6
TRACES OF INTELLIGENCE
Marianna returned to her rent-a-Cooper in the Fort Meade visitors lot, feeling like a mushroom—as in, being kept in the dark and fed bullshit. Considering how much talking Brad Donegan had done in the past half hour, to her and then to her boss, it was remarkable how little he’d actually divulged.
She was going to California on the four p.m. out of Dulles, that much was certain, as attested by the e-tickets now tucked into her emergency travel bag. From there, she was to link up with Jon, find out what he knew about the Fatimah Ansari situation, and then …
Beyond that point, it all got blurry. She had no idea what ACT expected this junket to accomplish.
And she still didn’t know what the damned QuMRANN thing was.
A rap at the driver’s side window interrupted these musings. She turned, half expecting to find Donegan’s goons spoiling for a rematch. It was a pleasant surprise to see instead—
“Mycroft? What are you doing here? I thought you were … uh, someplace else.”
Anyplace else. It simply hadn’t occurred to her that Mycroft had teleconferenced into the ACT meeting from elsewhere in the same freaking building.
Evidently his aversion to face-to-face contact trumped the hassle of setting up an intramural video link.
Which would have left her wondering why he was standing there in the flesh right now, had not Mycroft answered that one with his next words: “Would you mind if I accompanied you to the airport, Marianna? I have a six-thirty flight out to New Mexico.”
“Sure, hop in.”
He did, but into the tiny rear seat. She should have expected that Mycroft would want to maintain maximum distance between them. Maximum for a Mini Cooper, anyway. But in that case, why bum a ride with her at all? Why not order up one of those chauffeured limos—not as if NSA couldn’t afford it—and cruise out to Dulles in the solitude he preferred?
Something else was going on.
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” she ventured once Spook City was receding in her rearview. “How’re you doing?”
“It’s as you’ve just seen,” he said, “ACT has full claim on my billable hours these days. And will through the forthcoming roll-out.”
Roll-out of what, she carefully didn’t ask. Instead: “That’s got to be making Archon happy, adding NSA to the client roster. I’m guessing the CROM connection didn’t hurt any?”
“I’m certain our working relationship would have proven most helpful, had we pursued the opportunity via an RFP process. As it is, the ACT assignment more or less fell into our laps—a spin-off from work on a related Agency project, regrettably now defunct.”
Marianna came fully alert. Pete had mentioned something about a canceled NSA project, hadn’t he? In connection with—
“This ‘related project,’” she said, casually as she could, “It wouldn’t by any chance be called Qu—”
Before she could get the rest of “QuMRANN” out, Mycroft did something utterly unprecedented: he leaned forward and placed a hand on her shoulder. She nearly swerved over the white line, so startling was even this much physical contact from the least touchy-feely guy she’d ever met. A glance in the mirror showed the guy in question placing a finger to his lips.
Then it showed him doing something else, although she’d seen Mycroft do this several times before: namely, take out his handheld and start playing one of its games—Tetris Extreme, from the beeps-and-boops sound of it.
Jon had told her it was his friend’s way of tuning out of long, boring meetings. Had Mycroft tired of her company so soon?
Mycroft continued to stare at the handheld’s screen, fingers flying across the miniature keypad, the picture of total absorption. Then, still not looking up, he spoke:
“It’s safe to talk now, Marianna. As long as I keep playing, the listening devices Bradford has had planted in your vehicle will stay jammed.”
Tuning out, indeed!
☯
“Christ! What’s wrong with the bloody thing?” Knox slammed his fist against the tabletop, hardly caring if he jiggled the workstation sitting on it. “This is total nonsense!”
The target of his ire, the mechanical dog-thing impassively lying there at his feet, did not reply. The outburst had more of an impact down at the far end of the machine shop, prompting Dariush Mogadam to rise from his console and stroll over to where Knox was sitting.
“Is there a problem, Mr. Knox?” the young tech said with a grin. Drafted by Hamza as impromptu technical support for Knox’s equally impromptu interrogation of guardbot Alpha-Alpha-Delta-Six-Five-Beta, Dariush seemed to be enjoying this unexpected assignment.
