Crucible Read online

  Painter sighed. “Just find them.”

  7

  December 25, 1:18 P.M. EST

  Lisbon, Portugal

  “I wish my mother could’ve seen this,” Carly said.

  As they both crouched over her laptop, Mara understood her friend’s sentiment. Part of her own motivation to do her best work was to make Dr. Carson proud, to prove that the woman’s investment in a young farm girl from O Cebreiro hadn’t been misplaced. Having lost her own mother at a young age, Mara knew Dr. Carson had become more than a mentor to her.

  From a corner of her eye, she studied Carly.

  While Mara couldn’t show her work to Dr. Carson, at least the woman’s daughter could bear witness. After the ambush at the airport, the two had changed taxis three times, then took the metro to reach her hotel here in the Cais do Sodre district. Hopefully the circuitous route had shaken loose anyone trying to tail them. Once here, Carly turned her phone back on and texted her sister, Laura. It was only one word—SAFE—then she turned the phone off and pulled the battery.

  While en route to the hotel, they had both agreed to secure the Xénese device before reaching out for help.

  “She’s so beautiful,” Carly whispered, her gaze fixed to the laptop screen. She absently ran a palm along one hip. “I wish I had her curves.”

  Mara glanced sidelong at her. “You have nothing to be envious of.”

  Sunlight glinted off Carly’s blond curls, turning them a honey golden hue, an angelic glowing halo. Her friend might not be as voluptuous as the naked Eve, but her gray blouse and slim-fit black slacks accentuated a trim body, lean and muscular from Carly’s years of self-defense training and marathon running.

  Carly flashed her a smile. “Of course, you put Eve to shame.”

  Mara blushed and crossed her arms across her chest. She changed the subject. “It’s only a program.”

  She returned her attention to the screen, hiding not only the reddening of her cheeks but also any hint of what stirred deeper inside her, something she had not really acknowledged to herself.

  Instead she watched the avatar of Eve move slowly through her virtual Eden. Her arms no longer reached outward, inquisitively absorbing the data locked into every petal, branch, and water droplet in the garden. The figure simply stood on a rocky outcropping, overlooking a cerulean sea. A thunderstorm built on the digital horizon. The dark clouds seemed to mirror Eve’s expression and posture: the stiff back, the pinched brow. Her eyes reflected the flashes of lightning.

  Worry set in. Could Eve already be altering her surroundings to match the mood of her processing? If so, that was far quicker than before, again raising the specter that some remnant of the original programming might have survived the purge back at the lab, a ghost of the first iteration.

  Carly reached a finger toward the screen. “It’s all so realistic. Look at the waves crashing against the rock.” She leaned closer. “Why did you put such detail into all of this?”

  “A couple reasons. First, to teach Eve about the world through pattern recognition. Most neuroscientists theorize that pattern recognition was our first step to becoming intelligent. Recognizing patterns gave our early ancestors an evolutionary edge, along with most of our abilities today. Creativity and invention, language and decision making, even imagination and magical thinking . . . all can be attributed to the fact that we’re really just superior pattern-recognition machines.”

  Carly nodded. “Like how a toddler learns to talk, by repetition, by hearing speech patterns over and over again.”

  “Or how IBM taught a program all the chess moves and had the machine play matches over and over again in a virtual setting—until eventually it was able to beat a grandmaster at his own game, seemingly becoming smarter than a human.” Mara pointed to the screen. “That’s what I’m doing here, having Eve move throughout this virtual world, gathering data and learning patterns. It’s the first step to exposing her to the full breadth of the human experience. It’s a daunting task.”

  “And cheaper.”

  Mara glanced over, more surprised by this understanding than she should have been. Over at NYU, Carly was studying engineering, with an emphasis on mechanical design.

  “To build a robot,” Carly said, “with actuators to allow it to explore the real world, along with finely attuned sensors to analyze everything, it would be astronomically expensive. If even possible.”

