Soul Identity (14 page)

“Meaning nobody can be blatantly forced through.”

“Right,” she said.

“What’s stopping them from submitting somebody else’s eyes?”

She pointed at me. “That is exactly why we need to make sure our readers have integrity, and did not get their certification through a two week training program.”

I nodded. Ann’s comment got me thinking: if the same program read and then validated the identities, we’d have to make sure that the program had just as much integrity as a human reader. Well, not the program, but the programmer behind the code.

There was no need to worry Ann about this now. I needed to do my own digging first. In the meantime I could fulfill the promise I made to
Berry
by getting him in the system.

“Ann, can you still do readings?”

“Can a colt find his momma in the dark? Of course I can.”

 
I pulled
Berry
’s photograph out of my pocket and handed it to her. “I’d like this guy’s identity read and certified.”

She put on a pair of glasses and scrutinized the picture. “It’ll be tough, but doable. We used to take photographs of the iris and then do our matches from that. This focus is clear and the colors aren’t faded. Who is it?”

“Somebody who wants to become a member. He lost an eye a while back, and one of your newer computer-trained readers told him he couldn’t join. I was thinking you could do it by hand.”

She nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

“Is a hand reading as accurate as a computer?” I asked.

“It’s just as accurate. Friendlier, too, I would imagine.”

“There’s a bunch of us computer geeks who prefer the technology.”

“You want the reading or not, hon?” She smiled. “Would you like to test my accuracy?”

“Sure. How?”

“We can go to the dungeon and have the images read by the computer, and then you’ll see.”

Anytime somebody wanted to go down where Val worked, I was ready. “Now?”

“It’s as good a time as any. And it sure as hell beats doing email all afternoon.” She knelt in front of her credenza. “I’ve got to grab my old reader.” She pulled out a dusty steel container that was shaped like a lunch box. “Let’s go.”

James brought Ann and
me to the basement, and we headed to the dungeon. I rang the bell, and Forty opened the door.

“Is your boss around?” Ann asked him.

He brought us in and knocked on Val’s open door. “Yo Val,” he said. “Ms. Blake and Scott are here to see you.”

Val smiled at me, and I thought I had died and gone to heaven all over again.

Ann was all business. “Val, can you access our identity and match programs?”

“Of course,” Val said. “What do you need?”

“I’m going to use this here photograph,” Ann held up
Berry
’s picture, “to generate a manual soul identity. I want you to verify my accuracy and show Scott how good I am.”

Val winked at me as Ann handed her the photograph. “I’ll just scan this in so I can also work from the images.” She looked at Ann. “You want me to burn you a larger copy?”

“That would be great, hon. These eyes ain’t what they used to be.”

“No problem.” Val looked at the picture. “Who’s the guy?”

Ann pointed at me over her shoulder with her thumb. “Scott’s friend wants to join, but he lost an eye.”

“Okay.” Val turned to me. “This is going to take us at least a half hour.”

“And I haven’t done email for a while. I’ll go get my laptop from the guesthouse. Be back in a bit, ladies.” They were busy planning their reading and missed my exit.

I walked back to the guesthouse and ran into George coming out of my bathroom. “Any luck with the shower?” I asked him.

George was wiping his hands on a dirty towel. “You’re all set now, Mr. Waverly. The valve stem was rusted and the hot water was blocked. Tomorrow morning you and your friend will be nice and cozy.”

“Thanks, George,” I said. “Hey, I have a question for you.”

“Shoot.” He stuffed the dirty towel into his pocket.

“You said Feret stayed here for several weeks?”

He nodded. “His validation took a while.”

What could take so long? “Isn’t it all computerized these days?”

He scratched his head. “I remember something about him having an eye infection. They had to wait for a clear reading.”

“And he stayed here and waited?” I grabbed my laptop from the table.

“Overseers’ soul lines are old and rich. If it were me, I’d stick around as long as it took.” He grabbed his tools and we left together.

A large sheet of paper lay in front of Ann. Like Archie’s depositary images, the paper had two circles on top and one on the bottom. She looked at me over the rims of her glasses. “Val enlarged the images and I cut them out. I need to verify the placements, and then do the reading.”

She pulled a magnifying glass and a glass disc out of her steel lunchbox. The disc had hundreds of thin lines radiating from the center. “The trick is to make sure we keep the eyes on the same plane. If we’re off, the identity will be wrong.”

Ann put
Berry
’s original image on the disc. She peered at it through her magnifying glass. “Gotta get this right,” she muttered.

Val glanced over. “I printed some numbered tick marks on the enlarged images, to save you some time. The scanner kept them on the same plane for me.”

Ann looked with her magnifying glasses at the large eye images. “So you did. Bless you.” She put the glass disc away and got out a bottle of rubber cement. “Now I can glue the images to the reading sheet.”

Val smiled. “And I printed onto adhesive paper. You can peel the back off and line up the tick marks.”

Ann shook her head. “When I was reading, we didn’t have all these new fangled tools. It was pretty damn hard.” She peeled the backs and carefully aligned the images with the numbered tick marks. She reached into her steel box pulled out a dark green velvet bag. She withdrew a tripod with three miniature gold telescopes attached.

“That’s your reader?” I asked.

“It is.” She wiggled the tripod. “I’ll line this up with the images and do the reading.” She detached a metal loop that hung from the side of it.

Ann placed each tripod leg on ‘X’ marks printed on the reader sheet. Two of the telescope barrels pointed at the images; the remaining barrel pointed at the empty circle underneath. She threaded the metal loop into the velvet bag and attached the other end of the bag to the third barrel. The bottom dangled a couple inches above the empty circle.

“You wanna see the identity?” Ann asked me. She pointed to the bottom circle.

I looked closely. Sure enough, a faint image projected onto the paper. “How do you record it?” I asked.

