Alison started looking away but stopped when she noticed that Lee was still smiling. “What?”
“That’s not what I was working on all night.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “What were you working on then?”
“I have something else to show you guys.” He grabbed the chair and promptly sat back down. He pulled up a new window on his screen that Alison had seen before in Puerto Rico. On one side was video footage. The other side displayed a long list of text, some of which was highlighted in red. The video held a still frame of DeeAnn and Dulce in it. “Recognize this?”
“Aren’t those the translation errors you’ve been trying to figure out?”
“Yes, they are.”
Chris lifted his eyebrows. “Did you find something out?”
Lee smiled. “I think so.” He turned back to the screen. “I was working on the tonality problem when something suddenly occurred to me. When you were underwater today, Alison, and were having problems, I was afraid we were going to find the same synchronizing errors we’ve been having with Dulce: the ones where some of the translated speech is time-stamped incorrectly. Luckily for us, there weren’t any errors. Instead, it was a limitation of how IMIS was instructed to process the data.” He turned back around to them. “But that got me thinking… what if the errors we’ve been having with Dulce weren’t really errors either?”
Now both Chris and Alison were listening intently.
“Think about this. The one thing that was confusing the hell out of me was that I could see the errors occurring on the screen, but I couldn’t detect any speech related errors in the video. And neither did DeeAnn or Dulce. Therefore, I had to assume they were subtle and still infrequent enough that they would eventually begin to appear as translation drops. But they never did.”
“So, are you saying the errors are not real?”
“Yes! That’s exactly what I’m saying!” The excitement in Lee’s voice was growing. “At least in a sense. After all, how can you have a problem with a cause, but no effect?” He looked back and forth between them. “The answer is… you don’t! It’s because the effect is the problem! In other words, if you can’t observe the effect, there is no problem.”
Chris furrowed his brow. “I think you just lost me.”
“What I’m saying, is that I was trying to find a cause to something that wasn’t really a problem.”
“But,” Alison cut in, looking back at Lee’s monitor. “I thought the computer errors were the problem?”
“That’s what I thought,” Lee nodded. “But then I asked myself, what if the computer was wrong? What if it was confused, like it was today with the vest?”
“So you’re saying there’s no problem?”
Lee was smiling widely now. “Right.”
“And the log entries in the computer are wrong.” Chris continued.
Lee suddenly held up his finger at what Chris said. “Actually, no!”
“No?” Chris looked back to Alison, confused. “I’m lost again.”
“This is the exciting part,” Lee replied. “My point is that there is no translation problem, and the entries in the log are valid!”
Chris squinted at Lee. “How can that be?”
“Because,” Alison said, thinking through it. “Those log entries mean something else.”
“Exactly!” cried Lee.
“So what do they mean?”
Lee’s grin grew even wider. “For this, you two might want to sit down.”
34
Alison and Chris both turned around, then shot Lee a sarcastic look.
“Sit down where?”
Lee looked past them at the small empty hallway. “Oh, sorry. Never mind.” After a chuckle, he whirled around in his chair and restarted his video of DeeAnn and Dulce. “Like I said, I couldn’t find any noticeable discrepancies in the translations. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re not present, but if these were true errors, the frequency alone means we should have seen several hiccups. Words being wrong or maybe a little out of context. But so far, nada. If anything, IMIS is getting faster, which is exactly how it worked with Dirk and Sally on the old system.”
Alison watched the video while she listened. “Okay, so they aren’t errors, but we still don’t know what they are?”
Lee smiled slyly. “Or maybe we do.” He slowed the video down dramatically then zoomed in on DeeAnn and Dulce in the middle of the frame. Their slow motion images became clear enough to see their facial expressions. They watched DeeAnn ask Dulce a question.
“They look like they’re trapped in molasses,” Chris joked.
After an unusually long wait due to the slow motion, Alison and Chris could see the translated text appear up on Lee’s screen.
“Would… you… like… to… play… another….game?” she asked.
The three watched while the sound emanated from DeeAnn’s old vest. They could barely see Dulce’s expression start to change or her mouth move when the red letters abruptly appeared in the computer logs.
“There!” cried Lee, stopping the video. “Right there! There’s one!” He pointed at the red lettering on the screen. “From here, you see that it takes almost three seconds for Dulce to speak. Yet as far as IMIS is concerned, the translation already happened. We’ve never seen this with Dirk and Sally before.”
Alison and Chris remained fixed on his screen.
“And Dulce’s translations have never been wrong?” Alison asked.
“Not as far as I can tell.”
“Maybe the camera’s audio and video are out of sync.”
“Good guess,” Lee offered to Chris. “But they’re not, I checked. Remember, we have multiple cameras surrounding her habitat.”
“Well, if the translations are happening early, and they’re correct, then IMIS must be anticipating the words to be translated.”
Lee pointed to her. “I thought the same thing. But our algorithms can’t actively predict behavior. At least not yet. Which leaves only one more possibility. IMIS is picking up on something else.”
“Something else? Like what?”
“Okay, remember what DeeAnn told us… that gorillas are quiet communicators. That they’re calm and thoughtful. I remember that because she told me about a thousand times while I was helping code the new software to study primates. Calm and thoughtful. Which means nonverbal, something else DeeAnn says all the time, ‘most of their communications are non-verbal.’”
“Oh, my gosh,” mumbled Alison, as Lee’s words began to dawn on her.
“You see,” Lee continued, “the system was never broken. It was just the opposite. If anything, IMIS was working too well. So well in fact, that I think IMIS has begun translating a language with Dulce on a level that humans can’t even detect!”
Alison and Chris stared at Lee before finally turning to each other. They wore the same look on their faces.
“Did you say an undetectable language?”
“Yes!” Lee was so excited that he had to force himself to keep his voice down for Kelly, who miraculously was still sleeping. “It’s the only thing that fits. Dulce is able to communicate on a level, a primate level, which only IMIS is able to pick up on. And it’s fast!”
Alison took a deep breath. “Wow.”
Lee eagerly looked back and forth between them. “And that is why I haven’t slept all night.”
Chris smirked, with the look of shock still on his face. “Well, that’s about the best excuse I’ve ever heard.”
Alison stood silently, thinking, with the back of her hand covering her mouth. “So, what kind of language is it?” she asked out loud.