Double Helix Ch. 22

Norm nodded. "Got it. I don't know what that is, but it sounds expensive."

"Of course," Nissi said. "A single device of the type we need is well into five figures. On the upside, we'll need the retrovirus for future projects, so it's a good investment. Oh, another thing we'll need is more cold storage."

"Okay, okay," Norm said. "Get me the list. If we get the go-ahead from the Agency, we'll work through our contacts to buy what you need. I have to get back out to the dig site. But first..." He stepped forward and put his hands on either side of Nissi's neck, drawing her down for a sensual kiss.

"Look at that," Nock said, nudging me with an elbow. "Terrible form. Are you trying to kiss her, man, or remove her tonsils?"

When Norm released her, he flipped Nock the bird. "Jealousy is a bad look on you, amigo. You only wish you had moves like that."

I knew what was coming next by the hint of a smile Nock gave him. "Your sister might say differently."

The next moment I was pressed tightly against him, his fingers, lips and tongue playing me like a tingling, moaning instrument. Okay, that was a pretty bad simile, but you get the idea. No one I had met before could kiss like Nock. I was only vaguely aware of the noises of disgust that my brother made as he left, but I caught his parting shot. "Dude, this is supposed to be a clean environment."

"You're a cruel, cruel man," Nissi said. "I approve."

Nock glanced at a digital wall clock. "I should get going." He turned to me. "You want to come with me, little tomato? I have some fascinating data collection and reports to compile on the terminal upstairs. It should be positively droll."

"That sounds delightful," I said, hooking my arm in his.

"Have fun, kids," Nissi said, giving us a wave.

A second terminal had been added in the den, so I could have browsed the internet while Nock worked, but I pulled up a chair to sit next to him. I watched him for a moment as he speed-read through text reports and flipped through social media pages. The text pages came from several hundred volunteers on the darknet who kept an eye on the over 200,000 reverts left in the country.

About seventy reverts disappeared each day. Out of those, a few turned out to have been killed in accidents, suicides, and the like. A few were false alarms, the type where the person turns out to have just taken an unexpected vacation. The majority of them, though, were legitimate disappearances, with bosses, coworkers and family sometimes frantic to find them.

Nock compiled his report and sent it off, then took a look through his email. "I think this one's for you," he said, opening mail with the subject "RE: Righting a Wrong, Please Read". My heart skipped a beat as I realized that it was in reply to an email I had sent two months ago. The sender was named Anthony Turner, and the message had come in just a few hours ago.

Greetings,

We would have replied sooner, but most of us were dubious of both your identity and your intentions. Since our forced reversions, the twelve of us have kept in contact and would meet up every few months. We never knew why the FBI raided us that day, until now. I doubted that you could be who you said you were. What kind of person could do that, and then ask for forgiveness?

That all changed a few days ago. Two of our own, Cari and Derrick Moore, are gone. I went to their house and found both cars in the driveway, but no one was home. When they failed to answer the door, I tried it and found it unlocked. Inside, I discovered signs of a struggle. There was a spot of blood on the carpet and furniture was overturned in the dining room. The remains of a meal was there, uneaten.

I immediately thought of your email and the instructions for how to reply. I spoke to the others, and after a little deliberation, we decided to contact you. As per your instructions, I have left my contact information for an Agency rep to find. I sincerely hope that you are genuine, because many of us, myself included, are concerned that you might be the very people that disappeared our friends. If you are for real, then perhaps we will meet soon.

Anthony.

"All done?" Nock asked, after I gave a sigh.

I nodded, and he started flipping through different windows. "No one picked this up yet," he said. "No missing persons reports filed. Looks like the Moores didn't have a lot of friends outside this little circle. Little social media presence. Still, we probably would have noticed within a few days."

"You'll get word to the Agency?" I asked.

"Yeah, doing that now."

I told Nock that I wanted to give them the option to come here. They would probably prefer that to being strewn all about the country in different safe houses. We didn't have living space for ten more people, but we would figure something out. Knowing him, my brother probably already had a plan for that, since it had been his idea to bring them here.

