White Death (34 page)

‘I noticed that too. But how will we find out exactly what it was, until we find him?’

Tartu shrugged. ‘No idea. But look. Here’s something. He says he plays online. Someone like Kwasi, he can’t live without chess, and he can’t always play against machines. If we can find where he plays online, which site he uses – or which sites – maybe we can, I don’t know, get in touch with him. You can send messages on those sites. You can even chat to your opponent during games.’

‘And,’ said Patrese, pretty much thinking aloud, ‘if you were monitoring someone’s e-mails, it wouldn’t show up there.’

‘That’s right.’

‘These servers: they store everything, right?’

‘Games, sure. Comments, I don’t know. As in, whenever I’ve played, sometimes you chat to your opponent in the dialogue box beneath the board, but when the game’s over, you can’t get those comments back once you’ve closed the window or logged out. The games are always there, but what you’ve said during them, no.’

‘In other words, a perfect way to communicate with someone without anyone else knowing. Even if they otherwise had you under surveillance. Where do we start?’

‘With the biggest. Also the first. The guys who pretty much invented real time online chess. The Internet Chess Club.’

If Kwasi was using the Internet Chess Club, the ICC, he wasn’t doing so under his own name. The ICC has more than thirty thousand members, and most of them use a handle of some kind –
TheFourHorsemen,
Chessticles,
Wrecker12006
, that kind of thing. Not that this was a problem. A quick search of the player database revealed that the same handle,
killerinstinct32
, headed all three time-control lists (standard, blitz and bullet). A ‘killer instinct’ handle and Kwasi’s own preternatural skills: it could only be him, surely?

The ICC, based in Pittsburgh, wasn’t saying. Only three pieces of information were publicly visible for each player: username, rating, country –
killerinstinct32
was indeed American. As Tartu had suspected, the ICC didn’t log tell-type communication – chat dialogue – between two users. The ICC’s admin staff couldn’t even listen in on such conversations, let alone save them, unless one member made a complaint about the other’s behavior.

Each user was tracked while online, of course. A permanent log was kept of every session by every player: time of connection and disconnection, name of interface, IP number of the connection, and machine ID of the computer. These details were kept secret, as were the real names, e-mail addresses, physical locations or credit-card details of their clients. Patrese would need to get a subpoena to force them to comply with this. He appealed to their sense of responsibility toward a multiple homicide investigation. When that failed, he appealed to their sense of solidarity with a Pittsburgh boy. When that failed, he slammed the phone down and told the receiver to go fuck itself.

Patrese hated having to apply for subpoenas. The moment you got bureaucracy involved, everything took ten times as long as it needed to. You had to fill in a form that demanded more information than anyone could possibly ever need, and then e-mail it to the Bureau department responsible, which would assess, scrutinize, and pick their asses for as long as they felt like. Sometimes it took them two weeks to issue one, though they proudly boasted that a few – a few! – had been turned round in as little as three days. There was no point marking your request ‘urgent’. Everyone did that. The subpoena guys were wise to that now (assuming they’d given a damn to start with).

Still, there was no other way, so Patrese filled in the form with laborious thoroughness, treble-checked it – these guys had no bigger thrill in life than sending back a form because it was incomplete, and requesting even more useless information, all the while reminding you that the clock on your request didn’t start running until it had been completed to their satisfaction – and e-mailed it.

In the meantime, Tartu started studying all
killer-instinct32
’s games. He’d be able to tell from their style whether they were Kwasi’s or not, he said. A strange kind of voyeurism, Patrese thought, spying on someone and trying to work out their identity by the way they moved pieces – rather, electronic avatars of pieces – round a chessboard; but perhaps no stranger than anything else about this case.

