The Footprints of God

CHAPTER 8

I moved silently through the dark trees. Rachel sounded like a blind bear blundering along behind me. On a Manhattan street she probably maneuvered like a pro halfback, but the woods were alien to her. I slowed until she caught up, then told her to hold on to the back of my belt. She did.

When we were fifty yards away from the house, I said, "Do you believe me about Fielding now?"

"I believe you worked with him," Rachel said. "I'm not sure he was murdered. I don't think you are either."

I stepped over a fallen log, then helped her over. "I know he was murdered. Only two people at Project Trinity opposed what was being done there. Fielding was one, and now he's dead. I'm the other."

"Are you going to tell me about Trinity now?"

"If you're willing to listen. I think you understand now that it could be dangerous for you."

She sucked in her breath as briers raked her arm. "Go on."

"When you came to my house today, I was making a videotape to give to my lawyer. He was to open it if some¬thing happened to me. I never finished it. And the truth is, I'm worried about seeing tomorrow morning alive."

Rachel stopped in the overgrown track. "Why don't you just call the police? Lu Li clearly shares your suspi¬cions, and I think there's enough circumstantial evidence to-"

"City police can't investigate the NSA. And that's who oversees Trinity."

"Call the FBI then."

"That's like calling the FBI to investigate the CIA. There's so much ill will between those agencies that it would take weeks to get anything done. If you really want to help, become my videotape. Listen to what I have to tell you, then go home and keep it to yourself."

"And if something happens to you?"

"Call CNN and The New York Times and tell them everything you know. The sooner you tell it, the safer you'll be."

"Why don't you do that? Tonight?"

"Because I can't be sure I'm right. Because the presi¬dent could be trying to reach me as we speak. And because, as juvenile as it may sound, this is a national security matter."

Holding Lu Li's whimpering bichon in my left arm, I put my gun in my pocket and pulled Rachel forward. Forty yards on, I saw a deeper darkness ahead. The trees gave way like thinning ranks of soldiers, and then a man-made wall stopped me in my tracks. When my eyes adjusted, I saw the door I had known was there. I opened it with my free hand and led Rachel through. We emerged into a moonlit bowl, lined with cut stone.

"My God," she said.

The amphitheater looked as though it had magically been transported to the Carolina woods from Greece. To our right was the elevated stage, to our left a stone stair¬way leading up through the seats to the top row. Not far above that lay Country Club Road. The view down from the road was almost completely blocked by pines and hardwoods, but I could see the broken beams of head¬lights passing high above us.

I took Rachel's hand, stepped onto the stone floor, and led her to the edge of the stage. There I tied Maya's leash around a low light stanchion. While the dog sniffed an invisible scent trail, I set the tape recorder on the edge of the stage and depressed RECORD. "This is David Tennant, M.D.," I said. "I'm speaking to Dr. Rachel Weiss of the Duke University Medical School."

Playback gave me a staticky facsimile of my words. I looked at my watch. "We need to do this in less than ten minutes."

Rachel shrugged, her eyes full of curiosity.

"For the past two years, I've been working on a spe¬cial project for the National Security Agency. It's known as Project Trinity, and it's based in a building in the Research Triangle Park, ten miles from here. Trinity is a massive government-funded effort to build a supercomputer capable of artificial intelligence. A computer that can think."

She looked unimpressed. "Don't we already have computers that can do that?"

This common misconception surprised me now, but when I went to work at Trinity, I hadn't known much better myself. For fifty years, science fiction writers and filmmakers had been creating portrayals of "giant elec¬tronic brains" taking over the world. HAL, the speaking computer of 2001: A Space Odyssey, had entered pop consciousness in 1968 and remained firmly embedded there ever since. In the subsequent thirty-five years, we had witnessed such a revolution in digital computing that the average person believed that a "computer that can think" was just around the corner, if not already within our capabilities. But the reality was far different. I had no time to go into the complexities of neural net¬works or strong AI; Rachel needed a simple primer and the facts about Trinity.

"Have you heard of a man named Alan Turing?" I asked. "He's one of the men who broke the Germans' Enigma code during World War Two."

"Turing?" Rachel looked preoccupied. "I think I've heard of something called the Turing Test."

"That's the classic test of artificial intelligence. Turing said machine intelligence would be achieved when a human being could sit on one side of a wall and type questions into a keyboard, then read the answers coming onto his screen from the other side and be certain that those answers were being typed by another human being. Turing predicted that would happen by the end of the twentieth century, but no computer has ever come close to passing that test. Using conventional technology, it's still probably fifty years off."

"Didn't that IBM computer finally beat Garry Kasparov at chess? I know I read that somewhere."