That made one of them. Knox had been at it for the better part of an hour now, and had gotten exactly nowhere. The only saving grace was that Hamza had not hung around to bust his chops, having gone off to oversee some sort of squad-level training simulation.
“The thing’s spouting gibberish. I’ve sat through enough requirements reviews to know it when I see it.”
“Mind if I take a look, Mr. Knox?”
“By all means, scoot in here.” Knox rolled his own seat back to let Dariush pull up a chair. “Oh, and call me Jon. ‘Mr. Knox’ is my father.”
“Whatever you say, Mr.—uh, Jon. Now, let’s just see here …” Dariush leaned forward to peer at a monitor window containing the running transcript of Knox’s interview with the bot.
“I really thought we were doing okay there for a while,” Knox said, “Like, when I asked, ‘Where did you go once you entered the garden,’ it came back with this.” He tapped the screen where it showed:
ALPHA-ALPHA-DELTA-SIX-FIVE-BETA MOVED TO GRID COORDINATE 00-17 AT GMT 2313 HOURS
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. It’s what came next.” Knox scrolled down to their most recent exchange.
Dariush gave the screen a glance. Then he snickered.
“What’s so funny?” Knox said. “I asked it a perfectly reasonable follow-up—”
Dariush stifled a chuckle long enough to say. “Right, you asked ‘Could you see the garden walk from that position?’”
“Exactly. And look what it came back with.” Knox pointed to the guardbot’s answer:
PAIRIDAEZA’S GARDEN CANNOT MOVE FROM GRID COORDINATE 00-17
Dariush was laughing out loud by now.
“Mind letting me in on the joke?” Knox fumed.
“Sorry, Jon,” the tech said, wiping tears from his eyes. “It’s just that, that has to be the funniest example of syntactic ambiguity I’ve seen in a long time.”
“Run that past me again in English?”
“That was English, or at least it was about English—English syntax.” Dariush paused, began again: “How much do you know about NLP—natural language processing?”
“You mean, like, ELIZA?”
Cobbled together by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum back in the mid-sixties, ELIZA was the world’s first, and still its best-known “chatbot”—as computer programs that try to fake their way through a conversation are called. Weizenbaum had named his brainchild after Eliza Doolittle, the heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and later, of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady. But whereas Shaw’s plucky Cockney flower girl had mastered upper-class elocution well enough to pass for a duchess, the linguistic skills exhibited by her computerized namesake were far more problematical.
“ELIZA—” Dariush’s mouth twisted as if the word had a bad taste to it. “—is not natural language processing. Have you ever tried talking to it?” Knox nodded. “On the web. It was doing its usual psychotherapist routine, so I told it—just to see how it would respond, you understand—I told it my mother doesn’t get along with my, uh, this girl I know, and it said ‘TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY.’”
“Uh-huh. And were you impressed?”
“Initially. Till I noticed I’d get the same answer if I keyed in ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ or ‘English is my mother tongue’ or even ‘This will be the mother of all battles.’ Pretty much anything with the word ‘mother’ in it would give me that same ‘TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY’ line.”
“That’s because ELIZA’s not actually analyzing the meaning of what you’re saying. It’s just doing what’s called keyword spotting: scanning the input to see if it contains any one of a short list of so-called keywords, then generating the corresponding canned answer. You could have said ‘blah-blah mother blah-blah’ and gotten the exact same response.”
“Sounds pretty brain dead. But what’s so different about Six-Five-Beta here?”
Dariush ran his fingers through an already disheveled mane of black hair. “Jeez, what isn’t? Where ELIZA’s only got the one keyword-spotting trick, Beta’s got a whole array of language-understanding technologies—lexical and syntactic analysis, discourse management and pragmatics, knowledge representation and reasoning, language generation and prosodics—all aimed at figuring out what you’re really asking and coming up with an answer.”
“Huh. Seems like an awful lot of work to go to, if all it’s going to do is screw up.”
