Harry Harrison - The Turing Option

Dusty smirked and stretched, touched his knuckle to his mustache. “We made believe that we knew each other because that was part of the deal. But I’ll tell you something, the old fart had forgotten, but I had seen him once before. And I even remember his name because one of the guys afterwards was bullshitting my ear off about what a hotshot this old guy had been in the old days.”

“You know his real name?”

“Yup. But we got to make a deal…”

Ben’s chair crashed to the floor and he strode forward into the camera’s view, seized the pilot by the collar and dragged him to his feet. “Listen you miserable piece of crap — the only deal I make is to send you to jail for life if you don’t shout that name out loud — now!”

“You can’t.”

“I can — and I will!” The pilot’s toes were dragging on the floor as Ben shook him like a great rag doll. “The name.”

“Let me go — I’ll help. A screwball foreign name, that’s what it was. Sounded like Doth — or Both.”

Ben dropped him slowly back into the chair, leaned forward until their faces were almost touching. Spoke with quiet menace.

“Could it have been Toth?”

“Yes — that’s it! Do you know the guy? Toth. A funny name.”

The tape ended, and when his recorded voice died away Benicoff spoke aloud.

“Toth. Arpad Toth was head of security here at Megalobe when the events occurred. I checked the Pentagon records at once.

“It appears that he has a brother, by the name of Alex Toth. A helicopter pilot who flew in Vietnam.”

“This is my responsibility now,” General Schorcht said, a glint of grim determination in his eye, a touch of cold anger in his voice. “Toth. Alex Toth. An army pilot!”

“That is a very good idea,” Ben agreed. “This is on your patch and you have the organization to do it. We will of course keep the investigation going at this end. I suggest that Colonel Davis and I liaise at least once a day, oftener if there are any dramatic developments. We must keep each other fully informed about our mutual progress. Is that satisfactory, General?”

“Satisfactory. Company dismissed.”

The two Army officers jumped to their feet, stood at attention, followed the General out.

“And you have a good day too, General,” Brian said to the stiff, vanishing backs. “Were you ever in the Army, Ben?”

“Happily, no.”

“Do you understand the military mind?”

“Unhappily, yes. But I don’t want to be rude in the presence of a serving officer.” Ben saw Shelly’s grim expression and softened his words with a smile. “A joke, Shelly, that’s all. Probably in the worst possible taste — so I apologize.

“No need,” she said, returning a slight smile. “I don’t know why I should be defensive about the military. I joined rotsee to pay for college. Then I enlisted in the Air Force as the only way to get through graduate school. My parents had a vegetable stand in Farmers Market in L.A. Which for anyone else would have been a gold mine. My father is a great Talmudic scholar but a really lousy businessman. The Air Force enabled me to do the only thing I wanted to do.”

“Which leads inexorably to the next generation,” Brian said. “Where does the investigation go from here?”

“I’m going to follow up all the leads that the copter development opened,” Ben said. “As to the Expert Program, our wizard detective Dick Tracy- — that is up to you, Shelly. What’s next?”

She poured herself a glass of water from the carafe on the conference table; gave herself a moment to think.

“I’m still running the Dick Tracy program. But I don’t expect it to find anything new until we get more data for it.”

“Which leaves you with free time — and that means you can work full time on the AI with me,” Brian said. “Because the work we do will eventually be fed into the Dick Tracy program.”

Ben looked puzzled. “Say again.”

“Think about it for a moment. Right now you are approaching the investigation from only the single point of view of the crime that was committed. Well and good — and I hope you succeed before they reach me again. Otherwise I’m for the knackers. But we should also be taking a second approach. Have you thought about just what it was that they stole?”

“Obviously, your AI machine.”

“No — it was more than that. They tried to kill everyone who had any knowledge of the AI, to steal or destroy every existing record. And they are still trying to kill me. That makes one thing very clear.”

“Of course!” Ben said. “I should have realized that. They not only wanted the AI — but they wanted a world monopoly on it. They might possibly be trying to market it now. They will want to use it commercially to turn a profit. But they have committed murder and theft and certainly don’t want to be found out. They have to conceal the fact that they’re using it, so they must exploit it in such a way that the AI cannot be traced back to them.”

“I see what you mean,” Shelly said. “Once they get it working, the stolen AI could be used for almost any purpose. To control mechanical processes, maybe to write software, follow new lines of research, aid product development — it could be used for almost anything.”

Benicoff nodded solemn agreement. “And that makes it rather hard to catch them out. We have to be on the lookout, not for anything very specific, but for virtually any type of program or machine that seems peculiarly advanced.”

“That’s much too general for my program to be able to deal with,” Shelly said. “Dick Tracy can only work with carefully structured data bases. It just doesn’t have enough knowledge or common sense to help with a problem as broad as this.”

“Then we will have to improve it,” Brian said. “This is exactly what I’m driving at. It is now perfectly clear what we have to do. First we have to make Dick Tracy smarter, to equip it with more general knowledge.”

“You mean to make it into a better AI?” Benicoff asked. “And then use it to find the other AIs. Like setting a thief to stop a thief.”

“That’s half of it. The other half is what I’m doing with the robot Robin. Making it more like the AI in the notes. If I can do that, then we’ll know more about what the stolen machine is capable of. And that will help narrow the search.”

“Especially if we can upload those same capabilities into Dick Tracy,” Shelly said. “Then it could really know what to search for!”

They all looked at one another, but there seemed to be little more to say. It was clear what each of them had to do.

Ben stopped them as they rose to leave. “One last and important matter to discuss. Shelly’s living quarters.”

“I’m sorry you mentioned that,” she said. “I thought I was getting a lovely little apartment. But at the very last moment the whole deal fell through.”

Ben looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry but, well, that was my doing. I have been thinking about the attacks on Brian’s life and I realized that you must also be a target now. Once you start developing AI, the murderous power out there will… it’s not easy to say, will want to kill you as well as Brian. Do you agree?”

Shelly nodded a reluctant yes.

“Which means you will have to live with the same degree of security as Brian. Here in Megalobe.”

“I’ll get suicidal if I have to live in the businessmen’s flophouse where I am staying now.”

“No question of that! I speak with feeling because I have spent many a miserable night there myself. Now can I make a suggestion? There are WAC quarters in the barracks here with provision for female Army personnel. If we knocked a couple of rooms together and fitted them up as a small apartment — would you mind staying there?”