Chasm Waxing: A Startup, Cyber-Thriller (13 page)

Josh had long believed
that a significant proportion of Atom search engine traffic
could
be displaced
by an AI that discovered things for its users.
Users would no longer have to type explicit search terms. Nucleus
wouldn’t like it, but maybe they’d buy his company.

Josh didn’t view discovery
and search as mutually exclusive, but he felt that if he
implemented
discovery
in a compelling manner,
the Atom search engine would not be the only game in town. He
believed that discovery could be especially compelling if coupled
with VR or Augmented Reality—AR.

VR and AR were similar.
The primary difference was that the VR head-mounts completely shut
out the real world. VR was total immersion. AR superimposed digital
content, like words or graphics, over the physical world. It wasn’t
fully
immersive;
you could still interact
with your physical environment.
In the same way
that the computing
experience on a phone
differed
from a PC; VR and AR were
distinct computing platforms.

Becca
re-engaged
in the
conversation. “Wow, that’s exciting! I want my computer to discover
things for me. Then, I can quit searching. I get it. So, to
summarize our meeting, we’re not in love with our current AI—it’s
just an open source engine we’ve trained for
cyber
-events. Our entire
architecture is modular; all of our intellectual property centers
on G-Bridge. My co-worker, Ali, will welcome focusing on other
things rather than recognizing cyber-events. You just have to talk
to Samantha about how all this happens from a business perspective.
That’s above my paygrade. I suppose you can work out a licensing
agreement or something.”

“
Right,
” said Josh, “I’ll shoot her an
email later tonight and copy you on it. When
I’m done
, maybe we could
get
together?
I’ll show you what I’ve got.
By the way, is it happy hour yet?”

“
Hardly,” laughed Becca.
“That sounds like a plan.”

Becca’s mind wandered.
“I’ve been
thinking. You’re
a
smart guy. Maybe you know the answer. I
understand how Gamification Systems, CyberAI, and the thought-based
VR controller company—Prosthetic Thought—were down-selected for the
Accelerator.

“
And now, I get what the
General
was thinking
when he suggested
we’re
more complimentary than
competitive. But why do you
think
Shields also funded a drone
company and a wireless power company? It
doesn’t
make any sense to
me.”

Josh paused. “I guess I
haven’t ever thought about it. I think Flashcharge will
wirelessly power
the drones. I’ve talked to the Swarmbot
guys. Their focus is on
cheap drones and robots that provide swarm intelligence—link
ants or bees. But, I don’t know what the NSA needs with swarming
robots.
Their
expertise is in signals intelligence and
encryption.”

12:20 p.m. (EDT), Thursday, July 30,
2020 – Baltimore, MD

National Aquarium, 501
East Pratt St.

Becca nearly choked on her sandwich.
She gasped loudly at the uncomfortable question from her father,
Elisha Roberts.

Earlier in the
morning,
she
Ubered
the 20-plus mile drive from Columbia to the
National Aquarium. Becca and her dad spent the morning touring
the
huge
complex. The Dolphin Discovery Exhibit, which housed eight
Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, consumed a good portion of their
morning together. She loved the dolphin’s intelligence and
grace.

The father and daughter
were
on
the top floor of the aquarium. They’d just strolled through
the Sea Cliffs Exhibit and grabbed a box lunch from the Harbor
Market Counter. They sat at a table overlooking Baltimore’s
historic
, Inner
Harbor. Watching this same harbor during the War of 1812, Francis
Scott Key wrote, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Elisha Roberts was in town
to be a guest pastor at a Charismatic church, just outside downtown
Baltimore. Other than some doctrinal beliefs related to the Holy
Spirit,
little separated
Charismatics from Pentecostals. They were
both
significant
constituents of Evangelicals—the group Becca felt
only received their news from Fox and the Drudge Report.

“
Dad, I haven’t found a
church that I like. I’ve been working almost 24/7 for
Gamification,” said Becca, with a snarky tone.

Becca was telling a
half-truth. She hadn’t found a church. But,
she
also wasn’t looking.
Becca’s heart hurt when she thought about church.
There were so many fond memories.
Memories of her mom and dad attending church and church activities,
like picnics and campouts. Texas was a lifetime ago.

The brow-beating question
irritated her. She loved her
father. But Becca
maintained a slowly
simmering bitterness—or maybe it was disappointment—with her dad.
She was
definitely
angry at
God,
i
f He existed.

Pastor’s kids didn’t just
go to church on Sundays. They lived
church
daily. Elisha preached at two
services on Sunday. After that, there was the Wednesday night
service. Church members were always dropping by the house. Despite
the busyness, those were the happiest days of Becca’s
life.

Then her mom died. Elisha
Roberts, an
up-and-coming
healing preacher, could get other people
healed—but not her mom. Susan Roberts was in the prime of
her
life,
when
the cancer
attacked the
very
ovaries that gave Becca breath.
Becca stopped believing in her dad and God.

After Susan’s death,
Elisha had to leave Texas. There were too many memories for him to
process every day. Elisha suffered a protracted season of
depression. A friend in Tennessee hired Elisha to be an associate
pastor
of
his Memphis church.

