Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) (24 page)

“What is it?” Jacob said, his impatience turning to anxiety. “Stop hedging. What happened?”

The Organizer let it out. “One of our men decided that the officer constituted an unacceptable risk.”

Jacob tilted his head. “And?”

“Our man killed the officer.”

Jacob
blinked several times, making him look like someone forced to step from a dark room into blinding sunlight. “Where?” he said finally.

The Organizer took a breath. “Two blocks from the school.”

Jacob brought his fist down on the keyboard, snapping the spacebar in two. The video connection ended abruptly, and the Organizer’s face disappeared from the screen. Jacob put his head down and gripped the edges of his desk.

He stayed in this position for several minutes, thinking.

Finally he seemed to come to a decision. He turned back to George, who was still patiently holding the enormous framed mirror in place. George did not seem to be struggling; his mind was elsewhere.

“You can put that down,” Jacob said.

George looked at the mirror as if he had forgotten he was holding it, and then he placed it gently on the ground. The huge frame made a creaking sound as it leaned against the wall.

“Did you know that the first computer would have barely fit inside this room?” Jacob asked suddenly.

George shook his head placidly, as if to demonstrate, with the gentle wag of his great, battering-ram of a head, that he simply did not
care
about such things.

“It was huge, but it was still a miracle machine,” Jacob went on. “It could do all kinds of calculations faster than any human.” He patted the chair next to him, inviting George to come sit down. George obliged him. He had been thinking about his next painting, and he could afford to humor his brother for a few minutes. “Speed has always been the thing,” Jacob said. “It’s what makes computers useful. Watch.”

He turned and began typing on one of the two remaining keyboards at his desk, and in seconds a map had appeared on the center monitor. “That search took less than a second of Google’s CPU time, and now I have the location of every police station in Manhattan. With a little more effort, I could find the name of every officer in the city. And if you put a bunch of people to work, they could dig up the home address
es
of every single one of those officers.”

George nodded.
Excruciatingly boring
, his expression said,
but very nice
. The painting was coming together in his mind, slowly and pleasantly. As a painting should. A winter scene this time, sleds on a hill. Maybe in the park.

“But interpretation is a different matter,” Jacob was saying now. “The ability to rise above the data, to make sense of it all in an intelligent way – this is what computers will never be able to do.”

“Okay,” George said gently, starting to get up from his chair. “Let’s get this mirror hung, and then I’m going to – ”

“You have to listen to this,” Jacob said sharply. “You have to understand what we’re doing.
Why
we’re doing it.”

George sighed and sat back down in his chair. “Maybe you could go ahead and get to it, then,” he said. “I hear you scheming every morning with your odd army-type friends on the computer, but you haven’t explained a thing.”

“Be patient.”

“I
am.
”

They stared at each other silently for a moment, and then Jacob spoke again. “I want to explain the singularity,” he said slowly. He was trying to avoid sounding patronizing, and only partly succeeding.

“Go for it.”

Jacob nodded. “If this man, this Pascal Billaud, does manage to solve an NP problem, then computers
will
be intelligent. They
will
be able to interpret and synthesize.”

“Okay,” George said. “Great. And then what?”

“Nobody knows!” Jacob said, his voice rising suddenly. “And it’s
not
great. When a computer can solve
an
NP
problem
, anything’s possible. Computers can come up with new stuff. They can
invent
things. Actually
create
new ideas.”

George nodded slowly. “Okay. Still with you. But it still sounds good. Interesting, at least.”

“No. Not good at all. Because after that, it’s impossible to predict what will happen. The day after an NP solution is like a black hole – there’s no way to see what happens on the other side. Which is why we call that day the
singularity
.”

George shook his head. “Nope. Lost you.”

Jacob sighed. “If a computer could make up ideas, it would totally change the way we live. They could make even smarter computers on their own, and those new computers would come up with even
better
new ideas, and even
better
computers, and so on.”

“Okay,” George said. “Smarter and smarter, and then it just accelerates from there.”

“Right. Now, some people – ridiculous, ignorant people – think the singularity will mean some kind of apocalypse, some summer-movie nonsense about computers and robots taking over and enslaving the human race.”

