Unpossible (19 page)

"You said he was a cold fish." And Eli was, sometimes. Borderline Asperger’s, uninterested in social niceties. A geek whose idea of small talk was proposing pathfinding algorithms for neural networks. Whenever Cora and Eli were together, Reg spent a lot of time buffering and translating.

"I’m used to fish," she said.

"Dr. Berentz, I’ve been wondering about the meaning of this word," Marshall Lin said. "Is it the name of one of the software packages you purchased?"

"What, Logosphere? Naw, Dr. Karchner made it up years ago. He loves biblical references." Reg could see that the kid didn’t get it. "See, logos is Greek for word. It’s a nod to Genesis: In the beginning was the Word."

"Oh." Lin’s face was still blank. The boy had grown up in Indiana, but he’d escaped Sunday school and, evidently, all television and non-public radio. So far he’d shown himself oblivious to any of Reg’s pop cultural asides. In a lot of ways he was more of a foreigner than Dipti, a homegirl from Bombay who could carry on entire conversations in Simpsons quotes.

Reg tried again. "In the first stage, the mytes exist only as bits, right? And in this network we’ve cooked up, we pass data in sixty-four bits, which are—"

"Eight-byte words—yes, of course. A pun."

"Now you got it. And when we decant the mytes, the word is made flesh."

Lin nodded. Reg still didn’t think he got it, but it didn’t matter. The kid was a sharp coder and knew quite a bit about parallel processing. He’d been a help these past few weeks tracking down the clumping problem—or rather, eliminating variables that weren’t causing the clumping problem.

Weeks into the fall semester and they still hadn’t been able to duplicate the mytes’ behavior from the summer’s minefield test. Tweaking the environmental variables, including sunlight, hadn’t yet driven the mytes into the corners like they’d seen in the field. The model could never match reality, of course—nature just had too many bits—but there were techniques for maximizing the computational power of the simulation. The first trick was commandeering the hardware of the mytes themselves. The network servers provided the environment, but the myte shells computed their own actions, just as they would in the field. When a myte met another, the network put them in touch with each other, allowing them to trade code as if they were alive.

"Let’s try another ten runs, on ten fields," Reg said. Lin’s expression had turned pained. "Yes, Marshall?"

"Dr. Berentz ... " Lin said hesitantly.

"Go ahead," Reg said.

"I’ve been looking at the instruction sets running on some of the myte chips and—"

"You can read that stuff?" Reg was impressed. Even decompiled, grown code was as dense-packed and parsimonious as DNA: endless strings of characters that told you almost nothing about how they’d be used in the field. You had to run the program to see what the code did.

Lin shrugged, embarrassed. "Some of it. Mostly I see patterns. Something seemed off, so I compared the instructions over time, and ran them through a stats package. There was a big shift in the code base a few months ago, even though the myte morphology didn’t change. And some of the code looks human-written, originally."

"And? What’s the changed code doing?"

"I ... I don’t know. It’s been mixed in to the evolved code, and I haven’t yet figured out ...

"I think I know what you’re seeing," Reg said. "Eli wrote the original libraries, back in the day. Some of that code must have persisted when the other stuff got overwritten, like junk DNA. Or maybe not—maybe it just looks hand-coded. There’s an awful lot of code, after all, and it’s easy to fall prey to pattern recognition with this stuff."

Uh oh. Lin looked like a slapped school boy. Reg backpedaled. "But hey! Keep looking. You never know, right?" Lin nodded, his face flushed. Jesus, the kid was sensitive. Reg spun his chair around, clapped his hands. "In the meantime, let’s keep looking at the environmentals."

Lin went back to his workstation and reset the launch scripts. Reg tuned in from his own monitor, flipping between ten virtual blocks of mytes on ten virtual fields.

The mytes scattered and spread in speeded-up time. The GUI of the Logosphere represented each shell as single black dot on the gray sand, and the tripedal mytes as clumps of dots. The mines were blue disks that blinked red when triggered, green when tagged.

Except for the mines, none of the details of the field existed until the mytes discovered them. Each element—each rock, plant, inch-square of sand—was created on the fly as the mytes sensed them. And mine fields were simple compared to some of the environments the team had created. For the mytes’ other tasks, the Logosphere could generate urban environments, force-blooming an entire city improvisationally. Buildings and cars and even people were assigned sizes and positions at random within a set of construction rules. Each building was a hollow prop until a myte crawled inside, then the ’sphere spun out rooms, corridors, stairs, ventilation shafts, rows of electrical outlets. When a myte reached a room, random furniture appeared, and when it crawled into the spaces between the walls, the program provided wiring, plumbing, and obstacles.

Once created, each object was locked into memory for a time, like a quantum particle assuming its position in the classical world only after being observed. Only when the myte had moved along and the system needed to free up resources did the Logosphere put the Schrödinger cat back into its box and vaporize the room into indeterminacy.

Reg glanced at the timer. The mytes lived and died in six minute intervals, briefer than mayflies, and only thirty seconds were left. Across all ten fields, the mytes had correctly tagged almost all the mines. Not one of the groups had suddenly made for a corner of the field and froze. He shook his head, disappointed in the lack of failure. If they couldn’t replicate the bug, they couldn’t fix it.

The screen went black. The Angel of Death, the reaper program—the Boogens—descended on the Logosphere.

Eighty-nine percent of the mytes were killed immediately. In the wall of myte shells behind Reg’s head, the corresponding chips stopped their dreaming. The reaper program moved through the wall, extinguishing the charges in the chipsets, erasing all memory and genetic information.

