Brain Storm

5

"See if it'll fire on 0010010. Okay, perfect. Now patch that across on LISP. There, that's it."

Dr. Curt Newton was like a gleeful child turning pages in a favorite book. And with every turned page, he came closer to unlocking the secrets of the gray old man in the bank. For motivation, as well as to increase the sense of mystery among his assistants, he had printed several copies of the man's face and had taped them up around the lab. A picture of the man with the features of a squeezed lemon stared vacantly from above the computer screen at which Newton now worked.

Lothar Holz looked at the image of the bland old man with as little interest as was humanly possible for him to generate. This was a calculated indifference that he used in all sorts of business and social situations to show that he, the great Lothar Holz, was above being interested in anything. And if Lothar Holz wasn't interested in something, then it wasn't worthy of interest.

He found, in short order, that it was he in whom the scientists in this large room weren't interested.

Dr. Curt Newton, their leader, was shouting something at a group of them about proper algorithmic treatment on the neural net. It sounded like just another load of gibberish. This was common to Holz.

Since he had stolen Newton away from MIT a few years earlier to spearhead the interface project, he had been subjected to the worst kind of scientific lingo.

He had a nagging suspicion that these scientific types were just blowing smoke with a bunch of trumped-up terms. In fact, when this jargon seemed to have gotten completely out of hand early on, Holz decided to put Dr. Newton on the spot. The scientist wanted to conduct something called PET research as an adjunct to his interface study. Holz had demanded to know what the equipment was for.

"It's used for diagnostic imaging," Newton had explained.

Lothar Holz had nodded as if he understood.

"PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography,"

Newton had said patiently. "It gives us the chemical physiology, as well as structure of the brain." He could see that he wasn't getting through to Holz. He spoke very slowly. "A patient is injected with a glu-coselike substance which emits positrons. The positrons then collide with electrons to form photons. We can then detect and record the speed and path of the photons through the brain."

Completely lost, Holz had asked gruffly, "Is it necessary for your research?"

"Crucial."

Newton had the PET imaging scanner the next morning.

Holz felt the same way now as he had then. Everyone in the interface R&D complex in Edison, New Jersey, was running around as if preparing for a cor-onation. And they were acting as if the nondescript old man whose brain patterns they had downloaded were their new king.

Holz tugged the picture down from above Dr.

Newton's screen.

The image was in color, but Holz would have argued that fact with anyone. The old man still looked as if he were in black-and-white.

Or shades of gray, anyway.

"What's so special about him?" he inquired blandly.

The technician who was monitoring the rate the information was flowing into the smaller computers had just gone to the back of the room to check the mainframe.

"Only the culmination of years of research,"

Newton said. He snatched the picture away and replaced it above his screen.

Feigning boredom with the entire procedure, Holz asked, "Is he really worth all this effort?"

Curt Newton actually stopped typing and stared at him in disbelief. "Are you kidding?" he asked, shocked. "This guy is like nothing I've ever seen.

His mind is so orderly, if we can figure out how it works, we could work backward from him. His brain would be a flawless pattern for reverse interface engineering. Years of work could literally take only weeks."

Holz laughed derisively. "I doubt that."

"Lothar," Curt Newton said icily, 44if you were impressed by the demonstration at the bank this morning, I can assure you that you will be stunned by what we cart do with what we learn from this man."

Holz paused to consider. The truth was, he had been impressed by the demonstration. PlattDeutsche America had become complacent in the marketplace of late and had accepted the downsizing of the military without much of a battle. Though he hadn't exactly lied at the press conference when he listed all of the peaceful applications of the interface technology, the truth was, he was hoping to make the United States government realize what it was missing out on if it didn't sign on with PlattDeutsche. A big, fat government contract would help finance further development.

It had been a gamble. The board hadn't been pleased with the unauthorized test at the bank and the president of the company was screaming for his head. Holz had found that out through his own Private channels. He smiled inwardly. If the president ever found out who really ran the company, he'd probably have a stroke. Holz was being called before the board for a meeting that afternoon. Maybe he'd drop the big secret on them then. He grinned at the thought.

"Have you learned anything about the old man so far?" he asked Newton.

The scientist continued typing at his workstation as he spoke. Monotonous sequences of zeros and ones flew by at breathtaking speed. "We know his name is Smith."

