CHAPTER NINE
“Vince talked to Schroder sometime this morning about it,” Richter said from the screen in Dyer’s office. “The bean counters at CIM are still grumbling but it sounds as if your point yesterday about postponing any upgrade to the net and discontinuing the FISE project being two separate issues was well taken. It’s still in the balance, but Schroder seemed to be starting to bend your way. I thought you’d like to know.”
“Thanks,” Dyer acknowledged. “Did Vince have any idea how long it might take before we know for sure?” Richter shook his head and showed his hands in front of him on the screen. “How about this chance you mentioned of Vince maybe putting internal funding into FISE?” Dyer asked. “Any more on that?” Richter shrugged and shook his head again.
“We didn’t go into that.”
Dyer made a face and nodded resignedly. He was naturally anxious to see the FISE project saved from the axe, especially after the amount of work that he and his team had put into it and following the encouraging developments that had taken place that week, but at a more personal level there was more at stake. HESPER had been his contribution to making the world a generally better place; to him, the continuing national and international support for the FISE project symbolized the world’s acceptance and approval of both him and his work. Withdrawal from HESPER and abandonment of FISE would be tantamount to a vote of no confidence and the implications bothered him more than he was prepared to admit even to himself.
“So we’ll just have to wait and see what next week brings,” he said. “Unless somebody can come up with some answers to those questions, there’s not a lot we can do. Had any more thoughts about it, Ted? Did you get a chance to talk to Sigmund about it?”
“No,” Richter replied. “I’ve been thinking about it but it just keeps going around the same circle. Sigmund’s not in today.” Of course, Dyer thought to himself. It was Friday—another yachting weekend. “Anyhow,” Richter went on, “as you say, we haven’t got much choice but to leave it at that for the time being. I’ll keep you posted if anything happens. Okay?”
“Okay Ted, I’d appreciate it,” Dyer said. “See you around.”
“See ya, Ray.”
Dyer cut off the screen and remained staring at it for a long time. The meeting in Washington had debated the issue into the evening and he had talked to Richter about nothing else on the way back to New York, but always they had come back to the same impasse. If TITAN ever developed the equivalent of a survival drive, what could it do about it? The only way anybody would know would be when it happened. The risks implied by that would be totally out of the question. There had to be another way of getting the answers they needed.
At length he sighed, shook his head and leaned back in his chair. As he did so he noticed the wad of equipment maintenance approval forms that he had finished signing just as Richter called. He scooped them up and walked out of the office to give them to Betty, at the same time wondering to himself why it was that in an age when everything from tax returns to personal letters had become electronic, things as mundane as interdepartmental formalities still required pieces of paper in triplicate.
“These are okay,” he said as he dropped the forms on Betty’s desk. “Signed, sealed, stamped and approved. You can get rid of ’em.”
“Thanks,” Betty said. “Oh. Frank Wescott called from CIT while you were talking to Ted. He just left a message . . .” She checked a note pad by her elbow. “It said, ‘How do you deal with a time bomb that’s wired to a doomsday machine?’ ” Betty looked up curiously. “He said you’d know what it meant.”
“It’s okay,” Dyer replied, smiling. “Just something we talked about in Washington yesterday.” Betty shook her head and looked nonplused.
“Fancy that. I always wondered what you people talked about all day at those meetings. Now I know. Isn’t it nice to know there are people in the world who worry about the time bombs and the doomsday machines for us. There—that’s one more thing I won’t have to lose any more sleep wondering about.”
“Glad to hear it,” Dyer told her. “Life would sure be dull without them.”
At that moment Ron’s voice rose from behind the partitions that separated them from the lab area.
“Hell, I keep tellin’ ya, it’s obvious! We go after them with the tanks!”
“No, shut up a second, Ron,” Chris’s voice replied. “I don’t like it. There’s something funny about—”
“But they’re wide open in the center there. If we go in fast we’ll bust ’em wide—”
“Shut up, Ron!”
“But I’m tellin’ ya we’ve got ’em licked!”
“And I’m saying it’s a trap. They want us to go after them in the center. It was only a token fight and they’re pulling out too fast.”
