Maddie smiled as she parsed the response. <We’re from the cloud. Everywhere in the world.> She typed a follow-up:
You don’t know where he is either, she thought. But maybe you can help?
The response was swift and unambiguous:
<Hang on, we’ll make a big wave and bring it crashing down.>
The knock came Sunday morning.
Mom opened the door to reveal Dr. Waxman standing in the hallway.
“I’ve come to answer your questions,” he said coldly in lieu of a greeting.
Maddie wasn’t really surprised. She had seen the news that Logorhythms’s stock had crashed the previous Friday, so much so that trading had to be halted. Machine trading was being blamed again, though some thought it was the result of manipulation.
“It’s been a few years,” said Mom. “I thought we were friends. But after David died, you never even called.”
Maddie last saw Dr. Waxman at a party at the Logorhythms office, where he had been cheerful and effusive, and told her how close he and her father were and how important her father was to the company.
“I’ve been busy,” Dr. Waxman said. He didn’t look Mom in the eye.
Mom stepped aside to let him in. Maddie and her mother sat down on the couch while Dr. Waxman took the chair across from them. He set down his briefcase on the coffee table and opened it, taking out a laptop computer. He turned it on and began to type.
Maddie couldn’t hold back any more. “What are you doing?”
“Establishing an encrypted connection back to Logorhythms’s secure computing center.” His tone was clipped, angry, as though every word was being ripped out of him against his will.
Then he turned the screen toward them: “We’ve installed the linguistic processing unit—withholding it clearly didn’t work, so what’s the point? You can talk to him through this camera. He’ll write back in text—though he seems to still prefer emoji for some ideas. I imagine a synthesized voice is the last thing you want to hear right now.
“There may be some glitches, as the simulation for the neural patterns for linguistic processing is still new and unstable.”
“David?”
All the faces of you—the phases of you. I will never be tired of them; have enough of them all every entire. The lingering light of a September afternoon; the smell of popcorn and hotdogs. Nervous. Will you or won’t you? The promise of the premise. Then I see you. And there is no more holdback suspense doubt. A softness that curls into me, fits me in all the right places. Complete. Warm. Sweet. I will yes I will yes.
“Dad!”
Little fingers, delicate, ramified tendrils reaching extending stretching reaching into the dark ocean that you once drifted in; a smile the heat of a thousand suns.
I cannot conceive you. A missing presence, a wound in the mouth of the heart that the tongue of the will cannot stop probing. I have always have missed missed missed you, my darling.
“What happened to him?”
“He died. You were there, Ellen. You were there.”
“Then what is this?”
“I suppose you’d call this an example of unintended consequences.”
“You’d better start making some sense.”
More text scrolled across the screen:
Integrating placement and routing; NP-complete; three-dimensional layout; heuristics; fit and performance; a grid, layers, the flow of electrons in a maze.
“Logorhythms supplies the world’s best chips for high-volume data processing. In our work, we often face a class of problems where the potential solution space is so vast, so complicated, that it’s impractical for even our fastest computers to find the best solution.”
“NP-complete problems,” said Maddie.
Dr. Waxman looked at her.
“Dad explained them to me.”
That’s my girl.
“Right. They show up in all kinds of applications: circuit layout, sequence alignment in bioinformatics, set partitioning, and so on. The thing is, while computers have trouble with them, some humans can come up with very good solutions—though not necessarily the best solution—very quickly. And David was one of them. He had a gift for circuit layout that our automated algorithms could not touch. That was why he was considered our most important resource.”
“Are you talking about intuition?” her mother asked.
“Sort of. When we say ‘intuition,’ often what we mean are heuristics, patterns, rules-of-thumb that can’t be articulated because they’re not consciously understood as such. Computers are very fast and very precise; humans are fuzzy and slow. But humans have the ability to extract insight from data, to detect patterns that are useful. It’s something that we’ve had trouble recreating with pure artificial intelligence.”
Maddie felt a chill in the pit of her stomach.
“What does this have to do with my dad?”
Faster, faster. Everything is so slow.
Dr. Waxman avoided looking at her. “I’m getting to that. But I have to explain the background to you—”
“I think you’re just dragging this out because you’re ashamed of what you’ve done.”
Dr. Waxman stopped.
My girl.
Dr. Waxman gave a light chuckle, but there was no mirth in his eyes. “She’s impatient, like you.”
“Then get to the point,” Mom said. Dr. Waxman started at the icy intensity in her voice. Maddie reached for her mother’s hand. Her mother squeezed back, hard.
Dr. Waxman took a deep breath, blew it out. “All right,” he said in a resigned monotone. “David was ill; that was true. You remember that he died during surgery, the final attempt to save him that you were told had very little chance of success?”
Mom and Maddie nodded together. “You said only the clinic at Logorhythms could do it because it was so advanced,” Mom said. “We had to sign those liability waivers for you to operate.”