Rachel looked off into the dark trees. “This sounds anything but simple. In fact, it sounds crazy.” She looked back at me, her eyes glinting. “You said Trinity got halfway to success in nineteen months. What’s holding up the second half?”
“Building a computer powerful enough to hold a complete neuromodel in its circuitry. The human brain is fairly slow in terms of speed, but it’s massively parallel. It contains over a hundred trillion possible connections, all capable of simultaneous calculation, and that’s just for processing. It also holds the equivalent of twelve hundred terabytes of computer memory.”
She shrugged. “That means nothing to me.”
“Six million years of The Wall Street Journal.”
Her mouth fell open.
“When Trinity began, no computer on the planet had that kind of capacity. The Internet as a whole does, but it’s far too dispersed and unreliable to be controllable.”
“And now?”
“IBM is building a computer called Blue Gene that will rival the processing power of the brain, but it’ll still be unable to do things any five-year-old child can.”
“And Trinity is different?”
“You could say that. Blue Gene will fill a fifty-by-fifty-foot room and need three hundred tons of air-conditioning just to function. Trinity will be about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. And Godin thinks that’s still too big. He’s always saying that the human brain weighs three pounds and uses only ten watts of electricity. He believes the solutions to great problems must be beautiful. Elegant.”
Rachel gazed up the incline of stone seats, trying to grasp a future that was crashing headlong into the present. “How close is Trinity to becoming a reality?”
I thought of the black mass of carbon and crystal growing almost like a life-form in the basement lab of the Trinity building. “There’s a prototype sitting in our lab right now with one hundred and twenty trillion connections and practically unlimited memory.”
“Does it work?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because even if you succeed in loading a neuromodel into the computer, how do you talk to it? The human brain interacts with the world through a biological body with five senses. Imagine your brain downloaded into a box. It’s deaf, dumb, blind, and paralyzed. A quivering mass of fear. And thank God for it. Because once a machine like that can talk—and listen and act—there’s no telling what it might do.”
Rachel looked up at me with interest. “What could it do?”
“Do you remember HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey?”
“Sure. The most reliable computer ever made. Urbana, Illinois, right?”
I chuckled softly. “He was until he murdered the crew of his spaceship. Well, imagine what HAL could do if he were connected to the Internet.”
“Tell me.”
“One Trinity computer connected to a phone line could hold the industrialized world hostage. It could disrupt power grids, rail lines, air traffic control, missile systems, NORAD, Wall Street. It could demand whatever it wanted.”
She shook her head in confusion. “But what would it want?”
“What does any intelligent entity want? Especially one that’s essentially human?”
“Power?”
“Exactly.” I jumped as my cell phone rang. The ID said “Andrew Fielding.” I pressed SEND. “Lu Li? Has something happened?”
“Nothing happen,” Lu Li replied in a shaky voice. “I worry about Maya. I think I hear noises outside. You bring her back, Dr. David.”
The bichon stopped sniffing the ground, looked up at me, and cocked its head as though listening.
“We’re coming. Right now.”
“Is she all right?” Rachel asked as I ended the call.
“Yes. She wants us to come back, but we’re going to wait a bit.”
“Why?”
“Because the NSA heard that call. If they have people in the woods, they’ll probably move now. And we’ll hear them.”
Rachel glanced anxiously at the wall that separated us from the trees. “Do you really think there’s someone out there?”
“That’s not what scares you,” I said. “What scares you is that now you think there might be.”
She slid off the stage and looked at the door we’d passed through. It was easy to imagine someone waiting behind it.
“You said Fielding was murdered because you and he resisted the project. How exactly did you resist it?”
“We didn’t just resist it. We stopped it cold. Suspended it, anyway. Fielding was the driving force, but it took me interceding with the president to accomplish it. It was like trying to stop the work on the atomic bomb during World War Two.”
“Why did you want to stop it?”
“I’m not completely sure about Fielding’s reasons. I think he kept a lot from me—to protect me, I mean. But my reasons were simple.
“Six months ago, we tested the Super-MRI machine. We used animals first, and there were no problems. The first humans to be scanned were the six of us in the inner circle. Within a week, we all developed strange neurological symptoms. Side effects from exposure to the machine. Fielding believed—”
“MRI doesn’t cause side effects,” Rachel broke in.
“Not the machines you use. But the magnetic fields generated by the Trinity MRI are exponentially more intense than those in present-day machines. They use superconducting materials that allow massive pulses—”
Maya was growling deep in her throat and looking up the slope of stone seats. I hadn’t heard anything in the woods, but maybe the dog had. I put the tape recorder in my pocket, picked up Maya, then drew my gun and pulled Rachel through the stage door.
Darkness enveloped us.
“Stay right behind me,” I said, ducking under a branch.
“Did you hear something?”
“No.”
If I hadn’t had Rachel with me, I would have used stealth to safely reach the house. But speed was the only option now. I plowed through the underbrush, warning Rachel whenever I hit branches likely to whip back into her face. She cried out twice and stumbled once, but she got back up and somehow managed to stay on my heels. As we neared the house, I saw the yellow square of Fielding’s patio doors. Lu Li stood silhouetted inside them, a perfect target. The image made me shiver.
When she slid open the door, I pulled her deep into the room. Maya barked wildly until Lu Li bent and held out her arms. The dog leapt into them as Rachel closed the glass door.
“Call a taxi,” I whispered over my shoulder.
Rachel went to the phone.
Lu Li’s eyes were wet. I touched her elbow, and the dog snapped at me. “I wish I could stay the night with you,” I said quietly, “but that would look more suspicious than my going home. I’m going to go to work tomorrow and try to get some answers, so I want everything to