Blasphemy (23 page)

Edelstein continued smoothly. “The Turing test was an attempt to answer the question, ‘Can a machine think?’ Turing’s proposal was this: a human judge engages in a written conversation with two entities he can’t see—one human and the other machine. If, after a long exchange, the judge can’t tell the human from the machine, then the machine is said to be ‘intelligent.’ The Turing test became the standard definition of artificial intelligence.”

“All very interesting,” said Innes, “but what does that have to do with our problem?”

“Since we haven’t achieved anything close to artificial intelligence, even with the most powerful supercomputers, I find it astonishing that a mere piece of malware—a few thousand lines of slag code, presumably—could pass the Turing test. And on such an abstract subject as God and the meaning of life.” He pointed at the transcript. “That is why this is
not
puerile—not at all.” He folded his arms and looked around.

“Which is why we have to do another run,” said Hazelius. “We have to keep it talking so Rae can trace it back to its source.”

People sagged in their chairs. No one spoke.

“Well?” said Hazelius. “I’ve made a proposal. We’ve talked about it. Let’s take a vote: Tomorrow, do we run this logic bomb to ground or not?”

Halfhearted nods and sounds of vague assent went around the room.

Ford said, “Tomorrow is the day of the protest ride.”

“There’s no way we can delay this any longer,” said Hazelius. He looked fiercely from face to face. “Well? Raise your hands!”

One by one, the hands rose. After a hesitation, Ford raised his with the others. Only Dolby’s remained down.

“We can’t do it without you, Ken,” Hazelius said quietly. “Isabella’s your baby.”

A pause, then Dolby swore. “All right, damn it, I’m in.”

“Unanimous,” said Hazelius. “We’ll begin the run at noon tomorrow. If all goes well, by nightfall we’ll be at one hundred percent power. Then we’ll have all night to track down and kill this malware. And now—let’s get some sleep.”

As Ford headed back across the field, Kate’s phrase kept ringing through his head:
It knew. It knew
.

AS FORD WALKED TOWARD HIS CASITA, he heard someone speak his name and turned. The short, slim figure of Hazelius came striding across the field toward him.

“The events of last night must have been quite a shock to you,” the director said, falling into step next to him.

“They were.”

“What do you think?” Hazelius tilted his head slightly and looked at Ford sideways. His gaze was like a microscope.

“I think by not reporting it right away, you painted yourselves into a corner.”

“What’s done is done. I’m relieved that Kate told you about it. I didn’t like deceiving you. I hope you understand why we didn’t level with you before.”

Ford nodded.

“I know you assured Kate you would keep this to yourself.” He paused significantly.

Ford didn’t dare speak. He no longer trusted himself to be a good liar.

“Do you have a moment?” Hazelius asked. “I’d like to show you the Indian ruin up the valley that’s causing the controversy. It would give us a chance to chat.”

They crossed the road and followed a path through the cottonwoods, moving rapidly up the dry bed of an arroyo that branched off from Nakai Wash. Ford could feel his body and his senses revving up after the exhausting night. The sandstone walls on either side of the wash narrowed, until the ripples and twists carved in the soft stone by ancient floods were close enough to touch. A golden eagle came gliding over the rim, its wingspan as wide as Ford was tall, and they paused to watch it. After it spiraled out of sight, Hazelius touched his shoulder and pointed upcanyon. About fifty feet up the canyon’s sloping sandstone wall stood a small Anasazi ruin, wedged into an alcove. An ancient trail, pecked into the rock, led to it.

“When I was younger,” Hazelius said, speaking softly, “I was an arrogant little prick. I thought I was smarter than everyone else. I believed that made me a better person, more worthy than those born with normal intelligence. I didn’t know what I believed in and I didn’t care. I churned along with my life, collecting proofs of my worth—a Nobel, the Fields, honorary degrees, accolades, buckets of money. I saw other people as props in the movie starring me. And then I met Astrid.”

He paused as they reached the bottom of the ancient trail up the rock.

“Astrid was the only person on earth I ever truly loved, who took me out of myself. Then she died. Young and vital, struck down in my arms. After she was gone, I thought the world had ended.”

