Discovery Page 2

  He hoped it would be long enough. So did his family. So did every living creature on the planet.

  Chapter 1

  "DataLab Arizona, how may I direct your call?" The young man smiled to himself, amused by his minor deception of callers seeking information about a hush, hush federal project he had no intention of ever discussing. He was alone in his small office; there was no one else there to direct a call to.

  Just why he perpetrated this little ruse was known only to him; his family would probably say he was just bored and passing the time.

  He was, however, expecting a call from an important mystery man but he neither knew the identity of the man nor even why he was so important. He waited impatiently as instructed by his associate in Seattle who had engaged him to undertake this task as a personal and professional favor. So, he answered the phone, hoping the next call was the one that would free him from this mind numbing and slightly aggravating task.

  Then he would go home, arriving late at her condo knowing full well she would be most displeased. He was a ‘no show’ the previous day for a family social obligation that was important to her. She thought it was also important to him.

  And he had forgotten to call.

  He had stepped in it once again; it was far from his finest hour. So, he passed the time throwing sharpened pencils in the soft perforated ceiling tiles, seeing which ones would stick. This had better be worth the wait, he thought; he was in deep trouble with her and he hated that feeling. His excuse would have to be truly exceptional this time.

  He had been sitting alone in his tiny office off campus near one of the computer engineering labs on the grounds of the University of Arizona. According to his own cover story, he processed data for a project no one there seemed to know or care much about. And, according to some of his newly minted computer sciences colleagues, the only thing he did seem care about was the healthy paycheck that showed up in his bank account every two weeks; it was good pay for grad student who had only recently arrived on campus amid the sweltering heat that was Tucson in early June.

  There were few other co-workers around, most having already fled the desert for cooler mountain climes or to the west coast beaches of California. The undergrads had all departed Tucson in May after finals and gone home. There would be almost no supervision in evidence anywhere; even the teaching professors and their TA’s had beaten a path out of town, some even more quickly than the undergrads.

  As he waited, the only thing he thought was astonishing was that he received any phone calls at his tiny office at all. He was anticipating only one; the few others were either wrong numbers or misdials. One or two voicemails had been left by girls he had met at the local campus pub, but his own romantic interests lay elsewhere. He was stuck in Tucson until he had that one final conversation though, in truth, he didn’t know why he still had to be there. He could easily have rerouted the call to his home or his cell but the man in Seattle was firm that he wanted no screw-ups. He needed the young man to remain at his post. Just in case.

  He thought he knew why he was about to receive the call but even then, sadly, he was wrong.

  Few fellow students from the computer lab bothered to visit his little hovel, as he was seldom around anyway. He spent most of his time at a computer lab on campus with the computer engineers pretending to be part of a bustling and vibrant federal project with fascinating, super cool collaborators doing cutting edge ... something. It was a perception he tried hard to cultivate, although it too was patently false.

  His new buddies at the computer lab, and that cute girl from Omaha, thought he was just another itinerant grad student filling in for the guy who normally occupied his chair. Nothing more.

  The few remaining girls still around always seemed to have a warm smile and a phone number for him, so he was often invited to most of what remained of the University summer social scene. He had gone to a few keggers, the occasional interdepartmental mixer and even one University-sponsored interdepartmental meet-and-greet.

  The girls found him charming but somewhat cool and aloof; the guys found him friendly and intelligent. But there was something odd in his demeanor that unsettled them and there was something chilling about the way he visually appraised his fellow students. He seemed to peer into them as if assessing something meaningful about each. He was assessing nothing, of course, but this was a somewhat common reaction to him that often kept others at a discrete distance.

  He was tall, maybe 6’1”, boyishly handsome and visibly athletic. He could be very likeable too; but it was also true that his “creepy” factor was also slightly elevated. He ate meals at the cafeteria alone and kept to himself unless approached. He made little effort to otherwise engage with his fellow co-workers and collegians, so after a while, they just left him alone.

  Even for a guy supposedly working on a Ph.D. dissertation in Computer Sciences, he was remarkably quiet and reserved. He rarely discussed his dissertation research into artificial intelligence and seldom confided anything about his thesis, as if it were some great state secret. Some folks are like that, his fellow students mused, overly self-important. To the real U of A grad students, it didn’t matter much. He would be gone in September, if not sooner, and back to his mates at some little school in western Canada. Canada. Tucson in the summer and Canada in the winter – what was this guy thinking? Was he a complete moron?

  After all the DataLab Project at University of Arizona was an infinitesimally tiny part of the mammoth global and intergovernmental project then formally known as the International Historical and Data Preservation Initiative. The Initiative originally conceived and birthed sometime in the mid-90’s at a small think tank somewhere in western Canada, was designed to digitize the book collections and manuscripts of public and private libraries across English speaking North America. Later an idea was conceived by a Japanese Fellow at some small research institute that with all the data captured digitally, maybe new software could be developed that could extract specific relevant research data very quickly. If so, perhaps the project might one day become useful as an advanced research tool for both industry and academia.

