Gridiron

'People went home for the holidays.'

'So find more.' The Japanese glanced around the restaurant. 'Maybe a few of these waiters would like to earn some easy money. Shit, it's not even illegal. How often can you say that these days?' He reached into his coat pocket, drew out a manila envelope and pushed it across the table.

'I still don't get it,' said Cheng, pocketing the envelope without opening it. 'What's in it for you?'

'What's to get?' The Japanese shrugged. 'It's like I told you when we first met. You want to demonstrate against the Yu Corporation's involvement with the Communist Chinese. And I want to sponsor you to do it.'

Cheng Peng Fei recalled the occasion of their only other meeting: the Japanese — he still did not know his name — had tracked Cheng down after seeing his name in the newspapers in connection with the original demonstration on the new Hope Street Piazza.

'But I think you should be less polite. You know what I'm saying?

Make a little more fucking noise out there. Throw a few rocks or something. Get tough. It's a good cause, after all.'

Cheng wanted to say that he had thrown a piece of rotten fruit at a car entering the Gridiron's underground car park, only he thought that the Japanese would find that funny. What was a piece of fruit beside a rock?

Instead he said, 'Is that what you really think? That it's a good cause?'

The Japanese looked puzzled.

'Why else would I be doing this?'

'Why else indeed?'

The waiter came to take Cheng's order.

'A Tsingtao,' he said.

'You're not eating?' said the Japanese.

Cheng shook his head.

'Too bad. This is really very good.'

When the waiter had gone, Cheng said, 'Shall I tell you what I think?'

The Japanese forked some fish into his mouth and stared levelly at Cheng. 'You can say what you like. Unlike the People's Republic of China, this is still a free country.'

'I think that you and your employers are probably business rivals of the Yu Corporation and that you would like to see them embarrassed in any way possible. I'll bet you're in the electronics and computer business too.'

'Business rivals, huh?'

'Don't you Japanese have a saying — business is war? Is that why you want a demonstration outside their new building? Although I can hardly see why it should matter very much in the corporate scheme of things.'

'It's an interesting theory.' The Japanese laughed, wiped his mouth with his napkin and stood up. Still smiling he threw a handful of dollars on to the table. 'You have imagination. That's good. So get imaginative. Think of some way of making your protest a little more noticeable.

'Oh, one more thing,' added the Japanese. 'You get arrested for something? You never even met me. I hope it goes without saying that I would be very unhappy if I found out you spoke about this to anyone. Is that clear?'

Cheng nodded coolly. But when the Japanese had gone he realized that he was afraid.

-###-

Mitch had made a temporary office for himself on the twenty-fifth floor, in those parts of the building that were nearest completion and that would soon become the luxuriously appointed private and semiprivate domains of senior Yu Corporation personnel. Most of the rooms had tall doors made of dark varnished wood with silver aluminium frames designed to look like the Yu Corporation logo. Some of the rooms were already carpeted — light grey, to contrast with the darker grey carpet in the corridors — and a few of them were already marked by the negligent footprints of the electricians, plasterers and joiners who were still working there.

Now that the work was almost complete there was a general air of desertion about the building. Mitch found this unsettling, especially at night when the downtown area emptied and, like a modern Marie Celeste, the very size of the Gridiron seemed to point up the lack of human occupants. It was strange, he thought, how books and movies dwelt on the fears people had on finding themselves alone in old buildings, when new ones could be every bit as unnerving. The Gridiron was no exception. Even in the middle of the day a sudden moan of airconditioning, a whisper of water in a pipe or a groan of new woodwork as it expanded or contracted could momentarily raise the hair on the back of Mitch's neck. He felt like the one-man crew of an enormous spacecraft on a five-year mission into deep space. Bruce Dern in Silent Running. Keir Dullyea in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now and then he was inclined to take Jenny Bao's feng shui as seriously as he affected to treat it when he was with her: maybe there really was a spiritual energy, for good or evil, in a building. More rationally, he wondered if perhaps it was something to do with the observer illusion with which the computer had been endowed: maybe the feeling he had was simply that of being observed by the computer itself.

For all that, he usually enjoyed being alone in the Gridiron. The peace and quiet gave him a chance to think about his future. A future he hoped would include Jenny Bao, but not Richardson and Associates. Mitch was bored with being Ray Richardson's technical coordinator. He wanted to go back to being an architect, pure and simple. He wanted to design a house, or a school, or maybe a library. Nothing showy, nothing complicated, just attractive buildings that people would like looking at as much as being inside them. One thing was for sure. He had had quite enough of intelligent buildings. There was just too much to organize. As Mitch went from floor to floor wearing his laptop computer on an ergonomically designed harness, he found few signs of activity: a solitary plumber connecting one of the automatic executive washroom modules, prefabricated, like many of the Gridiron's systems and components, by the Toto Company of Japan; a telecommunications engineer installing the latest videophone-a fast-packet system with a caller ID and polygraph facility.

