Ben nodded, suppressing the burning desire to explain why that simply wasn’t possible.
“I heard you were going to use some Cray time this afternoon?” she said, referring to the Cray SV1 Supercomputer in Uniwave’s North Carolina headquarters, which had to be accessed through a fiber-optic link.
“Just testing a wild theory.”
“What is it?”
“Embarrassing, if I’m wrong, which I probably am.”
“Okay,” she replied, handing him the folders and swinging out of his cubicle.
Ben checked his watch. The Cray reservation was for 4 P.M. Anchorage time, which was in less than ten minutes. He thought about the fact that he’d allowed himself nothing to eat since morning, and filed it away. Food he could take care of later. This was far more important.
He picked up the folder carrying the disks he’d been carefully programing for three hours and quickly left the offices through the side door, not wanting to talk to anyone else.
The previous night had been a never-ending series of short naps broken by hours of pacing around the house. He’d tried to think through a growing list of disturbing problems, starting with his rising concern about whether he’d revealed too much to Nelson Oolokvit.
By 5 A.M., with no magic answers forthcoming and the shroud of depression looming over him once more, Ben had sat down at Lisa’s prized cherrywood desk in the living room and pulled out the last six remaining sheets of the heavyweight Crane stationery she’d bought so long ago in an attempt to be socially proper. He’d found his aging fountain pen and inserted an ink cartridge before composing his thoughts and inscribing a simple will, formally providing for Schroedinger and leaving all his worldly goods to his sister, Phyllis. A brief letter to Phyllis followed. She had dutifully produced three children — two girls and a boy — for the severe, federal-bureaucrat husband she’d married — a man who spent his life deeply worried that somewhere, someone might be having fun. Ben loved his sister and the kids, but couldn’t stand to be around someone anal enough to take offense when a brother-in-law’s thoughts were out of what he considered to be proper order. Phyllis could use or dispose of his personal effects as she saw fit, but it was important to Ben that anything he left her and whatever cash could be squeezed from his house and savings accounts remained her separate property.
He had put the final touches on the letter, and then the will, before realizing that the first rays of dawn had already begun to redden the eastern sky.
Ben had showered and dressed for work, amazed that he could face the probability of his own death with such calm. The test flight was scheduled for 8 P.M., and there was virtually no doubt in his mind that something terrible was about to happen. The one bright spot, Ben had chuckled to himself, was his creative plan for getting the renegade code back into his office computer to examine.
“This is a ‘Well, duh!’ revelation, Schroedinger,” Ben had told the cat as the yellow feline supervised Ben’s preparations for departure. “Uniwave security is very careful what we take out of the building, but they couldn’t care less what we bring back in. So I’ll simply walk through security with this disk.”
Schroedinger was unimpressed, but Ben had spent extra time holding him and scratching him behind the ears anyway, and was preparing to get up when the tomcat surprised him by moving forward and placing a raspy lick on his face. Ben had picked him up to hug him back, not even caring about the cat hairs that would inevitably make his nose itch the rest of the day. It was worth it, he had concluded. Somehow Schroedinger had seemed to understand that this was a different sort of goodbye.
Ben brought himself back to the present as he walked down the Uniwave hallway, detouring through another corridor in order to bypass Lindsey’s office door, hoping to avoid contact. She wouldn’t understand why he was so hurt and angry, and she’d probably given no thought to the possibility he might find out the T-handle she’d promised was a sham.
Good, he thought. No sign of her.
He continued to the far side of the building and slipped into one of the telecommunication suites equipped with expensive computers hooked into the distant Cray. Six minutes remained before his scheduled session, and he spent the time carefully uploading the program disks he’d prepared before sitting back in thought to reexamine his logic.
The renegade code had been in the Gulfstream’s on-board computer three nights before, and it had almost killed them. He was sure of that now. A circuit board malfunction simply wasn’t enough to explain the jet’s actions. Someone had planted the code, then — when Ben had come too close to the truth — that same someone had pulled the code out of the master program and sanitized all the remaining copies to make it appear as if it’d never existed. That meant that whoever it was enjoyed open access to his lab, the computers, and the building!
But he’d not only seen the renegade code, he had a copy of it. All three thousand — plus lines of the code were on one of the uploaded disks with instructions to the Cray to compare the dizzying mass of computer instructions with every type of so-called sub-routine the Cray could reference. He’d already taken the code apart and put it back together several times, as well as compared it with vast libraries of software codes, but he’d failed to figure out what the set of instructions was trying to get the computer — or the aircraft — to do.
The Cray was his last shot. With its massive ability to compare trillions of bytes in tiny flashes of time, it was his best chance to unlock what someone had obviously gone to so much trouble to create.
The computer screen flashed on, indicating his hard-connection to the Cray was up, and he inserted the disk and triggered the sequence.
Ben sat back, watching the changing numbers on the screen that heralded the increasing percentage of completion.
Twenty minutes elapsed before a gentle electronic beeping recaptured his attention and pulled his eyes to the screen. He read the words casually at first, then leaned forward, reading them again in disbelief.
My God, the renegade code is a basic form of fuzzy logic. The computer was trying to think for itself!
That could explain the descent, he figured, and perhaps even the precise fifty-foot altitude. But there was still the problem of the commercial airline database he’d found embedded as a table within its lines of code. Why an airline database? What possible legitimate function could be served by that?
Ben downloaded the information to another disk and shut down the fiber link with the Cray, then stuffed everything in his leather folder and left. There was no choice now, he decided. Dan Jerrod, Uniwave’s security chief, had to be informed that something that smelled very much like sabotage was in progress.
Jerrod, by all accounts, was incorruptible. An ex-FBI agent and ex-Marine who’d taken on the job of Anchorage director of security when the project started, Jerrod was also rumored to have been in the intelligence field. By all accounts, he took his responsibilities very seriously, working to educate and counsel Uniwave’s staff on the right ways to handle a massively classified project rather than just trying to catch them in security indiscretions.
Ben found Jerrod in his office and explained the discovery of the renegade computer code, strategically avoiding any reference to having transmitted it home.
“Those three thousand lines of code were there in the middle of the master program when I left the other night. But when I came back the next morning, they were gone from the master and all copies. Someone had meticulously removed it. I knew better than to come alert you without evidence, so… I waited until I could reassemble it from backup records.” Ben handed the disk across the desk and explained what the Cray had found.