“Hey, you’re the boss, Ricky.”
“That’s right, I am,” Ricky said, still visibly angry. “And by the way, your break ended ten minutes ago. So let’s get back to work.” He looked into the adjoining game room. “Where are the others?”
“Fixing the perimeter sensors.”
“You mean they’re outside?”
“No, no. They’re in the utility room. Bobby thinks there’s a calibration problem with the sensor units.”
“Great. Did anybody tell Vince?”
“No. It’s software: Bobby’s taking care of it.”
It was at that point that my cell phone beeped. I was surprised, pulled it out of my pocket. I turned to the others. “Cell phones work?”
“Yeah,” Ricky said, “we’re wired here.” He went back to his argument with David and Rosie. I stepped into the corridor and got my messages. There was only one, from the hospital, about Julia. “We understand you are Ms. Forman’s husband, and if you could call us please as soon as possible…” Then an extension for a Dr. Rana. I dialed back at once. The switchboard put me through. “ICU.”
I asked for Dr. Rana, and waited until he came on. I said, “This is Jack Forman. Julia Forman’s husband.”
“Oh yes, Mr. Forman.” A pleasant, melodic voice. “Thank you for calling back. I understand you accompanied your wife to the hospital last night. Yes? Well then you know the seriousness of her injuries, or should I say her potential injuries. We really do feel that she needs to have a thorough workup for cervical fracture, and for subdural hematoma, and she needs a pelvic fracture workup as well.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what I was told last night. Is there a problem?”
“Actually, there is. Your wife is refusing treatment.”
“She is?”
“Last night, she allowed us to take X-rays and to set the fractures in her wrist. We’ve explained to her that X-rays are limited in what we can see, and that it is quite important for her to have an MRI, but she is refusing that.”
I said, “Why?”
“She says she doesn’t need it.”
“Of course she needs it,” I said.
“Yes, she does, Mr. Forman,” Rana said. “I don’t want to alarm you but the concern with pelvic fracture is massive hemorrhaging into the abdomen and, well, bleeding to death. It can happen very quickly, and-”
“What do you want me to do?”
“We’d like you to talk to her.”
“Of course. Put her on.”
“Unfortunately, she’s gone for some additional X-rays just now. Is there a number where you can be reached? Your cell phone? All right. One other thing, Mr. Forman, we weren’t able to take a psychiatric history from your wife…”
“Why is that?”
“She refuses to talk about it. I’m referring to drugs, any history of behavioral disorders, that kind of thing. Can you shed any light in that area?”
“I’ll try…”
“I don’t want to alarm you, but your wife has been, well, a bit on the irrational side. At times, almost delusional.”
“She’s been under a lot of stress lately,” I said.
“Yes, I am sure that contributes,” Dr. Rana said smoothly. “And she has suffered a severe head injury, which we need to investigate further. I don’t want to alarm you, but frankly it was the opinion of the psychiatric consult that your wife was suffering from a bipolar disorder, or a drug disorder, or both.”
“I see…”
“And of course such questions naturally arise in the context of a single-car automobile accident…”
He meant that the accident might be a suicide attempt. I didn’t think that was likely. “I have no knowledge of my wife taking drugs,” I said. “But I have been concerned about her behavior for, oh, a few weeks now.”
Ricky came over, and stood by me impatiently. I put my hand over the phone. “It’s about Julia.” He nodded, and glanced at his watch. Raised his eyebrows. I thought it was pretty odd, that he would push me when I was talking to the hospital about my wife-and his immediate superior. The doctor rambled on for a while, and I did my best to answer his questions, but the fact was I didn’t have any information that could help him. He said he would have Julia call when she got back, and I said I would wait for the call. I flipped the phone closed. Ricky said, “Okay, fine. Sorry to rush you, Jack, but… you know, I’ve got a lot to show you.”
“Is there a time problem?” I said.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
I started to ask what he meant by that, but he was already leading me forward, walking quickly. We left the residential area, passing through another glass door, and down another passageway. This passage, I noticed, was tightly sealed. We walked along a glass walkway suspended above the floor. The glass had little perforations, and beneath was a series of vacuum ducts for suction. By now I was growing accustomed to the constant hiss of the air handlers. Midway down the corridor was another pair of glass doors. We had to go through them one at a time. They parted as we went through, and closed behind us. Continuing on, I again had the distinct feeling of being in a prison, of going through a succession of barred gates, going deeper and deeper into something.
