David Walton - The Genius Plague

She put together a program to recognize the basic pattern of the whistle message and set it churning through the thousands of indecipherables to find the ones that matched.

“The problem with computers,” she said, “is that they can’t forget things. They can’t generalize. You recognize my face, not because you have an exact mapping of it in three-dimensions, but because you unconsciously forget all the parts that don’t matter and hang on to those tiny bits that do. You couldn’t articulate what it is about my face that makes it unique, but your brain knows.”

“So forgetting things is good,” I said, thinking about my father.

“It’s one of the human brain’s chief strengths,” she said. “There was a man, a research subject, years ago, who couldn’t forget anything. Literally anything. He could memorize pages and pages of random numbers, just by reading them once, and then years later—years!—recall them perfectly. He remembered every word that was ever spoken to him in his entire life, along with the date and place and situation. And it was a terrible handicap.”

“How is that a handicap?” I asked, amazed.

“He couldn’t generalize. You could show him a page with an easy pattern—numbers increasing by threes, for instance. And he couldn’t see it. He could recite every number of the page in order, but he couldn’t recognize the pattern.

“He had a terrible time with faces, because they were never exactly the same. Seen from a different angle, or with a different expression, or in shadow, they looked different to him. His brain couldn’t boil it down to those few, essential, defining characteristics that would allow him to distinguish your face from mine, regardless of the circumstance.”

“Still,” I said. “Forgetting too much can be a handicap, too.”

She sighed and nodded. “I’m sorry about your father. We lost him too early. He had a lot to contribute.”

“You knew my father?” I was surprised. Of course, they would have been at the NSA for a lot of the same years, but Fort Meade was a gigantic place. I had assumed that no one I was working with would remember him.

“Yes, I knew him,” she said wistfully, in a tone of voice that implied more.

“I never met you, though,” I said. “Did you ever visit the house?”

She looked sad. “No. I didn’t know him all that well. Just by reputation, as a colleague. A talented one.”

A thought struck me. “That’s not why you offered me a job, is it? Because of my father?”

She shrugged. “It was what I first noticed about your resume. But that wouldn’t have been enough, by itself. I need people who can think outside of the box, and you seemed to be that sort of person. Like him.”

It made sense, then. Her willingness to make me an offer, despite my lack of a degree, and then sticking out her neck to defend me when I was arrested. It was because of my father.

While her search program was running, we worked on deciphering the whistle message. With the data from SIL, we could match graphs of the frequency distribution of certain whistled “words” with their meanings. It was tedious and far from comprehensive, but it worked. Sort of. A little past eleven o’clock, we had a rough English translation.

“Hmm,” Melody said.

I sighed. “Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

“We’re probably missing some nuances. We’re going to need linguistic help before this is over, if we can get it. In the meantime, we’ll do the best we can.”

“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is how this language is being used as a code at all. This is a primitive group of people. They hunt and fish and canoe on the river. They don’t have computers or cell phones, or even electricity or running water. The concepts that can even be expressed in their language are very limited. They can’t do math; they don’t even have words for numbers higher than two! So who is using this code to communicate? Not the Johurá, that’s for sure.”

“Surely there are tribespeople who leave the tribe,” she said. “Sail down the river, learn Portuguese, join a different community.”

“I guess there must be. But how many? Five? We’re talking about a people group of four hundred members here. All of the characteristics that make this difficult for us to translate—its difficulty, its rareness—would make any kind of widespread use as a code impossible. I suppose the Ligados could have two wandering Johurá, and are using them to communicate between two locations.”

Before going home, we checked the results of Melody’s program. Thousands of indecipherables, most of them recent, had been flagged as probable whistle messages. “Incredible,” Melody said. “You may have found the motherlode. We’ll have to get Shaunessy in on this tomorrow.”

“Why Shaunessy?” I asked.

“Programming skills,” she said. “I’ve got the cognitive theory, and I can muddle about, but for any serious Java work, we need somebody with the right experience. This is far too much to translate by hand, and we’re going to need a specially written program to do most of the translation for us, preferably one that can distribute the work over hundreds of servers to get it done fast. Shaunessy’s the master at that kind of thing.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

But I didn’t see her in the morning. Her office was empty, and when I finally asked, Andrew said she was taking a personal day. “But I saw her late last night, and she didn’t say anything about that,” I said.

Andrew just shrugged. “She called this morning. Personal day. She’ll be back in tomorrow.”

I did my best to explain to Shaunessy what Melody and I had discovered the night before, and what Melody wanted her to do. We worked on it together, me showing her how to match up the frequency distributions in the SIL material to the whistled words in the messages, and her whipping up some software to automate the translation.

“I’m amazed by you guys,” I said. “You, Andrew, everybody. Knocking out sophisticated software like it’s as easy as breathing. It’s awesome to be here.”

Shaunessy gave me a lopsided smile. “As long as you pay proper homage, we may deign to grant you the occasional boon.”

I grinned. I liked her better without the chip on her shoulder. “I live to sit in the dust at your feet,” I said. “But seriously. This team kicks ass.”

“Seriously back at you. Nice job on this one.” She shook her head. “Whistle language. That’s something else.”

Despite the supposed personal day, Melody did show up in the office just after lunch. I peeked into her office and found her rummaging through papers in her safe.

“Not now, Neil,” she said. “I’m not really here.”

“Is everything okay?”

“It’s nothing. A personal crisis. There’s just one thing I need to do, and then I’m leaving again.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help…”

“There’s nothing, but thank you.”

“Will you be in tomorrow?”

“Yes. I hope so. I think I will.”

I backed out of her office, troubled, but knowing it was none of my concern. She wasn’t a friend, not really, and I had no business pushing my nose into her life.

I went back to my cubicle. “Melody seems out of sorts,” I said. “Did something happen?”

Shaunessy shrugged. “Don’t know. Probably something we’re not cleared for.”