The Turing Test Page 9

  He held the door for her, wondering what that meant.

  When she returned to the table from a stop in the restroom, he got the answer. She’d literally let her hair down, and an abundance of lustrous red tresses framed her face to extremely favorable effect. “What looks good to you?” she said, sitting down.

  He blinked twice, only catching her meaning when she picked up her menu. “Oh!” he said, “I don’t know. Most of this stuff is pretty unfamiliar to me.”

  “Do you like sushi?”

  “Not really.”

  “Sashimi?”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Okay. Sounds like you’ll be sticking with the American end of the menu then. I’m going for the exotic, starting with the drink list.”

  One hour and two drinks later, he was feeling more relaxed. Shannon was very interested in how his thoughts were developing and had some excellent ideas of her own. But they hadn’t made any real progress on next steps.

  “So, where does that leave us?” she asked, leaning forward and placing her chin on her hand.

  “With the same old paradox. The only actors capable of pulling off a series of attacks like this are the governments of the countries that have been hardest hit. But no government would ever hit itself that hard, so that means these attacks can’t be occurring. Except, of course, that they are.”

  She started laughing.

  “Was that funny?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, covering her mouth as she tried to stop laughing. “I’m sorry. It’s just that what you said reminded me of a funny song my grandfather used to sing to me. It seems to summarize things perfectly.” She pulled out her phone. “Give me a second – I want to find the lyrics so I get them right. Here we go – this is the verse I remember best. She handed him her phone and he read:

  Last night I saw upon the stair,

  That little man who wasn’t there,

  He wasn’t there again today

  Oh, how I wish he’d go away ...

  Go away, go away, and don’t come back no more!

  Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door ...

  “That’s amazing,” he said. “My father used to sing the same song.” Frank scrolled down to read the rest of the lyrics, and Shannon leaned closer so they could both read at the same time.

  “How about another drink?” Shannon asked.

  9

  Breakfast at Adversego’s

  One part of Frank’s brain was engaging in a slow and painful thought process. The rest of it seemed to be incapable of doing anything.

  The three concepts the first part of his brain was struggling to resolve ran as follows:

  1. His head had begun hurting sometime during the night, and the headache had gotten steadily worse.

  2. If he stayed in bed, he would be less aware of his throbbing head than if he got up.

  3. If he got up, he could have coffee.

  Eventually, his bladder introduced a fourth consideration that tipped the balance in favor of action. He swung his legs over the side of his bed and paused, hoping that if he exercised patience the room would return to its usual, stationary state. Then he heard a small sound behind him.

  His eyes shot open, and his mental capacities sharpened in an instant. The first product of this raised level of awareness was the realization that the sound he had just heard indicated the presence of another human being, followed immediately by the conclusion that the human being in question was occupying his bed. But achieving that state of enlightenment had taxed his capabilities considerably. Identifying who the human being might be did not follow immediately. He decided the best way to pursue that information would be to review the events of the day before and work forward as far as he could.

  He started with work, followed by his ride home, after which …

  Oh.

  Without looking behind, he wavered to his feet and walked carefully into the bathroom. What he saw in the mirror was not encouraging. He took a long hot shower, shaved and otherwise repaired as much damage as he could, and then opened the bathroom door a crack.

  There did indeed seem to be someone lying in his bed. Although he couldn’t see a face, logic and the luxurious wealth of red hair gracing his pillow confirmed that the someone was Shannon Doyle.

  He tiptoed to his closet and got dressed inside it. Then he tiptoed out to make coffee. As it percolated, he sat on one of his two kitchen chairs to see if he could recall the rest of the events of the evening before. But despite persevering through the entire brew cycle, he had made little progress. A gauzy veil seemed to have descended over his mind’s eye partway through the Scorpion Bowl for two Shannon had suggested they share. Surprisingly, he did recall that, as they sipped on their respective straws, he had noticed the color of her eyes for the first time. Less surprisingly, he could no longer recall what that color was.

  He poured a cup of coffee and gratefully inhaled its bracing aroma. The worst of his headache had been dulled by the shower, a couple of over the counter pain meds, and two large glasses of water. He decided that the headache aside, he was not displeased. Then he frowned. What if Shannon was? He started worrying about what might have happened on the other side of that gauzy veil and whether he should go out and buy something for breakfast. Or maybe it would make more sense to go out somewhere when she woke up? Or maybe they would just make awkward conversation and she would quickly leave. That would be bad. And Monday would be worse.

  “Knock, knock.”

  He turned and stood up, immediately wishing he’d done so more slowly. Shannon was standing in the doorway in a heretofore unused bathrobe Marla had given him several Christmases before. Worried, he looked for clues in her face to see in what frame of mind she’d awoken.

  “Good morning!” he said. “Coffee? And how’d you sleep?”

  “Oh, please. Pretty well, thank you. Probably better than I deserve. How many Scorpion Bowls did we drink?”