“Sounds as if they’re fighting World War II again,” Dyer grinned. Betty raised her hands and shrugged. Dyer strolled through to the lab to see what was going on.
It was as he expected. The image in the holo-tank was a miniature 3-D landscape made up of wooded hills, tracts of bare, rolling plain, rivers and forests, complete with towns, roads and bridges. Formations of mixed squares; circles, triangles and other symbols glowed superimposed on the terrain to divide it roughly into two halves, one dominated by red and the other by blue, although in places the two became intermixed and disordered, giving the whole thing the appearance of something like a general’s battle map. Ron was sitting at the console and looking impatient while Chris stood peering thoughtfully down into the top of the tank.
“What is it?” Dyer inquired as he drew up alongside Chris and began examining the situation.
“Battle of Kursk, 1943,” Chris replied absently. “Germans and Russians. We’re the reds . . . Zukhov.”
“Who’s on the other end?” Dyer asked.
“Mike and Dave at Cornell,” Chris told him without looking up. “I think they’re trying to pull a fast one here. The sods have done it before.”
The battle-simulation games available from the network library were Chris and Ron’s latest craze. Domestic holo-tanks to replace conventional flat-screen displays were expensive and one of Ron’s first improvements on the FISE display had been to build an interface to hook it into the net.
“They’ve just broken off from a punch-up with tanks in the middle there by the river,” Chris said, gesturing vaguely. “Now they’re pulling back and Ron wants to go after them. I think it’s fishy.”
“How come?” Dyer asked.
“Doesn’t feel right,” Chris said. “I reckon they’ve got something hidden up behind that ridge that’s waiting to cut us off if we cross the river.” Dyer surveyed the scene for a few seconds and then nodded slowly. There was a long, shallow ridge overlooking the approach to the river crossing and the ground behind the ridge was out of the direct line-of-sight from any of the red symbols as positioned. The displays presented to the two playing teams would not be identical; with the opposing forces deployed as shown, only the enemy “generals” and the computers that functioned as umpire would know whether or not the ridge concealed additional hostile units.
“You need an observation post up on top of the ridge,” Dyer commented. “Send a patrol up there.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Chris murmured.
“It’ll take all day,” Ron protested. “Why don’t we risk it and to hell with it? If anything does come over that ridge we’ve got three artillery batteries back there behind the town that can take care of it until we bring up some more tanks.”
“They’re only 45-millimeter,” Chris pointed out. “Too far back. Try a couple of ranging shots at the ridge and I bet they won’t reach. The 203s over the hills there would have covered it but they’ve just been hit by air strikes and won’t be in action again for a while . . .” He paused and rubbed his chin. “Now that is interesting. Why did they have to go at the 203s now of all times? See—it all adds up. They don’t want us covering that ridge.” Ron grumbled beneath his breath and bent his head to conduct a brief dialogue via touchpad with one of the console’s screens.
“Okay, you’re right,” he declared irascibly. “The shots fell short and the latest data says the 203s will be out for another five turns. So what do you want to do?”
“What Ray says,” Chris replied. “Send an infantry platoon up the ridge, dig the tanks in where they are and move another two brigades up behind that village on the left to cover. Then, if any rubbish does come over the top, we can act as if we have been surprised and retreat back toward the village. If they come after us, we’ll lead them right into the 45s. The way their shells have been falling makes me think they don’t know that the 45s are there yet. Then we’ll catch them at their own game.”
Ron frowned at the display for a while and considered the suggestion.
“Okay,” he said at last, and began tapping commands into the console panel.
Dyer watched as small groups of red symbols began moving toward their new positions. Then Ron transferred his attention to the other areas of the display and continued with the development of tactics in other places which he had already evidently agreed upon with Chris. Leaving Ron to his task, Dyer turned his head toward Chris.
“You’ve wrapped Hector up early today, eh? Have a busy day yesterday?”
“We were at it until gone ten,” Chris told him. “Those mods you put into the B7 tree—what did you do to it? Hector was going nuts.”
“I was trying to improve his generalizing abilities,” Dyer replied. He caught the expression on Chris’s face and grinned. “Why, didn’t it work?”