  Although designed as a cost saving measure for academic research, it grew in size, scope and use. As more and more private colleges and universities signed on, so too did government-funded libraries and research institutions. Later came foreign collections, and soon the Initiative, still in its infancy, began to take shape.

  The software folks everywhere were invited to design data extraction and query programs. Not long after that, a well-known business leader of a gigantic American software company suggested that the Initiative should seriously consider the development of specialized artificial intelligence software as a means of making the database fully functional and more commercially viable for both government and industry. Academics too, of course, they hastily added. The development of functional data extraction and analytical algorithms would not be far off and soon developers were seeing results. Most were intended but some were not.

  This would become the hallmark of the Initiative, later renamed the DataLab Project: vast stores of neutral information and data could be manipulated in new ways for business, government and academia. Though almost all applications were designed originally for beneficial and legally permissible goals, not every application remained so. In the end member organizations could misuse the power of the massive database for reasons that were not always clear and seldom publicly acknowledged. The adaptation of the DataLab Project to less altruistic purposes happened behind closed doors and at senior levels of government and commerce, slowly and over time. It was incremental bad behavior; almost imperceptible. But not to everyone.

  The results of pilot research projects reported in various obscure academic and business Journals were remarkably good. Since almost all the research and development into DataLab Project’s disclosed functionality was publicly available, a few thoughtful researchers in and out of private industry began to take note. Bu
t as interested as big business had become in its potential, there was still significantly more basic R & D to be done before it could truly be considered “commercial”.

  Global enterprises became invested in the idea of further development for potential applications but not if they had to pay for it. At least not right away. So, as if by some genuine religious miracle, massive government funding suddenly became available. Led by the United States Congress, a few select friendly foreign governments and research institutes were invited to contribute data and intellectual property to the Initiative. The sheer weight and volume of the data soon became an issue to address relative to storage and data extraction.

  By the year 2000, an interdisciplinary Board of Governors, comprised of highly credentialed men and women from academia, business and government, was in place and an “interim multi-year operating plan” devised. Full forward and permanent funding was committed, and a well-known international accounting firm engaged to manage grants and verify the utility and viability of the development process. Boondoggles were to be avoided and funds disbursed sparingly for specific, clearly enunciated and well defined academic and commercial objectives.

  But, of course, senior partners at big accounting firms enjoy boondoggles and the attendant prestige of knowing what others do not. Though confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements had been signed, word of some interesting functionalities nonetheless began circulating in industry, often leaked to large multinational business clients by their auditors. Within the space of a year, “special research accounts” littered the books of the Initiative as special interest research became de facto integral to the core mission of the Initiative.

  By the fourth full year of operation, the Board of Governors decided to appoint a permanent operating staff and fundamentally reorganize the Initiative along specific and commercially and governmentally oriented goals. With sustainable independent multi-source funding in place, new and specific development objectives were announced and new standards for data dissemination were implemented. These included new and significant curbs on access. This decision, along with its strict protocols, was arbitrarily implemented on April 20, 2001.

  Accountability for decisions and actions now rested with the various Department Heads of the Autonomous Research Departments within the Initiative. Authority for granting contracts, hiring decisions and Departmental research objectives were then effectively reassigned to the individual Department Heads. By late 2001, nobody seemed to know who exactly was in charge anymore or by what authority they acted. Notwithstanding, the research continued at an ever-increasing pace and new and ever more promising avenues of research were explored.

  As if by virtue by some supernatural grand design, the Initiative just grew. And it grew exponentially. Only now it was becoming something entirely novel: largely self-funded and self-sustaining in many public areas, it began relying on government and large corporate funding for the more esoteric and cutting-edge research yet unattached to specific known commercial and government projects.

  Whoever thought they had control, because they had been involved since inception, were now nothing more than historical footnotes in a megalith that they no longer recognized. Events overtook the founding academics and think tanks that originally conceived the Initiative and whizzed past them as if standing still.

  On a date certain, they were all locked out and had to reapply for new credentials to gain access. Few were automatically allowed back in. All were subjected to background checks with newly implemented access protocols and security clearances.

  That is, except for one small research institute in western Canada that continued, unimpeded and unabated by these changes. They could never be denied access. They had built and developed the original software architecture and were intimately involved in creating its unique operating system.

  By around 2003, or thereabouts, when many of the original academic pioneers of the Initiative were asked about the freshly renamed Initiative, now simply denominated the DataLab Project, they would feign deep and intimate knowledge of its current status. When pressed for details, they would reply, in the most condescending fashion possible, “Oh, you mean the DataLab Project? We’re involved, of course, but it’s all very hush-hush now. Sorry, I just can’t comment.”