  Mara waved to the laptop. “This was far easier . . . and possible.”

  “Still, you said this was only the first reason for building this virtual world. What’s the second?”

  Mara watched the storm grow wilder on the screen’s horizon. Her voice lowered, as if she were worried about being overheard. “It also serves as a prison.”

  “Prison?”

  “A gilded cage. For safety’s sake, I thought it best to grow an AI in a digital sandbox where it could go through this learning phase, this infancy, both insulated and—”

  “And unable to escape into the larger world.”

  She nodded. “Where it risks transforming into something dangerous and wreaking havoc. So, before cracking open that cage door, I wanted to make sure it grasped and appreciated the human condition, that it had some version of a digital soul.”

  “A sound precaution, I suppose.”

  “But not necessarily foolproof.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you ever heard of the AI-box experiment?”

  Carly merely frowned.

  “Back some years ago, the head of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in San Francisco conducted a test to see if an AI that was boxed up and sequestered like Eve could escape. So, MIRI’s director posed as an artificial intelligence—using his own human-level intelligence to mimic some future AGI—and locked himself into an online chat room, a virtual box. He pitted himself against a slew of dot-com geniuses, whose goal was to keep this human AGI from escaping into the greater world. The prize if the gatekeepers could keep the AGI boxed up was thousands of dollars. Still, in the end, the director managed to talk his way out of the box every time.”

  “How did he do it? By lying, cheating, threatening?”

  “Don’t know. They never said. But this was simply a human-level intelligence.” Mara looked to her laptop. “What if something were hundreds, if not millions, of times smarter?”

  Carly studied the screen, her face less enamored and more worried. “Hopefully, you’ll prove to be a better gatekeeper.”

  “I did all I could. Back at the university, I had additional safeguards in place. When the Xénese device was locked into the Milipeia Cluster, I ringed it with hardware engineered with apoptotic components.”

  “Apoptotic?”

  “Death codes.”

  Carly stared at the glowing device on the floor. “In other words, you circled Xénese with a deadly moat, further entrapping what was growing inside it.”

  “But no longer.” Mara looked to her friend for support on her decision. “I had to remove the device from that circle of protection. I had no choice. I couldn’t risk my program falling into the wrong hands.”

  Carly nodded. “And you’ve given us a chance to learn what it had been trying to communicate at the end.”

  Mara stared over at her friend. Tears threatened. “I . . . I owed it to your mother—to the others—to at least try.”

  The five women of Bruxas, who granted Mara her scholarship and forever changed her life, each held a special place in her heart. Dr. Hannah Fest’s stern Teutonic practicality. Professor Sato’s gentle manners. Dr. Ruiz’s ribald humor. And of course, Mara’s local confidante and confessor, Eliza Guerra, the head of Joanina Library at the university in Coimbra. Mara spent countless hours—often deep into the night—with the librarian, talking, sharing, laughing.

  All of that love gone.

  “I had to take the risk,” she repeated. “For all of them.”

  Carly took her hand, the warmth of her palm reassuring her. “I wo
uld’ve done the same. My mom would’ve, too.”

  Tears finally broke.

  Carly pulled her into a hug. Mara trembled—and not just from the solace found in those strong arms.

  “I needed to know the truth,” she whispered to her friend. “About who murdered them. And why?”

  2:01 P.M.

  “We’re not far,” the technician said from the back of the Mercedes van. “Signal remains strong.”

  Todor Yñigo swiveled the front passenger seat around to glare at Mendoza, the team’s electronics expert. The thin, mustached Castilian balanced an iPad on his knee. It displayed a colored map of Lisbon.

  Mendoza leaned forward and held out the device. A small red blip shone on the screen. “Wherever they are, it looks like they’re staying put this time.”

  Todor studied the map. “They’re holed up in the Cais do Sodre district.” He turned to the driver. “How long to get there?”

  “Twenty-five minutes.”

  He tossed the iPad back at the tech. “Let me know if they move.”