It might be all high-tech and shiny glass walls-but it was still a prison.
DAY 6
8:12 A.M.
We came into a large room marked UTILITY and beneath it, MOLSTOCK/FABSTOCK/FEEDSTOCK. The walls and ceiling were covered with the familiar smooth plastic laminate. Large laminated containers were stacked on the floor. Off to the right I saw a row of big stainless-steel kettles, sunk below ground with lots of piping and valves surrounding them, and coming up to the first-floor level. It looked exactly like a microbrewery, and I was about to ask Ricky about it when he said, “So there you are!” Working at a junction box beneath a monitor screen were three more members of my old team. They looked slightly guilty as we came up, like kids caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Of course Bobby Lembeck was their leader. At thirty-five, Bobby now supervised more code than he wrote, but he could still write when he wanted to. As always, he was wearing faded jeans and a Ghost in the Shell T-shirt, his ubiquitous Walkman clamped to his waist. Then there was Mae Chang, beautiful and delicate, about as different from Rosie Castro as any woman could be. Mae had worked as a field biologist in Sichuan studying the golden snub-nosed monkey before turning to programming in her mid-twenties. Her time in the field, as well as her natural inclination, led her to be almost silent. Mae said very little, moved almost soundlessly, and never raised her voice-but she never lost an argument, either. Like many field biologists, she had developed the uncanny ability to slip into the background, to become unnoticed, almost to vanish.
And finally Charley Davenport, grumpy, rumpled, and already overweight at thirty. Slow and lumbering, he looked as if he had slept in his clothes, and in fact he often did, after a marathon programming session. Charley had worked under John Holland in Chicago and Doyne Farmer at Los Alamos. He was an expert in genetic algorithms, the kind of programming that mimicked natural selection to hone answers. But he was an irritating personality-he hummed, he snorted, talked to himself, and farted with noisy abandon. The group only tolerated him because he was so talented.
“Does it really take three people to do this?” Ricky said, after I’d shaken hands all around.
“Yes,” Bobby said, “it does take three people, El Rooto, because it’s complicated.”
“Why? And don’t call me El Rooto.”
“I obey, Mr. Root.”
“Just get on with it…”
“Well,” Bobby said, “I started to check the sensors after this morning’s episode, and it looks to me like they’re miscalibrated. But since nobody is going outside, the question is whether we’re reading them wrong, or whether the sensors themselves are faulty, or just scaled wrong on the equipment in here. Mae knows these sensors, she’s used them in China. I’m making code revisions now. And Charley is here because he won’t go away and leave us alone.”
“Shit, I have better things to do,” Charley said. “But I wrote the algorithm that controls the sensors, and we need to optimize the sensor code after they’re done. I’m just waiting until they stop screwing around. Then I’ll optimize.” He looked pointedly at Bobby. “None of these guys can optimize worth a damn.”
Mae said, “Bobby can.”
“Yeah, if you give him six months, maybe.”
“Children, children,” Ricky said. “Let’s not make a scene in front of our guest.” I smiled blandly. The truth was, I hadn’t been paying attention to what they were saying. I was just watching them. These were three of my best programmers-and when they had worked for me, they had been self-assured to the point of arrogance. But now I was struck by how nervous the group was. They were all on edge, bickering, jumpy. And thinking back, I realized that Rosie and David had been on edge, too.
Charley started humming in that irritating way of his.
“Oh, Christ,” Bobby Lembeck said. “Would you tell him to shut up?”
Ricky said, “Charley, you know we’ve talked about the humming.”
Charley continued to hum.
“Charley…”
Charley gave a long, theatrical sigh. He stopped humming.
“Thank you,” Bobby said.
Charley rolled his eyes, and looked at the ceiling.
“All right,” Ricky said. “Finish up quickly, and get back to your stations.”
“Okay, fine.”
“I want everybody in place as soon as possible.”
“Okay,” Bobby said.
“I’m serious. In your places.”
“For Christ’s sake, Ricky, okay, okay. Now will you stop talking and let us work?” Leaving the group behind, Ricky took me across the floor to a small room. I said, “Ricky, these kids aren’t the way they were when they worked for me.”