"Done," Nock announced a few minutes later. "They'll go through the usual intake process, but I've been promised that, should they choose to, they will be sent as a group to a secure location in northern California. We can then put them through further vetting procedures and decide if it is safe to bring them here."

Just like that, I thought, marveling that my boyfriend enjoyed that kind of pull.

I figured that there was little chance that we would refuse them, especially after we brought them up to speed on the nature of the danger they were all in. I wondered if they would be angry with me, as my brother had been. Anthony's letter had expressed something like that, but as my subject line had said, I was trying to right a past wrong. That meant facing the consequences of my decision.

I pulled a chair up to the other terminal to let Nock work while I logged in to the darknet. If he had been working break/fixed, I would have joined him, but this was administrative stuff, where I would be of zero help. I visited several message boards, browsing some of the more interesting research projects taking place.

Unlike the universities, government agencies and the corporate world, the darknet was an information clearinghouse, free from patents, copyrights, and regulatory restraints. There had been some efforts in the early days to establish some kind of intellectual property, but without a government to recognize and enforce IP claims, nearly everyone quickly came to the realization that it was futile. If you wanted monopoly protections, you would have to do it through official channels.

The end result had been--surprisingly to some--more, not less, innovation. Rather than one person or group staking claim to some piece of information while forbidding anyone else from using it, everyone shared ideas freely, collaboratively. If you thought you could incrementally improve someone else's work, it was all but expected that you would do so and publish the results.

I had discussed with Stan how our mesh network design might benefit from such crowd-sourcing, but he had come back with a very good counter-argument. It was the same reason that we had not released the source code for the encrypted tunneling that we utilized for the current generation darknet: security. None of us could be sure that agents of the US or friendly governments had not already infiltrated the darknet, so for now we had to assume that they had. For that reason, we had to keep our work on our next gen topology secret.

"Alright," Nock said, pushing his chair back. "That ought to do it. We have a few hours before dinner, and I need to meet with Tilly."

"Oh, great! I need to talk to her too."

We left through the side door and headed north towards the creek. Tilly's latest project took up a footprint of about two-thirds the size of the greenhouse and lay just to the east of that structure. You couldn't tell it was there, though, until you were almost upon it. Before starting work on the apartments, the construction team had used the excavators to dig out the space needed for the farm, then put up retaining walls on all four sides. This put the top of the farm at ground level, making its concealment far easier to accomplish than the greenhouse, and we wouldn't need to destroy the crops in the process.

I spotted Kurt first, working with Terry to fasten a length of horizontal metal beam to a vertical support. Those two were specialists who had been brought in to help Tilly expand her aquaponics farm, but they were only on loan to us. Once the new farm was complete, they would head up a pilot project to build another farm at a remote location somewhere on the west coast. This facility would operate similarly to our own, using genemods that were currently in hiding, under the care of Agency personnel. If that farm was successful, they would train more personnel, more farms would be constructed, and the Agency would finally begin to solve the food supply problems that had grown worse and worse for all of us over the last three years.

"Hey, Tilly!" Nock shouted, waving. I squinted my eyes, but the figure descending the ramp at the far end of the aquaponics farm was too distant to make out any features. The indistinct reply was definitely female.

We waited until she drew closer. She was pulling a cart loaded with building supplies, which she left near the pair still working. She jogged towards us then put on a burst of speed. With a grunt of effort, leapt to the top of the retaining wall, alighting almost daintily in front of us.

Tilly blew out a breath and dusted off her hands. "You're early," she said to Nock. There was no rancor in it, just an observation.

He shrugged. "I got done with my work early."

She nodded and turned to me. "Gena! It's been a while. How are things going with you?"

I couldn't help but smile. Tilly always seemed so earnest and genuine. When she addressed you, you felt like she really cared about what you had to say.

"Things are pretty good." I told her how we were testing the mesh network, leaving out my own faux pass. "We've got some more testing ahead of us, and then we have to figure out how to scale it up."

