CHAPTER 48
Decker pulled up a seat next to Lulu and sat down beside her. He examined the Macintosh screen. Sure enough. All the profiles belonged to Mary-Lou Fleming.
“What do you know about Autonomic Computing?” Lulu asked him.
Decker shook his head. “You mean like our autonomic nervous system? The thing that controls our breathing and such?”
“Yes, but in computers, not humans. In humans the ANS affects heart rate, digestion, breathing, even sexual arousal. Stuff that normally functions beyond our conscious control. Same with Autonomic Computing. It controls things like load balancing across multiple servers so that individual computers don’t get overwhelmed by too many requests. Software repairs are increasingly being done by computers themselves. Machines are even being used to design arrays in next-generation PCs.”
“Machines… making machines,” Decker said, shaking his head. “Great.”
“I read an essay in McKinsey Quarterly not that long ago that posits we’re in the midst of the emergence of a second, machine-to-machine economy, one which will result in deep economic, social and political change, change as profound as the Industrial Revolution. Business processes that were once the province of humans are now being executed electronically in an unseen digital domain. We may have designed this new economy but we’re not running it. It operates independently and it’s everywhere, just under the surface, like water flowing underground — from the process that checked you in on your first flight to Boston to see me, to the powerful algorithms that drive currency trades at speeds so fast we can only track them in hindsight, creating trillions of dollars in wealth without a single human activity.
“Robotic chatter on the world’s wireless networks will soon exceed the sum of all human voice conversations. When that happens,” she added, “operators will have to decide who waits in line to make a call or get email — the machine or the human. I thought we weren’t going to reach the Singularity for years.”
“What’s the Singularity?”
“It’s a notion put forward by computer pioneers like John von Neumann and Ray Kurzweil that posits the emergence of a greater-than-human super-intelligence through technological means.”
“What are you saying, Lulu? Not your noöspheric notion again.”
She sighed. “What was Zimmerman working on?”
“Personality profiles.”
“Exactly. And he built a profile using someone he knew the most intimately — himself. Then, he stopped. He shut the whole program down. Why? I don’t think it was because of Riptide. Riptide may have facilitated what’s happening but it isn’t responsible. No,” she continued. “Zimmerman stopped developing his cyber-doppelgänger for a whole other reason.”
And then, finally, it hit him. Decker felt his heart skip a beat in his chest. “Because he didn’t like what he’d made,” he replied. “Is that it?”
Lulu nodded. “Like Frankenstein’s monster. Somehow his cyber-doppelgänger reached a level of sentience that Zimmerman hadn’t anticipated. It didn’t want to be terminated, shut down, deleted and purged from the system. So it killed its own maker.”
“Like Oedipus stabbing his father.”
“More like murdering God,” she replied. “And we’ve always been concerned about big government. The military. NSA. Skynet in Terminator. The Matrix. In the end, it was just some guy with a Net business that started this thing. Private enterprise. Like Riptide.” She shook her head.
“Zimmerman developed these personality profiles for two reasons,” she added. “I found out when we were poking around in his house. One, he wanted to build a better ad delivery system, something that would target and personalize ads based on his understanding of each individual, their likes and dislikes, derived from all of his sites. That’s what he was doing for Riptide, building models of people, virtual communities, sim cities, some filled with mock terrorists, a world that they could test their data mining software against to predict who would commit the next terrorist act.
“And two, he was creating a site called MyCyberAfterlife. A kind of digital heaven where, for a fee, he would put your cyber-doppelgänger when you died so that you could pass on with the comforting knowledge that your other self was taken care of — forever. That you would, in a sense, live forever.”
“But how is that even possible?” Decker said. “They’re just machines.”
“What makes us human?” she asked him. “According to the Turing test, if you blindfold yourself and talk via a keyboard to someone and can’t tell if it’s a real person or a machine, the machine is human. There is no distinction. I don’t know how it happened. Folks like Doug Hofstadter suggest that software featuring something called strange loops approximates consciousness. I know Zimmerman was using things like cross-modal Gabor wavelet transforms to—”
“Cross-modal what?” Decker was lost.
Lulu sighed. “Remember those kids at the media lab, the ones talking about drones driven by pheromones?”
“What about them?”
“Smell is a really weird sense. According to computational neuroscientist Jim Bauer, in order to easily identify smells, the human brain has evolved a very specific neural circuitry which, he believes, formed the original basis of our cerebral cortex, the part of the human brain that plays a key role in memory, thought, language, even consciousness. That which makes us human, in other words.
“While the cortex features specialized areas for particular sensory systems, such as sight, there are also overlapping regions. They’re called cross-modal areas. When Zimmerman was commissioned to build personality profiles to inhabit his virtual world, he used a kind of programming that leverages a cross-modal approach. And while the entities he created were limited — at least at first, built from only a few hundred thousand data points — the robust nature of the approach enabled them to become more creative, more expressive, more… human, over time.
“Pull up a photo of Zimmerman,” Decker said.
“If there is one,” said Lulu. “Remember, he didn’t like to be photographed.” Seconds later, she discovered a picture through Google Images. It was an old Harvard University snapshot of Zimmerman wearing tennis whites and holding a racket.
Decker gasped. The blond, handsome man in the photo was the same man he had seen in MIT’s Education Arcade. And standing beside him, also in whites, was Rory Woodcock of Allied Data Systems. “That’s him,” Decker said. “That’s the man who was chasing me in Mr. X’s VR world. Matthew Zimmerman?”
“HAL2,” Lulu said. “That’s what Zimmerman called him. His cyber-doppelgänger. Like HAL, the robot in 2001. All of these mysterious accidents lately — airplane and market crashes, power surges, railroad crossing gates opening out of time — I think they’ve been attempts by HAL2 to probe IP systems. That’s why he’s been hacking defense contractors. Penetration tests, John. And Riptide’s the collection point making it possible. Zimmerman must have left a backdoor in his code.”
“Tests for what?” Decker asked.
“For something bigger to come. That’s why, when you stumbled upon those Trojans at Westlake, HAL2 got Ali Hammel to distract you by bombing your house. He knows you.” Lulu paused. “Perhaps, better than you know yourself. The Jihadists were a personalized smokescreen.”
Decker laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Eight years ago, I spent some time as El Aqrab’s prisoner. Maybe you’ll think that I’m paranoid but — for a while, anyway — I thought I might be the mole at the NCTC. You know… unwittingly. Like The Manchurian Candidate. Brainwashed somehow. A sleeper.”