Ten of the remaining 11 percent were saved, not by lamb’s blood over the door, but by their own fitness. These survivors were the ones who had scored the highest: finding the most mines in the shortest time. It was the time-honored use of evolution to do a roboticist’s design-work.

The breeder program launched next. The software paired each survivor with a mate of the same species, took half of the genetic code from each, and made new packets of code—offspring. Eli also allowed a mutation rate: the program introduced a small percentage of deliberate errors as it transcribed the genetic code to the offspring.

The remaining one percent Eli had named the Lucky Losers. They were chosen at random, from the individuals whose scores didn’t merit salvation. The Losers were allowed one child, while the gifted ten percent were allowed multiple offspring. Perhaps they shouldn’t have been allowed to breed at all, but through genetic mixing and mutation, even a pair of losers might make a DaVinci, a Mozart, a Lassie. God wasn’t the only one who moved in mysterious ways.

Finally, the programs disposed of the elderly 11 percent and filled each shell with the code of the new generation. The entire breeding process took a minute and thirty seconds. Painfully slow, but the best the hodgepodge of equipment could do.

The cycle began again. The Logosphere set down the virtual mytes in the center of the blank screen. Instinctively the newborns scattered, and began to rebuild their world around them.

After two months of Cecrolysin treatments, Eli’s appetite had come back with a vengeance. He devoured everything put in front of him: the bowl of salad, several slabs of garlic bread (a Cora specialty: butter, parmesan, tomato chunks, and those sixteen deadly cloves mashed into a pavement and baked onto halves of French bread), three lasagna servings as thick as bricks, a stack of asparagus, and glass after glass of red wine.

The conversation over appetizers had been labored, Reg scrambling to fill in long silences. Once they sat down to the table, Eli barely spoke, eating with the same monofocus he brought to his lab work.

Watching him inhale all that food was simultaneously appalling and satisfying, like one of those wildlife documentaries in which the alpha lion shoves the pride away from the kill and proceeds to eat the entire wildebeest. Reg tried not to stare. Theo couldn’t take his eyes off him.

"Theo," Cora said. "Eat some of your food."

The boy feigned deafness. Reg tapped the boy’s plate with his spoon. "Eat up, Captain."

Theo absently picked up an asparagus stalk and chewed in time with Eli. Cora shook her head and poured the last of a bottle into her glass.

Reg peeled the foil from the last bottle and wadded it into a heavy ball. "Eli, you were right about the wine." The man had shown up with three identical bottles of cabernet, like someone who’d read only the first line in a paragraph about American Dinner Customs.

On the other hand, the three bottles that had seemed excessive an hour ago now seemed like a good start. Alcohol could only help.

"It’s very good," Cora added. "Nice choice."

Eli brushed crumbs of garlic bread from his beard, nodding. He lifted another chunk of lasagna "And this, this is very ... "

Reg thought: C’mon Eli, you can do it, just one polite compliment to the chef.

" ... filling."

The foil ball shot from Reg’s fingers and bounced off the table. Theo yelped, "I’ll get it!" and dove under the table. Reg ducked down as well.

Oh god, he’d nearly barked out a laugh. Filling? He stayed down so he wouldn’t see Cora’s face—if he looked at her now he’d lose it. Theo found the foil and scrambled up. Reg stayed under for a moment longer, trying to control his breathing. Don’t look at Cora. Don’t look at Cora.

He sat up, smile fixed, and reached for his wine glass. Theo weighed the foil in his hand. Eli stared at his plate, chewing thoughtfully. And on Cora’s face ... the Happy Homemaker Smile.

"Okay! More wine!" Reg downed the last of his drink and reached for the corkscrew. He uncorked the last bottle and refilled everyone’s glasses, trying to remember why exactly he thought this dinner was a good idea.

"To the chef," he said. "For a filling meal."

Eli looked up. Theo raised his plastic water cup—they’d pretended to toast before, so he knew the routine—and tipped it against Cora’s glass. The Happy Homemaker smiled sweetly. "To the fill-ees," she said.

Reg saluted—"From a fine filly!"—and swallowed half the wine in one gulp. Warmth rushed to his ears. His fingers tingled. It seemed reasonable, suddenly, that he should drink faster and keep drinking as long as possible. Tomorrow was Saturday and Reg could sleep in until seven or eight before heading back to the lab. So why not get drunk? The trick would be to pull back just before his head detached and began to bob against the ceiling.

Theo put down his cup. "I’m filled," he said. Cora and Reg cracked up. Maybe she was getting drunk too.

"What? What did I say?"

Reg said, "Nothing, Phil." Which made Cora nearly spit her wine.

She wiped her lips. "So Eli. You’re going back to work tomorrow? Reg said you’re doing another field test."

He nodded. "It’s been too long."

"Amen to that," Reg said. They hadn’t been able to replicate the myte’s clumping behavior in the Logosphere, and if the mytes did it again in the minefield, Reg wanted Eli to see it.

"There’s something I’ve asked Reg a dozen times, but he’s never given me a decent answer," Cora said. "When you came up with this myte idea, what did you really want them to do? You, personally."

"Is that important?" Eli said.

"Well, sure," Cora said.

"Did you ask yourself what purpose Theo would serve before you had him?"

Reg laughed, forcing it a little to smooth the awkwardness. "I think that’s a little different. I couldn’t get a grant to conceive Theo."

Eli was distracted again. He was looking at Theo. After a silence, he said, "I’ve been thinking of Adam and Eve."