  “Sí, Familiares.”

  Todor could not tolerate any further setbacks. While tracking the pair—hoping the Moorish witch would lead them to her infernal device—they had lost the GPS signal when the two women had fled underground into the subway system. All the team could do was wait outside the Saldanha station—in central Lisbon—where the two had vanished. With no telling which direction their targets would go, they had to bide their time. As frustrating minutes ticked away, Todor had considered updating the Inquisitor General, but he chose not to burden the head of the Crucible. He did not want to report another failure.

  He had only met the Inquisitor General twice in his life. The first time was when Todor earned the new title of familiares. Only those who had proven themselves truly worthy were allowed to learn the identity of the Inner Tribunal, headed by the Grand Inquisitor. At the time, on his knees, he had been shocked by the revelation of the Crucible’s leader, never suspecting the truth. Still, he had been honored to have an original copy of the Malleus Maleficarum gifted to him, a weapon to use against the rising filth of the world. Feeling its weight in his hands, he could not stop grateful tears from blurring his vision as he gazed upon the true face of their leader, who smiled beatifically down at him.

  Then they met once more—

  Todor shuddered at the memory, felt the heat of the blood on his hands. You are God’s merciless soldier. Prove this by shooting without hesitation, without any show of remorse. In the end, he had demonstrated his worthiness, not balking at even this distressing command, not with the eyes of the Inquisitor upon him, judging his faith, daring him to fail.

  He had not then.

  And I will not now.

  Todor could easily blame this current delay on a technological mishap, but he was all too cognizant that any further excuses would not be tolerated. Four days ago, he had used the same type of tracker when his team had followed the U.S. ambassador to the library, planting the device on the woman at an embassy party. While the system had worked flawlessly, his mission still ended in disappointment.

  I can’t let that happen again.

  Finally, after an hour, the tracker’s signal popped up near the coast. With its position holding steady now, Todor hoped it indicated that the witch had returned to her device, to suckle again at that satanic teat.

  His palm settled upon his holstered pistol.

  I will not fail this time.

  2:04 P.M.

  Carly hovered over Mara’s shoulder, noting the jasmine scent wafting from the fall of her dark hair. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Mara pointed to the power conditioner on the floor. “Can you check to make sure I’ve got green lights across its board? With all the reconstruction going on in this part of the city, I’ve been battling regular surges.”

  She crossed over and dropped to a knee. “What would happen if you lost all power?”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem. At least on the short term. The device has built-in storage batteries. Making it self-contained. If the power is cut, the device switches to low-power mode. It can idle that way for nearly a day.” Mara glanced over. “I’m more worried about surges, unexpected power spikes that could damage circuits.”

  Carly studied the power conditioner. “Looks all good here.”

  Mara nodded, her brow pebbled by sweat. “I especially don’t want anything to glitch while unpacking the data on drives three and four. This next subroutine is a delicate process, marking a critical juncture. I want to run it and get it integrated into Eve before we risk moving the equipment.”

  From the floor, Carly studied the Xénese device. The sphere’s tiny crystal windows shone with a blue brilliance. “You’ve showed me schematics of Xénese,” she said, “but I never imagined it would look this stunning when switched on.”

  “The chips are powered by a laser array designed by Optalysy out of the U.K. That’s what you’re seeing. It speeds up the processing power a hundredfold, while consuming a quarter of the energy and producing almost no heat. It allows my algorithms to run faster, particularly Fourier transforms, mathematical functions involved in pattern recognition.”

  “So, you’re computing at the speed of light.”

  Mara smiled while continuing to work. It was an expression both shy and proud—not to mention cute. “I needed the power to run Google’s Bristlecone chip, a 72-qubit quantum processor that’s buried in the heart of the device. Consider it the brainstem of this intelligence.”

  “And the rest of its brain?”

