Phantom

Thirty-eight

The widow led the way through the sodden woods. The rain was heavier now and they were slogging through mud. She had a powerful flashlight, which was a good thing. The massive exposed roots of the redwood trees would trip up a bull moose coming through here, Congreve thought, cinching his overcoat a bit tighter, wiping rainwater from his eyes as he stepped gingerly over a root as thick as his waist.

“Not far now,” Stella said over her shoulder. “There’s a lookout toward the ocean. Ten minutes. Quite lovely up there, were it not obscured by weather and tainted with sadness.”

They carried on, each alone with his or her thoughts.

“Here we are,” she said as they finally emerged from the wood. It was a rocky promontory that jutted out from the side of the mountain. In the distance, beneath lowering clouds, the Pacific Ocean rolled on in great grey swells. In the sky above, a nighthawk circled and cried.

“This is where I found them,” Stella said, looking at the pool of white light on the ground, avoiding their eyes.

“Them?” Congreve asked.

“Yes. Them. My husband, before he turned the gun on himself, shot his dog, Chief Inspector. An old black Lab named Feynman. And I will tell you something. Sometimes I felt he loved that dog more than me. I don’t care what the police say. That he was secretly depressed, dying of some fatal disease he didn’t want to suffer through for my sake. Utter nonsense. Even if it were true, he never, ever, would have killed his dog.”

“You said he seemed distant after that phone call,” Congreve said. “How, may I ask?”

“Not himself. Everything about him was flat, distant, mechanical. Whoever that man was who hung up the phone, he wasn’t my Waldo.”

“Mechanical? In what way?”

“Robotic, Chief Inspector, robotic.”

“As if someone else was controlling his actions.”

“That is exactly what I mean.”

R eturning to the house, they came to a fork in the path. Stella paused and said, “Would you care to see Waldo’s laboratory? Having come all this way, I assume you would. It’s only a brief walk down this path here to the left.”

“We should be delighted,” Ambrose said. He had intended to ask to see it in any event.

The path was short but snaky, winding around trees and boulders, but soon they came upon it. A little log cabin with a cedar-shingled roof and a stone chimney. A place where a man might escape the world and lose himself in his work.

“Here we are,” Stella said at the door, inserting an old-fashioned iron key into the lock and twisting it. “Wait here a moment until I can get some lights going.”

When they were all inside, she said, “If I had to compete with Feynman for Waldo’s affection, I also had to compete with this cabin. I was victorious, of course, but it was a constant struggle, I don’t mind telling you. Have a look. Not much to see, mostly books and knickknacks he’d collected over the years. That’s his Nobel certificate on the wall. I had it framed for him; otherwise, it would have ended up lost.”

“Ah, I’ve never seen one,” Congreve said, and he went over to inspect it.

“Each certificate is different, Chief Inspector, unique creations for each winner. They are all lovely, rich in color, as you can see. Before and after the celebratory dinner, you are shown into a room where all the laureates’ certificates are in protective cases so everyone can see.”

“And where did you find the note?” Hawke asked.

“There on his worktable, between the computer and the telephone. He always kept a pad next to the phone. Scribbled things down while he was talking, reminder notes to himself that he rarely saved and probably never read.”

Congreve sat on the stool at the worktable, and Hawke could almost see the invisible wheels beginning to spin. He said:

“He wrote ‘Darius, 7:47PM, H50,’ and then the equation. So Darius called him before or after your anniversary dinner?”

“Just before. We always had dinner at eight. And Waldo was never late.”

“And the ‘H50.’ Does that have any scientific significance?”

“No. I’m sure he was just writing what Darius said. ‘Happy fiftieth.’ That’s what he would have considered the salient fact of the call. That Darius remembered our anniversary. The equation beneath deals with the speed of light. It was a common topic between them.”

“Why?”

“Because if we can exceed the speed of light, which is theoretically impossible, but not necessarily so, then whole new worlds open up to us. This is one of the things Waldo was working on when he went… off the scientific community’s radar.”

“Stella,” Hawke said, “is this the same computer your husband was working on when he was pursuing the Perseus Project?”

“Yes. For the last few years he was using it in his office at Stanford, then he brought it here when his beloved project was disbanded.”

Congreve said, “Those file drawers. Contain all his scientific papers, I presume. Articles he wrote for journals, that sort of thing?”

“Indeed. Everything pertaining to Perseus is in there.”

“So that would include work created by other members of the team? Darius, for example?”

“I imagine so, yes. Would you like me to check?”

“Indeed. I’m interested in anything pertaining to the work of Darius or created by him while he was under your husband’s tutelage. Was Darius his last name?”

