Skyhook

TWENTY TWO THURSDAY AFTERNOON, DAY 4 UNIWAVE FIELD OFFICES ELMENDORF AFB, ALASKA

“Hey, Ben?”

Ben Cole jumped off his chair and let out an involuntary cry as he scrambled to his feet, his heart racing.

“Jeez, Ben, it’s just me,” one of his team said, her eyes wide. “Sorry if I scared you.”

He tried to laugh and keep his hand from migrating to his heart, which was still pounding.

“Whoa! Sorry for that response. I was way deep into a problem.”

“Apparently,” she said, shaking her head. “You asked for these folders tracking what we’ve examined so far. We’re eighty percent complete.”

“And… no luck?”

“Not a thing out of place that we can find.”

“And no new theories?”

She shook her head. “I think we’re all of a mind that, provided the last twenty percent shows no sign of contamination, the program is golden and it had to be the circuit board. Somehow it was just partial to flying fifty feet above the water.”

Ben nodded, suppressing the burning desire to explain why that simply wasn’t possible.

“I heard you were going to use some Cray time this afternoon?” she said, referring to the Cray SV1 Supercomputer in Uniwave’s North Carolina headquarters, which had to be accessed through a fiber-optic link.

“Just testing a wild theory.”

“What is it?”

“Embarrassing, if I’m wrong, which I probably am.”

“Okay,” she replied, handing him the folders and swinging out of his cubicle.

Ben checked his watch. The Cray reservation was for 4 P.M. Anchorage time, which was in less than ten minutes. He thought about the fact that he’d allowed himself nothing to eat since morning, and filed it away. Food he could take care of later. This was far more important.

He picked up the folder carrying the disks he’d been carefully programing for three hours and quickly left the offices through the side door, not wanting to talk to anyone else.

The previous night had been a never-ending series of short naps broken by hours of pacing around the house. He’d tried to think through a growing list of disturbing problems, starting with his rising concern about whether he’d revealed too much to Nelson Oolokvit.

By 5 A.M., with no magic answers forthcoming and the shroud of depression looming over him once more, Ben had sat down at Lisa’s prized cherrywood desk in the living room and pulled out the last six remaining sheets of the heavyweight Crane stationery she’d bought so long ago in an attempt to be socially proper. He’d found his aging fountain pen and inserted an ink cartridge before composing his thoughts and inscribing a simple will, formally providing for Schroedinger and leaving all his worldly goods to his sister, Phyllis. A brief letter to Phyllis followed. She had dutifully produced three children — two girls and a boy — for the severe, federal-bureaucrat husband she’d married — a man who spent his life deeply worried that somewhere, someone might be having fun. Ben loved his sister and the kids, but couldn’t stand to be around someone anal enough to take offense when a brother-in-law’s thoughts were out of what he considered to be proper order. Phyllis could use or dispose of his personal effects as she saw fit, but it was important to Ben that anything he left her and whatever cash could be squeezed from his house and savings accounts remained her separate property.

He had put the final touches on the letter, and then the will, before realizing that the first rays of dawn had already begun to redden the eastern sky.

Ben had showered and dressed for work, amazed that he could face the probability of his own death with such calm. The test flight was scheduled for 8 P.M., and there was virtually no doubt in his mind that something terrible was about to happen. The one bright spot, Ben had chuckled to himself, was his creative plan for getting the renegade code back into his office computer to examine.

“This is a ‘Well, duh!’ revelation, Schroedinger,” Ben had told the cat as the yellow feline supervised Ben’s preparations for departure. “Uniwave security is very careful what we take out of the building, but they couldn’t care less what we bring back in. So I’ll simply walk through security with this disk.”

Schroedinger was unimpressed, but Ben had spent extra time holding him and scratching him behind the ears anyway, and was preparing to get up when the tomcat surprised him by moving forward and placing a raspy lick on his face. Ben had picked him up to hug him back, not even caring about the cat hairs that would inevitably make his nose itch the rest of the day. It was worth it, he had concluded. Somehow Schroedinger had seemed to understand that this was a different sort of goodbye.

Ben brought himself back to the present as he walked down the Uniwave hallway, detouring through another corridor in order to bypass Lindsey’s office door, hoping to avoid contact. She wouldn’t understand why he was so hurt and angry, and she’d probably given no thought to the possibility he might find out the T-handle she’d promised was a sham.

Good, he thought. No sign of her.

He continued to the far side of the building and slipped into one of the telecommunication suites equipped with expensive computers hooked into the distant Cray. Six minutes remained before his scheduled session, and he spent the time carefully uploading the program disks he’d prepared before sitting back in thought to reexamine his logic.

The renegade code had been in the Gulfstream’s on-board computer three nights before, and it had almost killed them. He was sure of that now. A circuit board malfunction simply wasn’t enough to explain the jet’s actions. Someone had planted the code, then — when Ben had come too close to the truth — that same someone had pulled the code out of the master program and sanitized all the remaining copies to make it appear as if it’d never existed. That meant that whoever it was enjoyed open access to his lab, the computers, and the building!

But he’d not only seen the renegade code, he had a copy of it. All three thousand — plus lines of the code were on one of the uploaded disks with instructions to the Cray to compare the dizzying mass of computer instructions with every type of so-called sub-routine the Cray could reference. He’d already taken the code apart and put it back together several times, as well as compared it with vast libraries of software codes, but he’d failed to figure out what the set of instructions was trying to get the computer — or the aircraft — to do.

The Cray was his last shot. With its massive ability to compare trillions of bytes in tiny flashes of time, it was his best chance to unlock what someone had obviously gone to so much trouble to create.