  “My own design. Well, sort of. The higher processors—Xénese’s cerebral cortex—are run by neuromorphic chips developed at the University of Zurich. The chips merge visual processing—pattern recognition—with memory and real-time decision making, both of which are essential to cognition. Each chip mimics the action of four thousand neurons.”

  “Like little bits of a brain.”

  “But what are neurons without synapses, the gap over which one nerve cell communicates to another? That’s where the real action takes place in the brain. So, I borrowed a technological breakthrough from the National Institute of Standards and Technology out of Colorado. They developed an artificial synapse—a superconducting synapse—that fires at a billion times a second.”

  “How’s that compare with our synapses?”

  “We fire only fifty times a second.”

  Carly eyed the innocent-looking device on the floor, aghast at such power, this amalgam of neuron-mimicking chips and lightning-fast synapses, all powered by light with a quantum drive at its base.

  What sort of Frankenstein’s monster did Mara build?

  She answered it. “This conformation produces a quantum learning machine. Something Google, Microsoft, IBM, and other industry giants have been pouring money into to produce.”

  “And you beat them.”

  “Barely. Back in 2014, IBM produced its TrueNorth chip, with 5.5 billion transistors configured in a brainlike architecture. The chip was developed by the corporation’s SyNAPSE program, whose ultimate goal is to reverse-engineer the brain, to produce a neuromorphic computer—a computer based on our cognitive architecture.”

  “A digital brain.” Carly eyed her friend with greater respect. “And you built it.”

  “I can’t take full credit. The technology was already out there. Somebody just needed to put it all together.” She waved to the glowing device. “But that’s only an empty brain. My real work was in developing the program that could grow inside that shell.”

  “Eve.”

  Mara stared at the screen. “The true miracle of Xénese is not the hardware, but its ability to house a program that could mimic the amazing plasticity of our brains, one capable of growing and evolving on its own, of altering and improving its own processing.”

  “That . . . that sounds . . . terrifying.”

  Mara straightened. “Oh, very much so. That’s why my work is so important. Someone is going to fol
low my footsteps or go down their own path and reach the same end. Either way, Eve needs to be there.”

  “Why?”

  “Remember that gatekeeper from the AI-box experiment. For humankind to survive what’s coming next, the world needs a friendly gatekeeper, one powerful enough to keep any nascent AI in check, to keep it from destroying the world. That’s why I must not fail.”

  As Mara returned to her work, Carly joined her. “And how do you accomplish that?”

  “One step at a time.” She nodded to the box of hard drives wired into the Xénese device. “Or one subroutine at a time. It’s all about refinement, first teaching Eve about the world through pattern recognition. Then folding in an endocrine mirror program.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When it comes to human thought, passion often overrules reason. And it’s hormones that primarily fuel our emotions. For Eve to develop a true humanlike intelligence, to better understand us, she would need algorithms that mimic human emotions.”

  “Is that why you made her female?”

  “One of the reasons, but after that, I taught her all the languages, as a way for her to learn about culture, and to further shine a light on how humans think. But all of this is also necessary so that she can appreciate the third subroutine module.”

  “Which is what?”

  Mara tapped a key. From the tiny laptop speakers rose a familiar song, one close to both their hearts.

  “‘One Night in Bangkok,’” Carly said, understanding. “The next lesson is music.”

  “Remember, it was you who exposed me to this subroutine. You used your love of music to draw my nose out of my algorithms and code, to show me that music was more than just background noise. That listening to music wasn’t a fruitless waste of time, but a way to better understand another’s joy and pain.”

  “And that’s what you’re trying to pass on to Eve.”

  “Now that she has been taught language—along with human cadence and rhythms of speech—she can understand lyrics and music.” Mara waved to the box on the floor. “The next two hard drives contain every concerto, opera, rock ballad, and pop song composed by humankind. What better way to glean an understanding of us than to study our music, the primary method by which we give voice to our passions. The goal of this next subroutine is to teach Eve the algorithms and mathematics that connect our thoughts to beauty and art—and ultimately to our humanity.”