“No. It was something else. Odd name. Saffari. Like an African safari. That was it. Darius Saffari. Why are you so curious about him, Chief Inspector?”

“Oh, it’s probably nothing, I assure you. But the timing of the phone calls is interesting. One just prior to dinner and one just following it. Coincidences are by their very nature intriguing, don’t you think?”

She pulled out a drawer and began going through it.

“Here we go. Dr. Darius Saffari. It’s a rather large file; could you-”

“Yes, let me get it for you. I’d like to skim through it for a few moments. Not that I’ll understand a bit of it, of course. But then one never knows, does one?”

Ambrose took the bulging file to the worktable and began going through it, page by page. Hawke had taken a comfortable leather chair by the fireplace. He was leafing through a book from the shelf entitled Understanding the Singularity, and he asked, “Stella, could you join me over here for a moment while the chief inspector is engaged? There’s something I’d like to ask you about.”

“Certainly, that’s what I’m here for,” she said and took the identical chair opposite Hawke’s.

“I’m sure you’re well aware of some rather catastrophic events that have occurred lately. I am referring to the sinking of an American cruise liner by a Russian nuclear submarine. And the disaster at Fort Greely, Alaska, that killed hundreds of U.S. Army personnel and their families. And also the bizarre incident in Israel’s Negev Desert? A supposedly secret demonstration of a new robot-fighter aircraft that defied its own preprogrammed flight plan and killed everyone present.”

“Yes, I watch the news. In addition to the horrendous loss of life, I find these incidents all rather oddly similar.”

“So do I, Stella, so do I. You should know that there is another incident I’m aware of, classified in the interest of national security, which fits exactly the same pattern. As my friend over there would say, patterns are intriguing.”

“Yes. Go on, please.”

“Well, I’m wholly ignorant on the current state of AI research, I’ll freely admit. But it would seem to me that these events share a certain commonality that could be attributed to advanced artificial intelligence. They were all instances of cyberwarfare.”

“And your point is?”

“Let me put it this way. Every government affected is, of course, enlisting massive resources to uncover the perpetrators and bring them to justice. But they’re all coming up empty. There’s not a single clue as to who may be responsible for these attacks. Not to mention that even the top scientists in each country are bewildered as to how such attacks might have been effected.”

“Like the Stuxnet worm in Iran.”

“Yes. A highly advanced cyberweapon. But. There is no known technology on earth, at least that anyone is aware of, with the capacity to override highly complex technological weapon systems, not to mention an entire submarine, and use that destructive capability against the systems themselves. Do you follow?”

“Of course, I follow. The same question has obviously occurred to me.”

“And what do you conclude?”

“That this ‘force,’ for lack of a better word, this unseen and untraceable enemy, has somehow leapfrogged existing cybertechnology to create some kind of phantom. An active presence, a ‘specter’ if you will, that can disrupt and destroy, but one that is not physically present. A phantom, after all, is an evil presence that can be felt but not seen.”

“A perfect description. And, is there anyone, any single scientist or group that you have reason to believe to be capable of such a creation as this-phantom, as you put it?”

“Yes, there is. Only one. My late husband. Think of it this way, Mr. Hawke: if you assembled a thousand scientists, each with a mind operating at speeds a million times faster than our own, they could achieve an entire century’s worth of scientific breakthroughs in under an hour. An hour. Think what they might accomplish in a week! A month, or a year, Mr. Hawke.”

“Are you saying that your husband was capable of operating at that level?”

“Yes, I think he actually was. Not he himself, of course, but the kinds of AI hardware, ultra-intelligent machines he was working toward, yes, they would easily be capable of the kind of cyberattacks that are now occurring. In fact, I would go so far as to say this would be mere child’s play for such machines.”

“None of this is within the parameters of human intelligence? Is that a fair statement?”

“Absolutely.”

“Stella,” Ambrose said, swiveling the top of his stool toward them, “would it be at all possible for Alex and I to take possession of this file and return to England with it? It bears closer inspection, possibly by some of our top scientists at Cambridge University.”

“Of course, if you think it will help you find out who or what killed my husband, you can take my whole house.”

“Who or what?” Congreve said.

“It may not be a ‘who,’ ” Hawke replied. “It may well be a ‘what.’ ”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning a machine, Ambrose. An ultra-intelligent machine. That’s what Dr. Cohen has been working on all these years. On that very computer in front of you.”

“Hmm. I see. Well, in that case, I wonder if we might take the computer as well?”

“Yes, be my guest. Take anything you want. As long as I can be there when that murderous machine goes on trial.”

Alex looked at her calmly and said, “If this machine actually exists, Stella, I’ll make certain that it never makes it to trial.”