As five o’clock rolled around Mike poked his head in the door to the office.
“I logged you out as of five,” he said. “I leave at six. If you’re here after that the night guard can swipe you out.”
“Thanks,” I said, “that’ll be great.” I finished the e-mail to Woolser’s office reporting on the inventory I had completed and went back to work on the robot’s head.
I had constructed an interface box the night before with two cables connecting to my laptop computer, one for inputs and one for outputs. I was still connecting wires when I heard footsteps outside the office door. I gently placed the robot’s head back inside the box just as the night guard opened the door. He was African-American, a little on the chubby side and short, maybe five six or so. The shirt of his uniform puffed out over the belt. I froze, not knowing how he was going to handle seeing the open box on my desk with wires running to the computer on my desk.
“Mike told me you’d be here,” he said as he walked toward my desk. He stopped and stared at the wires and the open box. “What the hell? You ain’t sposed to be messin’ with that stuff!”
I sat back watching his expression, trying to get a take on where he was coming from. He seemed outraged, so I decided I had to do something to change his state of mind.
“You like science fiction?” I asked.
“What?”
“Do you like science fiction?”
“What’s that got to do with anything? You messin with important stuff.”
“You ever see Star Wars?” I asked.
He paused. I had managed to break his train of thought. Now all I had to do was establish a new direction in his thinking.
“The movie?” he asked. “I seen ‘em all. What difference it make?”
“How about Raiders of the Lost Ark?” I asked.
“Yeah, what about it?” He shifted his weight and looked more relaxed; now he was curious instead of outraged.
“You ever wonder if there was some huge secret buried deep in this warehouse that they didn’t want anyone to know about?”
“You mean like…?”
“Yeah. That’s exactly what I mean.” I replied. “It’s not the Ark, but it’s something equally interesting, and potentially just as shocking. You ever wonder what’s been hidden right under your nose?”
He shifted his weight again. Curiosity was getting the better of him.
“Can you keep a secret?” I asked.
He debated the issue in his mind for a few moments more. “Sure,” he replied almost reluctantly, “what is it?” I quickly debated how much I should actually tell him. Then I thought, what the hell. I waved him over and pointed into the box containing the robot’s head. He approached slowly, his mouth dropping open as he looked into the box.
“They found it on the moon, back in seventy two on the last Apollo mission. NASA didn’t want anybody to know what they found, so they buried it here in the warehouse.”
“This for real, man?” he asked slowly.
“Put your hand on it.” I replied.
He reached out tentatively and slowly touched the robot’s head. He drew his hand back quickly and looked up at me.
“It’s a hundred percent real.” I said.
“Does it work?” He seemed almost as curious as I was now.
“Don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“I always thought sumptun secret was hidden away back here, but whit the size of this place ya never know where to start lookin. Where was it?”
“In the Moon Room.”
“The what?” he asked. The moon room was turning out to be one of the best kept secrets in the entire place.
“You mean they never showed you the Moon Room?” I asked.
“Nah, man, they dint show me shit; just gave me these rounds to make and that was it.”
I smiled at how excited he was. This could turn out to be a fun assignment after all.
“Come on, I’ll give you the tour.” I opened the door to the Moon Room and took him up and down the aisles.
“These real moon rocks?” he asked.
“Yep. The real deal.”
“God, this is so cool. Can’t wait to tell Moniesha. She’s my wife.”
I began to wonder if this whole thing was starting to get out of control. “You can tell her about the Moon Room but the robot’s head is our secret, right?”
“Yeah,” he replied quickly, “she don’t need to know ‘bout that, but this is just so cool.”
“I’m Carl,” I said as I held out my hand.
“Leroy,” he replied shaking my hand, “Leroy Simms.” From the size of the smile on Leroy’s face I figured I had a friend I could count on.
I didn’t want to keep hooking up and disconnecting the wires to the robot’s head every day. Leroy made a wooden box where I could store the whole thing as one assembly. We even invented a new ICN for it so it wouldn’t look out of place in the Moon Room. Leroy liked pizza so I sprang for a delivery every night around eleven. That meant I was back to bringing my own sandwiches for lunch, but it seemed like a reasonable tradeoff to me.
Progress was slow. I didn’t know how much voltage the robot’s head was designed to handle, so I started out low and gradually kept increasing the power to the robot’s head as I sent signals into various input wires and watched the output wires for any activity. For the next two nights nothing happened. Then I started getting signals on some of the output wires. They showed up on the computer screen as random symbols; arrows, spaces, flashing letters in various colors. It all appeared random but my gut told me it wasn’t.
I wrote a program to feed information from the output wires back into the input wires and record any repeating sequences. It wouldn’t tell me what the robot’s head was trying to do, but it would give me some kind of insight into the type of code that was being used. I also wrote another program to search the accumulating database of information being exchanged in and out of the robot’s head for patterns that might mean something. So far nothing was making any sense, but something was working inside the robot’s head; that much was certain. Then suddenly the signals on the output wires stopped. I waited. Nothing. Did it finally die? This was going to require deeper thought, so I packed the whole thing up and put it back in the box.
The following night I hooked the robot’s head back up to the power supply and turned everything on. I wanted to try something different but was having trouble deciding on just what I would do. It was then I noticed a short blip on the output line from the robot’s head. A few seconds later, another blip. Short sections of code were being sent by the robot’s head to my computer. I tried to see what it was sending, but nothing made any sense. Then I reduced the signals down to their binary code level. It was machine language, the system of ones and zeros that runs the computer. The robot’s head was testing the operating system of my computer by sending operational commands to the processor chip and observing the response.
Within a few minutes, small code fragments began appearing on the lines running to the inputs in the robot’s head. It was learning how my computer system worked. I watched in awe as the volume of data gradually increased between the robot’s head and my laptop computer. I sat there, totally fascinated at what was happening. Then eventually everything stopped again. My guess was, it had learned everything that was on my laptop.