“What is this place?” Lash asked.
“The Tank,” Mauchly replied. “After you, please.”
Lash stepped into a room that was large, but whose low ceiling and indirect light gave it a strangely intimate atmosphere. The walls to the left and right were covered with various displays and instrumentation. But Lash’s attention was drawn to the rear wall, which was completely dominated by what seemed some kind of aquarium. He paused.
“Go ahead,” Mauchly said. “Take a look.”
As Lash drew closer, he realized he was looking at a vast translucent cube, set into the wall of the chamber. A handful of technicians stood before it, some scribbling notes into palmtop computers, others simply observing. Inside the cube, innumerable ghostly apparitions moved restlessly back and forth, colors shifting, flaring briefly when colliding with other apparitions, then dimming once again. The faint light, the pale translucence of the entities within, gave the cube an illusion of great depth.
“You understand why we call it the Tank,” Mauchly said.
Lash nodded absently. It was an aquarium, of sorts: an electromechanical aquarium. And yet “Tank” seemed too prosaic a name for something with such an otherworldly beauty.
“What is this?” Lash asked in a low voice.
“This is a graphic representation of the actual matching process, occurring in real time. It provides us with visual cues that would be much harder to analyze if we were scanning through, say, reams of paper printouts. Each of those objects you see moving within the Tank is an avatar.”
“Avatar?”
“The personality constructs of our applicants. Derived from their evaluations and our surveillance data. But Tara can explain it better than I.”
So far, Tara had stayed in the background. Now, she came forward. “We’ve taken the concept of data mining and analytics and stood it on its head. Once the monitoring period is over, our computers take the raw applicant data — half a terabyte of information — and create the construct we call the avatar. It’s then placed in an artificial environment and allowed to interact with the other avatars.”
Lash’s gaze was still locked on the Tank. “Interact,” he repeated.
“It’s easiest to think of them as extremely dense packets of data, given artificial life and set free in virtual space.”
It was strange, almost unnerving: to think that each of these countless gossamer-like specters, flitting back and forth in the void before him, represented a complete and unique personality: hopes and needs, desires and dreams, moods and proclivities, manifested as data moving through a matrix of silicon. Lash looked back at Tara. Her eyes shone pale blue in the reflected light, and strange shadows moved across her face. A faraway look had come over her. She, too, seemed mesmerized by the sight.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “But bizarre.”
Abruptly, the faraway look left her eyes. “Bizarre? It’s brilliant. The avatars contain far too much data to be compared by conventional computing algorithms. Our solution was to give them artificial life, let them make the comparisons on their own. They’re inserted into the virtual space, and then excited, much in the way atoms can be. This prompts the avatars to move and interact. We call these interactions ‘contacts.’ If the two avatars have already intersected in the Tank, it’s a stale contact. But if this is the first encounter between two avatars, it’s a ‘fresh contact.’ Each fresh contact releases a huge burst of data, which basically details the points of commonality between the two.”
“So what we’re looking at right now are all of Eden’s current applicants.”
“That’s correct.”
“How many are there?”
“It varies, but at any one time there could be up to ten thousand avatars. More are added constantly. There could be almost anybody in there. Presidents, rock stars, poets. The only people…” she hesitated. “The only people not allowed are Eden personnel.”
“Why’s that?”
Tara’s reply did not address this question. “It takes approximately eighteen hours for any one avatar to make contact with all the others in the Tank. We call that a cycle. Thousands upon thousands of avatars intersecting with every other, releasing a massive torrent of data — you can imagine the kind of computing horsepower required to parse the data.”
Lash nodded. There was a low beeping behind him, and he turned to see Mauchly raising a cell phone to his ear.
“Anyway,” Tara went on, “when a match is determined, the two avatars are removed from the Tank. Nine times out of ten, a match is made within the first cycle. If there is no match, the avatar is retained in the Tank for another cycle, then another. If an avatar hasn’t found a match within five cycles, it’s removed and the candidate’s application is voided. But that’s only happened half a dozen times.”
Half a dozen times, Lash thought to himself. He glanced over at Mauchly, but he was still on the phone.
“But under normal circumstances, you could take one of these avatars, put it back in the Tank a year from now, and another match would be found. A different match. Right?”
“That’s a sensitive issue. Our clients are told that a perfect match has been found for them. And it’s true. But that isn’t to say we couldn’t find an equally perfect match for them tomorrow, or next month. Except in the case of the supercouples, of course — those really are perfect. But we don’t tell our clients about degrees of perfection, because that might encourage window shopping. Once we’ve found a match, that’s it. End of story. Their avatars are removed from the Tank.”
“And then?”
“The two candidates are notified of the match. A meeting is set up.” As she said this, her expression once again grew distant.
Lash turned to the Tank, staring at the thousands of avatars gliding back and forth within, weightless and alien. “You mentioned the need for computing horsepower,” he murmured. “That seems an understatement. I didn’t know any computer could handle such a job.”
“Funny you should say that.” It was Mauchly speaking this time, slipping the phone back into his jacket pocket. “Because there’s one person in this building who knows more than anyone else about that. And he’s just asked to make your acquaintance.”
SEVENTEEN
Five minutes brought them to a sky lobby: a two-story space on the thirtieth floor, surrounded by banks of elevators. One end opened onto an employee cafeteria, and Lash could see workers clustered around dozens of tables, talking and eating.
“We have ten cafeterias here on the inside,” Mauchly said. “We discourage people from leaving the building for lunch or dinner, and the excellent free food helps.”
“Lunch or dinner?”
“Or breakfast, for that matter. We’ve got technicians working shifts round the clock, especially in the data-gathering sections.” Mauchly made for an elevator at the end of the nearest bank. It was set apart from the others, and a guard in a beige jumpsuit was posted before it. When the guard saw them approach, he stepped aside.
Mauchly turned to Tara. “You’ve got the latest code. Go ahead.” And he indicated a keypad beside the elevators.
“Where are we headed?” Tara asked.
“The penthouse.”
There was a quick intake of breath, quickly checked. Tara punched in a code and, a moment later, the doors opened.
As he stepped inside the elevator, Lash sensed something was different. It wasn’t the walls, which had the same glossy wood grain as the others in the building; it wasn’t the carpeting, or the lighting, or the safety railing. Suddenly he realized what it was. There was no pinhole security camera in this car. And there were only three buttons on the instrument panel, all unmarked. Mauchly pressed the topmost button, placed his bracelet beneath the scanner.