“By hand.” She reached into her steel lunchbox and pulled out a long wooden carton. “With my trusty colored pencils. It should take me another half hour.”

“Cool. I’ll do my email.” I fired up my laptop and entered the wireless key Val gave me. I browsed to Web mail. I had two messages: one from Dad and one from Val.

I looked at Val. “How’d you get my email address?”

“It wasn’t easy,” she said. “You’re pretty much undetectable.”

“I know. So how’d you find it?”

She smiled. “I looked it up in our contracts system.”

Clever girl.

“Hey, keep it down while I concentrate,” Ann said.

I went back to my email. Val had sent me an online card thanking me for a great night. I returned the favor with my own private note.

I clicked Dad’s message. He had forwarded a list of questions from Jane Watson about my airport report, along with her proposed solution for fixing the security hole at the airport exit. I answered the questions and wrote that her plan looked good.

I closed the laptop. “How’s the reading coming, Ann?”

“Just finished.” She put down her colored pencils and shook her head. “I may be out of practice, but this here image is balls-on accurate.”

“I’ll print out the system generated identity,” Val said, “Then we can compare.”

Val came back with the printed reader sheet and laid it down next to Ann’s hand-drawn sheet. “Uh oh,” she said.

I looked at the two identities. They were different. In fact, they were not even close. “Um, Ann, what were you saying about accuracy?” I asked.

Ann looked at the papers. “No way. My identity is accurate.” She used her magnifying glass to look at both sets of eye images. “Our eyes match, so one of us must be wrong.”

“Let’s both run them again,” Val said. “Maybe one of us goofed.”

“One of us meaning me?” Ann asked. “I doubt it. But in the interests of accuracy, let’s see. Print me some more images, would you?”

“I’ll surf while I wait,” I said. Again they weren’t listening. Time to see what I could learn about Valentina Nikolskaya. I found some postings she made to email distribution lists, a couple papers she co-authored at a previous job, her contributions to her alumni association, and a leftover Web page from a university course seven years before. Nothing earth shattering.

Ann was still coloring her identity, so I searched for Andre Feret. The name was more common than I had imagined. I checked images too, but I didn’t find anybody matching the portrait I had seen in the lobby.

“I’m done,” Ann said. “Let’s see where we are.” She held her two reader sheets up in the air. “Just like I said, my two images match.”

Val had just returned with her printout. “So do mine.”

The three of us looked at each other from across the table. “So why are your two identities different?” I asked.

Ann shrugged. “Maybe I am out of practice. But I can’t believe I’m consistently out of practice.”

“Could your reader be broken?” Val asked.

Ann picked up the tripod and looked down the barrels. “I don’t think so,” she said. “There’s no moving parts inside—just some prisms, lenses, and mirrors.” She held out her hand. “Let me see your computer sheet, hon.” She scrutinized it. “Did the computer match to an existing line?”

Val shook her head.

“I wrote a little program last week which also calculated soul identities,” I said.

They both looked at me.

“I was trying to figure out what the reader did,” I said. “I have the program here on my laptop. Let’s run mine and see what happens.”

“You’re such a geek.” Val smiled. “I’ll get you the images.” She saved them to a USB key. I copied them to my computer and loaded my program. I clicked the delta button, set my slider, and the identity appeared on the screen.

“Here we go.” I turned my laptop so they could see.

“Ha! Scott, you are such a darling.” Ann held her reader sheet next to the laptop screen. “Mine matches yours perfectly.”

The two were identical. I turned to Val. “What’s wrong with your program?”

“Nothing.” She looked troubled.

Ann looked from Val to me. “What do we do now?”

“Val, could you check who this identity matches?” I saved it to the USB key.

Val loaded it to her screen. She dragged the image onto a match icon, and a window popped up.

“Matching, please be patient,” I read. I looked at Val. “How long does it take?”

“The match program turns the identity into a list of shapes with their color, size, rotation, and location,” she said. “That takes a few seconds to work out. Then it calculates twenty bit hash values from this list of data.”

Hash values distributed large amounts of information into a smaller number of buckets. Instead of trying to match on the trillions of combinations that fifty or so shapes could make, they narrowed down the list to match on a little over one million individual values. “How many identities do you have in your database?” I asked.

“Over fifty million,” Val said.

“
Fifty million
? Archie said you have two million active members.”

“Did he tell you about his optometrist project?” Ann asked.

“He mentioned it. I didn’t realize you were keeping non-matches.”

“We only keep the identity, name, location, and time for our soul cycle research,” Val said. “If we do find a match, we also keep the original images, and the names of the reader, recruiter, and soul seeker.”

I did some mental calculations. It was one heck of a database running here. “Still, this first cut of matching by the hash should filter out all but fifty or so possibles, right?”

“Right. But I said that we calculate hash
values
, not just one value. We calculate three hundred sixty hash values for each soul identity match.” She smiled at me. “Can you tell me why?”

“Nope.” Then it hit me. “Wait, I do. Because you don’t know which way is up, right?”

“
Molodets
,” Val said. “That’s
good boy
in Russian. Our readers only made sure the eyes lined up, but we don’t know the orientation of the images or the identities. So we run through all three hundred sixty hashes. That gives us somewhere around eighteen thousand checks. It takes thirty seconds at most.”

“How long have you been using this hash index system?” I asked.

“Ten years now,” Ann said. “It was a big project we did right before Y2K, when we upgraded the readers.”

“Hey, we have a match,” Val said. “And the winner is—” She looked at the screen and put her hand over her mouth.

Ann came behind her and looked. “It can’t be.” She shook her head. “There has to be a mistake.”

I got up and looked. Underneath the identity image it read, “Match found: Soul line #26. Current carrier: Andre Feret.”