen before. Suddenly he stopped. “Sorry,” he said, laughing shyly. “I guess I think about these things a lot more than I talk about them. Anyway, back to Liza’s architecture. She employs a very advanced form of a neural network—a computer architecture based on how the human brain works. Regular computers are constrained to two dimensions. But a neural net is arranged in three: rings inside rings inside rings. So you can move data in an almost infinite number of directions, not just along a single circuit.” Silver paused. “It’s a lot more complicated than that, of course. To ramp up her problem-solving capability, I employed swarm intelligence. Large functions are broken up into tiny, discrete data agents. That’s what allows her to solve such profound challenges, so quickly.”
“Does she know we’re here?”
Silver nodded toward a video monitor set high in one wall. “Yes. But her processing isn’t currently focused on us.”
“Earlier, you said you needed to access Liza directly for complicated work. Such as?”
“A variety of things. She runs scenarios, for example, that I monitor.”
“What kinds of scenarios?”
“All kinds. Problem-solving. Role-playing. Survival games. Things that stimulate creative thinking.” Silver hesitated. “I also use direct access for more difficult, personal tasks like software updates. But it would probably be easier just to show you.”
He walked across the room, slid open the Plexiglas panel, and took a seat in the sculpted chair. Lash watched as he fixed electrodes to his temples. A small keypad and stylus were set into one arm of the chair; a hat switch was mounted on the other. Reaching overhead, Silver pulled down a flat panel monitor, fixed to a telescoping arm. His left hand began moving over the keypad.
“What are you doing?” Lash asked.
“Getting her attention.” Silver’s hand fell away from the keypad and fixed the lavalier mike to his shirt collar.
Just then, Lash heard a voice.
“Richard,” it said.
It was a woman’s voice, low and without accent, and it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It was as if the room itself was speaking.
“Liza,” Silver replied. “What is your current state?”
“Ninety-eight point seven two seven percent operational. Current processes are at eighty-one point four percent of multithreaded capacity. Thank you for asking.”
The voice was calm, almost serene, with the faintest trace of digital artifacting. Lash had a strange sense of déjà vu, as if he’d heard the voice before, somewhere. Perhaps in dreams.
“Who is with you?” the voice asked. Lash noticed that the question was articulated properly, with a faint emphasis on the preposition. He thought he even detected an undercurrent of curiosity. He glanced a little uneasily up at the video camera.
“This is Christopher Lash.”
“Christopher,” the voice repeated, as if tasting the name.
“Liza, I have a special process I would like you to run.” Lash noticed that when Silver addressed the computer, he spoke slowly and with careful enunciation, without contractions of any kind.
“Very well, Richard.”
“Do you remember the data interrogatory I asked you to run forty-eight hours ago?”
“If you mean the statistical deviance interrogatory, my dataset has not been corrupted.”
Silver covered the mike and turned to Lash. “She misinterpreted ‘do you remember.’ Even now, I sometimes forget how literal-minded she is.”
He turned back. “I need you to run a similar interrogatory against external agents. The arguments are the same: data crossover with the four subjects.”
“Subject Schwartz, Subject Thorpe, Subject Torvald, Subject Wilner.”
“That is correct.”
“What is the scope of the interrogatory?”
“United States citizens, ages fifteen to seventy, with access to both target locations on the stated dates.”
“The data-gathering parameters?”
“All available sources.”
“And the priority of this process?”
“Highest priority, except for criticals. It is vital we find the solution.”
“Very well, Richard.”
“Can you give me an estimated processing window?”
“To within eleven-percent accuracy. Seventy-four hours, fifty-three minutes, nine seconds. Approximately eight hundred trillion five hundred billion machine cycles.”
“Thank you, Liza.”
“Is there anything else?”
“No.”
“I will begin the expanded interrogatory now. Thank you for speaking with me, Richard.”
As Silver removed the microphone and reached again for the keypad, the disembodied voice spoke again. “It was nice meeting you, Christopher Lash.”