"Deep Blue?" I laughed, the sound strangely brittle in the amphitheater. "Yes. But it won by using what computer scientists call brute force. Its memory contains every known chess game ever played, and it processes millions of prob¬abilities every time it makes a move. It plays very good chess, but it doesn't understand what it's doing. As a human being, Garry Kasparov never has to consider the bil¬lions of possibilities-many of them ridiculously simple-that the computer does. Kasparov's acquired knowledge allows him to make intuitive leaps, and to learn permanently every time he does. He plays by instinct. And no one really understands what that means."

Rachel sat on the edge of the stage. "So, what are you telling me?"

"That computers don't think like human beings. In fact, they don't think at all. They simply carry out instructions. All those TV commercials you hear about 'software that thinks'? They're bullshit. Serious AI researchers are afraid to even use the term artificial inteligence anymore."

"Okay. So what's Project Trinity?"

"The holy grail."

"What do you mean?"

"Everyone wants to build a computer that works like the human brain, but we don't understand how the brain works. Everyone concedes that. Well… two years ago, one man realized this didn't have to be the obstacle everyone thought it was. That we might be able to copy the brain without actually understanding what we were doing. Using existing technology."

"Who was this man?"

"Peter Godin. The billionaire."

"Godin Supercomputing?"

Now she'd surprised me. "That's right."

"They have a Godin Four supercomputer in a base¬ment at TUNL, the Duke high-energy lab."

"Well, Godin is the man who conceived Project Trinity."

Rachel looked as though the accumulating details were starting to persuade her. "What kind of existing technology can copy the brain?"

"MRI."

"Magnetic resonance imaging?"

"Yes. You order MRI scans every week, right?"

"Of course."

"There's a lot of information on those scans, isn't there?"

"More than I can interpret sometimes."

"Rachel, I've seen MRI scans that contain a hundred thousand times the information of the ones you see every day. A hundred thousand times the resolution."

She blinked. "But how can that be? How much more can you see?"

"I've seen reactions between individual nerve synapses, frozen in time. I've seen the human brain working at the molecular level."

"Bullshit."

Any doctor would have said the same. "No. The machine exists. It's sitting in a room ten miles away from us right now. Only nobody knows it."

She was shaking her head. "That makes no sense. Why would a company keep something like that secret?"

"Because they're legally bound to by the government."

"But an MRI like that would make whoever developed it hundreds of millions of dollars. It could detect malig¬nant cells long before they even become tumor masses."

"You're right. That's been my main problem with this project. It's unethical to keep that machine from cancer patients. But for now, just accept that there's an MRI machine that can produce three-D models of the brain, with resolution to the molecular level."

"Molecular snapshots of the brain."

"Basically, yes. Ravi Nara calls them 'neuromodels.'"

"Neuromodels. Okay."

"Rachel, do you realize what one of those neuro¬models is?"

"I know that a single one of them would revolutionize neuroscience. But I get the feeling that's not what this is about."

"A neuromodel is the person it was taken from. Literally. His thoughts, memories, fears-everything."

"But… it's just a scan, right? A high-resolution map of the brain."

"No. It's a coded facsimile of every molecule in the brain, in perfect spatial and electrochemical relation. Which means that-"

"Hold on. Are you about to tell me they can load one of these neuromodels into a computer?"

"No. But that's what they've been working around the clock for two years to achieve. Godin predicted it would take fifteen to twenty years, but they got halfway there in nineteen months. I've never seen anything like it. The only historical precedent is the Manhattan Project during World War Two."

Rachel started to speak, but I held up my hand. High above us, a pair of headlights was cruising past at less than half the speed of the other cars. They slowed still more, then sped up and disappeared.

"We need to hurry."

"If Trinity is everything you say it is," she said, "then why in God's name would it be based in North Carolina?"

This I hadn't expected. "Aren't you the top Jungian analyst in the world?"

"Well…one of them."

"Why are you based in North Carolina?"

She frowned. "Because Duke University is here. That's different."

"Not so different. Peter Godin wanted Trinity based at his R and D lab in Mountain View, California. The NSA is footing the bill, and they wanted it based at Fort Meade, Maryland. Research Triangle Park was the ulti¬mate compromise. High-tech, but out of the way."

"What's the end point, here? What does the NSA want to do with Trinity?"

"Our government sees most scientific revolutions in terms of weapons potential. If such a machine can be built, our government wants to be the first to do it."

"What kind of weapon can this computer be?"