George rolled his eyes, but Jacob waved him off. “No, I know that’s stupid. Those people haven’t actually thought about it. But I
have
, and I know what I’m talking about. This is my field. And what’s scary, what’s really terrifying about the singularity, is that the robot-apocalypse people don’t know the half of it. It’s
worse
than what they think.”

Now Jacob pushed himself up to a standing position again. A rare feat, twice in two days. “The singularity will not be the end of us,” he went on. “But it will be the end of the human
mind
. All of this – ” He gestured to the walls of the huge apartment, to the contraptions and inventions, to the framed blueprints, and to the countless paintings higher up. “ – all of this will be rendered useless. Obsolete. Our
brains
will be obsolete.” Jacob lowered his head and sat down, looking unsteady and out of breath.

George watched him uneasily. His brother was speaking nonsense, obviously. But he was also clearly convinced by his own ranting. He
believed
what he was saying.

“I’m serious,” Jacob insisted, his voice rising again. “Once you give up the creative spark, you can’t reclaim it. And that spark is all we have. That spark is what separates us from the animals, what brings us closer to God. Sure, a monkey can use a tool to capture ants, and yes, a bird can build a nest, just as a spider can spin a web. But who
designed
the nest? Not the bird. And who
thought up
the web? Not the spider. Anyone can follow instructions; anyone can follow a plan. But when you’re the one who
makes
the plan, you’re doing something ethereal, something that only humans and God can do. Creating an idea is no less amazing than creating an entire world. The ability to invent even the simplest notion, to
generate
something from nothing, is the only ability that matters. And I’m not willing to give that ability away.”

George was silent for a minute, thinking. He seemed to have no inclination to try dissuading his brother from these strange beliefs; Jacob had always been the stubborn one, after all. But George also seemed completely unimpressed. And he was still waiting. “You said you were going to explain what we were
doing
,” he said finally.

Jacob sighed. “You’re right. Here it is. Pascal Billaud might be close to solving an NP problem with a computer, which would mean he’s found a short-cut to the singularity. Because NP problems are related to all kinds of super-complex computing problems. And if you solve one, you solve them all.”

George nodded, encouraging his brother to continue. He didn’t seem to feel that anything had been explained.

“Billaud is the problem,” Jacob went on, “but he’s also the key. He’s the only one who can do it.”

“The
only
one?”

“Pascal Billaud is one in a million. In a billion. One in
seven
billion. I met him once, several years ago, at a conference in Washington. I could barely follow what he was saying. And I’m good at this stuff.”

George gave a grudging nod. With this, at least, he was willing to agree.

“Anyway, Billaud is an anomaly.
He
might be able to solve this problem, but nobody else could. Not even if he tried to explain it to them, or if he gave them all his notes. He’s like a professor working with third graders; they couldn’t help him if they tried. He either solves the whole thing, right to the end, or no one does.”

Jacob paused, then frowned deeply. “Of course, until recently he’s been totally inaccessible. Locked away in some bunker while he works on this stuff.”

“Nobody sees him?”

“Well. Government people, I suppose. But nobody else.” Now a little smile found its way onto Jacob’s face. “Except for one thing. Mr. Billaud’s son just happens to go to school right here in Manhattan. A private, all-boys elementary school only a couple of blocks away from this apartment. And it turns out that Mr. Billaud is a bit of a softy. My sources say he’s going to show up at parents’ day next Friday.” Jacob put his hands up triumphantly, a prize fighter celebrating before the match had even begun.

“So we’re going to go find him,” George said, finally understanding. “You’ll go talk to him on parents’ day and explain the risks. Why you think he should walk away from this project of his.”

Jacob sat back slowly in his chair, and a small sigh escaped him. He waited a minute before answering. “George,” he said gently, “we’re not going to
talk
to him. He won’t agree, he won’t be convinced. And this is too important.”

George waited for his brother to go on. But Jacob was silent. He stared back at him, and there was another long moment of quiet. Finally George turned and looked over his shoulder, at the mirror leaning against the wall. Then he got up and walked back to his chair in the far corner of the room. Jacob let him go.

He turned to his computer, and then he called up the menu that let him place calls. In another moment a connection was made. The Organizer’s face came back into view.

“Yes?”

“Send him here,” Jacob said quietly.

“Who?”

“The man who killed the officer. I want to talk to him.”