  No wonder he felt the way he did; he’d hoped the answer was singular rather than plural.

  “Uh, if you’re relying on me, we’ll need to call the restaurant to find out.”

  Her eyes smiled at him above her coffee cup as she took a sip. They were a beautiful shade of green.

  “You know,” she said, “there’s this really great brunch place nearby I’ve been wanting to try …”

  * * *

  “Frank!”

  The urgency in Shannon’s voice brought him in from the balcony at a run. Shannon was standing on a chair, staring down at the animal that was staring back up at her.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Shannon, feeling foolish, stepped down from the chair. “Are you aware there’s a rather large turtle in your apartment?”

  “No. That’s Thor. And he’s a tortoise. I guess I forgot to introduce you.”

  Shannon sat down. “How exactly is it that you came to have a tortoise in your apartment?”

  “Oh, my daughter gave him to me for my birthday. I agree, it is kind of strange to have a tortoise as a pet. But he kind of grows on you.” Frank squatted down. “Thor, this is Shannon.” If the tortoise’s expression, such as it was, changed with this information, Shannon was unable to detect it.

  “Charmed, I’m sure,” Shannon said in the general direction of the reptile. “So, what goes into having a tortoise as a pet? I assume you don’t have to take it out for walks?”

  “I probably should. But he seems to be happy enough here without that.”

  “Happy? How can you tell?”

  That stumped Frank for a minute. “Okay. So, let’s say not visibly unhappy. Anyway, all I have to do is put some vegetables out for him.”

  “You mean he’s house trained?”

  “No, not exactly. But if you don’t
give him very juicy food, he almost never urinates.”

  “I’m assuming that only answers half the question.”

  Frank’s eyes lit up.

  “That’s right! Let me show you what I came up with for that.”

  He ducked into a closet and came out with a familiar round object with some sort of contraption on top.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a robotic vacuum cleaner. And on top is a tortoise waste removal device I invented. I’m thinking of patenting it. Let me show you how it works!” Frank went into the kitchen and returned with a paper towel wadded up into a damp sausage.

  “Here goes!” He dropped the wad of paper on the floor. “The bit on the top is a plow I took off a kid’s remote-controlled earth mover toy. I also added a little camera in the front and hooked everything up to a battery and a Raspberry Pi processor I programmed to receive the video stream and operate the plow.” He turned the vacuum cleaner on and set it on the floor.

  With mixed shock and amusement, Shannon watched as the vacuum cleaner identified the wad of paper and trundled toward it. As it grew closer, it lowered the plow until it was sliding along on the floor. When it reached the paper, it neatly scooped it up, raised the plow a couple inches, and then glided off to the kitchen. “There’s a cat litter box in there it will dump that into. I figured it was easier to train a robot than a tortoise, and it all comes out the same.”

  “You know, Frank,” Shannon said, “I’m glad we got together before I found out just how strange you are.” She paused and then added, “At least I think I am.”

  * * *

  Frank sat on his micro-balcony on Monday morning, pondering the events of the weekend. Shannon had not only failed to dash off on Saturday morning, but she stayed through the entire weekend. He’d found it surprisingly pleasant to have someone around despite the small size of his apartment and his solitary ways. Shannon seemed always ready to talk when he was and happy to be online when his thoughts were elsewhere.

  In any event, she was not there now. She’d left early to pick up a change of clothes before leaving for Fort Meade, leaving him to his solo morning routine of reading the news on his tablet. The only difference was that instead of a bowl of dry diet cereal, the remnants of a bowl of strawberries sat in front of him. They were courtesy of a shopping stop Shannon had insisted on making after discovering the monastically barren refrigerator and cupboards in his kitchen.

  He stepped back inside to get a coffee refill. When he returned, the bowl was empty. He frowned. Had he eaten the last two strawberries and forgotten it? He walked back inside for the remainder of the berries and had just sat down on the balcony again when he heard the ping of a text message landing on the phone he’d left in the kitchen. He got up to see what it said and smiled to see a funny text from Shannon.

  Returning to the balcony he found … no strawberries. He was starting to feel like Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, but there was no one nearby to blame. Or at least no one human. Perched on the railing of his neighbor’s balcony, though, was a large black bird. Large enough, he guessed, to be a crow. Discovered, it tilted its head back and launched into a long, triumphant caw. Curious now, Frank stood up and went inside. But instead of going to the kitchen for more food, he stepped into the living room and looked out the window. The crow was on the railing of his balcony now, cocking its head from side to side, looking for any new scraps of food. Disappointed, it flew away.

  Frank hunted through his kitchen for something else to feed the bird and settled on half a bagel. He tore it into pieces and returned to the balcony. But the crow, or whatever it was, was nowhere to be seen. Oh well. He returned to the news and ate the bagel himself.