The Stata Center was emptying fast: the annual Thanksgiving exodus across the nation for turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, gravy, yams, mash, hominy, green bean casserole, cornbread, sweet potato pie, pumpkin pie, family arguments and indigestion. Unzicker didn’t notice. Nursultan had been up to Cambridge yesterday to read Unzicker the riot act, demanding results and threatening funding cuts and worse if Unzicker didn’t come up with something pretty damn quick. Unzicker hadn’t pointed out that his mind had been on other things lately, and Nursultan hadn’t mentioned it, save for an oblique reference about how Unzicker might have turned down Nursultan’s lawyer, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to turn down the man himself. If need be, Nursultan would sit here, in this office, until Unzicker made the breakthrough.

Truth was, Unzicker knew, he’d needed the kick up the ass, and he never worked better than when up against it. There was a purity in his approach now – just him and Misha, Frankenstein and the monster, and Unzicker worked with a purpose that would only be sated when Misha gave up its secrets. And when that happened, Misha would stop being an ‘it’ and become a ‘he’, because Unzicker would have given life to this program, made something inanimate into something human.

When Kasparov had played Deep Blue twice in the late nineties, winning the first match but losing the second, people had talked about it being a shared triumph: 1–1 between man and machine. But for Unzicker, man had won both times: the first as a performer, the second as a toolmaker. He would win now, as the toolmaker, but after that, no one knew.

He made minuscule adjustments to Misha’s chip, he ran diagnostics, he went back and forth on microscopic highways known only to him and the burgeoning intelligence he hoped, thought, prayed was inside Misha. When he was satisfied, he logged on to the ICC. Misha had its own dedicated account, declared as a computer – that was ICC rules – though of course for secrecy’s sake Unzicker hadn’t registered it as Misha. Its handle was a suitably nondescript
repino
, named after the birthplace of Misha’s inspiration, Mikhail Botvinnik.

The ICC welcome screen unrolled, and with it a message.
Your arrival was noted by--->
killerinstinct32
.

Observe
killerinstinct 32
, typed Unzicker.

killerinstinct32
is not playing or examining a game.

Among the icons across the top of the screen was that of a fencer: this was the avatar to challenge an opponent. Unzicker tapped on it, typed
killerinstinct32
, and sent it.

A few seconds later, the opening board flashed up: Kwasi as white, Misha as black.

They started playing. Ruy Lopez, one of the most popular openings. After a few moves, Unzicker clicked on another icon, this time a handful of faces:
Show observers.

{Game 1452 (
killerinstinct32
vs.
repino
) Game started}.

Observing 1452 [(
killerinstinct32
vs.
repino
]:
JDoss solidly chessdennis iloveicc pirahna frankandbeans rodent ndogbosok01 RTE Ditton66 ekmel NapaMD greatowl carlosh99 trule Winsome vova Tellus megchess JohnnyBallgame KnightRider12 CamaroSS
: 22 people.

Round about move 15, Unzicker realized something he knew Kwasi would have clocked long before: this was the same game that they’d played through in Kwasi’s apartment in Bleecker Street not long before Kwasi had gone on the run, which in turn had been the same game Kwasi and Misha had played through in February. Misha had lost both those games on move 20, when it had played bishop to c5 rather than b4.

Unzicker hadn’t directly programmed Misha to change that move. If Misha moved to b4 this time, therefore, it would prove it was thinking for itself: it would have corrected an error without external input.

Unzicker sat closer to the screen, willing Kwasi to play the same moves as before.

Move 20. Kwasi moved. Misha thought. No, not thought:
calculated
. Brains thought: silicon circuits calculated. Five minutes. Ten. Go on, thought Unzicker. If it had been going to play bishop to c5, the wrong move, surely it would have done so?

Fifteen minutes. Longer than Misha usually spent on a move this early, but by no means unusual for grandmasters at this level.

Unzicker clicked on the Show observers icon again. There were almost 100 now. You may be watching history, my friends, he thought, if you only knew it. You may be watching history. He wondered if they were chattering to each other online. Observers to a game can chat together, as can players, but one group can’t see what the other is saying.