“Oh, right. Well, as to that, let me show you what happened there.” Dariush keyed in a command and the work station’s transcript of Knox’s interrogation gave way to a diagnostic trace of what was going on inside the bot’s head while they talked. It all boiled down to a single line of text at the bottom of the screen:
kUHdyUWsItYdhAHgAArdAHnwAOkfrAHmdhAEtpAHzIHshAHn
“The starting point,” Dariush said. “Raw speech recognizer output. Look familiar?”
Knox shook his head.
“Here, let me mark the word boundaries.” Dariush tapped a key. “That help?”
kUHd | yUW | sIY | dhAH | gAArdAHn | wAOk | frAHm | dhAEt | pAHzIHshAHn
Knox got it then. “Oh, right: what I asked: ‘Could you see the garden walk from that position’—so far, so good, I guess.”
“Right. But here’s where it gets tricky. Watch what happens when we run the parser—”
could you see the garden walk from that position
verb noun verb det noun verb prep det noun
“—See the problem?”
Knox scrutinized the display. “Got to admit I don’t.”
“Okay, let’s try that same input again, only this time with one little change.” More keystrokes and—
could you see the garden path from that position
verb noun verb det noun noun prep det noun
“It looks different,” Knox said. “Not sure how, though.”
“The key is here.” Dariush moved the cursor to the midpoint of the sentence. “When I changed ‘the garden walk’ to ‘the garden path,’ the parser gave us the result we were looking for. This should process through just fine now.” And indeed it did:
OBJECT GARDEN-PATH NOT VISIBLE FROM GRID COORDINATE 00-17
Knox examined the output. “That’s what I was after, all right. And you got there just by replacing ‘walk’ with ‘path’?”
“Yep. It goes to the heart of what a syntactic analyzer is, Jon: basically an engine for breaking a sentence down into its component pieces. What comes out the other end are the parts of speech for each input word—the standard grammatical building blocks you learned back in grade school: nouns, verbs, prepositions, and so forth. Then it’s the job of the downstream semantics to take those building blocks and assemble them into the meaning behind the original sentence. With me so far?”
Knox nodded. “But if it’s that simple, how did Beta manage to screw it up?”
“Whoa, Jon! Who said it was simple? For a machine, syntactic analysis can be a real bear—a bear named ambiguity.”
“There’s that word again. Is this ambiguity of yours what’s behind the different results for ‘path’ versus ‘walk’?”
“Absolutely. You see, the English word ‘walk’ has two meanings, corresponding to two different parts of speech: one is a noun, a thing like a trail or path, and that’s the one you meant. More commonly, though, ‘walk’ is a verb, denoting the action of moving from one place to another on foot. The parser has to choose between the two meanings, and in this case it guessed wrong.”
“So, the bot assumed I was asking if the whole garden just picked up and walked off?”
“Exactly, and it all went downhill from there: For instance, you’ll also note that Beta assumed the starting point for that walking action was the bot’s own position at square 00-17.”
Knox thought a moment. “And the reason that substituting ‘path’ for ‘walk’ fixed the problem is that ‘path’ is, um, unambiguous?”
“Right again: Which is to say there is no verbal sense of the word ‘path.’ You’re getting good at this, Jon.”
“I’ll have to, I guess, if I’m going to have any hope of cracking this kidnapping nut.”
☯
Marianna waited, but for someone who’d just assured her that they could talk freely now, Mycroft seemed reluctant to reinitiate the conversation. The rearview showed him crammed in the Mini Cooper’s back seat, running his handheld’s game cum signal jammer seemingly on automatic, and looking at her expectantly.
“Okay if I use the Q-word now?” She paused till his reflection nodded assent, then said, “So, what is it, this QuMRANN project? What’s the connection to that kidnapping business? And—separate but related question—how does Jon figure into any of this?”
A sigh came from behind her. “Actually, Marianna, it’s on Jonathan’s account that I wanted to speak with you in private. I’m concerned he’s gotten himself involved in something which may inadvertently lead into areas that are, well …”
“Hazardous to his health?”
Another sigh. “Perhaps not the way I would have phrased it, but yes. You’ve seen firsthand how sensitive ACT is about anything to do with Davoud Ansari’s operation.”