“A pleasure,” Lash murmured. Hearing this voice speak to him, watching the interaction between Silver and his computer, was both fascinating and a little unsettling.
Silver plucked the electrodes from his temples, put them aside, and got out of the chair. “You said you’d go to the police if you thought it would help. I’ve just done something better. I’ve instructed Liza to search the entire country for a possible suspect match.”
“The entire country? Is that possible?”
“For Eden, it’s possible.” Silver swayed, recovered. “Sorry. Sessions with Liza, even brief ones, can be a little draining.”
“How so?”
Silver smiled. “In movies people talk to computers, and they talk glibly back. Maybe it will be that way in another decade. Right now, it’s hard work. As much a mental exercise as a verbal one.”
“Those electroencephalogram sensors you wore?”
“Think of biofeedback. The frequency and amplitude of beta or theta waves can speak a lot more distinctly than words. Early on, when I was having troubles with her language comprehension, I used the EEG as a shortcut. It required a great deal of concentration, but there was no confusion over dual meanings, homophones, nuances of intent. Now, it’s too deeply buried in her legacy code to change easily.”
“So only you can communicate with her directly?”
“It’s theoretically possible for others to do so, too, with the proper concentration and training. There’s just been no need.”
“Perhaps not,” Lash said. “If I’d built something this marvelous, I’d want to share it with others. Like-minded scientists who could build on what you pioneered.”
“That will come. So many other enhancements seem to occupy my time. And it’s a non-trivial task. We can discuss the details some other time, if you’re interested.”
He stepped forward, put a hand on Lash’s shou
lder. “I know how hard it’s been on you. It hasn’t been easy for me, either. But we’ve come this far, done this much. I need you to stick with it just a little longer. Maybe it is just a freakish tragedy after all, two double suicides. Maybe we’ll have a quiet weekend. I realize it’s hell not knowing. But we have to trust Liza now. Okay?”
Lash remained silent a moment. “That match Eden found for me. It’s on the level? No mistakes?”
“The only mistake was sending your avatar to the Tank in the first place. The matching process itself would work for you as it does for everybody else. The woman would be perfectly suited to you in every way.”
The dim light, the whispered hum of machinery, gave the room a dreamlike, almost spectral air. Half a dozen images flitted through Lash’s head. The look on his ex-wife’s face, that day in the blind at the Audubon Center when they separated. Tara Stapleton’s expression at the bar in Grand Central when she told him of her own dilemma. The face of Lewis Thorpe, staring at him out of the Flagstaff television screen.
He sighed. “Very well. I’ll stay on a few more days. On one condition.”
“Name it.”
“That you don’t cancel my dinner with Diana Mirren.”
Silver pressed Lash’s shoulder for a moment. “Good man.” He smiled again, briefly; but when the smile faded, he looked just as tired as Lash felt.
TWENTY-NINE
S eventy-five hours,” Tara said. “That means Liza won’t have an answer until Monday afternoon.”
Lash nodded. He’d summarized his talk with Silver, described in detail how the man communicated with Liza. Throughout, Tara was fascinated—until she heard how long the extended search would take.
“So what are we supposed to do until then?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“I do. We wait.” Tara raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Shit.”
Lash looked around the room. In size, Tara Stapleton’s thirty-fifth-floor office wasn’t that different from his own temporary space. It had the same conference table, same desk, same shelving. There were a few distinctly feminine touches: half a dozen leafy plants that appeared to thrive on the artificial light, a paisley sachet of potpourri hanging from the desk lamp by a red ribbon. Three identical computer workstations were lined up behind the desk. But the most distinctive feature of the office was a large fiberglass surfboard leaning against a far wall, badly scored and pitted, the stripe along its length faded by salt and sun. Bumper stickers with legends like “Live to surf, surf to live” and “Hang ten off a log!” were fixed on the wall behind it. Postcards from famous surfing beaches—Lennox Head, Australia; Pipeline, Hawaii; Potovil Point, Sri Lanka—were taped in a row along the upper edge of the bookshelf.