"What sorts of problems does that pose?"

I sighed. "Well, for starters, we need to fly under the radar. We can get away with broadcasting out here, but in a city, our transmissions will get noticed. I'm working on beamforming, which will both boost signal strength and give us relatively tight-beam communications."

"Can you explain that?"

"Sure. To beamform, you set up an array of antennas so that they reinforce the signal in the direction you want and cancel out in the directions you don't. By varying the phase of the signal to each antenna, you can steer the beam to a limited extent."

Tilly nodded. "Got it. What other issues do we have?"

"The other issue is the long-haul hops. We've got to connect cities together, and eventually, cross oceans. Again, we have to do it in a way that escapes the notice of the authorities in hostile regimes. Microwaves could do it, but the antennas we would need would really stick out."

"And the longer the hop, the more power you need to cross the distance, and the more likely you are to be detected. Have you considered lasers?"

"Exactly!" I said, "the risk of..." And then my brain caught up to what she had said. "Oh!" The solution was both simple and, in retrospect, obvious. Laser communications offered very high bandwidth, long range, compactness, and the beam was nearly undetectable. "I never thought of that. That could solve most of our issues."

Laser communications were less developed and commercialized as a technology than wireless, so we would have to build much of the hardware ourselves, but that seemed far more surmountable a problem than trying to hide large, leaky radio antennas.

Tilly smiled at seeing my excitement. "I'm glad I could help." She turned back to Nock. "You ready for my report?" At his assent, she gave him a summary of their progress on the aquaponics farm. They were still on schedule to finish the framing next week and begin enclosing the space in tempered glass. It would be several weeks yet before it was all ready to begin planting and seeding with fish.

Just like the greenhouse, the farm needed an airtight seal so that everything inside could be sterilized. And it would be modular to limit the damage if a spore should gain entry, with four distinct quadrants. Tilly planned to try different combinations of fish and crops in each quadrant to see which produced the best yields and required the least amount of nutrient input and waste output. Also, to give us more variety of food to eat and sell.

"Did you get any answer yet on my other concern?" Tilly asked.

"Still working on that," Nock answered. "No definitive answer yet."

"Well, we have some time, but I don't want to get this thing built and have to leave it standing empty."

The problem was manpower. With all the other projects going on, everyone on the farm already had a full schedule, most putting in sixty hours or more each week. Terry and Kurt would stay long enough to get one quadrant of the farm operating before they moved on. We could all put in a few extra hours in the short term to help with the aquaponics farm, but Tilly needed at least five full-time helpers to work the farm, assuming she spent most of her work time here. I knew that she was keen to get back to studying Rot and ways to neutralize it.

"We'll have more people coming in soon," Nock assured her. "Maybe even sooner than we thought. We might have to renovate another of the old houses around here if Norm isn't done with the apartments."

"It's probably too much to hope that any of them will have experience in aquaculture or hydroponics," she said.

"Not likely," Nock agreed. "But those you teach can teach others."

Tilly spread her hands. "Well, I'm no expert, either. I've just read a few books."

"You'll do great," I assured her. Tilly could figure anything out. I wished I could do that.

As I had that thought, she gave me a peculiar look, as though she were trying to figure something out, but it vanished a moment later. "I appreciate the sentiment. I just hope the concept proves out."

"We'd better let you get back to work," Nock said. "Same time tomorrow, eh?"

Nock was quiet on the walk back to the big house. "Something bothering you?" I asked.

"Yeah, you could say that. Did you notice that look that Tilly gave you just before we left?"

"Well, sure. What about it?"

"See, Tilly was designed with the ability to read emotions to a great degree of accuracy, but she found out a while back that she has a hard time deciphering envy and jealousy. Her theory is that she lacks the capacity to feel them herself, and I think that bears out. She senses the emotion, but it's like it's scrambled. You were feeling envious of her, weren't you?"

I chuckled. "Well, sure, who wouldn't? She's got a mind like I used to have."