" Think Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq. Everything's computerized in modern war. Code-breaking, nuclear weapons testing, information warfare, battlefield sys¬tems. But a Trinity wouldn't be merely an advance. It would make today's supercomputers as obsolete as Model Ts. And if Fielding was right about it having quantum capabilities… then present-day encryption is gone. That's why the NSA has spent close to a billion dollars on Trinity."

Rachel processed what I'd said. "But this isn't just a faster supercomputer. We're talking about a computer that thinks like a person."

I shook my head. "We can't build a computer that thinks like a person. We're talking about copying an individual human brain. Creating a digital entity that for all practical purposes is a person. With his or her cognitive functions, memories, hopes, dreams… everything except a body. Only it would run at the speed of a digital computer. One million times faster than biologi¬cal circuitry."

She spoke almost to herself. "This is why Andrew Fielding and Ravi Nara would be working together."

"Exactly. Nobel laureates in quantum physics and neuroscience. Peter Godin brought them together." I checked to see that the spools on the recorder were still turning. "But I've only told you part of Trinity's poten¬tial. Once your neuromodel is loaded into the computer as Rachel Weiss, speed isn't the only advantage it will have over you-the original."

"What do you mean?"

"Say I decide to learn to play the piano. It takes me three years of intensive study. You're impressed by that. You want to learn to play the piano too. It's going to take you three years as well, give or take. That's the dis¬advantage of the human brain. Each one has approxi¬mately the same learning curve. But the computer model of your brain doesn't have that problem. The sum total of music theory can be digitized and downloaded into its memory-your memory-in about three seconds. There's no learning curve at all."

She shook her head. "You're saying you could down¬load the sum of human knowledge into this computer- into me-all in a few hours?"

"In theory, yes."

"David, you're talking about something like… like a god, almost."

"Not almost. Because that computer model would not only be Rachel Weiss. It would be Rachel Weiss forever. It could be backed up and stored, or downloaded into another Trinity computer. It would never have to die."

She pursed her lips to speak, but no words emerged.

"Are you starting to believe me now?"

"What's your job at Trinity?"

"I was appointed by the president to evaluate any ethical dilemmas that might arise. During the Manhattan Project, some scientists turned against the atomic bomb for moral reasons, and they had no real voice. The presi¬dent wanted to minimize the public controversy that was bound to come if Trinity became a reality. He knew my brother in college, and he'd read my book on medical ethics-or watched the NOVA series based on it, more likely. That's what made him pick me for the project. It's really that simple."

Rachel looked off into the dark trees. "This sounds anything but simple. In fact, it sounds crazy." She looked back at me, her eyes glinting. "You said Trinity got halfway to success in nineteen months. What's holding up the second half?"

"Building a computer powerful enough to hold a complete neuromodel in its circuitry. The human brain is fairly slow in terms of speed, but it's massively parallel. It contains over a hundred trillion possible connections, all capable of simultaneous calculation, and that's just for processing. It also holds the equivalent of twelve hundred terabytes of computer memory."

She shrugged. "That means nothing to me."

"Six million years of The Wall Street Journal."

Her mouth fell open.

"When Trinity began, no computer on the planet had that kind of capacity. The Internet as a whole does, but it's far too dispersed and unreliable to be controllable."

"And now?”

"IBM is building a computer called Blue Gene that will rival the processing power of the brain, but it'll still be unable to do things any five-year-old child can."

"And Trinity is different?"

"You could say that. Blue Gene will fill a fifty-by-fifty-foot room and need three hundred tons of air-conditioning just to function. Trinity will be about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. And Godin thinks that's still too big. He's always saying that the human brain weighs three pounds and uses only ten watts of electricity. He believes the solutions to great problems must be beauti¬ful. Elegant."

Rachel gazed up the incline of stone seats, trying to grasp a future that was crashing headlong into the pre¬sent. "How close is Trinity to becoming a reality?"

I thought of the black mass of carbon and crystal growing almost like a life-form in the basement lab of the Trinity building. "There's a prototype sitting in our lab right now with one hundred and twenty trillion con¬nections and practically unlimited memory."

"Does it work?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because even if you succeed in loading a neuromodel into the computer, how do you talk to it? The human brain interacts with the world through a biological body with five senses. Imagine your brain downloaded into a box. It's deaf, dumb, blind, and paralyzed. A quivering mass of fear. And thank God for it. Because once a machine like that can talk-and listen and act-there's no telling what it might do.''

Rachel looked up at me with interest. "What could it do?"

"Do you remember HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey?"

"Sure. The most reliable computer ever made. Urbana, Illinois, right?"

I chuckled softly. "He was until he murdered the crew of his spaceship. Well, imagine what HAL could do if he were connected to the Internet."

"Tell me."

