“Me?” Clifford stopped chewing for a second and looked puzzled. “Why should I be interested?”
“Listen to this,” Sarah told him, unfolding the sheets of notepaper in her hand. She read aloud from part of the letter: ” ‘Walter has gotten himself a good promotion at last . . .’ ”
“Good for Walter,” Clifford threw in.
“Shut up and listen. Where was I . . . ? ‘Walter has gotten himself a good promotion at last. In fact, everybody seems to be moving around in ACRE because there has been the most almighty shakeup there you ever did see . . .’ ” Sarah glanced up and noticed that Clifford was looking at her with evident interest. She read on. ” ‘Walter isn’t too sure what’s behind it all, but he says there are all kinds of rumors about really big trouble behind the scenes. He thinks a lot of the top guys are getting hell from Washington about the way they’ve been handling something or other—all the usual secret stuff. Jarrit—he was the big boss there if you remember—has gone, but nobody is sure where. Prof Edwards has been moved up to take his job. That smart-aleck guy, Corrigan I think it was, has gone too. Walter thinks that Edwards got to Washington and demanded that they throw him out. Rumor has it he’s been shifted to a missile test range or some such thing—somewhere on Baffin Island.’ ” Sarah lowered the letter and looked across at Clifford. He threw back his head and roared with laughter.
“That’s all I needed to make this a perfect week,” he managed at last. “Well, how about that? Wait till I tell Aub.” He began laughing again.
“Zimmermann certainly wasn’t kidding when he said he’d wheel in a few big guns,” Sarah chuckled. “I think he’s done rather well, don’t you?”
“Big guns?” Clifford laughed. “Them minions haven’t been gunned, baby. Zim’s pals have carpetbombed the bastards!”
Chapter 16
Voice recognition by computer had begun in a crude way during the early 1970s. Not long afterward, experiments conducted at the Stanford Research Institute demonstrated that parts of the electrical brain waves associated with the faculty of speech could be decoded and used to input information directly from the human brain to the machine. The method utilized mental concentration on a particular word to trigger the word’s characteristic pattern of neural activity in the brain, without the word’s actually being voiced; once a pattern had been detected, it could be matched against those stored in the computer’s memory—each human operator having his own unique prerecorded set—and translated into machine language. The operation of the computer or whatever it was controlling was then determined by the machine-language command. By the early eighties, a sizable list of experimental machines of this type had appeared in research laboratories around the world, initially each with its own very restricted command vocabulary, typically: On, Off, Up, Down, Left, Right, and so on. But the vocabularies were growing. . . .
These early beginnings broke the trail for the developments that began appearing over the next thirty years. Other centers of the brain, such as those relating to visual perception, volition, and abstract imagination, were also harnessed as direct sources of data and command information for computer processing. Later on, techniques for accomplishing the reverse process—of enabling the brain to absorb data from the machine independent of the normal sensory channels—were added.
The result of all this was the Bio-Inter-Active Computer—the latest word in computer technology, offering perhaps the ultimate in man-machine communication. The BIAC eliminated the agonizingly slow traffic bottleneck that had always plagued the interface between the superfast human brain on the one hand, and the hyper-superfast electronics on the other. For example, a straightforward mathematical calculation could be formulated in the mind in seconds, and its execution, once inside the machine, would occupy microseconds; but the time needed to set the problem up by laboriously keying it in character by character and to read back the result off a display screen was, in relative terms, astronomical. It was rather like playing a game of chess by mail.
But the BIAC did much more than simply enable data and instructions to be fed into the machine more quickly; it enabled the machine to accept input material of a completely new type. Whereas classical computers had required every item of input information to be explicitly specified in numerical or encoded form, the BIAC, incorporating the most up-to-date advances in adaptive learning techniques, could respond to generalized concepts—concepts visualized in the operator’s mind—and convert them into forms suitable for internal manipulation.