The Turing Test Read online

  Table of Contents

  By the same author:

  Prologue

  1 You Dirty Rat

  2 The How and the Why of It

  3 Click!

  4 By George, I Think He’s Got it!

  5 Working in a Coal Mine

  6 Who? Me?

  7 Sorry. Gotta Split

  8 A Really Bad Case of Gas

  9 Breakfast at Adversego’s

  10 But That’s Not What You Said!

  11 It’s Not as Bad as All That

  12 I Saw What You Did

  13 Tear Gas and Television

  14 Beep, Beep!

  15 Back to the Well

  16 Not all Fake News is Bad News

  17 What? Me Worry?

  18 A Mobile Case of TMI

  19 May the Force be With You

  20 A Little Adventure Along the Way

  21 Road Trip!

  22 Oh Jerry, You Shouldn’t Have!

  23 Aw, Shucks!

  24 Howdy, Pardner

  25 Many Fishes Bite if You Got Good Bait

  26 Wellhead for President!

  27 Is it Getting a Little Hot in Here?

  27 Tag, You’re It

  28 The Return of the Desert Fox

  29 We’ve Got to Quit Meeting Like This

  30 What’s Making You So Jumpy Today?

  31 I Just HATE it When You do That!

  32 It’s Test Time!

  33 What Kept You?

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  THE ALEXANDRIA PROJECT

  1 Meet Frank

  The Turing Test

  Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Updegrove. All rights reserved.

  First Ebook Edition: July 2017

  Starboard Rock Press

  Marblehead, MA

  Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics

  [email protected]

  https://updegrove.wordpress.com/

  ISBN: 978-0-9964919-8-3

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons – living or dead – is entirely coincidental.

  To my sister Anne, who lived life to the fullest,

  but not for long enough

  By the same author:

  The Alexandria Project, a Tale of Treachery and Technology

  The Lafayette Campaign, a Tale of Deception and Elections

  The Doodlebug War, a Tale of Fanatics and Romantics

  Available in paperback and eBook at Amazon and in paperback on order through your favorite local book store

  Prologue

  The soles of Jake Barr’s feet were telling him something was wrong. Eighteen years on the night shift had made him sensitive to the mood of the generators, and they were growing restless.

  He pressed his hand against one of them. The vibrations should be smooth. But they weren’t, not quite; they were more like the ride of a car with a wheel out of balance.

  Everything in the dimly lit, cavernous facility looked all right. Was it his imagination? If something was wrong, the sensors in the machines would be sending alerts to the control room.

  He looked up to where the engineers worked behind the glass on the second floor. One was looking at a computer terminal. The other two were talking.

  But something was wrong. He could feel it. And now he thought he could hear it, too. The generators were speeding up. The hum of the drive shafts was strained. Louder, too. But still, none of the engineers looked concerned.

  Was that a thin haze in the air? The familiar smell of engine oil and hot metal had acquired an acrid edge. Something was getting out of control.

  He strode over to the panel of old-fashioned analog dials monitoring RPMs, temperature and vibration. All the needles were rising. Some of them were already in the red zone.

  He stepped back. How could everything in the control room still look normal? There should be flashing lights and alarms. He felt like the murderer in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-tale Heart, deafened by the beating of a heart only he could hear.

  Now the bearings in one of the generators were shrieking. There! The guys in the control room were finally waking up. Two were staring out onto the floor. The third was darting back and forth along the wall of instruments and switches.

  But the machines only ran faster. They were jolting, too. The whole building trembled each time they did. He backed up against the wall and watched, wide-eyed.

  Black smoke was rising now from the generators, making it hard to breathe. The drive shaft bearings must be running dry. But how could that happen, especially to all of them at once? Boom! Incredibly, all the generators were rocking in unison now. He turned and ran up the stairs, into the control room, and yelled at the engineers. But they ignored him.

  “I said what’s happening?” he yelled again.

  “How the hell should I know?” one said without turning around. “None of the controls are working. We can’t even shut the damn things down!”

  The tortured scream of the wildly spinning machines was deafening now. Smoke was seeping into the control room. The engineer at the computer screen looked up and pointed. “Holy hell – look at that!”

  The number one generator rocked back and forth on its broken floor mounts. The lights in the control room started to flicker. “Let’s get out of here,” Jake yelled.

  Down the stairs they ran, out of the building and into the parking lot. Huffing from the exertion, they listened to the muffled sounds of the generators tearing themselves apart. It was like a scene from hell, with the cries of the damned mixing with the black wraiths of coal smoke spiraling up, lit from below by the angry red glow streaming from the windows of the generator room. And all they could do was watch.