Misha moved, so suddenly that Unzicker almost started.

Bishop to b4.

He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

I’ve done it, he thought. I’ve bloody done it.

A line came up in his dialogue box:

killerinstinct32
:
That what I think it is?

repino
: You betcha.

killerinstinct32
: Wow. Just wow.

repino
: I know.

killerinstinct32
: I’d better start thinking!

Kwasi and Misha went at it for three mor e hours, and eventually agreed a draw. Unzicker couldn’t have cared less about the result. Misha had self-corrected an error, and that was all that mattered.

But one move different wasn’t enough, not for Unzicker. He wanted to be sure. This is the scientist’s way: a great leap forward followed by a welter of self-doubt. No experiment could be said to have properly succeeded without running it against a failsafe.

He knew the ICC had a department called Speedtrap which ran checks to see whether players purporting to be human were actually computers. Speedtrap kept their methods quiet, for fear that making them public would help the cheaters beat the system, but Unzicker could guess most of them anyway: diagnosing processor actions through the server interface, checking moves against those known to be played by certain engines, those kind of things. In any case, he didn’t need to know
how
they did it, only
that
they did it.

He set up two new accounts.
Kuokkala
(the original Finnish name for Repino, Botvinnik’s birthplace) would be Misha.
Akbyr
would be Rybka, one of the strongest search engines around; Unzicker had a copy in his office. He would pass them both off as humans, set them playing against the strongest grandmasters on ICC, and see how long it took for Speedtrap to issue a warning.

Akbyr
managed three games before Speedtrap sent a message saying they’d detected that it was a chess engine. But
Kuokkala
just sailed on and on: game after game without arousing the slightest suspicion.

In its twelfth game, it came up against
killerinstinct32
. Kwasi didn’t know this was Misha, Unzicker realized. Should he tell him? No. This was a perfect blind test.

Misha/
Kuokkala
beat Kwasi in sixty-four moves. It was almost poetic.

Kwasi instantly issued a rematch challenge. Unzicker typed in the dialogue box.

Kuokkala
: It’s me, Misha.

killerinstinct32
: WTF?

Kuokkala
: New handle to see whether can remain undetected as engine.

killerinstinct32
: Why the hell didn’t you tell me?

Kuokkala
: Had to be a blind test.

killerinstinct32
: You don’t fucking trust me?

Kuokkala
: It had to be a blind test. You must see that. Tell me honestly: did you recognize this as Misha?

killerinstinct32
: Misha’s beaten me before.

Kuokkala
: Not my question. Did you think you were playing man or machine?

killerinstinct32
: Never had reason to think it machine. So man.

Kuokkala
: KK, we’ve done it. Properly done it.

killerinstinct32
: Fuckin A.

The best chess player in the world had played sixty-four moves against a computer and not known it. That was the Turing test, right there: where the actions of a machine were indistinguishable from those of a human.

Misha had passed the test. Misha was learning. Misha was thinking.

Misha was growing.

Thanksgiving itself had been a hiatus: a regathering, a truce, like Christmas Day in the trenches. Someone had pressed pause, and for twenty-four hours or so, no one had done anything of note. Patrese had taken over the surveillance of Unzicker himself, as everyone else had wanted to be at home with their families.

Patrese’s sister Bianca had asked him to stay with her family in Pittsburgh, as she always did, and he’d told her sorry but he had to work, as he usually did. Sooner or later, he thought, she’d just give up asking. She’d told him time and again that there was more to life than work, and
that was coming from a doctor at Pittsburgh’s biggest and
busiest hospital. When she stopped telling him, maybe he’d start listening.

Anyway: Patrese had watched Unzicker all day, and he’d rather have watched paint dry. Unzicker had done nothing apart from sit in his room and go for a walk. He’d seemed almost amused by Patrese’s presence, as though denying Patrese his vacation was somehow a small triumph. Perhaps it was.