“Work!” Chris pulled back the corners of his mouth into a grimace. “I’ll say it worked. In fact it worked too well. He’s been overgeneralizing.”
“How?”
“Now that FISE has realized that Brutus has got some of the same basic attributes as Hector, he thinks he’s supposed to make Brutus do all the things that Hector does. He can’t tell the difference . . . thinks he’s Brutus as well as Hector. The problem is he can’t manipulate Brutus the same way so he keeps making Hector chase him around all the time. Tries to make him sit in chairs and eat off the table and all sorts of idiotic things like that, but PROPS won’t cooperate. Either FISE or Ron was about to have a breakdown so we packed it in for the day.”
Dyer started to laugh. Ron pushed himself back; from the console and looked up.
“The patrol’s on its way up,” he announced. “They’re grouping panzers out there on the right for what could be an attack so I’m moving up a reserve division from the rear to that sector. I’ve pulled our line there back to the lake to close the flank so we should be okay. Now let’s wait and see what they do.” The display became inanimate while Mike and Dave at Cornell considered their next moves.
“There was something I wanted to ask you both,” Dyer said, changing the subject. “I was talking to Ted Richter on the tube coming back from Washington yesterday.” Chris and Ron looked at him curiously. “Remember what those people from Princeton were talking about when they were here on Tuesday . . . about TITAN deciding to go its own way and do its own thing. I know I said I couldn’t see it ever happening and all that, but just suppose that it could. What could we do to make sure that we knew about it before it had time to go too far? I’m interested in new ideas.” The other two stared at him in an odd sort of way and then at each other. Chris immediately went into introspection mode and began examining the question for cryptic meanings. Ron rubbed his beard and continued to look at Dyer curiously.
“You been having nightmares or something?” he asked.
“No. Just looking for some original thinking,” Dyer answered.
“I don’t see the problem,” Ron said with a shrug. “Why do we have to know about it in advance? It’s just like any other machine—you give it a try and hope for the best. If it starts screwing around you pull the plug. Where’s the big problem?”
“Mmm . . .” Chris was staring absently through the side of the holo-tank. “Suppose it gets to the point where it won’t let you pull the plug,” he said in a faraway voice.
“That’s what I was getting at,” Dyer nodded.
“Oh, I see. The unpullable-plug argument,” Ron said. “The only way I can see, if somebody was really worried about it, would be to pre-empt it. Power the net through manually controlled switching stations that are isolated from the distribution grid. That way you’d always have a plug that the system’s got no access to.”
“Too messy.” Dyer shook his head. “You’d have to rewire the whole planet and it’d cost a bomb. Think of something else.”
That issue had been debated ad nauseam at Washington and rejected or relegated to the category of last resort for a whole list of reasons of that kind. Dyer didn’t mention the other reason that ruled out an approach of that type. A decision to go ahead with a program of precautionary engineering on a scale that vast would equate to a public admission of a real danger that the world could go out of control; the alarm that would undoubtedly follow ruled it out. It would be like passing legislation that required surgeons to administer last rites along with anesthetics.
Similar considerations ruled out putting remote-triggered destructive devices into the primary node centers of the net, devices to cut the trunk data links, reconfiguring the net into segments that could be easily isolated and other such possibilities that had been discussed at the meeting. In every case too many people would have to know what was going on and why. Sooner or later the media would find out about it and once that happened the dust wouldn’t settle for years.
“What you need is a supersimulator,” Chris said at last. He gestured toward the miniature landscape inside the holo-tank. “Something like that but big enough to simulate the whole world. Then you’d need a supercomputer connected to it, large enough to run the whole TITAN system. Give it the equivalent of a couple of centuries of accelerated evolution, and if it doesn’t do anything nasty with that world plug the real one in. Simple.” He kept his face absolutely serious, which usually meant that he’d given up looking for a serious comment to offer. The suggestion was, of course, ridiculous. There was no computer even remotely conceivable with the capacity to simulate the billions of operations being performed every nanosecond, day and night, throughout the TITAN complex. In terms of representing the real thing, Hector’s simple world came about as close as would a child’s sketch of a pinwheel to conveying the molecular structure of the Milky Way Galaxy. The question of simulation had also been examined in Washington but dismissed as being totally impracticable.