  1

  You Dirty Rat

  Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

  Alan Turing colleague I. J. Good, 1965

  The question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions.

  Marvin Minsky, 1988

  Frank ambled around his living room, a puzzled expression on his face. How could he not find his sunglasses? They were probably lying around in plain sight. The angry voice echoing around the room wasn’t helping his concentration either. Where the heck could he have put those glasses?

  The room was suddenly silent, and he stopped in his tracks. What was the last thing he’d heard?

  He grabbed the phone and took it off speaker mode. “I’m sorry, Ms. Cornwall. I didn’t quite catch that last question?” Son of a gun! His sunglasses had been right next to the phone all along.

  “I said how did you catch my husband?”

  It had been easy. He knew from Ms. Cornwall that her husband liked to spend an hour or two each morning working at a local coffee shop. No, she didn’t think he had a portable cellular connection for his laptop. Yes, she could email Frank a picture of him.

  The next day Frank settled in at the same coffee
shop with his own laptop. Predictably, the mom-and-pop business had a wide-open router. Before his hapless prey finished his latte, Frank had recorded enough compromising chat and video to make Anthony Weiner blush.

  “I was able to intercept your husband’s email at the coffee shop he visits. What I sent you last night is a sampling of what he and Cindy Dymples were exchanging.”

  The mention of her husband’s administrative assistant set Ms. Cornwall to ranting once again. When she finally ran down, Frank told her he was sorry that he’d confirmed her suspicions. Yes, he’d send her his bill by the end of the week.

  He pulled on a sweatshirt and clattered down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk. The cool air hitting his face as he broke into a trot was a relief after the tirade he’d just endured. Maybe he’d do an extra mile today to flush his mental systems clean.

  But by the time he was completing his wide, half-moon sweep behind the Washington Monument, he was feeling worse instead of better. How many more ho-hum assignments like this could he tolerate? They paid the bills but provided no challenge. And nobody was ever happy when he was done.

  But what right did he have to complain? He had the reputation – but not the resources – to attract clients with interesting problems. Big companies wanted a rapid-response team of engineers, lawyers, and PR spin doctors to contain and fix all the damage when they were hacked. He had neither the skill nor the stomach to hire and manage a posse like that.

  As he plodded back up the stairs after his run, he wondered when, or for that matter whether, he’d get another project from the CIA. When had he finished his last one? Seven months ago? Eight?

  He hung a towel around his neck, picked up his computer tablet, and slid open the door to his tiny balcony. The landlord hadn’t invested much in converting the seedy old apartment building into condos. But he had sprung a few bucks to add a token amount of outdoor space to each unit. Frank was surprised how much he appreciated the postage stamp of a balcony, especially for cooling off after his morning run.

  He settled in and started skimming the news. What had the world been up to overnight? Things had settled down politically after the party conventions; but that wouldn’t last. The Middle East was a mess, as usual.

  Then he stopped and held the tablet closer. This looked interesting. Three power plants had suffered severe damage after their engineers lost control of the generators. That sounded familiar. The CIA had famously succeeded in causing just such an event by hacking into the computers of a power plant back in 2007. A real black hat must have pulled off a similar exploit now!

  He put the tablet down and tapped his fingers on his knee. The power plants were domestic, so they weren’t on the CIA’s turf. But given the prior staged attack, the CIA would certainly be consulted. Maybe his old boss George Marchand could help him get his foot in the door.

  He shot off an email and spent the rest of the day fretting. Marchand replied eventually, promising to see what he could do.

  * * *

  A day later, Frank’s early morning email included one from George. Could he be at the headquarters of the National Security Agency at 10:00 AM? Yes, he could. Assuming his seldom-used, last-millennium heap of a car rose to the challenge.

  At 9:00 AM he uttered a silent prayer before turning the key in the ignition. The starter motor cranked the engine through three agonizingly slow rotations. The fourth time around, the engine caught. He set a course for Fort Meade, twenty-five miles distant from downtown Washington.

  The traffic gods were kind, and with fifteen minutes to spare, he presented himself at the reception desk inside OPS2A, the big, boxy, black-glass building where most of the NSA’s Operations Directorate work.

  “Frank Adversego, here to see Major Tong. I’ve got a ten o’clock appointment.”

  The guard held Frank’s security clearance card up to confirm Frank’s face matched the one on the card. Then he typed Frank’s name into his computer and studied the screen before handing back the card.

  “Thank you, Mr. Adversego. Please look into the camera.”

  Frank did, and the guard handed him a clip-on tag with a grainy, unflattering picture printed above his name. “Please take a seat. Someone will come to escort you.”