The computer screen flashed on, indicating his hard-connection to the Cray was up, and he inserted the disk and triggered the sequence.

Ben sat back, watching the changing numbers on the screen that heralded the increasing percentage of completion.

Twenty minutes elapsed before a gentle electronic beeping recaptured his attention and pulled his eyes to the screen. He read the words casually at first, then leaned forward, reading them again in disbelief.

My God, the renegade code is a basic form of fuzzy logic. The computer was trying to think for itself!

That could explain the descent, he figured, and perhaps even the precise fifty-foot altitude. But there was still the problem of the commercial airline database he’d found embedded as a table within its lines of code. Why an airline database? What possible legitimate function could be served by that?

Ben downloaded the information to another disk and shut down the fiber link with the Cray, then stuffed everything in his leather folder and left. There was no choice now, he decided. Dan Jerrod, Uniwave’s security chief, had to be informed that something that smelled very much like sabotage was in progress.

Jerrod, by all accounts, was incorruptible. An ex-FBI agent and ex-Marine who’d taken on the job of Anchorage director of security when the project started, Jerrod was also rumored to have been in the intelligence field. By all accounts, he took his responsibilities very seriously, working to educate and counsel Uniwave’s staff on the right ways to handle a massively classified project rather than just trying to catch them in security indiscretions.

Ben found Jerrod in his office and explained the discovery of the renegade computer code, strategically avoiding any reference to having transmitted it home.

“Those three thousand lines of code were there in the middle of the master program when I left the other night. But when I came back the next morning, they were gone from the master and all copies. Someone had meticulously removed it. I knew better than to come alert you without evidence, so… I waited until I could reassemble it from backup records.” Ben handed the disk across the desk and explained what the Cray had found.

“Doctor, are you saying that the illicit computer code is a program for artificial intelligence?”

“Not as such. I mean, whoever wrote it didn’t intend for the machine to ‘come alive’ or start arguing with us, or anything so science fiction. But there’s a forerunner of what will someday be artificial intelligence, and it’s called ‘fuzzy logic.’ That’s the ability of a computer program to analyze data and make an unpredictable decision based on what, for a better phrase, would be its qualitative assessment of that data.”

“Okay, Doc, you’ve utterly lost me.”

“It’s a type of program I can’t imagine us using in a precise military system where our task is quite clear and finite: Give a remote pilot the ability to bring an Air Force aircraft home in an otherwise unrecoverable emergency.”

“But you mentioned civilian airline data. What’s that about?”

“I don’t know, and it’s really scaring me. I’ll tell you flatly as the chief software engineer on this program, there is zero reason for having or needing such information in this project. Whoever put it there had something else in mind, and—”

“You’re thinking terrorism, aren’t you?”

“How can I not? A strange fuzzy logic code, airline tables and information, none of which should be there. And, I’m fairly convinced it was that damned fuzzy logic code that nearly killed us the other night by diving the airplane.”

“You say you’ve got a final test flight tonight that’s terrifying you?” Jerrod asked quietly.

“Yes. I mean, I can verify beforehand that this… this renegade code is gone, and I think we’ll be safe from having the same thing occur for the same reasons, but whoever did this to begin with is still on the loose, and if the point is to destroy this program and maybe the company, they can’t let that test succeed.”

“So, they’ll find some other way…”

“To kill us, literally or figuratively. Yes.”

Jerrod drummed his fingers on his desk. He was a man of medium build, penetrating eyes, and a steady gaze, who still favored Marine-style haircuts and a no-nonsense air, but his words were surprisingly reassuring.

“With you watching the software, and me watching everything else, Doctor, whoever it is will not succeed tonight.”

Ben felt an illogical flash of relief. Jerrod might be amazingly effective, he thought, but he couldn’t be everywhere stemming every risk.

“So, what should I do?” Ben asked.

“Maintain normal routine and appearance, but prepare to make sure that the… what did you call it?”

“Renegade code?”

“Yes. Make sure it doesn’t climb aboard the aircraft with you tonight.”

“Okay. I’ll get out there early.”

“And let me caution you as you already have sensed, that this is the highest level of security concern. We could have, for want of a better description, a hostile mole inside our own organization. It’s not impossible.”

“What?” Ben asked, his alarm evident.

Jerrod had his hand up to calm him. “What I mean is, discuss this with absolutely no one else, regardless of clearance, regardless of normal need to know. No one at Uniwave. No one in the Air Force. No one at home. Not even your dog.”

“I have a cat, or rather, I’m owned by a cat.”

“Understood. Not even your cat.”

“Okay.”

“Actually, the funny thing is, I’m dead serious. There have been instances in which pets have been bugged because intelligence operatives knew their targets talked to their pets.”

“You’re not joking, are you?”

“Nope. There can also be bugs in a home, if not surgically implanted in the cat or the cat’s collar. Look, we’ll talk in a few days. But only you and me.” Dan Jerrod rose from his chair and shook Ben’s hand. “You did the right thing, Doctor.”

Ben left Jerrod’s office and headed down the corridor feeling a chill of latent guilt. There was a momentary urge to turn back and ask Dan Jerrod if the name Nelson Oolokvit rang a bell, but he squelched it.

Behind him, Dan Jerrod stood for a few moments in the door of his outer office watching Ben Cole until he disappeared around a far corner on the way back to his lab and office. Jerrod checked his watch, mildly surprised to find it was already 4:15 P.M. He had too much to do before 8 P.M. to be standing around, and the unspoken self-admonition propelled him back inside as he closed the door and decided to sweep his office for clandestine listening devices before making the calls he now had to make.

Cole was a lot more astute than he’d first concluded.