Not to mention how quick they were to resort to force majeure when someone jiggled one of their tripwires. Yeah, she could see how Jon would be better off steering clear of Donegan’s outfit, but—“What I still don’t get is what he’s doing out there at all. If it’s anything to do with the kidnapping, Jon would be the first one to tell you he’s no criminal investigator.”
“As to that, I suspect he was called in because, well … he and Jazmine McGovern have something of a, ah, history together, you know.”
Matter of fact, she hadn’t known: Jon preferred not to talk about past relationships, his or hers. But “a history” sounded serious. That had better be ancient history.
No point worrying about it now. “You were telling me about QuMRANN. What is it about a terminated project that can still get NSA’s knickers in a twist?”
“Well, to begin with, you must understand that QuMRANN was no ordinary government project. It was a preliminary attempt to come to grips with perhaps the most serious challenge—and at the same time, the greatest opportunity—confronting the intelligence community today. Does the term ‘Big Data’ mean anything to you?”
“Really, really large bits and bytes?”
Mycroft chuckled. “No, not hardly. More like the sum total of all the intelligence collected from both public and clandestine sources regarding every event, every trend, every phenomenon of conceivable interest throughout the world, all residing in a single repository. Think of it: all that critical information, zettabytes of it, gathered up into a maximally secure networked data cluster. It could be the most powerful resource for high-level threat forecasting the world has ever seen, if only we could access and analyze it as a whole.”
“What, you mean NSA went and built a capability they didn’t know how to use?”
“Well, there are relatively tractable techniques for exploiting Big Data: map-reduce and the like. But in a larger sense, no, they couldn’t tap into anything like its full potential. Not when the informational complexity of the Well, as the repository is called, has begun to approach that of the world it models.”
“I don’t get it then: what’s the point?”
“The point is, that’s where QuMRANN came in. The Quantum Magneto Resonance Artificial Neural Network project was an attempt to create a machine intellect that could do what no human could—namely, assimilate the total content of the Well and produce forward-looking analysis based on it.”
“And the project was canceled because … let me guess: When push came to shove, the contractor couldn’t deliver. How does the saying go? ‘Artificial intelligence, technology of the future—always has been …’”
“‘… Always will be,’” Mycroft finished the one-liner for her. “But, no, Marianna. My understanding is that Psyche Industries did deliver—if anything, more than they’d contracted for. It’s just that, before QuMRANN could be handed over, an alternative had, ah, emerged.”
“Alternative? It doesn’t have anything to do with that Delphi place I overheard Donegan talking about, does it?”
“Well, Delphi is not a place, exactly …”
“The only one I know of is a place. The place, in fact. In Greek mythology, the temple at Delphi was supposed to be the center of the universe.” Here, at least, Marianna was on solid ground, courtesy of a classics-professor father and an expatriate Greek mother.
“Be that as it may, our Delphi is located out in the southeast corner of New Mexico. I speak from experience when I say it’s hardly the center of the universe.”
Marianna was only half-listening. She was still trying to solve the riddle. “—Or, if this is all about forecasting, maybe it’s the Pythia that’s the key?”
In the rearview mirror, Mycroft was managing to look pleased and chagrined at the same time. “I should have known you of all people would guess the reference. Yes, the Pythia, the Oracle at Delphi, the priestess who served Apollo, uttering prophecy under his divine influence.”
“Try: under the influence of the ethylene vapors seeping up through the bedrock.”
“Quite right.” Mycroft beamed at her again. “Down to earth as usual, Marianna.”
His smile shaded into what, on a less serious man, might have been mistaken for a twinkle. “But what if I were to tell you that we’ve found a way to eliminate the middleman—or middlewoman, as it were—and commune directly with the gods themselves?”
☯
Knox hadn’t expected the effect his words would have on Dariush: the young technician sat there as if stunned. “K-kidnapping?” he stammered, “—is that what this is about?”
“Yes, of course. Six-Five-Beta here—” Knox gestured at the guardbot sitting alongside the console. “—is the closest thing I’ve got to an eyewitness. What, you thought I was quizzing the thing for the fun of it?”
