Secrets: Chapter 36 (part 2 finale)

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Chapter 36

Enduring Richard Kirkpatrick's self-satisfied prophecy of digitized Armageddon was beyond the limited tolerance James possessed at the end of his holiday.

In trying to contribute something to August's life, instead he'd complicated everything until it was a Gordian knot in a Japanese puzzle box inside nested Russian dolls.

Now he just wanted to forget. Maybe Shattered Land would help. Or not. He had just as many issues there.

Sleep was the safer choice.

***

James worked multiple shifts per day for five days, falling into bed exhausted each night, waking early each morning to rinse and repeat. Wednesday at noon, just before leaving for the single shift of a relatively easy day, a text from Casey buzzed his phone.

hey! hey! wassup theres like, a huuuuuge event for teh falgarde invasion intro. u know how the invasion is sunday, but tomorrow at 6 (ur time) is the warmup, so come play if u can k? k?

James went to the library, did his duty for a handful of forgettable hours, came home, and sat on the couch doing nothing for several more.

Avoiding Kanade was counterproductive, but the idea of confronting the situation directly made him feel sick to his stomach. Seeing her while pretending nothing was going on was even worse.

There were only two options. James could tell Kanade everything about August, Donald, his father, and anything else he could think of, then ask her about her own circumstances, and go from there; or, he could acknowledge that a person he knew only from a virtual universe, and about whom he understood almost nothing, was not an object of affection that he could seriously pursue.

From the way she talked and acted, Kanade would let things continue on indefinitely as they had been, simultaneously friends and strangers, intimately close and infinitely far. But that wasn't only for her to decide. Didn't he have the right to know something, anything about her life?

His phone jolted him upright just as he was drifting into frustrated sleep.

"Yeah."

"It's August."

"What is it?"

"I ... well, I've been analyzing these bloody documents. The ones we got from your ... from Richard. I came up with some things I can't quite make sense of, and I thought ... maybe you'd want to go over it with me...?"

"Okay," James said, even knowing that it would be better not to.

He was just barely maintaining a precarious balance where the best explanation for everything he knew was a combination of public paranoia, private bitterness and unjustifiable accusations. Learning anything more might push him over the line into true suspicion, and then what?

If it came down to taking sides, which one was he on?

***

James found the door unlocked and August sitting in the kitchen, elbows planted and hands at the sides of her head, staring at a ream of paper that covered every inch of table surface.

"Oh." She looked up, halfway from unfocused to dazed. "Hi."

James studied her for a few seconds, leaning against the frame of the kitchen doorway. "Are you sleeping properly?"

"Ah, well..." August looked away. "Been a bit caught up."

James pulled a chair up. "Tell me what I'm looking at."

"Quite a lot." August shifted closer to him. "Do you remember the files?"

"Not really. All nonsense to me." James struggled to hold down the irritation. "Technical jargon. What you'd expect on a computer geek's system."

"Think so?" August turned thoughtful. "I don't know. Anywho, here's what I found for research materials." She waved her hand at the sheets on the right edge of the table. "Viral marketing." Then she indicated the center of the table. "Information management." Then the left. "Genetic algorithms." She paused. "There was one other thing, but let's leave that for last. Where to start?"

James rubbed his face with both hands, trying to scrub away the weariness that had followed him all the way from home. "Wherever you think."

"Viral marketing, then. How much do you know?"

"Sounds like an ad exec with a cold."

"Oy. Let's start at the beginning."

In 1994, Pink Floyd released their fourteenth and final album, The Division Bell. During the ensuing world tour, their record label flew a zeppelin called The Division Belle from venue to venue, promoting the album. Part of the press kit that was issued contained the statement: You have spotted the Pink Floyd Airship. Do not be alarmed. Pink Floyd have sent their airship to North America to deliver a message.

On June 11, 1994, a cryptic post to a Usenet newsgroup addressed the users, asking if they had "listened" to the message, adding, "all of you must open your minds and communicate with each other, as this is the only way the answers can be revealed." The post was signed: Publius.

