Discovery Page 10

  A quick survey by his Portland crew of what Adam had acquired in Tucson led to the rather rapid conclusion that while Adam had found something interesting, it just wasn’t the goldmine his friend in Seattle wanted: complete mafia financial records dating back over the past fifty years. There were crates and crates of documents, but most seemed to be of a historical rather than criminal nature. Most of the crates were filled with documents that couldn’t be understood; they were written in strange unknown languages that his people couldn’t decipher.

  Unless this collection was the work of master forgers trying to con wealthy collectors, it was probably useless junk. Adam called the FBI field office in Seattle and spoke to Peter Berg, the Regional Director, giving him the bad news. He was disappointed, naturally and asked Adam to dispose of the worthless junk. But Peter mentioned that if Adam’s father, Edward, thought the materials had any historical or anthropological value, he would be inclined to sell it to him at a discount. If that were the case, Peter would be delighted to unload the collection to the Institute for the princely sum of one dollar.

  “Done,” said Adam, after discussing it with Edward. “The paperwork and a dollar bill will be on your desk in a week. The Institute thanks you.” That was several months ago, and Adam hadn’t thought twice about it since. The Portland facility was always busy, so getting six container loads of dusty old paper, books and manuscripts and who knows what else, wasn’t a priority. But it was a puzzle and Adam liked puzzles.

  Berg said goodbye, adding, “Say hello to your father for me. And we owe you one, Adam. Sorry to send you on such a wild goose chase. Hope it didn’t screw up your plans for the weekend.”

  Though Adam had mostly put the whole episode out of his mind, he was still suspicious of the man he had met on the phone. Following up would be a bother. He was far too busy for that, so he’d happily leave disposal of the dusty old shit up his father and the DataLab Project crew in Portland. Might be useful for historical research, so he’d let his Dad, the archeologist, figure it all out.

  Adam was about to make his daily phone call to Hannah when the phone rang. Bitsie Tolan was calling him from the “Workshop”, their nickname for the DataLab Project processing facility in Portland, Oregon.

  “Bitsie, what’s up? You don’t usually call. Something wrong?” Adam’s radar was on and sensing drama from a new direction where none had previously dwelled.

  “There might be something wrong, but I can’t be sure. Something is very odd about the stuff you sent us from Tucson and I thought you might want to have a peek at some of it before I start processing it.”

  “Tell me more,” Adam said inquisitively; he was uncharacteristically curious about this collection. Interest in old documents was unusual for Adam, the computer geek. Though he had been involved in his father’s archeology for many years, in fact since his childhood, Adam’s actual interest was always peripheral.

  Bitsie’s call to Adam was also unusual. She was never very chatty with Adam; she really detested the lad and usually made her colleague and close friend Tony Adamson deal with the arrogant boy king. The subtext of her few conversations with him was a quick right cross to his face. Perhaps a swift kick even lower and much harder, just for the pure pleasure of watching him writhe in fantasy pain.

  Bitsie Tolan led a rich fantasy life when it came to her boss. None of it was pleasurable for him, at least not in the ordinary sense of the term.

  “Well, for one thing, Tony and I suspect these records may go back as far as a couple thousand years.”

  “Really? So?” Adam now sounded a bit absent and unfocused, the norm for a guy who could talk on the phone while continuing to write code; his skill at this pissed Bitsie off immensely. Adam should at least pretend to pay attention; he was, after all, supposedly running the Workshop and was rumored to be paid enormous sums for doing so by the Feds.

  In fact, he wasn’t; he was paid enormous sums of money by the Feds for running the DataLab Project as its Chief Technology Officer, although he also had other very important official titles too. Running the Portland facility was something Edward wanted Adam to do for some unknown reason. The Feds agreed to make Adam the head honcho of the Workshop, but Edward really ran the place along with Tony Adamson. Edward needed a physical facility unattached and unrelated to the Institute with all the gadgets he and his son might require for other sensitive and more personal projects.

  “Well, for another thing most of this stuff, and there is a shitload of it, is written in a bunch of different foreign languages. I’m guessing that some of it may even be encrypted.”

  “That’s to be expected.” Nothing shocking there, Adam thought. Very often data comes in that must be translated, sometimes from ‘dead languages’ or even archaic versions of modern languages. Encryption was sometimes employed and somewhat uncommon but hardly worth a phone call to him.

  “Perhaps,” Bitsie continued, “but these are apparently not your typical ancient Greek or Roman dialects. Those things won’t even cause a slight ripple in the programming once we start the upload. If we start an upload, that is. But before we started, I had second thoughts. I had taken a quick look at the primary source materials just out of curiosity.”

  “Why? That’s not protocol.” Adam said. “Why waste your time? You have a lot more important things to do, right?”

  “Usually. I happened to be in Receiving when the first container arrived. The guy at the loading dock waved me over to take a look, so I poked around the contents. The materials in Container One were meticulously arranged and sealed in boxes, complete with detailed packing and inventory documents. And, with an enormous amount of attention paid to care and preservation. It suggested this dusty old shit was important to someone. So, I got curious.”