"How did you find that out?"

"We've programmed the computers here to recognize patterns of a certain type. Other information is more difficult to decipher, but the clearest patterns always start with numbers, which really govern people's lives in a lot of ways. In a literal sense—telephone, social security, addresses, birth dates. But also in a more esoteric sense. The basic alphabet can be seen in numerical terms. There's the finite number twenty-six, which in combination yields a virtually infinite number of possibilities. Infinite in terms of our capabilities, anyway," he added. "Computers read things in numbers. My theory is that the human brain does, too. I link up numerical sequences. It's that simple."

"And that told you his name was Smith?" Holz still sounded skeptical.

"Absolutely."

"So what's his first name?"

Newton was vague. "I'm not quite sure. In test subjects, that has generally been one of the easiest things to determine, the human ego being what it is.

But this man has virtually no ego whatsoever. It seems that even in his own thoughts he hardly every refers to himself by his first name. And without many like references, it's going to be a while before we discern a pattern that our name file recognizes."

"So you've stalled." Holz seemed pleased that the brilliant Dr. Newton had stumbled.

"Only as far as that's concerned," Newton admitted. "But we've learned other stuff that tells us more about him."

"Like what?"

"Well, for starters, he's from New England originally. Right now I'm willing to bet Vermont. He had a strict upbringing. He lives somewhere in south-eastern New York. And he's into computers...

perhaps much more than he imagines."

Newton pushed against his desk. His chair rolled on its casters to a console several feet behind him, where two lab computer programmers were working on the background information on the test subject.

"Stern and Geist have found a few interesting items," he said as he bumped to a stop against the new workstation.

The two men looked up at Holz, who had followed Newton over. "There's a lot of morbid stuff in here, Lothar," the first technician, Ron Stern, said. "A lot of stuff about death, dying. It's a recurring pattern.

Almost an obsession."

"But he's pretty old, so that probably makes sense," Geist, the youngest of the programmers, suggested.

"What's that?" Holz asked, pointing at the screen.

Stern shook his head. "It's a neural symbol that we can best match up to mean destroyer. We're finding it a lot."

"Maybe he was in the war," Geist said.

Holz raised an eyebrow.

Stern snickered. "Which one, the Revolution?"

Geist chuckled, and both men returned to their respective keyboards.

Newton tapped his balled fist in nervous excitement on the table a few times as he watched the raw neural data stream across Geist's green-tinted monitor. As if the endless lines of linked numbers were some sort of encouragement to his own work, he slid back over to his own workstation and attacked his keyboard.

He was doggedly followed by Holz. "I sincerely hope, Doctor, that all of the effort you're expending on this one man does not prove to be a waste of valuable PlattDeutsche time."

"I am saving PlattDeutsche more precious time than you could possibly imagine." Newton didn't look up from his computer screen.

"I hope that you are. I've been called in front of the board this afternoon to justify the expense of this project. The higher-ups had a slight problem with our bank deal and decided to review the entire interface project."

Newton stopped typing and spun his chair around, wild-eyed. "They're not thinking of cutting funding?" he demanded.

"It's a possibility. I sold them on the project in the first place. If they've lost faith in me..."

"They can't," Newton pleaded. "Not now."

Holz smiled reassuringly. "I'll do my best. But it would help if you could get the interface project further ahead of schedule."

"I'll redouble my efforts."

"That might help," Holz admitted. In his mind, he wondered how this would be possible. Newton already spent at least twenty hours a day at the lab.

But that wasn't his concern. For all Holz cared, Newton could drop dead tomorrow. As long as he perfected his process today.

With an encouraging slap on the back that was devoid of anything resembling sincerity, Lothar Holz left the main R&D lab.

Once he was gone, Newton exhaled a nervous puff of air.

He hadn't told Holz that there was a snag. A huge snag.

Yes, the man named Smith had the most orderly mind the scientist had ever seen, but in that orderli-ness there was an area that was blocked off and had so far proved impenetrable to their best efforts. Its real-world counterpart would be a filing cabinet with many drawers. Most of them were wide open for inspection but there was one at the bottom that was locked securely. Why?

With renewed vigor, Dr. Curt Newton, P.C.—

Physical Cryptologist—vowed that he wouldn't rest until he had broken into that mysterious bottom drawer.