“Why wait for it to go its own way anyhow?” Ron asked. “Why not plant some instincts in it to start with that will make it want to do the kinds of things you’re happy with . . . like Kim’s doing? Why be passive about it?”
“What kind of instincts?” Dyer inquired, although he thought he already knew the answer.
“Tell it that it has to love people,” Ron said.
“What if it doesn’t know what people are?”
“Tell it.”
“How?”
“Hell, if it was as obvious as that we’d be out of a job,” Ron said defiantly. “If FISE thinks he’s Hector, why can’t a super-FISE think it’s people?”
“Oh come off it, Ron,” Chris chipped in. “It’s not as simple as that and you know it. FISE can associate with Hector because Hector is really only a load of program code running inside FISE. The visuals are just by-products for our benefit. How are you suggesting we turn the whole population into program code?”
“If super-FISE associated with anything, it’d associate with something running inside itself,” Dyer added, elaborating the point further. “And people are outside, not inside.”
“So even if you did give it some instincts regarding people, it’d be just as likely to evolve new ones of its own that overrode them,” Chris pointed out.
“So it goes its own way,” Dyer completed. “Which brings us back to my original question. If it was going to do that, how would you find out about it, before it did it?”
Ron scowled and stared into the display, which had suddenly become active again, He propped his chin on his fist and glared over the top of the console housing.
“Ray, why do you always have to come up with things like this just before weekends? That neat idea you had for a new default-weighting algorithm cost me all of last Sunday and half of Saturday. I’m not even gonna think about this until we come back next week.” With that he returned himself fully to Kursk, 1943, swiftly assessed the latest developments and began hammering in a sequence of responses.
“Our patrol’s getting near the top of the ridge,” Chris observed casually. “Are you in a mood for taking bets, Ron?” Then he became more thoughtful once more and looked back at Dyer. “Why are you taking the pessimistic view anyway, Chief? Why does TITAN have to go the wrong way? It might go the other way. Suppose a mob of mean green things in UFOs decided to move in to stay one day. We could end up finding that TITAN was the best insurance we ever bought . . . It could turn out to be a bloody good general. As far as I can see, the whole thing could just as easily turn out to be for the better as for the worse.”
While Dyer thought the proposition over, the small red square reached the crest of the ridge. Immediately a mass of tightly clustered blue symbols appeared on the previously empty stretch of terrain beyond.
“Bloody hell!” Chris exclaimed. “What did I tell you! They’ve got a whole army there! We need a new fire plan—fast!” Ron went frantically to work on the console. Chris studied the position for a few more seconds and changed the subject back again without looking up. “It’s fifty-fifty, isn’t it, Ray?” he said.
“Probably,” Dyer agreed. “But the stakes are a lot higher than when you’re betting on what’s over the ridge, aren’t they.” He paused. Chris caught the tone of his voice and looked up curiously. “Look at it this way,” Dyer suggested. “You’ve got a house full of young kids and somebody’s just given them a one-month-old animal from some other planet as a pet. Right now it’s cute and cuddly but nobody knows what it’s going to grow up into. And since you don’t know anything about it, it might grow up overnight for all you know. Now . . . it’s a fifty-fifty risk, but would you be prepared to take it?”
Chris pondered on the problem for a long time.
“There’s only one safe way,” he said eventually. “You have to take it out of the house and let it grow up somewhere else . . . in a zoo maybe.” He shrugged. “It’s the only way you can avoid having to take the risk.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Dyer said. “There isn’t any zoo. Your family lives on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. That’s all there is. There isn’t anywhere else to take it.”
“Then you have to get rid of it. There’s no other way.”
“Not so easy. The kids wouldn’t stand for that.”
Chris gave a long sigh and shook his head slowly.
“In that case, if you want to be sure they’ll be okay, you’d better make damn sure you teach them how to look after themselves before it grows up,” he offered. “Just in case it comes to the worst . . .”