"One Trinity computer connected to a phone line could hold the industrialized world hostage. It could disrupt power grids, rail lines, air traffic control, missile systems, NORAD, Wall Street. It could demand what¬ever it wanted."

She shook her head in confusion. "But what would it want?"

"What does any intelligent entity want? Especially one that's essentially human?"

"Power?"

"Exactly." I jumped as my cell phone rang. The ID said "Andrew Fielding." I pressed SEND. "Lu Li? Has something happened?"

"Nothing happen," Lu Li replied in a shaky voice. "I worry about Maya. I think I hear noises outside. You bring her back, Dr. David."

The bichon stopped sniffing the ground, looked up at me, and cocked its head as though listening.

"We're coming. Right now."

"Is she all right?" Rachel asked as I ended the call.

"Yes. She wants us to come back, but we're going to wait a bit."

"Why?"

"Because the NSA heard that call. If they have people in the woods, they'll probably move now. And we'll hear them."

Rachel glanced anxiously at the wall that separated us from the trees. "Do you really think there's someone out there?"

"That's not what scares you," I said. "What scares you is that now you think there might be."

She slid off the stage and looked at the door we'd passed through. It was easy to imagine someone waiting behind it.

"You said Fielding was murdered because you and he resisted the project. How exactly did you resist it?"

"We didn't just resist it. We stopped it cold. Suspended it, anyway. Fielding was the driving force, but it took me interceding with the president to accomplish it. It was like trying to stop the work on the atomic bomb during World War Two."

"Why did you want to stop it?"

"I'm not completely sure about Fielding's reasons. I think he kept a lot from me-to protect me. I mean. But my reasons were simple.

"Six months ago, we tested the Super-MRI machine. We used animals first, and there were no problems. The first humans to be scanned were the six of us in the inner circle. Within a week, we all developed strange neuro¬logical symptoms. Side effects from exposure to the machine. Fielding believed-"

"MRI doesn't cause side effects," Rachel broke in.

"Not the machines you use. But the magnetic fields generated by the Trinity MRI are exponentially more intense than those in present-day machines. They use super¬conducting materials that allow massive pulses-"

Maya was growling deep in her throat and looking up the slope of stone seats. I hadn't heard anything in the woods, but maybe the dog had. I put the tape recorder in my pocket, picked up Maya, then drew my gun and pulled Rachel through the stage door.

Darkness enveloped us.

"Stay right behind me," I said, ducking under a branch.

"Did you hear something?"

"No."

If I hadn't had Rachel with me, I would have used stealth to safely reach the house. But speed was the only option now. I plowed through the underbrush, warning Rachel whenever I hit branches likely to whip back into her face. She cried out twice and stumbled once, but she got back up and somehow managed to stay on my heels. As we neared the house, I saw the yellow square of Fielding 's patio doors. Lu Li stood silhouetted inside them, a perfect target. The image made me shiver.

When she slid open the door, I pulled her deep into the room. Maya barked wildly until Lu Li bent and held out her arms. The dog leapt into them as Rachel closed the glass door.

"Call a taxi," I whispered over my shoulder.

Rachel went to the phone.

Lu Li's eyes were wet. I touched her elbow, and the dog snapped at me. "I wish I could stay the night with you," I said quietly, "but that would look more suspicious than my going home. I'm going to go to work tomorrow and try to get some answers, so I want everything to look as normal as possible. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"I'll take Andrew's box of toys with me. I don't want anyone to find it here. Is that all right?"

Lu Li nodded, stroking the bichon as lovingly as she would a child.

"I'm going to pull into the garage when I leave, so no one sees me take the box. If anyone asks you what I was doing here, tell them it was a sympathy visit. If they somehow overheard some of our conversation, just act like what you are. A distraught widow."

"What means distraught?"

"Grief-stricken. Grieving."

She smiled bravely. "I no need to act this."

I laid my hands on her shoulders and squeezed, then spoke almost inaudibly. "In the FedEx letter Andy sent me, there was some white powder. Almost like sand. It's in those plastic bags on the couch. Do you know any¬thing about that?"

Lu Li's gaze went to the couch, and her face wrinkled in confusion. "No. Nothing."

"Did you drop it off at the FedEx box?"

"Yes. How you know?"

"It doesn't matter." I knew Lu Li had dropped off the envelope because I had been inside Fielding's head dur¬ing my last dream. I felt a sudden compulsion to get out of the house. "Rachel? The taxi?"

"Any minute," she said from behind me.

"I want you to go into the garage," I told Lu Li. "When you hear me tap the horn, open the door for me. After I pull in, close the door."

"Okay." She left the room without a word.

