“Compulsion loop?”
“You know,” Noonan said. “The thing that makes a player keep playing, gets them hooked on the game, so to speak.”
“You actually call it that? The compulsion loop?”
“Oh, yeah,” Noonan said. “It’s a vital part of the game. Otherwise, everyone might just go outside and play soccer.”
Father Pat gave a resigned sigh. That was a discussion for another time. “So your software has something to do with artificial intelligence?”
“That’s exactly what it is. To be honest, we didn’t develop it. We developed the computer that developed it. The idea is to give the NPC — your partner in the video game, if you will — some kind of reward for moving forward.”
“And your Calliope goes beyond that?”
“There’ve been a hell of a… sorry, a heck of a lot of advancements into AI, but this is beyond the next big thing.” Noonan became more animated as he spoke, absent the plodding fatigue that he’d arrived with, now that he was talking about something important to him. “As it is, once a game learns how to play, say, chess, the computer is pretty much unstoppable when you tell it to play. NPCs in modern video games can seem pretty lifelike in their actions.”
“Okay…” West said, prodding gently.
“The thing is,” Noonan said, “up to now, NPCs… have been reactive.”
“But your software is different?”
“Oh, yeah,” Noonan said. “We built off a Fristonian theory called Free Energy. Our software, our NPC, explores the boundaries. It’s inquisitive, behaving very much like a human player — and a shit-hot human player at that.”
Noonan continued into the intricacies of Karl Friston’s theories, but West’s brain was already looking at a larger picture. Completely engrossed in thoughts of what China could do with this kind of artificial intelligence, he was more than a little startled to find that the trail had already looped back around and they were just a few hundred feet from the cars.
“A breakthrough, then?” West slowed to negotiate the sloppy scree and rotting vegetation as they worked their way downhill.
“I’m here to tell you it’s worth millions.”
It’s worth more than that, West thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he asked: “Humor an unlearned priest for a moment. In one sentence, what makes it so unique?”
Noonan nodded emphatically. “One sentence?”
“As best you can.”
“Simple,” Noonan said. “You assign Calliope a mission, and she heads off to solve the problem. Turn her loose in the game and she will perform whatever mission you ask.”
“Without you?” West tried to wrap his head around that.
“Yep,” Noonan said.
“Would this Calliope perform the same way in the Cloud?”
“I think so,” Noonan said. “She wants to play. Where isn’t the issue with her.”
“That sounds like—”
A withered woman who looked seventy but was likely in her late forties shuffled out of the jungle on the trail ahead, making a beeline for Noonan. She was dressed in rags. Mud and soot smudged her sunken cheeks. The old woman proved amazingly nimble on the switchbacks, considering how bent she was. To Noonan’s horror, she grabbed him by the arm with gnarled hands and tried to drag him back into the undergrowth toward her small hovel. Her animated chatter might make anyone not fluent in Sundanese think she was extremely angry.
Noonan yielded when she first touched him, going along with her a few steps before finally coming to his senses and digging his heels into the dirt. The old woman looked too light to keep her feet in a strong wind, let alone pull a stocky man anywhere he did not want to go. Unable to move him, she turned up the volume of her pleas, giving him toothless smiles and pointing toward the shadows while she chattered.
Father West took a wad of several thousand rupiah from the pocket of his running shorts — it took fourteen thousand to make one U.S. dollar.
“She wants you to visit her home,” he explained to Noonan. “She believes the gesture will demonstrate her poor circumstance and hopefully convince you she is not tricking you into giving her a handout.”
West pressed the money into the old woman’s hands, trying gently to send her on her way.
She took the money but did not leave, continuing to yank Noonan’s arm, glancing behind her as if she had an audience in the trees.
West felt the desperate urge to make a call, to give someone the intelligence that he’d heard. He kept one eye on the old woman while he checked his phone. No signal. None of this felt right. There was no doubt in his mind that young Noonan’s honey trap was engineered by a foreign government. But if that were the case, why had they let him live after he’d turned over such valuable software?
West’s previous training, long subdued by meditation and study, kicked into high gear. The jungle shadows suddenly took on an electric feel, charged with static and danger. The priest hadn’t felt this exposed since… well, since he’d been on the job, running operations in far-flung corners of the world where discovery would have meant certain death.
Noonan had described the men who’d surprised him in his room as Indonesians and an Asian. Chinese? Maybe. Ethnic Chinese got blamed for everything here, like some countries used Jews as scapegoats, blaming them for their woes — because they were generally prosperous and owned so many businesses. Still, Indonesia did a lot of business with mainland China. Mistrusted or not, they had a real presence in the country. West nodded absentmindedly to himself — a subconscious trait his instructors at The Farm had trained out of him decades before. China was the real threat. The Chicoms—Did anyone call them that anymore? — were all over artificial intelligence. He’d read somewhere that they were supposed to be the world leader in AI by 2025. They would certainly want to get their hands on the kind of next-level tech Noonan’s software apparently provided.
West groaned, repenting for letting himself get caught up in the game again. That life was behind him. He needed to get off this mountain. The moment he got a signal, he’d make a call to tell someone with the authority to follow up. Maybe it was nothing. Either way, he’d do his duty and make the call — then wash his hands of the entire thing.
The old woman finally gave up and shuffled sullenly back to the shadows, squatting down in front of her shack — like a spider, situating herself to rush out and meet the next passerby.
“I gotta hit the crapper, Padre,” Noonan said, looking around.
West really hated when people called him that. “There’s an outhouse of sorts just beyond your car.”
He didn’t have the heart or patience to explain that there wouldn’t be any toilet paper, just a bucket of water and a dipper.
Other Hashers mingled slightly uphill for down-downs — punishments for bad behavior or “crimes” during the run. It involved a toilet seat and chugged alcohol — all in good fun, but West refused to get too crazy doing something that could end up on social media, so he was generally immune. He could push it only so far, though, and ignoring the closing ceremony to make a phone call was a sure way to get called out — even as a priest.
He chanced it and moved down the hill with Noonan, stopping halfway to check his phone again. Two bars. He stopped and tried to make a call, but it didn’t connect. West stared at the cell phone, watched Noonan trot toward the wooden structure. Two Indonesian men got out of a battered Toyota that was parked beside Noonan’s car. Then two more, probably Chinese, got out of the same car. Seemingly oblivious to them in his urgent condition, Noonan ducked around the outhouse to locate the door.
Keeping his phone low, West began to type a text message with his thumb. His stomach fell as the taller of the two Asians left the car and disappeared around the outhouse after Noonan. The stockier of the two, with thinning hair and a quiet demeanor, remained by the vehicle. Certainly Chinese, he was probably from the Ministry of State Security, the MSS, China’s version of the old KGB. West had a knack for spotting intelligence officers. The stocky man said something to the two Indonesians and nodded up the hill toward West. They’d obviously seen Noonan speaking with him. West typed faster, surely misspelling words, but not taking time to edit. He hit send when the men were twenty feet away. Still no signal. He hit the send key again, then held down the power button to turn off the device.