Publius next stated that the "ingenious person (or group of persons)" who solved the riddle would find a "unique" prize. To prove his legitimacy, Publius staged a "display of communication" for July 18. On the indicated night, at the Pink Floyd concert in East Rutherford, the front stage lights flickered into a pattern that spelled ENIGMA PUBLIUS, and enthusiasm for the phenomenon took off. Pink Floyd fans followed Publius and his enigma for more than a decade, but the puzzle was never solved and the prize never given out.

The Publius enigma constituted one of the earliest examples of media-based viral marketing: advertising driven by public interaction. Instead of directly promoting a product, viral marketing was about generating a message, one infectious enough to be passed along and iterated upon by the participants themselves. An informational virus.

"Did UCC use a viral campaign to market Shattered Land?"

"No," August replied. "Shattered Land's really never been advertised at all. The game centers've been operating at full capacity as fast as UCC can open them up."

"What is this data doing in Donald's hard drive, then?"

"I've no idea." August gathered up and put aside all the related papers. Two-thirds of the table was still covered in sheets. "Maybe if we move on to the rest, it will make more sense to you. Though ... it didn't to me."

"Alright, hit me. Can't get any worse."

"Next is information management." August smiled for the first time since James had arrived. "It's pretty much as it sounds. The thing is, it's changed a lot lately."

"Explain."

For most of the twentieth century, information management primarily involved simple paper files—their storage and life cycle concerns. By the 1990s, however, most stored data became accessible electronically, exponentially increasing the need for data sifting and transactions. The massive amounts of information were difficult to catalogue across various formats. Corporations, governments and public services scrambled to find ways to more efficiently store, tag, retrieve and analyze data. It became a field of research all its own. Huge sums of money were spent on optimization, mainly by certain entities with vested interests in data manipulation.

"Certain entities," James said, staring down at the summary sheet.

"Like ... the NSA?" August looked at him sideways, one eyebrow raised. "They sort millions of calls, emails, internet searches and the like every single day. And they file it away for reference."

"UCC, too. I know squat about computers, but I can imagine what kind of data processing it takes to run Shattered Land." James frowned. "Actually, I can't."

August nodded. "I work for UCC, and even I don't know how they do it."

"This sort of data being on Donald's computer makes sense."

"But the information management bit was lumped in with the viral marketing. I don't see the connection. Do you?"

James stared at the papers for a long minute of silence before he shrugged. "No."

"Okay. Next the big one. Ready?"

"I doubt it."

"Genetic algorithms. Oy!"

James found himself struggling for an intellectual foothold less than a minute into August's explanation. Phrases like stochastic, heuristic, candidate solution, fitness function, schemata and local optima entered one ear, swirled briefly and then tumbled back out the other. It was just ... hard to care.

Even in the days before the accident, Richard and James Kirkpatrick had been peas in different pods. James came to focus on writing and language for two reasons alone: he had the knack, and more importantly, the romance of turning a good phrase was antithetical to the determinism of math and science.

That James retained his capacity for logical deduction was an oddity he had never reconciled with his dislike of organized sciences. He was partly his father's son, no matter the lengths he went to in pretending otherwise.

James was jarred back to the present by silence. When he looked up, August was gazing at him with mixed hurt and apology.

"Am I boring you that much?"

"No. Just ... force of habit."

"How's that?"

"I've spent too many years trying not to be Richard Kirkpatrick Junior. Hearing you talk about the same sort of things he used to just ... made me turn off. Try again, I'll concentrate."

August stared at him with something stirring in the deep emerald of her eyes.

"What?" James said.

"I understand why you were so angry at the house," August said. "And when we left. And at all of this. Like he's just getting one back at you for wanting to be different. Pushing your buttons."

"Maybe."

August's gaze was directed at the masses of paper on the table, but her eyes were focused on some distant point inside the earth. "Why are you putting yourself through this for someone like me?" she said, so quietly that it must have been mainly to herself.

"Because someone like you is someone like me," James said. It just came out.

Her eyes rose to meet his again, as green as a living forest alive with sun. "Thank you."

"For what? We haven't done anything except waste time."

"Finding nothing with you has been completely different ... than finding nothing alone was."

There was no answer to that which wouldn't take them down a road James had decided not to travel, so he said, "Tell me about genetic algorithms. I'll listen."

"Can I ask something first?"

