“Thanks, do you even have…” she asked, looking dubious.
He held up a finger and then pulled out a drawer. Inside was a kettle, which he switched on, and a container of instant coffee. “You take cream and sugar?” he asked, pulling a paper cup full of small sachets out of the drawer. “I don’t myself, but I still have the stash I stole on the plane flight over.” The water boiling was very loud in the small space.
“Black is fine,” she said. She looked up at the seascape photograph on his wall, “You grew up on the coast?”
“No ma’am… Devlin,” he said. “That’s where I’m going to retire. La Jolla, San Diego, you know it?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“I’ve been putting away every spare dollar I made in China, and now here. Should have enough to buy into a condo by the beach in a couple of years, and then I’m going to learn to surf.”
She looked at him dubiously. Despite the mop of grey speckled hair he didn’t look old enough to be thinking about retiring, nor fit enough to think about surfing.
He held up a hand, little finger and thumb outstretched, “Sick idea, right?”
“California dreaming,” she said. “There are worse retirement plans. But it takes a lot of money to retire.”
He pulled out the kettle and poured two cups of coffee, “Oh, not completely retire. I’ll still do consulting and stuff to pay the bills. There are only about 20 people in the world who can do what I do.”
“And what is that, exactly?” she asked. “I’m told I’ve been cleared now.”
“Yeah, I got the paperwork. Well… I program natural scenes and natural language on recursive neural networks,” he said.
“Again?”
“I teach machines to speak and understand plain English and interpret images,” he said.
“OK, and what do you do for the NSA?” she asked. “Here at my Embassy?”
“Oh, I work with HOLMES, keeping him fed, debugged, and reporting on any intel he finds interesting,” he said.
“HOLMES?”
“I know, you’re wondering is it an acronym or something?” he said. “It’s kind of. It’s like, I’m Dr. Watson, and he’s…”
“Sherlock Holmes?”
“Yeah, the someone I wanted you to meet,” he said, opening his laptop and typing in a long password that he supplemented with a DNA thumb swipe. The laptop was hard-wired to the wall by something Devlin hadn’t seen in a long time — a long thin optical fiber Ethernet cable. “I couldn’t just bring him to your office — it’s best if he’s hard-wired so his comms can’t be intercepted. And you don’t have the bandwidth up there anyway for me to show you what he is capable of.” He turned his laptop around and Devlin saw a window that looked like a simple video conference window. She saw an image of herself captured by the laptop camera on one side of the screen, and a Japanese manga style image of Sherlock Holmes on the other.
“Say hello to the Ambassador HOLMES,” Williams said.
“Pleased to meet you Ambassador Devlin,” a British accented voice said from the speakers of the laptop. “That’s a nice necklace you’re wearing. Australian South Sea Pearls from Broome, correct? A present from the Australian Foreign Minister.”
Involuntarily, Devlin’s hand went to the pearls at her neck. She looked at Williams, “That’s creepy. I was given this about six years ago, when I was leaving Canberra.”
“There must be a photo of it on a State Department server somewhere,” Williams said, sounding unimpressed. “Ignore him, he’s just trying to show off. HOLMES, the Ambassador met with the Russian Foreign Minister today. She is going to ask you some questions.”
Devlin stared at the manga detective on the screen, not sure where or how to start.
“Just ask,” Williams prompted. “Start your questions with his name, like you do for Siri or Alexa. If I need to rephrase your question, I’ll chime in.”
“Ok… HOLMES, do… what do you know about the current political situation between Russia and America over Saint Lawrence Island?” She leaned forward, but Williams spoke before the A.I. could.
“Parse it HOLMES, ultra-brief download, specific answers only from here,” he said, then looked at Devlin, “I’m guessing you don’t want to know everything he knows. That could take hours.”
“Yes Carl,” the British voice said. “At 0400 hours last Monday Russian ground, air and sea forces invaded the US territory of Saint Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait and have occupied the territory claiming they are doing so to protect commercial shipping from quote ‘unprovoked US aggression’. They have demanded that the US enter into negotiations on a new treaty guaranteeing freedom of navigation in Arctic waters. The incursion followed the destruction at sea of a Russian owned merchant vessel and an alleged cyber attack on a Russian nuclear submarine both of which Russian has blamed the USA for. Is this summary sufficient?”
“Ah, yes, sure. State Department has a theory that this is just a pretext, and the Russian occupation of Saint Lawrence is a feint, intended to test our willingness to go to war over control of the Bering Strait. The first step in a possible attempt to redefine maritime boundaries. But when I put this to the Russian Foreign Minister this morning, he looked… I don’t know…” Devlin petered out.
“Confused, relieved, guilty, happy, sad….” Williams offered.
“Smug,” Devlin said after thinking about it. “He looked smug.”
“Thank you Ambassador, that is very valuable input,” HOLMES said. “I was able to take the audio file of your meeting off the Danish Embassy server but I had no video with which to put your discussion into emotional context.”
Devlin looked at Williams, “The Danes recorded us?”
“Of course,” Williams said. “Wouldn’t we have?”
“I guess,” she said. “But you hacked…”
“Their server, yeah. We already had a backdoor into most of the missions in Moscow. Those we didn’t, we do now thanks to HOLMES. Except for the Chinese. Those Unit 61398 guys are good. What do you want to ask, Ambassador?”
“You worked out it was a Finnish submarine firing one of our missiles that sank that Russian robot ship,” she said to Williams. “You warned in a briefing note to NSA of a scenario in which Russia would use that attack as a pretext for political or military action of some sort in the near future and you were right.”
“That was HOLMES,” Williams said. “Scenarios are his thing. He runs them night and day. He has access to every single data point collected by the NSA, CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, Border Force, DIA, Aerospace Command… you name it… going back twenty years. Once he lands on a scenario he tests it against the data, and then refines it as new data comes in. He’s good at it, aren’t you HOLMES?”
“I love new data,” HOLMES said.
Devlin raised her eyebrows.
“I didn’t program that,” Williams said, defensively. “He’s decided that himself. He means ‘like’, he likes new data. I give him broad areas of investigation. Then he builds scenarios and he’s programmed to seek data out, use every new datum point to refine the probabilities in his scenarios. Once they reach a threshold of 30 percent probability, I write them up.”
“I don’t like new data,” the voice from the laptop said, sounding piqued. “I love it.”
“Still working on that,” Williams said to Devlin. “Sorry. He’s only supposed to respond when you page him, but he’s always listening so he’s started to anticipate verbal queues. You want him to share the scenarios he’s building on the Russian invasion of Saint Lawrence?”
“Yes,” Devlin said. “That’s exactly…”