“I know. Everybody’s a little uptight right now.”
“And why is that?”
“Because of what’s going on here.”
“And what is going on here?”
He stopped before a small cubicle on the other side of the room. “Julia couldn’t tell you, because it was classified.” He touched the door with a keycard. I said, “Classified? Medical imaging is classified?”
The door latch clicked open, and we went inside. The door closed behind us. I saw a table, two chairs, a computer monitor and a keyboard. Ricky sat down, and immediately started typing. “The medical imaging project was just an afterthought,” he said, “a minor commercial application of the technology we are already developing.”
“Uh-huh. Which is?”
“Military.”
“Xymos is doing military work?”
“Yes. Under contract.” He paused. “Two years ago, the Department of Defense realized from their experience in Bosnia that there was enormous value to robot aircraft that could fly overhead and transmit battlefield images in real time. The Pentagon knew that there would be more and more sophisticated uses for these flying cameras in future wars. You could use them to spot the locations of enemy troops, even when they were hidden in jungle or in buildings; you could use them to control laser-guided rocket fire, or to identify the location of friendly troops, and so on. Commanders on the ground could call up the images they wanted, in the spectra they wanted-visible, infrared, UV, whatever. Real-time imaging was going to be a very powerful tool in future warfare.”
“Okay…”
“But obviously,” Ricky said, “these robot cameras were vulnerable. You could shoot them down like pigeons. The Pentagon wanted a camera that couldn’t be shot down. They imagined something very small, maybe the size of a dragonfly-a target too small to hit. But there were problems with power supply, with small control surfaces, and with resolution using such a small lens. They needed a bigger lens.”
I nodded. “And so you thought of a swarm of nanocomponents.”
“That’s right.” Ricky pointed to the screen, where a cluster of black spots wheeled and turned in the air, like birds. “A cloud of components would allow you to make a camera with as large a lens as you wanted. And it couldn’t be shot down because a bullet would just pass through the cloud. Furthermore, you could disperse the cloud, the way a flock of birds disperses with a gunshot. Then the camera would be invisible until it re-formed again. So it seemed an ideal solution. The Pentagon gave us three years of DARPA funding.”
“And?”
“We set out to make the camera. It was of course immediately obvious that we had a problem with distributed intelligence.”
I was familiar with the problem. The nanoparticles in the cloud had to be endowed with a rudimentary intelligence, so that they could interact with each other to form a flock that wheeled in the air. Such coordinated activity might look pretty intelligent, but it occurred even when the individuals making up the flock were rather stupid. After all, birds and fish could do it, and they weren’t the brightest creatures on the planet.
Most people watching a flock of birds or a school of fish assumed there was a leader, and that all the other animals followed the leader. That was because human beings, like most social mammals, had group leaders.
But birds and fish had no leaders. Their groups weren’t organized that way. Careful study of flocking behavior-frame-by-frame video analysis-showed that, in fact, there was no leader. Birds and fish responded to a few simple stimuli among themselves, and the result was coordinated behavior. But nobody was controlling it. Nobody was leading it. Nobody was directing it.
Nor were individual birds genetically programmed for flocking behavior. Flocking was not hard-wired. There was nothing in the bird brain that said, “When thus-and-such happens, start flocking.” On the contrary, flocking simply emerged within the group as a result of much simpler, low-level rules. Rules like, “Stay close to the birds nearest you, but don’t bump into them.” From those rules, the entire group flocked in smooth coordination. Because flocking arose from low-level rules, it was called emergent behavior. The technical definition of emergent behavior was behavior that occurred in a group but was not programmed into any member of the group. Emergent behavior could occur in any population, including a computer population. Or a robot population. Or a nanoswarm.
I said to Ricky, “Your problem was emergent behavior in the swarm?”
“Exactly.”
“It was unpredictable?”
“To put it mildly.”
In recent decades, this notion of emergent group behavior had caused a minor revolution in computer science. What that meant for programmers was that you could lay down rules of behavior for individual agents, but not for the agents acting together. Individual agents-whether programming modules, or processors, or as in this case, actual micro-robots-could be programmed to cooperate under certain circumstances, and to compete under other circumstances. They could be given goals. They could be instructed to pursue their goals with single-minded intensity, or to be available to help other agents. But the result of these interactions could not be programmed. It just emerged, with often surprising outcomes.