"I suppose."

"If you felt this way so strongly ... why did you bring the data to Richard? I get that you were helping me, and I can't tell you how much it means to me ... but if you thought he was just going to get back at you for cutting him off and being your own person..."

James got up from the table. He went to the window wall, opened the blinds and looked into the dark. The only illumination came from the moon, and the few stars bright enough to shine through the smog. But what light there was bounced off the snow atop nearby buildings, reflecting back out into space, a thousand earthly beacons.

"I don't really believe he's doing that." James pressed his hand to the window, the bracing cold of winter leeching fatigue and tension away.

"You don't?"

"There are two things about my father: he never does anything unless it suits him, and he doesn't lie. Though he's capable of withholding the truth. Whether or not that's the same thing is a debate I've had with myself too many times." Especially lately, regarding Kanade, himself, and the infinite gulf of the untold that lay between them. "But fabricating those documents would be impossible for him. As impossible as staying bound to a woman with nothing left to contribute."

***

It took two hours for James to get the gist of genetic algorithms.

In the most basic terms he could boil it down to, the idea was to create a search function that could adapt. Instead of pounding a square block into a round hole until the block disintegrated, the function might eventually try a different shape of hole; not necessarily a square one, but any progress was better than none. By results alone, if the algorithm pounded a square block into a rectangular hole, it was as much a failure as if it had chosen a round hole. But subjectively, a rectangle was closer to a square than a circle was, and recognizing that counted for something.

That was where fitness functions came into play—determining whether the search function had reached suitable effectiveness. Combining a search algorithm with a strong fitness function gave birth to a genetic function that could evolve over generations.

The technical details were elusive, but his understanding had reached the point where he could come to the needed conclusion.

"What we're talking about here is still just a search function."

August cocked her head to the side. "What do you mean just?"

"It searches a space and can try different methods. But we're not talking about a computer evolving. The most it can ever do is find a solution to one problem."

"That's about the size of it." August shrugged, plopping her chin into a nest made by her hands.

"And from the way you describe it, the computing muscle it takes to run these is ... ridiculous."

"Righto."

"So where are we?"

"Nowhere."

"That's what it seemed like." James went over to the kitchen sink and splashed cold water on his face.

"There was one other thing in the file," August said.

"The countries?"

"The countries..."

James dried with paper towel from the counter and then leaned against the rounded edge. He had been here so often lately that it was starting to feel like his own apartment, which couldn't be good.

"You're not going to tell me it's a list of all the countries people have accused UCC of tampering with, right?"

One corner of August's mouth turned up. "If only."

"Then what?"

August pulled a stack of sheets across the table. "The countries on the list—which may be incomplete—are Syria, China, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, India, Cuba and Russia." She shuffled through the sheets and brought one to the top. "Syria, Iran and Cuba have had a military coup or civil uprising overthrow the government within the last four years. Three out of eight is a right scary coincidence."

"That's still five out of eight that weren't. And nothing else in the data supports a connection, unless you think they were overthrown by virally marketed genetic algorithms."

August laid her head in the crook of her elbow on the table. "You think it's all just nothing?"

James made an effort to see what was in front of him. August's hair was a mess, her cheeks pale as porcelain. Her collar bone stood out just a little more than it had a few weeks ago. The best answer for both of them was clearly, Yes, I think it's nothing.

"What do you think?" he said, instead.

August buried her face in her arm, muffling the response. "I keep telling myself it's nothing. I want to believe it so badly I sometimes think I'm going mad."

"But?"

"I just feel it." August took her head out of her elbow and looked at him, almost pleading. "I feel it, and I don't even want to anymore. Am I completely gone?"

"I don't know."

Minutes passed in brooding silence. James crossed his arms, staring at the lights on the ceiling to the verge of blindness. August slumped over the kitchen table like an ultramarathon runner that had just stumbled out of Death Valley and collapsed over the finish line.

"I think there's something, too," James said. Even though he knew he shouldn't. Even though he didn't want to.

Because not telling the truth was too much like lying.

"Really?" August slowly raised herself into a sitting position.

"I think UCC created a true artificial intelligence, and it's impersonating a human being."

"What?"

"And I know who it is."

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