“Thanks,” DeeAnn gave Alison a devious smile. “You want to come in and do some laps with Dulce?”
Alison laughed. “I would if I could, but I need to make sure everything is ready for Thursday. It’s a big day,” she added, with a wink.
“Gotcha, have fun.” DeeAnn waved and stepped back from the glass, pushing the button again on her vest. She looked down at Dulce, who was smiling up at her. “Okay, one more chase.”
Alison watched DeeAnn run away after Dulce, hopelessly outmatched. She still marveled at what Lee and Juan had done, with help from IBM, of course. The mobile unit was amazing, providing it stayed within wireless range of the IMIS system. But as incredible as the vest was, it almost seemed trite compared to what Lee and Juan were working on now: an improved vest that was also waterproof.
5
Dulce sat on the ground, across from DeeAnn, studying the large board in front of her. Her small brown legs bowed in front of her as she reached down with her thick fingers and spun the wooden dial on the board. It was a game that DeeAnn had built to teach colors and shapes.
The oversized dial stopped turning above a large red triangle, which made Dulce clap her hands. She loved the triangles. Excitedly, Dulce stood up and swung her arm over the board. She grasped her piece in her dark hands and moved it to the next red triangle spot. She immediately raised her head and grinned happily from ear to ear.
“Very good, Dulce,” DeeAnn clapped along with her.
Still standing, Dulce examined the board again and then pointed at DeeAnn.
You turn you turn. The words emanated from the built-in speaker on the vest.
DeeAnn laughed and leaned forward. “I know. I know.” She reached down and brushed the dial with her hand. When it landed on a black circle, Dulce suddenly stopped and shook her head.
Not good.
DeeAnn opened her mouth, pretending to be offended, causing Dulce to promptly begin laughing with another toothy grin. When DeeAnn could no longer hold her smile in, Dulce jumped over the board and into her lap.
Dulce squealed and wrapped her arms around her. Me love Mommy.
DeeAnn hugged her back and gently touched her forehead to Dulce’s. “I love you too.”
Dulce was, of course, smart enough to understand she wasn’t human, but DeeAnn was the only mother figure Dulce had ever known. Or at least remembered.
DeeAnn was already caring for Dulce when they traveled to Puerto Rico to join Alison and her team. In fact, Dulce was just under a year and one-half old when DeeAnn had found her. Now almost two years later, they were as close as ever. It seemed as though Dulce had forgotten the terrible trauma before DeeAnn came along and had managed to become trusting again, as proven through her physical affection. Most gorillas were much less affectionate, or downright dangerous, if they got too close. But Dulce was different. She was naturally strong for her size, but she also had a soft side which made her more human than DeeAnn had ever seen.
DeeAnn Draper would know. She had spent several years working with the famed female gorilla Koko, in southern California, whose ability to learn sign language had made news around the world in the mid-1990s. Koko was an exciting step forward when it came to communication between primates. But if Koko was a step forward, then Dulce was a giant leap.
Sign language was an amazing accomplishment, but IMIS changed all that. DeeAnn came to the research center to prove the Koko skeptics wrong. Yet even after witnessing a real exchange between Alison and Sally, she never imagined that IMIS would ultimately be able to reinvent how she communicated with Dulce.
But it did. It took several months, but when IMIS broke the language barrier, it did so in a big way.
DeeAnn let her go and watched Dulce scramble back to the other side of the board and point at the wooden pointer again. Me turn me turn.
“I know,” she conceded. “It’s your turn.”
Kelly Carlson arrived less than an hour later, carrying a large box containing several pounds of lettuce, celery, and kale, for Dulce’s lunch. She punched her code into the console on the opposite wall and waited for the large glass door of the habitat to click open behind her. She then backed up, pushing it open with her backside, and wiggled through, letting the door close hard behind her.
Of all the staff Alison had hired, Kelly was one of the most dynamic. Attractive, with a slender figure and long blonde hair, Carlson was, among other things, a former scuba instructor, boat captain, private chef, and tour guide. She’d grown up in the tropics of the Caribbean and unlike many people who eventually got island fever, she showed no signs of wanting to leave. She was a sunshine addict and as sharp as a whip.
Kelly winked at DeeAnn as she approached and then turned to Dulce, who was already on her feet rocking back and forth excitedly. She seized the top of the box and nearly tore it from Kelly’s hands by accident.
“Easy, honey.” Kelly smiled and dropped the box gently onto the ground. She watched Dulce tear into it, before turning to DeeAnn. “Ali said you were ready to do some more group play.”
“Thanks, yes. Maybe in thirty minutes?”
“Sure,” Kelly nodded. “I’ll be back in a few. I’ve got to check a few things on the boat.”
DeeAnn propped herself up onto her knees in the soft dirt, watching Dulce eat her lunch. With a sudden, playful push, she forced Dulce’s small forty-pound frame off her feet, causing her to roll onto her hindquarters. Behind her, DeeAnn quickly snuck a piece of celery from the box and took a bite. Dulce pulled her own stalk from her mouth and stared back questioningly until she watched DeeAnn take another bite and make a funny face. Dulce snorted at her and laughed.
Not far away, inside the lab, Lee was watching them on his monitor. He and Juan had completed the diagnostics on the new vest and were now waiting for the data to finish uploading.
He wasn’t watching DeeAnn and Dulce live. Instead Lee was studying previous video segments that IMIS had recorded. But Lee had a problem. A big one.
Along with the current video segment, the right side of his screen displayed a window with detailed system log information. As he clicked on various log entries, the corresponding video and set of changing pixels would be highlighted, showing the area IMIS had zoomed in on while recording.
Lee put his hand over his mouth and tapped his cheek, struggling to understand what was causing the problem. Some of the logs and video sequences appeared to be out of sync, and he couldn’t find a reason for it. In other words, it was happening so infrequently that he was unable to predict it, let alone recreate it, which meant troubleshooting was extraordinarily difficult. And if he couldn’t isolate the cause or at least a reliable pointer, he could not even begin to fix it.
Because of this, his anxiety was silently growing. It was looking more and more likely that something was seriously wrong with the new computer code on IMIS. Like the original system, IBM had helped program the code for the entire system, including the artificial intelligence based algorithms. However, when they added the complication of studying a primate, in addition to dolphins, part of the system needed to be reprogrammed.
Primates were much more expressive and the vast majority of their communication happened on a much more subtle level. Facial expressions alone were something IMIS never had to track with Dirk and Sally. Dolphins simply didn’t have the myriad muscles in their faces as humans and primates did. Instead, IMIS tracked everything else such as whistles, clicks, and even physical movements. And even those took years to record and process. Yet in the end, from a technological standpoint, the original efforts to translate the dolphin language were in some ways simpler than primates.