Mitch was reasonably satisfied with the progress that was being made, although he could not see how the client could take occupation in anything less than six weeks. Many of the floors were in a remarkably unprepared state, while others that were supposed to have been completed were already showing the kind of damage that was the inevitable result of the continuing work. Although on the whole he was happy with the overall standard of workmanship, Mitch knew that no matter how hard everyone tried, Ray Richardson would manage to find fault with something. He always did.

For Mitch, that was one of the essential differences between the two of them and was probably why Richardson had got to be where he was: Richardson was the kind of man who believed that it was possible to achieve perfection in something while Mitch believed that architecture and building provided a perfect miscrocosm of a universe in which order existed, rather precariously, on the very edge of chaos.

Chaos and complexity were what interested him most at that moment: the more complex the system, the closer to the edge of chaos you got. It was one of the things that disturbed him about the whole concept of smart buildings. He had tried discussing this with Ray Richardson in relation to the Gridiron, only Richardson had got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

'Well, of course the building's complex, Mitch,' he had said. 'That's the fucking idea, isn't it?'

'That's not what I mean. What I'm saying is that the more complex a system is, the bigger the chance that something might go wrong.'

'What are you saying, Mitch? That this level of technology worries you? Is that it? Come on, buddy, wake up and smell the coffee, will you?

This is an office block we're talking about, not the Pentagon's earlywarning system. Get with the programme, will you?'

End of conversation.

When, towards the end of the day, Aidan Kenny telephoned Mitch and told him to get his ass down to the fourth floor, he hardly expected to find that in a small way his earlier concern might have been justified.

-###-

The computer centre on the fourth floor was like no other computer room Mitch had ever seen. You reached it by an underlit bridge of greenish glass, gently arched as if it led across a small stream instead of the many electrical cables it had been carefully designed to conceal. The double-height door was made of heavy, clear Czechoslavakian glass, spoiled only by a sign warning that the room was protected by a Halon 1301 fire-retardant system.

Beyond was an enormous windowless room carpeted in a special antistatic surface and surrounded by floor lights resembling the exit lights on a passenger aircraft. Dominating the room, in a closed circle that reminded Mitch of Stonehenge, were the five brushed aluminium monoliths that constituted the Yu-5 Super-computer. Each of the silverwhite boxes was eight feet high, four feet wide, and two feet thick. The Yu-5 Super-computer was really several hundred computers working together in one Massively Parallel Processing System. Whereas most computers worked serially, executing the required steps of a sequence on a single processing unit, the advantage of the MPPS was that the various parts of the same sequence could be divided up and carried out simultaneously, in less time than a single fast processor.

But operating the Gridiron's complex building management systems occupied only a small part of the computer's massive capacity. The larger part of its effort was devoted to the work of the Yu Corporation's Information Mechanics Group in their number-crunching search for a Universal Computer Language — a language that would not only be able to understand programs written in other computer languages, but at the same time would also be able to deal with mathematical manipulations and business data processing. It was this project, the NOAM project, as well as other projects even more secret — Aidan Kenny suspected that the Yu Corporation was also pursuing sophisticated 'liveware' research — that had necessitated the presence of two Yu Corporation chaperones to supervise Kenny's installation of the building management systems. Inside the first circle was a smaller circle comprising five operator desks with flat 28-inch tabletop screens. Behind three of these desks sat Bob Beech, Hideki Yojo and Aidan Kenny, while a small boy, presumably Aidan's son, sat at a fourth, absorbed in some computer-generated game that was reflected in the thick lenses of his rimless spectacles.

'Mitch, how ya doing?' grinned Beech. 'Where've you been keeping yourself?'

'Why is it,' Mitch remarked, 'that whenever you see computer programmers working, they always look like they're in the middle of a coffee break?'

'Yeah?' said Yojo, 'well, there's a lot to keep in your mind, man. It's like football, you know? A lot of the time we have to huddle and figure out all the possible plays.'

'I'm flattered that you want to include me in your touchline discussions, Coach.'

Beech whooped. 'You haven't heard what we want to ask you yet.'

Mitch smiled uncertainly. 'I understood that there's a problem.'

'Yeah, that's right,' said Beech. 'Maybe you can help us get a handle on it. A bit of technical coordination is what's required.'

'That's my job.'

'But first we need some kind of executive decision from you, Mitch. To do with Abraham here.'

'Abraham, right,' echoed Yojo. 'Whose dumb idea was that name?'

Cheech and Chong: like the two marijuana-movie stars of the early seventies, Beech and Yojo affected a laid-back air, heavy, Wyatt Earpsized moustaches and unhealthy, slightly glazed looks. Like Aidan Kenny, this impression was created by their deskbound, screen-centred occupations rather than by any fondness for smoking dope. Mitch was certain of that much, anyway. Every time you visited a washroom in the Gridiron your urine was tested for drugs by the computer. Preventive health-care was something the Yu Corporation took very seriously.

'Thanks for coming down, Mitch, I appreciate it.' Aidan Kenny cleared his throat and rubbed his mouth nervously. 'Jesus, I wish I had a cigarette.'

'Smoking is forbidden in the computer room,' said the computer's urbane English voice.

'Shut up, asshole,' said Yojo.