  So far, Adam was nonplussed. This really fell short in importance and didn’t merit taking up any of his valuable time.

  “So?”

  “Well, then I began with language segregation when we noted that most of the documentation was in a dozen or so completely new languages we have never seen. And by new, I mean no record anywhere in the DL Main. Or any other database that we could find.”

  “How odd. Still, there must be more than this bothering you, correct?”

  “Indeed, there is. There are a lot of interesting looking items but it’s the other books that have me calling you. There is a series of books, diaries really, that go back about three hundred years or so, written in reasonably modern languages by different “custodians” of the collection. The most recent book, probably written by the guy who just died, seems to suggest that the huge cache of records you just secured is not the complete library.” Bitsie paused.

  “Go on. And ...”

  “There may be as many as six or seven other major caches of books and records squirreled away around the world.”

  “And ...”

  “I think I might know where they are.”

  “And ...”

  “We found a series of books that Adamson thought you ought to see. One is a big book entitled The Book of Gensarii. The other set of volumes look like the dead guy’s personal diaries. A lot of this stuff is in English but some of it isn’t. We only uploaded some of this stuff to a staging computer for now. We’re sending all this material to you via secure server through the NSA portal. Full encryption. Read it, then get back to us about what you want us to do next.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what you know now then maybe we can skip all this cloak and dagger stuff. I don’t get what all the secrecy is about.”

  “Read the books, then call me. I hope this whole thing is a big joke that the MIT guys cooked up to fuck with us. But I don’t think they have that much time, money or imagination. So, read up. I’m a little freaked out. So is Tony.”

  “Alright. Send it now. But use the secure Institute portal, not the NSA portal. I think those fucks are still spying on us. And Bitsie?”

  “Yes boss?”

  �
�This better be important.”

  “Sure boss. I’ll call you in a few days to see what you think. Don’t forget. Read this stuff when you have some time.”

  Adam was annoyed at the disturbance in his ‘force’. He hoped that this thing Bitsie was going on about was something important. Otherwise he’d have to give Bitsie a demerit. Of course, she had a million credits in reserve; it would be a long while before he’d need to have that quiet and tense chat with her, she was just that good and just that valuable. Both Adam and Bitsie were happy to think dark thoughts about the other from a safe distance while going on about their work and daily lives.

  Still, he was her boss and that had to count for something. It really didn’t, but he liked to think it did.

  Chapter 19

  Adam clicked off his cell and thought about how odd that conversation had been. Bitsie Tolan and Tony Adamson ran the Workshop in Portland, a research facility that processed data for him as a part of the mega DataLab Project. Adam didn’t live in Portland; in fact, he only visited the Workshop onsite when required to fix screw-ups, of which there were few, and perform annual personnel assessments, of which were many. He visited, in the aggregate, perhaps four or five times a year in addition to employee evaluations which he pretended to do at least once a year. If Adam even knew any of the names of his employees in Portland, other than those of Bitsie and Tony, it would have been amazing. Tony did the hiring and handled all other HR functions dealing with a multitude of personnel matters for which he was neither paid nor at which he was particularly competent.

  The alternative would be a series of personal and individual one-on-one sessions with Adam, and nobody, including Bitsie and Tony, wanted that. So, Tony and Bitsie took seriously the need to develop the necessary skills to forge Adam’s scrawl and simply did his administrative work for him. The less they saw of Adam, particularly as far as Bitsie was concerned, the better they liked it. Having informed Edward of their informal system and obtaining his enthusiastic approval, the Workshop functioned efficiently and effectively. Edward saw to it that both Bitsie and Tony were evaluated by him, over Adam’s signature, and those evaluations always reflected their true worth and value as essential employees.

  Tony had worked for far worse bosses than Adam in his long career in tech and was largely unfazed by his prickly, argumentative personal style. Bitsie had not; she viscerally hated the boy king, and had no issue around letting him know all the nuances of her displeasure. Their work product together was exceptional; them working together an impossibility. Both Edward and Tony found new ways to minimize the daily telephone and email driven conflict between the two but later settled on hiring another computer engineer with a substantially less prickly personality, and even less interest in conflict, to intermediate their work. While it could be said that the work flow suffered a tiny bit and that, as an engineer, Dr. Tobias Faye was no genius, he did fulfill an important role in keeping the peace. And the previously frequent thermonuclear explosions in Barrows Bay and Portland were afterwards largely a thing of the past. So, a little tardiness and a minor lack of precision was a small price to pay for the resultant quiet in the Pacific Northwest.

  ***

  Bitsie Tolan held a Ph.D. in an obscure branch of Computer Engineering from MIT, though her main interests and abilities were significantly more valuable than her degree might otherwise imply. She had become somewhat of a guru in the growing discipline of what is now termed “predictive modelling” or “predictive analytics”. Her expertise was not, however, in business and digital commerce where datamining and consumer behavioral spending and decision models were all the rage.