This was
a huge demotion, but Elisha didn’t feel right
about pastoring other
people. He
was struggling to
pastor himself.
Recently, when his friend retired from the ministry, Elisha was
elected senior pastor.

Her mom’s
death
and the
subsequent
move, robbed Becca of
her very identity.
She
took
up hacking as a coping
mechanism to escape the pain.
Hacking,
and later
programming,
had a certainty
to it. It was simple cause and effect. Do this. Don’t do that.
Learning the rules was all consuming. But, at least there were
rules. If something
broke
, Becca could fix it. And, she
didn’t have to think about her mom.

In her early years, Becca
wasn’t covering her hacking tracks very well. At the age of 14, the
Memphis FBI paid a visit to Elisha. Becca got off with a warning. A
motherly FBI agent took an interest in
Becca. They
remained close. She
helped Becca land a job as a part-time hacker for the FBI. Becca
moved out of her dad’s house when she was 18.

Elisha smiled, “Alright, Alright. No
more church attendance quizzes. Have you shot any wild pigs
recently?”

Becca was relieved to
change the subject. “No, but I’ve found something I
really
enjoy. I
became the chief game designer for a project we’re doing at
Gamification. I love it! I got to create an entire world—monsters,
castles, weapons. I hope to do more of it.”

“
That’s wonderful. Why’d
you like it so much?”

“
I’m bored with hacking,
programming, and security. Making a game is like nothing I’ve ever
done. I love being able to author an entire world. It helps me see
everything differently.”

“
Do you think that you can
keep creating games for the company?”

“
I don’t know. Samantha
has told me repeatedly that our goal is to integrate with games
made by other
firms
. The game I designed is only a
prototype. I understand. We’ll see.”

“
That’s great honey.
It
’s nice to
see you happy. Are you dating anyone?”

Becca scrunched her nose,
elevating the glasses
on
her face. “No. There’s not much time for dating.
I just met someone, but I don’t know…”

Becca’s phone buzzed.

It was a text from Josh.
‘This new AI is
rocken
! TTL.’
Becca’s
eyes danced. She quickly
put the phone down.

“
How are
you,
Dad? How
was your prayer meeting last night?”

“
Awesome
! We had a great time of prayer
and fellowship at the Refuge Bible Church. It’s just down the
street. My sermon was on Daniel 12:4. An angel told Daniel to seal
his book ‘until the time of the end; many shall run
to
and
fro
and
knowledge shall increase.’ Isn’t that a perfect description of our
Big Data era?”

In addition to studying
the Bible; Elisha loved science, technology, and history. The
latest high-tech advances always permeated his churches.
R
ecently, he initiated a Bitcoin
donation program and was excited to launch a fleet of driver-less
cars. The autonomous vehicles would gather and distribute donated
food. He called the food ministry, ‘Elisha’s Chariots.’ It was a
play on words. Chariots only raptured Elijah, not Elisha. Elisha
had to carry on the ministry, while his boss rode away to heaven in
a fiery chariot driven by
my
ophanim.

Ever since she could
remember, Elisha told Becca that the Bible and science were in
complete harmony. Becca did love the fact that her dad could talk
about science—from particle physics to astronomy. However, she
thought there were a lot of contradictions in the Bible. Most of
all, Becca couldn’t get over the inability of the healing pastor to
save his
own
wife.

It made the numerous
reports of Elisha’s
healings
seem fake.
Some people get better just by taking
placebos
, thought Becca. Becca had
witnessed his healings. They seemed real. But, he must have been
curing people of psychosomatic disorders.

“
My message was that time
Daniel was prophesying about, some 2500 years
ago,
is at hand. Now is the
season
of
the End Times. Our remaining time is short. Daniel wrote his
book from captivity in Babylon. Babylon is 50 miles from Baghdad,
Iraq’s capital.

“
I talked about how many
brainy men like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates were
deeply concerned about AI causing the end of time for human
beings—a time in which
strong
AI overtakes the human race.
Then it can squash us like bugs.

“
I talked about Ray
Kurzweil’s notion of the singularity. You know. The idea
that
accelerating returns from exponential increases in all fields
of technology—AI, robots, nanotechnology, and genetics—inexorably
lead us to an instant of time in which everything changes. They
think everything changes when computers become as intelligent as
man.”

Becca was used to
this.
This was
her dad. “Geez Dad, that
's a
hell of a
sermon. I’m sure people were
streaming to the altar after that.”

Elisha chuckled. “No, that
was just the intro. My point was that everyone
sees
the results of these
exponential advances. But we live linearly. We live day-to-day. The
pace of change is accelerating faster and faster. We aren’t
progressing so
quickly
. God has His
own
concept of a
singularity. Time is moving
faster,
because we’re getting closer to
the end. That’s the real
singularity
—in my opinion.

“
In the first maps, the
Middle East was drawn as the center of the world. And Jerusalem was
the center of the Middle East. Isn’t it amazing, after
all
this time,
that the Middle East is still the
center
of the world? Sure, for a
period of time,
other places seemed like they were the center. Places like
the Soviet Union or China. Over time, they fade in importance. In
the 1950s, we were worried about the
Communist century. In the 1990s, we worried about the Japanese
century. Today, many fret about the Chinese century.