I picked up the Ziplocs, then led Rachel to the dark¬ened living room, where wide windows looked onto the street. I dropped the Ziplocs on a chair, then sat on a sofa opposite the window to wait for the cab.

"Is the taxi for me?" she whispered, sitting beside me.

"Yes."

"But my car's parked at your house."

"You don't want to go back to my house. You can get it in the morning if you want to. I'd rather you take a taxi to work."

"Did I hear you tell Lu Li you're going back to work tomorrow?"

"If I don't hear from the president tonight, I am."

"Why? If they killed Fielding, why won't they kill you, too?"

Her question gave me a perverse satisfaction. "It sounds like you're buying into my delusion."

Her lips tightened, and I could see that she was gen¬uinely afraid.

"Look, if they really wanted to kill me, I'd be dead already. And if they decide to kill me before tomorrow, nothing will stop them. But I think they're too worried about how the president would react to try that. If I'm alive tomorrow morning, it's all right for me to go in."

Rachel sighed and rubbed her temples with her fingers.

"I don't know what's going to happen," I whispered. "If anyone questions you, tell as much truth as you can. You came to my house because I missed three sessions. I got a call from the wife of a friend who died today. She has no family here, so you offered to help console her. We calmed her down and walked her dog. That's all you know."

She studied my face in the dim light. "This isn't what I expected."

"I know. You really thought I was crazy."

She bit her lip, the gesture almost girlish. "I suppose I did. Part of me hoped I was wrong. But now I'm fright¬ened. I know about psychiatric problems. This is some¬thing else."

I pulled her close and spoke into her ear. "I want you to forget it all. Unless something happens to me. Then you remember. Remember and scream to high heaven." I pulled back and looked into her eyes. "I won't be com¬ing back to your office."

She stared at me as though I'd said, "We're never going to see each other again," which deep down was what I felt.

"David-"

"Here's your taxi." I stood as headlights rolled to a stop in front of the house, looking close to make sure there was a taxi light on the roof.

She was shaking her head, almost helplessly.

"Don't worry," I said. "I'm going to be fine. You've helped a lot."

"I didn't do a damned thing for you."

I pulled her out of sight of the window, then took the recorder from my pocket, removed the tape, and put it in her hand. "If you want to help, here's your chance." I started to send her on, then hesitated. "There is one more thing you could do."

"Tell me."

I pointed to the Ziploc bags on the chair. "Is there someone at Duke who could safely test that powder for infectious agents and poisons?"

"Of course. There are guys over there who live for that kind of thing."

There was a slipcover on one of the sofa pillows. I took it off the pillow, then put the Ziplocs inside it and handed it to her. "Be very careful with those."

"You're preaching to the choir."

I squeezed her arm. "Thank you. Now, go."

She didn't go. She stood on tiptoe and kissed me gen¬tly on the lips. "Be careful. Please, please be careful."

As I stared, Rachel slid the slipcover under her blouse, then walked to the foyer. I heard the front door close softly. Through the front window I watched her get into the taxi. The cab pulled into Lu Li's driveway, then backed out and rolled up Gimghoul Street.

I went out to my car, pulled up to Fielding's garage door, and tapped my horn. Lu Li opened the door from inside, then closed it behind me.

She pulled open my passenger door and set her hus¬band's cardboard box on the front seat. I reached across it and gripped her wrist, my eyes boring into hers.

"Tell me the truth, Lu Li. Do you know what they're trying to build at Trinity?"

After several seconds of eye contact, she nodded once.

"Don't ever tell anyone that," I warned. "Never."

"Me Chinese, David. Know what can happen."

For an instant I flashed back to her standing silhouet¬ted in the patio doors, a target awaiting an assassin.

"Come with me," I said suddenly. "Right now. Just get in with your dog and we'll go. I'll keep you safe."

A sad smile touched her lips. "You good man. Like Andrew. Don't worry. I already make my own arrange¬ments."

Arrangements? I couldn't imagine what these might be. I didn't think she knew anyone in the States. "What are they?"

She shook her head. "Better you don't know. Yes? I be okay."

For some reason, I believed her. The revelation that Lu Li had not been rendered helpless by her grief made me ask one more question.

"In his letter, Andy told me that if anything happened to him, I should remember his pocket watch. What's so special about that watch?"

Lu Li studied my eyes for what seemed a long time. Then, in a nearly inaudible whisper, she said, "Not watch. Fob."

"Fob?"

"Watch fob."

I closed my eyes and pictured Fielding's watch. It was a scarred but precious heirloom, and at the end of its chain was a small, diamond-shaped crystal.

"The crystal?" I asked.

Lu Li smiled. "You smart man. You figure it out."