He stopped. “It’s hard to describe to someone who’s never been through it.”

“I have been through it,” Ford said, almost before meaning to. The awful coldness of loss wrapped itself again around his heart and squeezed.

Hazelius leaned an arm on the sandstone. “You lost your wife?”

Ford nodded. He wondered why he was talking about this with Hazelius when he wouldn’t even open up with his own shrink.

“How did you deal with it?”

“I didn’t. I ran away to a monastery.”

Hazelius drew closer. “Are you religious?”

“I . . . don’t know. Her death shook my faith. I needed to find out—where I stood. What I believed in.”

“And?”

“The more I tried, the less I was certain. It was good to discover that I never would be sure. That I wasn’t born a true believer.”

“Perhaps no rational, intelligent person can ever be absolutely sure of his faith,” said Hazelius. “Or in my case, sure of my lack of faith. Who knows, maybe Eddy’s God really is up there—vengeful, sadistic, genocidal, ready to burn everyone who doesn’t believe in him.”

“When your wife died . . . ,” Ford asked, “how did you deal with it?”

“I decided to give something back to the world. And so, being a physicist, I came up with the idea for Isabella. My wife used to say, ‘If the smartest person on earth can’t figure out how we got here, then who can?’ Isabella is my attempt to answer that question—and many others. It’s my statement of faith.”

In a small patch of sunlight, Ford noticed a baby lizard gripping the wall of stone. Somewhere overhead, the golden eagle still circled, its high-pitched cry echoing off the cliffs.

“Wyman,” Hazelius went on, “if this hacker business got out, it would destroy the Isabella project, ruin our careers, and set back American science by a generation. You know that, don’t you?”

Ford said nothing.

“I’m asking you with all my heart to please not divulge this problem until we have a chance to fix it. It would destroy all of us—Kate included.”

Ford looked at him sharply.

“Yes, I can see there’s something between you two,” Hazelius continued. “Something good. Something sacred, if I may use that word.”

If only it were true
, Ford thought.

“Give us forty-eight more hours to solve this problem and save the Isabella project. I beg you.”

Ford wondered if this intense little man knew, or had guessed, his real mission. It almost seemed as if he had.

“Forty-eight hours,” Hazelius repeated softly.

“All right,” Ford said.

“Thank you,” said Hazelius, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Now, let’s climb up.”

Ford put his hands in the steps above him and followed Hazelius slowly up the treacherous trail. Weather had worn and softened the steps, and it was hard for his fingers and feet to keep their grip.

When they reached the small ruin, they paused on the ledge in front of the doorway to catch their breath.

“Look.” Hazelius gestured to where an ancient inhabitant of the house had smoothed an outer layer of mud plaster across the stone wall. Most of this plaster had eroded away, but near the wooden lintel, handprints and streaks remained in the dried mud.

“If you look closely, you can see the whorls in the fingerprints,” said Hazelius. “They’re a thousand years old, but this is all of that person that remains.”

He turned his face toward the blue horizon. “That’s how it is with death. One day, bang. Everything’s gone. Memories, hopes, dreams, houses, loves, property, money. Our family and friends shed a tear, hold a ceremony, and go on with their lives. We become a few fading photographs in an album. And then those who loved us die, and those who loved them die, and soon even the memory of us is gone. You’ve seen those old photo albums in antique shops, filled with people in nineteenth-century dress—men, women, children. Nobody knows who they are anymore. Like the person who left this handprint. Gone and forgotten. To what purpose?”

“I wish I knew,” said Ford.

Despite the growing warmth of the day, Ford felt a shiver as they descended, touched to the core by a sense of his own mortality.

WHEN FORD REACHED THE CASITA, HE locked the door, drew the curtains, pulled his briefcase from the file cabinet, and dialed in the combination.

Sleep, you fool, sleep
, his body screamed. Instead he extracted the laptop and Volkonsky’s note from the briefcase. It was the first free moment he’d had to try to decrypt the note. He settled cross-legged on the bed with his back against the wooden headboard and pulled the computer into his lap. He called up a hex editor and began to type in the numbers and letters into a data file. The hexadecimal code of the mysterious note had to be in the machine before he could work with it.