"I'm worried about you, Gena. You heard what Nissi said. Trying to fix you could end up making things worse. I'm afraid that you want this so badly that you aren't thinking of the possible downsides. I don't want to lose you."

I was touched by his words, and reached out to squeeze his hand. "Yeah, I know that. I won't jump into this thing until we're sure that the risks are minimal."

"And if it works," he went on, his tone going soft and distant, "if you regain your former intelligence, how do I know you won't be different? Will you still feel the same way about me?"

My first impulse was to brush it off, to assure him that it could never happen, but something in his tone stopped me. I turned to look at him and our gazes met. I could not recall Nock ever appearing so serious, or so vulnerable. "I hadn't really considered that," I admitted. "What makes you think I would change like that?"

He sighed heavily. "I've been thinking about what Nissi said about Nona. I just can't shake the feeling that if you do this, the person you are now will be gone. I like who you are now. I'm in love with you, in fact."

I stopped walking and Nock turned to stand in front of me, waiting for my response. There was one secret that I had held on to for so long that the prospect of revealing it to anyone had always filled me with dread. I pushed past that, choosing my words carefully. "Back when I was at MIT, I designed all kinds of new computing architectures and data systems. It all came to me so easily then. I realized early on that not only did I possess intelligence far surpassing any normal human, but I had an affinity, if you will. I once heard that a true genius is not someone who is merely very intelligent, but who possesses a unique capability."

Nock was nodding slowly. "I've heard that, too. Like Mozart or Aristotle."

"My unique capability is in understanding computers, but more specifically, machine cognition. Before I was reverted, I spent a good deal of spare time on a personal project. I kept no notes, no documentation of any kind. I constructed it all in my head. Do you know what it was that I came up with?"

Nock was watching me intently. "What was it?"

"Artificial general intelligence. A thinking, learning computer, one capable of consciousness. Nock, I figured out how to build one safely."

"Safely" was the operative word. It had been in the mid 1970's when computing power had first begun to approach the exaflop range, potentially rivaling the human brain. By the end of the decade, several supercomputers existed that had passed this important milestone: three in the US, two in Germany, one in Britain and one in Japan. At the same time, research teams in each of those nations, and others, were hard at work developing new and more efficient machine learning algorithms.

That had abruptly ended in 1982. The accounts were somewhat spotty due to redactions, but from what I had been able to determine, a narrow but powerful learning machine tasked with growing the share price for JP Morgan had abruptly changed behavior and gone rogue. Up to that point, it had worked through economic means, buying and selling assets to achieve its primary motivation of maximizing the bank's wealth.

The engineers monitoring the AI had noted that the machine had diverted a notable chunk of its considerable resources to tasks seemingly unrelated to its central motivation, such as perusing the biographical and financial information of various public figures. This did not interfere with its normal activities, so the engineers and company management agreed not to pull the plug for the time being.

It was a few months later that the scandals began to drop. News outlets released reports of corruption, personal indiscretions and outright illegal activity on the part of US congressmen, lobbyists, investors, and corporate leaders. Much of it proved to be true, though some turned out to be fabricated, but the end result was dozens of resignations, terminations and more than a few arrests. The fallout dragged on for years afterward.

The only clue as to who might be responsible was the sudden crippling of all of JP Morgan's major competitors. Of the twelve banks worldwide with the most market share, the board of only one, JP Morgan, was left unscathed, and it saw its stock value soar to new heights while the others plummeted. Meanwhile, with midterm elections gearing up, a slate of previously relatively unknown candidates were being pushed to the front of public consciousness. It would later be revealed that each of them had an unknown benefactor supporting their campaigns, who had asked in turn that they support certain upcoming banking sector legislation.

The whole thing might have gone undiscovered if JPM had been successful in keeping things under wraps. By then, the engineers at the company had realized what their pet AI had been up to, but upper management had ordered them to keep quiet about it while they tried to figure out how to respond. Another month went by, with the chaos beginning to spread into other nations. Then a whistleblower emerged and revealed what had happened to the world.