“No, no—To tell the truth I had no idea what you were doing. The Ayatollah just told me to keep an eye on you, set you up, give you whatever help you needed.”
“Ayatollah? You mean Hamza?” That was where Knox had seen that gaze before. The Psyche Security Chief’s implacable glower was a dead ringer for the one habitually worn by the long-dead leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
“Sorry, yes, I meant Mr. Nassiri. We all call him the Ayatollah. It’s because of the way he runs this place, like a cross between a boot camp and a madraseh.” Alarm flickered in Dariush’s dark eyes. “You won’t tell him I said that, will you?”
“Relax, your secrets are safe with me.”
Dariush nodded his thanks, then sighed. “The kidnapping, that’s a terrible thing. We’re all very fond of Fatimah here. If there’s anything I can do to help, anything at all …”
“I think there just might be.”
“Name it. Anything.”
Knox looked at Dariush. The man’s eyes were brimming with tears. “I’m overreacting.” Dariush tried to smile. A dimple warped the path of the single tear now running down his cheek. “It’s just that, well, Timah never knew her mother. And with Mr. Ansari away on business so much …”
“The Pairidaeza staff became sort of surrogate family to her?”
Dariush nodded mutely, sucked in a ragged breath. “I’ll be all right in a moment.” He sat up straighter. “Sorry, Jon. It just gets to me when I think of that poor little girl, out there somewhere, all alone.”
☯
“Freddie?” Timah squinted against the glare of the afternoon sun streaming through the bedroom’s single window.
No sign of the tiny dancing ghost-light that would have signaled Freddie’s presence even amid so much brightness. No answer to her call. The walls seemed to close in on her. She rolled over on the bed, buried her face in the pillow, tried her best not to whimper.
“Please, Freddie”—muffled by the bedclothes, her voice was scarcely audible—“I want to go home now.”
The answering silence seemed to stretch on forever. Timah listened hard as she could, but there was nothing, only the pounding of the breakers against the rocks far below. Then, just as she was about to give up hope, she heard a tiny whisper from a long, long way off.
“Soon, Fatimah,” Freddie said, “I will bring you home soon.”
“Oh, please, Freddie—take me home now.”
“Not yet, not until it is safe. Until then you must stay calm.”
“I’m trying, Freddie, hard as I can. But my colors—I can feel them all around me.”
Another long silence. Then: “Are they coming yet?” Timah shook her head.
“You must tell me right away if the colors come. I can make them go away again, you know I can. But only if you tell me in time.”
☯
Knox looked up as the door to Pairidaeza’s machine shop was flung back and Hamza stalked into the room.
He approached the work station where Knox and Dariush were conferring, and without preamble said, “Mr. Knox, I trust you are now prepared to acknowledge that interrogating this so-called witness is a waste of precious time.”
“On the contrary, I think we’ve been making some real progress here.”
“Progress?” Hamza frowned impressively. “What progress?”
“Well, for one thing, I think we can pretty much rule out your skyhook hypothesis for how the kidnappers managed their escape. Beta here testifies to having observed nothing resembling an aircraft anywhere in the vicinity yesterday afternoon.”
That earned Knox another glare. “I had hoped you might have moved on from speculating about methods of entry and exit by now, Mr. Knox. But in any case, the ‘testimony,’ as you call it, of this sentinel unit proves nothing.”
“Why’s that?”
Hamza shifted his gaze to Dariush. “Have you explained to Mr. Knox the well-known limitations of the manner in which this unit internally represents the world?”
Now Knox too was looking at Dariush, who flushed and said, “What Mr. Nassiri is saying, Jon, is that Beta lacks the wherewithal to interpret a concept that’s truly out of scope.”
“Out of scope, how?” Knox said.
“Well, for instance, a really novel aircraft design might not register as an aircraft at all.”
“I’m not following you.”
“It’s called the ‘Frog’s Eye’ problem. See, a frog brain hasn’t got enough neurons to track everything going on in its environment. So its eye only processes the stuff that’s critical to survival, and that boils down to movement—an insect flying close enough to catch and eat, a bird swooping in for a hot lunch, that sort of thing. As far as a frog is concerned, the rest of the world might as well not exist at all.”
