Tom Avitabile
The Eighth Day
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to the selfless among us whose belief in something greater than themselves elevates them to the truly heroic. Be they America’s teachers, first-responders, or military men and women, they are the best of us and an inspiration to the rest of us.
CHAPTER ONE
Just imagine them all sitting there in their underwear, William Jennings Hiccock thought, invoking a little trick a politician once revealed on overcoming the fear of public speaking. He scanned the three hundred expectant faces crowded into the Iroquois Banquet Room of the Westchester Hills Country Club. On second thought, that’s even more frightening.
Braving 50,000 football fans almost every week back at Stanford did little to prepare him for this night and he harbored an unsettling feeling all day. This was a tougher crowd than the one that packed the university’s stadium. Even though they were not as physical as the opposing eleven-man squad hell-bent on making him pay a painful price for every pass completion, this group was just as ominous and even more cutthroat. They were, after all, scientists.
Augmentation. That was the medical term.
“New Rochelle, station stop is New Rochelle,” the train’s public-address system cackled.
“Boob job” was what her best friend called it. “An abomination before God” was her mother’s phrase. And regardless of what anyone else said, Cindy considered it a new lease on life. Ever since she was old enough to care about such things, she wanted to have a better figure. Once she entered the workforce, she noticed that all the shapely women were moving on the fast track and her career was … flat!
From a distance, Hiccock did not appear tall. He possessed the proportions of a smaller person in that they were balanced, his height not all in his legs or in his trunk. It wasn’t until he stood close to someone, or, as in this case, behind a podium, that his towering physical stature became apparent. This head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest quality enabled him to peg a rifle shot of a pass over the line of scrimmage. It was height and athletic ability that made him a valuable weapon to any coach on the gridiron, but those were second on his “things I like about myself” list. First place was solely occupied by his mental prowess. Perhaps his being so good at football was due to the fact that he understood every scientific aspect of the game, from the biokinetic structure of the human-propulsion mechanism to the ballistic trajectory of the leather-covered missile he launched from his rocket arm with deadly accuracy. He once concluded to himself that he didn’t as much play ball as “affect” ball.
That gift of logical analysis, which was the spark and magic to his game in the arena, proved a hindrance to his life off the field, especially when it came to women. Hiccock seldom did anything without serious thought. But he often found women to be emotional beings with contradictory actions and mind-boggling logic. In the Bronx, there used to be a saying, “can’t understand normal thinking.” He never accepted the crude and rude tone of that obscene acronym. Lately, however, he realized there was a kernel of truth there.
What does this have to do in any way with what I’m doing now? The reason he dwelled on the great male/female divide was the blonde-haired woman in the front row. Blondes. They inspired two basic “looks” in the average man: the “long shot” and the “close up.” For the most part, a full head of well-brushed blonde hair, dangling down and shimmering above a black dress, was indeed a head turner. Closer inspection, though, could reveal a supermodel — or your matronly Aunt Mary. As he zoomed in for the front-row woman’s “close up,” he noticed that Aunt Mary definitely did not make the trip here tonight.
Glancing away from her and down at his speech notes, he folded them, slid them into his vest pocket, and winged it with a different opening. He planted his feet, took a deep breath, smiled, and went for it.
“When I drove up tonight and I saw the laser beam writing ‘The Third Annual Artificial Intelligence Convention’ on the low-hanging cumulus, I felt a surge of pride. Did I say felt? Wow, that’s weird. I mean, scientists aren’t supposed to feel. You know, after years of qualifying, quantifying, and qualitating facts, anomalies, and iterations, I think we wind up more like … like efficient machines than humans. We adapt to our black-and-white environment, we join the family of exactitude and flawless logic, and we make warm friends of cold, hard facts. I mean it is drummed into our heads that in pure science there is no place for feelings, emotions, or opinions. It is ‘the truth’ we seek, unclouded by faulty human intervention. It’s almost as though the role of scientists is to sacrifice their humanity for the betterment of humanity.”
Where is this going, where am I going? Look at them. They don’t know whether to be insulted or uncomfortably polite. This is why I should stick to the script.
An uneasy pause hung in the room. A few pairs of eyes started to wander off him and onto the curtains and up to the chandelier in the center of the room. One man was checking his BlackBerry. Bill realized, for the first time, how frightening silence was. Back in the college stadiums of his youth, there was never quiet. Even booing was a sign that somebody was following the program, being a part of it. Silence was a suffocating condition. He felt as though he had a corkscrew inside his stomach and it was twisting his insides into a tightly wound knot. He looked down at the front-row blonde. At least her eyes were still on him. Taking notes, no less! Oh God. Somebody was actually writing this down! He started speaking again before he knew what he was going to say.
“That’s a shame.” Heads and eyes turned back to him. “I know you all think that the advancements in AI are just the logical conclusion of earlier steps done methodically.” He started nodding and they followed suit. “But I did feel something tonight. I know you felt it, too!” He delivered that line directly to a rotund man in a tuxedo who had the appearance and complexion of a vine-ripened tomato stuffed in a tight-necked, starched collar. The tomato started nodding as well. “A feeling not decipherable, not discernible or dissectible, just the unbridled pride over how far you have all come down this avenue of research.”
They were smiling now. She was smiling. They’re with me.
He came back more fervently. “The laser-lit heavens out front literally demonstrated just how far our field has risen from the first amassed loop matrix that I was lucky enough to be a part of, to the …” As he went on, he thought in the back of his mind that at least this crowd, sitting there in their boxer shorts, was giving him, the ex-quarterback, a polite chance to score points.
From the window of the chemical lab, looking out across the nearby Metro-North station, the laser-lit cloud over the country club was little more than a glow in the night sky three miles off. However, Professor Eric Holm would never see it, being focused as he was on the end of the one-inch diamond-tipped drill bit that was simultaneously drilling in and pounding through the concrete at his feet. It was his first time ever using a rotary hammer. It would also be his last. He was amazed that he knew how to operate the drill. Although he could not recall who directed him to do this, he felt a strong compulsion to complete the task.
The buffeting noise the tool created did not concern him. Few places were as deserted as the Intellichip Building in the Central Westchester Industrial Park on Sunday night. With a jolt, the three-foot-long drill bit chewed and punched its way through the eighteen-inch slab of concrete and the drop ceiling that separated the fourth-floor chemical lab from the third-floor substrate bath. With great effort he pulled the heavy tool out of the hole and laid it on the floor. Unaccustomed to any physical labor whatsoever, he grabbed at his side as a muscle extended beyond its normal range. In pain, he didn’t notice the pocket protector fall from his sweat-stained, white short-sleeved shirt.