  Bitsie had become particularly adept in terms of the metrics she employed, and the fact based critical assumptions she made. Bitsie called it data driven artificial abductive reasoning. She was careful to describe the logic behind what outcomes were predicted and the parameters of what it could be said to predict. Outcomes were only as good as the data employed, so like Adam, she was forever focused on validating the data input.

  Data is data, so if the data was bad, her model wouldn’t prevent faulty outcomes. And Bitsie never predicted what would happen so much as offer a range of options of what might happen given a specific data set and the narrowest set of assumptions that could be employed. Her software, and that of Adam’s, were significant in the advancement of this emerging field of technology.

  In an early experiment she developed for her dissertation, Bitsie modelled a battlefield scenario taken from detailed descriptions from World War II field commanders on each side of the conflagration. Bitsie’s model could be fashioned hypothetically with thousands of variables, and therefore, variations of possible outcomes. Then the predictions could be updated as the fog of war began to lift, and actual field data became available.

  Variables could then be confirmed and predictions either left in play or eliminated. It was no substitute for the good judgment of able field commanders, but field commanders would have one more objective tool for modelling potential courses of action.

  With this tool, field commanders, if linked, could get updated movements and actual results that could affect potential options for future measures and potential counter measures. The same could be done by a group of soldiers who had access to all the data and could “talk out” the potential ramifications. Bitsie’s model was simply faster and allowed field commanders to see what options or opportunities might present and what results might be obtained. The end game was to infer opposing strategy and tactics from the actual battlefield movements and, therefore, be able to offer a range of countermeasures based on all available factors. The system she developed wasn’t perfect, but it was very interesting – particularly to the United States Department of Defense.

  In truth Bitsie had been way more qualified to teach some of her required Ph.D. classes than her own professors in graduate school, something not lost on the Administration. But since they couldn’t simply award her a doctorate the day she arrived, they just let her do research for a few years while she was on campus. She attended classes when required, complied with all necessary formalities and, in due course, finished up her dissertation in her chosen field.

  Her dissertation advisor monitored her progress through several drafts of her thesis and became immediately concerned that her work was exceedingly more advanced than that of her fellow grad students and its potential application to the National Defense of the United States of America somewhat obvious and potentially chilling. Bitsie didn’t see it that way but, as she readily admitted, she was not trying to apply her research to military applications as a specific end. If there were such applications, she did not, herself, see them. Battlefield computer games were infinitely more interesting and relevant to her as recreation.

  And that war game scenario she had done for her dissertation was only one of many models she developed in a broad range of fields and applications. Its unique value, if it had any at all, was unimportant in her mind – just a simple proof of concept. She could have used any of a dozen other models but since she enjoyed playing computer war games, she used one she enjoyed constructing the most. It was a casual and seemingly incidental choice that had significant ramifications for her career, her life and her future.

  The DOD did, however, see such applications once made aware of them by her advisor. After that, Bitsie was awarded her doctorate, but her thesis was never published and was subsequently seized by the Federal government under highly unusual circumstances pursuant to statutory authority granted through eminent domain. She was compensated for her intellectual property, then asked if she would like to go to work for a guy who ran an interesting project that could use her particular skills. She would be paid an unconscionable amount of money, have a research facility all to her own, with a budget that only a government could afford. Bitsie was largely apolitical and was neither in favor of nor opposed to any use of her work by any branch of the federal government. She was an immensely talented scie
ntist who liked to work on her “stuff” and be left alone.

  Her lack of social skills and a bit of a chip on her shoulder from a lifetime of insensitive comments about her looks, her dress and her attitude, coupled with episodes of vicious bullying, initially made her instant and fast friends with Adam St. James. If Bitsie had ever had any interest in anything male, they might have made a cute couple.

  Adam was himself strictly a “special projects” guy, just not of the spy variety. He worked on software issues and processed data for the Workshop and government contracts as a way to support himself while he indulged his avocations, which often found their way back into the DataLab Project in one form or fashion. Solving “interesting problems” just to see if something was as he predicted it to be, or to see “if it could be done that way”, was largely his passion in life. It always came back to data and software, computing speeds, extraction algorithms and new puzzling problems. He was conversant with and deeply involved in the development of new software technology in such emerging fields as quantum computing, biochemical and DNA computing and memcomputing.

  Neither Bitsie nor Adam needed money to survive. Bitsie’s father managed her wealth, eventually putting it all in trust with advisors who were both sophisticated and talented. The financial aspects of Adam’s work earnings were largely left to his father and to Cindy Suarez, Rod’s wife, to manage. Adam had no interest in his own wealth and it could be accurately said that even writing checks to pay bills was a skill he never acquired. Credit cards he knew but only because he needed them to travel and participate in the real world.

  He once told his sister-in-law Cindy that it might be easier for him to hack into his credit card issuer and simply erase the transactions because then he wouldn’t need money at all. He had other ideas too, but Cindy assured him that none were legal, and, in any event, the Canadian penal system would probably not let him continue his research in jail. He thought he might be able to fix that too but was persuaded otherwise.