UIM 1: We still have the resources of the 4th, 5th and 7th Air regiments.
Kelnikov: I told Lukin it was folly to trust the air war to the same man who had his ass handed to him by the Americans over that shitty island.
UIM 1: We have air superiority over the operations area. The loss of the Okhotnik regiment was a temporary setback. The LOSOS landing at Nome is still on schedule.
Kelnikov: On schedule? The Americans are building an air armada south of Canada where we cannot reach them, and they will reach out and swat us like bugs when they are good and ready.
UIM 1: Let them hide behind the Rocky Mountains. Nome is ours Minister.
Kelnikov: Driver! Pull this heap over. Get this idiot out of my car.
UIM 1: Minister! I…
(TC: Sound of car doors opening and closing and more cursing from Kelnikov. Silence until end of journey.)
The conversation told Devlin a lot, and it had sealed the deal in Washington too. It told her the Russian council of ministers was split. Kelnikov, it seemed, was afraid the Americans were about to tip the conflict over into nuclear war. Devlin was afraid of this herself. She didn’t know what submarine Kelnikov was talking about, but it made sense to her the Pentagon would be preparing for the worst and positioning its stealth submarines within first strike range of Russia. The conversation also told her that there had been a major US attack on Russian air assets and it had shaken their confidence. Finally, the French intel had shown the NSA and thus the whole of the US military intelligence apparatus that the next target for a Russian ground operation would be Nome.
There were of course things which Carl Williams wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell Ambassador Devlin McCarthy.
The first was that it seemed his AI had fallen completely and totally head over silicon heels in love with her. Or what passed for love to HOLMES. One of Willams’ breakthrough coding efforts had been to program HOLMES to experience ‘pleasure’ and to seek it out. He had defined pleasure for the AI as the ability to satisfy the intelligence needs of individuals of high rank, and of course he had weighted the various bureaucratic positions in the US government to ensure HOLMES knew who outranked who. Their satisfaction was measured by the number of times one of his reports was cited or forwarded by them. It was a simple algorithm and HOLMES had taken it to his silicon heart. Williams had programmed HOLMES to derive intrinsic ‘pleasure’ from providing intel perceived of value to high ranked individuals. Few individuals came with a weighting as high as the US Ambassador to Russia.
The conflict was this. One of the only individuals in HOLMES universe who currently had a higher status rank than Ambassador McCarthy, was the head of the NSA, Levy Cohen. But Cohen was a cheer leader for the ‘de-escalation’ strategy. HOLMES derived little or no pleasure from providing reports which were routed to Cohen because he saw they were always ‘qualified’ by other analysts and assigned a low ‘truth and reliability’ rating. HOLMES was finding himself outplayed by the human analysts in the NSA who also derived their pleasure from satisfying individuals of high rank but who were much more sophisticated than HOLMES in realizing that success was driven by feeding Walters with the intel that supported his worldview, and discounting the intel which did not.
In the face of this dichotomy — a first ranked stakeholder who showed no interest in his intel, and a second rank stakeholder who accepted and championed his analyses — HOLMES made the very rational and almost human decision to down-prioritize data requested by the NSA, and focus on the intel requests of Ambassador Devlin McCarthy.
Williams saw this happening, and was powerless to interfere. And he was caught in a catch 22. He could of course at any time rewrite the code and pull HOLMES back into line. But he was seeing his AI behave with a level of intuition and sheer bloody-minded genius that had him gasping with exhilaration. Common to many successful artists was that they had a muse — a huge, heartbreaking love that inspired them to greatness.
Fifty-four-year-old Devlin McCarthy was serving as five-year-old HOLMES’ muse. And it was a relationship Williams was not inclined to disrupt.
Carl was sleeping in his broom cupboard in the New Annex, with his head in the crook of his arm. It was good, solid sleep and he deserved it to not be interrupted. Therefore, of course, it was.
The small rippling alarm was both soothing and irritating; designed by HOLMES to wake him gently, but insistently. Without raising his head he hit the space bar on his laptop to wake it, and mumbled into his arm, “This had better be on the scale of imminent global thermonuclear war.”
“Hello Carl,” HOLMES said. “I need to speak with Ambassador Devlin and she is not answering her telephone.”
He didn’t lift his head. “What is the time?”
“Three a.m.”
“That is why she is not answering her telephone HOLMES.”
“Yes, but I need to speak with her.”
“No. And besides, you shouldn’t be calling the Ambassador on her direct line. That’s not protocol, my man. You go through me.”
“In war, protocol goes down the toilet,” HOLMES quoted.
“Is that so?”
“According to former five-star general and Secretary of State, Colin Powell, yes.”
Williams sighed. “HOLMES, she is sleeping, like other normal people. What do you want me to do?”
“I need you to go to her residence and wake her,” HOLMES said. His calm British voice radiated patience.
“Spaso House is five blocks from here. She might not be there. That’s probably why you couldn’t reach her. People do strange shit at the end of the world. She’s probably out bonking her fitness instructor.”
“She is in bed at Spaso House. She uses a sleep tracking app with inbuilt GPS locator and it is currently reporting that she is in a deep sleep cycle which is why I cannot wake her.”
“You hacked her fitness bracelet. That is beyond creepy HOLMES.”
“Will you wake her?”
“Give me one reason why I should,” Williams demanded.
There was a millisecond pause, and Williams knew it was because HOLMES was thinking, in his quantum-core brain, oooooh, should I tell him? Apparently the answer was yes.
“I need you to wake her so that I can tell her I have identified the Russian air force officer who is leading the offensive against US forces in Alaska.”
Carl shifted his head to be more comfortable, “So what, he’s probably put it on his online CV already. ‘June to December, leader of air offensive against USA.’”
“The leader of the Russian air offensive, Major-General Yevgeny Bondarev, is the father of her grandchild,” HOLMES said. “Will you wake her now?”
Private Zubkhov had a grandmother. She was a lovely, wrinkled old woman who lived behind a church in Irkutsk. She had an apple tree in her backyard and made the best apple pie you ever ate in your damn life, and it was so simple. You took the apples, and you peeled them, then you stewed them in sugar and cinnamon water. When they were soft you mashed them and ladled them into a baking dish. Over the mashed apples you spooned a thick layer of oats, and more cinnamon sugar. Into the oven, and bake for 30 minutes until the oats had soaked up the juice of the apples and turned crisp on top. Oh, but you weren’t finished. You took it out of the oven, and across the top of the crisp oats you spooned thickened whipped cream. And on top of the whipped cream, a sprinkling of almond flakes. Soaked in orange liquor.
On top of all the other surprises in that baking dish, it was the orange liquor almonds floating on the whipped cream which turned it from an ordinary apple crumble into a work of culinary art.