  Frank perched on the edge of a couch and reached for his phone before remembering not to bother. The one-way glass walls of the building were sheathed with a thin, transparent, copper-based film to prevent radio signals from getting in or out. He put his phone back in his pocket and waited, both feet tapping, until he saw a young man striding his way across the reception area.

  “Mr. Adversego?”

  “Yes?”

  “Pleased to meet you. I’ll escort you to Major Tong’s office.”

  Frank was surprised to find himself in an elevator going down several floors rather than up. Then they walked for what must have been five minutes. Clearly, the underground office space went far beyond the footprint of the building aboveground. Finally, his guide knocked on one of the countless doors lining a last, long corridor.

  “Frank Adversego to see you, Major.”

  A professional-looking young woman with jet-black hair rose to greet him. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Adversego. Please sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

  Making himself comfortable around strangers was not a skill Frank had been born with, or ever acquired thereafter. He did his best not to fidget as the major paged slowly through the contents of the open file folder that was the only item on her large desk. “You have an impressive record, Mr. Adversego,” she said, looking up at last. “I see that you’ve done some very interesting work, both with government agencies as well as, shall I say, in spite of them? What sort of projects are you working on right now?”

  An honest answer would have been “playing net nanny for naughty adults,” but that wouldn’t do. He settled for “I’m doing work in the private sector these days.”

  “With a cybersecurity company?”

  “No, on my own. I guess you could say I’m the cyber-equivalent of a private detective.”

  “I see. I understand that an item in the news led you to contact Mr. Marchand, at the CIA.”

  “Yes – the cyberattacks on the power plants. It sounds like the kind of exploit we’ve been expecting for years, and now it’s finally happened.”

  “What do you know about the incidents?”

  The question surprised Frank. Then it occurred to him there might be more to this interview than an exploration of his professional credentials. For all the major knew, he was a foreign agent, security clearance and prior service as a CIA contractor notwithstanding.

  “Nothing more than I’ve read online.”

  “That’s it? Then why did you reach out, based on no more than that?”

  “I suppose I like challenges, especially new and difficult ones. Most of the work that comes my way in the private sector is pretty repetitive.”

  The major tapped her desk with the middle finger of her right hand. Then she flipped through the file until she found what she was looking for.

  “According to your file, you can’t always be trusted to do exactly what you’re told to do. Would you agree with that statement?”

  “I guess I’d phrase it a little differently.”

  “How?”

  “Well, if I find that sticking to the strict letter of my directions would stop me from accomplishing the task I’ve been assigned, I’ll opt for accomplishing the task.”

  She frowned slightly while maintaining eye contact. Her finger started tapping again.

  “It also says you’re not much of a team player and work best when you’re on your own. How about that assessment?”

  “I guess I couldn’t disagree with that.”

  More tapping and staring. “And a loner?”

  “I�
�ve always been something of an introvert,” he said, shifting in his chair. How much more of this would there be? Would Major Tong ask him to confirm his complete lack of fashion sense next?

  After another pause, the major smiled. “Then you should fit right in here. Are you free for the rest of the morning?”

  “Yes – for the rest of the day, actually.”

  “Good.” She stood up. “The first briefing of the power station attack response team is about to start. Please follow me.”

  More hallways and doors. Then into a room filled with chairs facing a podium and a screen. Frank watched as the room filled; a few people were in uniform. Someone entered and began fiddling with the projector control on the podium. When he was satisfied, he addressed the room.

  “Okay, folks. Let’s get started. For anyone who’s new, my name’s Jim Barker, and I’ll be the manager of this response team. I’d like to kick things off by reviewing what we know. Don, can you dim the lights? Great – thanks.”

  The screen lit up with a long view of what looked like a typical power plant.

  “This is the Sea Breeze power station. It’s big – over 200 megawatts. And it’s not very old, which is too bad, because there are lots of old, inefficient plants about to be retired. The evidence so far suggests each attack was generally similar, so I’ll use this one as a stand-in for the rest.”

  He switched to an interior view. “Here’s the generator room. Seems pretty normal from this distance, but let’s take a closer look.”

  Now they were looking at the partially disassembled end of one of the machines, and Barker was wielding a laser pointer. “This is one of the generators undergoing scheduled maintenance a few weeks ago.”

  He gave the controller another click, and the screen split into two images. “Here’s that shot again on the left, and on the right, you see the same generator as it looks now.” The red laser dot zigzagged back and forth across the screen like an irate Tinker Bell. “The electromagnet wire wrappings on the left are clean and bright. Over on the right, they get darker and blacker as you move in towards the armature – that’s the axle of the generator, if you will. And when you look at this main bearing with its housing removed on the left – let’s zoom in – you can see the bearings are shiny and greasy. But over on the right now, they’re charred and black.”