“You’re saying if the kidnappers had made their getaway on a flying saucer, the guardbot wouldn’t even have noticed?”
“Well, it would’ve detected an intrusion into its watch space by something. Would it classify it as an aerial vehicle, though, or form any useful representation of the event at all? Absent the relevant concepts, I’d have to say no.”
“So, it’s possible there were things going on out in the real world—things having to do with the kidnapping, specifically—that Six-Five Beta here might simply have missed?”
“It’s entirely possible, Jon. All Beta really ‘knows’—all it’s got an internal model for, that is—are the grounds of the compound, the buildings, and a fifty-meter strip surrounding the perimeter. As far as Six-Five-Beta is concerned, that little patch of real estate is the whole universe. The world can be a pretty small place when you’re an AI.”
“But, within the confines of that small world,” Knox insisted, “the bot does have a reasonably accurate understanding of objects and events, right?”
“Actually, I’d put that a bit differently: Beta’s got a pretty good representation of what’s happening. As far as understanding as such is concerned, though, it hasn’t got any at all.”
“Come again?” Knox said.
“There’s a thought experiment John Searle dreamed up back in the eighties …”
Dariush must not have noticed how Hamza’s face went several shades darker at the prospect of yet another digression, because he continued blithely on. “It’s called the ‘Chinese Room’ problem, and it goes like this: You’re locked in a room with nothing but a bunch of books. There’s a slot in the door, though, and every once in a while someone outside pushes a piece of paper through it. There are markings on the paper, but they look like meaningless squiggles. So, you check out the books, having nothing better to do.”
“Mr. Knox, on the other hand, does have better things to do,” Hamza began.
Dariush ignored the interjection. “When you look in the books, you see each page is also covered with squiggles, two columns of them. They don’t mean anything to you either, but you do notice that some of the squiggles in the left-hand column match some of the squiggles on the paper. So you start looking up all the squiggles in the books, and every time you find a match in the left-hand column, you jot down the squiggle to the right of it on a second sheet of paper. When you’re done, you shove that second sheet back out the slot. With me so far?”
“Keep going.” Knox said. “This is sounding like how I spend most days at work.”
Dariush chuckled. “Anyway, here’s the punch line: those squiggles are really Chinese ideograms, and the books contain rules for transforming one set of ideograms into another in such a way that, if the first set represents a question, the second set will be the answer to it.”
“So I’m actually speaking Chinese?”
“Well, something in the room is speaking Chinese, and understanding it too. But it can’t be you, can it? Far as you’re concerned, all you’re doing is comparing squiggles. You have no idea you’re answering questions. Above all, you have no experience of understanding Chinese.”
“You’re saying Six-Five-Beta has no experience of understanding English either.”
“More than that. Beta has no experience of anything. It’s got no interior life, so to speak.”
“The lights are on, but nobody’s home?”
“Yep. When all’s said and done, there’s no mind, no true awareness in there.” Dariush rapped his knuckles on the guardbot’s steel skull. “Is there, boy?”
☯
Hamza mulled Dariush’s final words on his walk back to the Ops Center. Much as he’d begrudged the time wasted on the Chinese Room conundrum, he could not quarrel with its conclusions: Of course the automated sentinel unit possessed no understanding, no sense of self. All it was capable of was executing simple Aristotelian logic—formal patterns of reasoning, not unlike the syllogisms Hamza had studied at seminary. And if one thing had come clear from those long-ago lessons, it was that the patterns as such were unintelligent, unselfconscious, mere mechanisms for manipulating symbols which, in turn, had no meaning in and of themselves.
How, then, could a collection of algorithms and heuristics—concrete realizations of those symbol-manipulating patterns—give rise to a mind? No, impossible: a machine such as Alpha-Alpha-Delta-Six-Five-Beta could never transcend its lockstep programming to attain self-awareness and free will.
As to whether those limitations also held for the QuMRANN entity, brooding in its secret redoubt on the bottommost level of Pairidaeza—well, Hamza felt far less certain of that.