'Yeah, thanks, Abraham,' said Kenny. 'Tell me something I don't know. Take a seat there, Mitch, and let me put you in the picture. And Hideki, would you watch your language in front of my son, please, guy?'

'Sure, no fucking problem. Hey, sorry, right?'

Mitch sat down at the spare desk and stared at the picture unfolding on the computer screen: it looked like an enormous coloured snowflake, growing even as he watched.

'What's this?' he said, momentarily fascinated.

'Oh,' said Yojo, 'that's just a screen-saver program. Stops the tube on the screen burning out.'

'It's beautiful.'

'Neat, isn't it? A cellular automata. We give the computer a seed and a set of rules and it does the rest itself. Go ahead and touch it.'

Mitch touched the screen with his finger and, like a real snowflake, the cellular automata melted quickly. Hundreds of strings of programming information started scrolling past his eyes.

'There's your problem,' said Beech.

'And how,' added Yojo.

A dull explosion emanated from the screen on Michael's desk and the boy banged the arm of his chair angrily. 'Shit,' he said loudly. And then

'Fuck, fuck, fuck.'

Hideki Yojo shot a look at Aidan Kenny and said, 'There's nothing I can teach your kid about cursing, Aid.'

'Son, cut it out. If I hear you using language like that again you'll be in big trouble, birthday or not. Do I make myself clear?'

'Yes, Dad.'

'And put your headphones on, please.'

'OK,' said Kenny, turning towards Mitch. 'This is a self-replicating system, right?'

Mitch nodded hesitantly.

'A fully autonomous, general purpose, self-replicating program that plans for the building and business-management needs of tomorrow. A fuzzy-logic-based system that operates a neural net so that it can improve on its own performance by learning. After a period of occupancy by the Yu Corporation, old Abraham here will have learned all there is to know about the way the company works. Everything from the likely pattern of office use to how the company plans to expand. For instance, using the electronic subscriber network it might monitor the local real estate market in order to alert the occupants as to the opportunities that exist in a particular location.'

'Is that so?' said Mitch. 'Maybe it can find me a house.'

Aidan Kenny smiled thinly. Mitch apologized and, sitting back in his chair, adopted a more serious-looking expression.

'After a while, version 3.0 writes version 3.1. Or, if you prefer, Abraham sires the next generation of program: Isaac. And who better to do it? That improved version of Abraham, Isaac, is even more capable of dealing with the developing needs of the Yu Corporation of tomorrow. After that, with Isaac operating at a higher level of fitness, and having performed his parental duty, Abraham becomes sterile and ceases to operate as anything other than a simple maintenance facility before finally lapsing into complete desuetude, when Isaac sires his own next generation of program, when version 3.1 writes version 3.2, if you like.'

Mitch folded his hands and nodded patiently. 'I understand all this,' he said. 'Get to the point, will you?'

'All right then, the point is this: it seems — '

'Seems?' said Beech. 'There's no seems about it, man. It's a goddamn fact.'

'It appears that Abraham has already begun his own self-replication program. Which means — '

'Which means,' said Mitch, 'that he's taking account of an entirely irrelevant occupancy. Namely ourselves. Not the Yu Corporation, like he's supposed to.'

'I told you Mitch would understand,' said Beech to Yojo.

'That's it exactly,' said Kenny. 'I mean, there's no point in Abraham evolving into a higher level of fitness and siring Isaac if he's only been dealing with us and a few goddamned workmen.'

'But this is what has happened?' said Mitch. 'Isaac is already in existence?'

Aidan Kenny nodded unhappily.

'And what does Abraham himself have to say about it?' asked Mitch.

'That's a joke, right?' said Beech.

'I don't know,' shrugged Mitch. 'You tell me.'

Bob Beech grinned and brushed up his formidable moustache with an outstretched forefinger and thumb.

'Hey, we're the best, but we're still in the twentieth century, Mitch,' he said. 'An explanation implies an understanding.'

'Not if you frame the question correctly,' argued Mitch.

'Yeah, it's a nice idea,' said Hideki Yojo. 'If only things were that sophisticated. We're doing well just to have improved on the old binary logic — true or false, y'know? Fuzzy logic encompasses binary logic but allows for the scenario which says that something might have partial membership of two separate sets.'

'So that something might be partly true, or partly false.'

'That's right. Or true given certain conditions.'

'I read something about that,' said Mitch. 'Wasn't there something about how a computer should define a penguin?'

'Oh, that.' Beech looked bored and nodded. 'Yeah, a conventionally programmed computer knows that birds fly. But when told that penguins cannot fly it insists that a penguin is not a bird. Fuzzy logic computers get around this difficulty by accepting that most if not all birds can fly.'

'Similarly,' said Aidan Kenny, 'with regard to systems management control, the fuzzy controller — in this case Abraham — permits some interpolation between sensor data classes.'

'Look,' said Yojo, 'can we please stop using that word "fuzzy" and use the proper term? It drives me nuts. This is an adaptive analog we're talking about. Mitch, the idea is that it's similar to what a human brain does in that it favours adaptation over precision and uses relative not absolute values. OK?'