The code could be anything at all: a short computer program, a data file, a text file, a small picture, the first few notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. It might even be an RSA private key—and useless, since the FBI had carried off Volkonsky’s personal computer.

Ford nodded off and slumped forward, knocking the laptop off his legs. He roused himself and went to the kitchen to make coffee. He hadn’t slept in almost forty-eight hours.

He was measuring the final scoop into the filter when he felt a stab in his belly and thought of all the coffee he’d been pumping into his system for days. He shoved the coffee machine aside and rummaged in the cupboard, finding a box of organic green tea way in the back. Two bags, steeped ten minutes—and he returned to the bedroom with a mug of the green liquid. As he typed in more code, he gulped the hot, bitter tea.

He wanted to finish quickly so he could nap before riding down to Blackhorse to talk to Begay one final time before the protest ride, but his eyes blurred as they moved back and forth from the screen to the paper, and he kept catching mistakes.

He forced himself to slow down.

By ten thirty he was finished. He sat back and checked the data file against the note. It looked clean. He saved the file and hit the hex-binary convert module.

Instantly the hex code showed up as a binary file—a large block of zeros and ones.

On a hunch, he activated the binary-ASCII convert module, and to his surprise, a plain-text message appeared on the screen.

Congratulations, whoever you are. Ha ha! You have IQ slightly better than normal human idiot
.

So. I take my skinny ass the hell out of this nuthouse and go home. I park myself in front of TV with bottle of ice-cold vodka and doobie and watch apes in monkey house beat on bars. Ha ha! And maybe I write long letter to Aunt Natasha
.

I know the truth, you fool. I saw through the madness
.

To prove it, I give you a name only: Joe Blitz
.

Ha ha!

P. Volkonsky

Ford read the note twice and sat back. It had the rambling, manic tone of someone growing deranged. What madness had he meant? The malware? Isabella? The scientists themselves? Why did he conceal the message in code, instead of simply leaving a note?

And Joe Blitz?

Ford Googled the name and got back a million hits. He paged through the top ones, seeing no obvious connections.

He pulled the satellite phone out of the briefcase and stared at it. He’d misled Lockwood. No, he’d lied to him. And now he’d promised Hazelius he wouldn’t mention the malware.

Damn it to hell. Why had he imagined that after two years in the monastery, he could just slide back into the same old lying and deception of his CIA years? At least he could tell Lockwood about the note. Perhaps Lockwood might even have an idea about this mysterious Joe Blitz. He entered his number.

“It’s been more than twenty-four hours,” Lockwood answered the phone testily, not bothering with the usual salutations. “What have you been doing?”

“I found a note at Volkonsky’s the other night I thought you’d want to know about.”

“Why didn’t you mention it yesterday?”

“It was just a piece of torn paper with some computer code on it. I didn’t know it was significant. But then I was able to decode it.”

“Well? What did it say?”

He read the note into the phone.

“Who the hell’s Joe Blitz?” Lockwood asked.

“I was hoping you might know.”

“I’ll get my staff on it. And also this Aunt Natasha.”

Ford slowly hung up the phone. There was one other thing he’d noticed: the note did not at all strike him as being written by a man on the verge of suicide.

AFTER A QUICK NAP AND A late lunch, Ford walked over to the stables. He had some important business to take care of with Kate: she had leveled with him, and now it was his turn to tell her the truth.

He found her filling up the horse troughs from a hose. She glanced at him. Her face was still pale, almost translucent, with worry.

“Thanks for vouching for me back there,” Ford said. “I’m sorry I put you in an awkward position.”

She shook her head. “Never mind. I’m just relieved I don’t have to hide anything from you anymore.”

He stood in the doorway, trying to screw up the courage to tell her. She was not going to take it well—not at all. His courage failed. He would tell her later, on the ride.

“Thanks to Melissa, everyone thinks we’re sleeping together.” Kate looked at him. “She’s impossible. First she was chasing Innes, and then Dolby, and now you. What she really needs is a good shagging.” She managed a wan smile. “Maybe you guys should get together and draw straws.”