  There was nothing new on the climate change front. Maybe that would give him time to tease something new out of the data they’d collected. He knew from long experience that the best way to do that would be to clear his mind as much as possible and then focus on anything that didn’t seem to hang together. He pulled on his jacket and headed downstairs for a walk.

  He started toward the Mall and allowed his thoughts to drift through the history of events and across the items of interest he’d already noted. Half an hour later, he decided the most significant thing worth noting was that everything always hung together. The targeting, the timing, the calculations – everything was always remarkably consistent. True, the attacker had found different vulnerabilities to exploit in most cases, but over time Frank had come to recognize that the attacker always used one of just three different approaches when it moved from accessing a system to carrying out the actual attack.

  So, if everything hung together so precisely, perhaps he should assume that the attacker was just as logically consistent in other ways as well. That sounded promising, but he didn’t know where to take it. He turned his collar up against a freshening, damp breeze and picked up his pace as he leaned into it. Where to go next?

  He didn’t know. To date, he’d always stopped at that point, because it seemed to point directly toward a dead end, since the only entities capable of pulling off the attacks couldn’t be behind the attacks. But what if that wasn’t the right way to look at it? What if you divided that step into two questions – the first being who could design the attacks and the second being who was actually carrying them out? That sounded promising. He texted Shannon to see if she was busy for dinner.

  * * *

  “So, here’s what occurred to me. Instead of fighting the conclusion that only a few countries are capable of designing the attacks, why don’t we embrace it? Maybe somebody hacked the NSA and stole a program capable of designing and executing the attacks. That would work.”

  “So, you’re suggesting we’ve been holding ourselves back?” Shannon said.

  “I guess you could put it that way, yes.”

  “Interesting. How do we go about figuring out whether that’s the case?”

  “Let’s review what we think we know, and see if that supports or undermines my idea.”

  “Okay. What do we think we know?”

  “First, that we’re dealing with someone that has access to almost infinitely deep databases and inventories of zero-day vulnerabilities.”

  “Fair enough,” Shannon said. “And we also think the attacker has access to databases only the NSA and one or two other agencies on earth maintain.”

  “Right,” Frank said. “And we know the attacks follow the triggering events almost instantaneously. From that we infer the attacker uses a program to select the targets and initiate the exploits. It also makes it possible to imagine that someone other than the original designer of the program could be behind the attacks, because the program is already equipped to fulfill these functions without a big team of sophisticated programmers managing it.”

  “That makes sense, sure,” Shannon said. “So, to sum up, you’re thinking the sequence is that the NSA, or some other equally clever agency, built the program first, then someone stole it, and after that, the program could run mostly on its own. Is that it?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Just one problem,” Shannon said. “If the NSA or some agency in Russia built it, why hasn’t someone told us?”

  “That’s a good question, and I’ve been trying to come up with a good answer.”

  “And?”

  “A couple of ideas, but it may be we won’t be able to find out whether either of them is right. For example, maybe the top brass at the NSA has had the same thought and isn’t telling anyone other than a small team assigned to look for such a thief.”

  “Why not tell us?”

  “How would it look to the public if the NSA designed something that’s causing all this damage and chaos? Maybe they’re afraid someone will leak the news to the press. And we’re coming up on an election again, don’t forget.”

  “But why would anyo
ne leak information like that?”

  “Why did Snowden reveal what he revealed? Maybe someone in the NSA wants to make the point that AI weapons are inherently too dangerous, and shouldn’t be designed to begin with.”

  “Point taken. And, of course, it might not be a U.S. program at all. It could have been developed by the Russians or the Chinese.”

  “Right. But either way, I’m thinking the best way to figure out how the attacks were designed and launched would be to see how the NSA would go about doing the same thing.”

  “Now that you mention it,” Shannon said, “I can easily imagine the NSA wanting to develop something like this. For example, we might want to release a program just like this to wipe out the energy infrastructure of an enemy we thought was about to launch a nuclear attack.”

  “Exactly,” Frank said. “Remember it was way back in 2010 we learned about the Stuxnet attack the U.S. and Israel launched against Iran, targeting the uranium concentrating centrifuges at one of Iran’s nuclear development facilities. If Stuxnet hadn’t accidentally invaded some systems in other countries, we would never have found out about it. Think what we must be capable of designing by now.”

  “How about this,” Shannon said. “Why don’t I ask Jim to schedule a meeting for us with whoever the top artificial intelligence architect is at the NSA?”

  “Perfect! Let’s do that.”

  10

  But That’s Not What You Said!

  “Jerry Steiner?” Frank said. “Do you know what he looks like?”

  “No, I’ve never met him,” Shannon said. “Why?”

  “I knew a guy by that name back at MIT. He was absolutely brilliant. Strange, but brilliant. He was accepted by MIT when he was just fourteen. He went on to graduate at seventeen, finished his PhD at twenty, and became a full professor at twenty-four. Everybody expected him to win a Nobel Prize for his work in artificial intelligence. AI was enjoying one of its up periods back then.”