  In fact, they no longer knew anything about it whatsoever. The International Historical and Data Preservation Initiative, now the DataLab Project, was no longer fully open to the public.

  But it was still open for business.

  Chapter 2

  “May I speak to Alan Sarmiento, please? I believe he is a data acquisition specialist for one of your research projects.” His voice was cool, calm and cultured, the young man thought, in that east coast, preppie ‘I have a lot of money’ sort of way. Pleasant, even cordial, but detached. A slight accent was noticeable, perhaps Italian. It sounded ... different.

  “Yeah, I’ll get him. Just a sec.” The young man put the caller on hold, while his computer software traced the call and the caller. He then activated his telephone recording device to capture the conversation for later use – possibly in court. The young man was unsure of the legalities of the surreptitious recording but then that wasn’t really his problem. That would be his friend’s problem in Seattle.

  The young man tried to sound like he was from the upper mid-west, maybe Chicago.

  He was not.

  ***

  Born in LA, he grew up in the diminutive community of Barrows Bay, British Columbia on rural Vancouver Island in Canada. As he often joked, Barrows Bay was “about an hour away from nowhere but just ten minutes away from a hockey rink”. His father, a well-known forensic archeologist, was a Senior Fellow at the local think tank, the Victoria Institute, known to the locals and permanent Fellows alike simply as the “Institute”.

  The Institute, with its transient researchers and research projects, as well as the permanent Research Fellows, was remarkably well-funded through various enormous endowments maintained for the benefit of cutting edge scientific and academic research. Research Fellows were well compensated and well cared for in this isolated and small town rural environment. Most found the atmosphere conducive to research and reflection, but others found the experience oppressively dull and tiresome. A few just never adjusted well to life in rural British Columbia and never understood the Canadian fascination with hockey 24/7/365. Add to the mix that Canada abolished the penny and its “paper” currency is actually plastic, some expats were quietly pining for home, wherever that might be.

  He left the man on hold, listening to the end of a cut from an old Jimi Hendrix album. It ended.

  “This is Alan. What can I do for you?” His voice was energetic and pure western Canada, if the man on the other end recognized any accent at all.

  “Mr. Sarmiento, my name is Saldiano Bennett. I’m an attorney with Bennett & Hawkins in Kansas City and I was hoping you could help me with a tricky little legal matter. Shouldn’t be very complicated though and I’m willing to compensate you well for your time and assistance.”

  The man’s opening gambit was smooth, leading as he did with the implication of meaningful financial gain. The grad student took the implication in stride. “Alright Mr. Bennett, I like compensation. But what exactly can I do to help?” He sounded curious and interested, a practiced affectation learned from his father.

  “I’m trying to locate a shipment of books, personal items and a huge family collection of artifacts that belonged to my late uncle from Chicago. You see he died intestate; that is, without any known and verifiable heirs. Most of the assets of his estate were recently auctioned off in Tucson where he had retired and was living at the time of his death. I understand that the items I am seeking were part of that auction, a certain Lot 721, Estate of Thomas Antonio Beneviste.”

  The young man interjected, “I’m sorry to interrupt but if he was your uncle, wouldn’t you have been an heir entitled to his Estate?”

  “Correct. Thom
as was a close family friend, and distant relation who we called “uncle”. But he wasn’t a blood relation and he lived alone in Arizona. We only recently received the news that he passed some time ago, an unfortunate lapse in regular contact on my part.

  “I see. Sorry, please go on,” said the young grad student, somewhat suspicious of the man’s story from the get go. The telephone trace showed he wasn’t in Kansas City, and there was no law firm called Bennett & Hawkins.

  “As you may know, if no legal heirs are discovered when a person dies intestate, the assets escheat to the State; that is the assets become the property of the State in which the decedent resided at the time of death. Hence the auction. My family is trying to have the estate sale set aside in Court but in the meantime, we would like to recover the things we consider family heirlooms. There is little of any real consequential value in Lot 721 except, of course, to my family. To us they are priceless treasures.”

  “Understood. So, what exactly can I do for you today, Sal? I don’t recall any of the specific items in Lot 721 except only vaguely. And I don’t think I have them here in my possession just yet. I believe the entire collection may still be in transit from storage to our processing facility out at he airport. But as soon as I do take possession, I’m sure we can work something out. But if this is technical legal thing, I’m really the wrong person to talk to. That’s all handled out of New York and DC. I can get the number of ...”

  “Mr. Sarmiento ...”

  “Alan” the young man interrupted. “My name is Alan.” Sal sounded as though he was already getting impatient with the direction of the conversation.

  “Yes, Alan. Of course; you’re very kind,” he said smoothly. “But these are family mementos and irreplaceable items that if lost, damaged or misplaced could see my entire family history lost forever. We really need to recover this shipment before anything gets lost. Do you follow me?”