Chapter NineCompany 5349

In December Gideon missed two deadlines following a reference at the bottom of a paper. He asked for extensions on both essays. One professor gave him three days; the other said no.

ISIS Semantic Interpretation Software. Four MIT graduates had given their language system a goddess's name. Gideon had found demonstrations of it answering questions, then a final release and nothing after it.

Gideon had not followed the project while it was active– he discovered it while doing research for a seminar at SAIL, the Stanford AI Lab. He had e-mailed Professor Villanueva about it. She remembered the project and sent him three papers, two of which disagreed with its central claim. She did not know why development had stopped. The source code as of two years ago was still available and updated by open sourcers around the net, but all development by the project leads had stopped abruptly and they had fallen silent. The website and code repositories that had fostered the community built around the project had all but disappeared.

Gideon had looked into the backstory on the four project leads, all MIT grads. Three of them, Ben Feld, Ana Reyes and Darshin Patel, had gone on to work for a company called Sentek in San Diego. The fourth, Matsu Hiroru, had gone to Google. Gideon had reached out to other programmers who had contributed to the project. One contributor was polite enough to tell Gideon that he had signed a nondisclosure agreement and couldn't discuss the project. When Gideon replied, asking who he'd signed the NDA with, he got no further response. The trail had gone cold. Gideon had spent many hours using all of his hack tricks and had only pulled up one lead. Darshin Patel had registered a website before he left Sentek.

company5349.be was just a 404 error page, the standard one generated by an Apache server when nobody had bothered to make their own. But an error page was something, it meant that the site was hosted on a server somewhere. Gideon stared at the page. Why would this guy register this site and then disappear? Why was he still paying to host it?

The hosting record pointed to a residential connection in San Diego. He wrote down the address with a question mark beside it. It could be Patel's house. It could also be an old record or somebody else's machine, and he didn't have a way to tell.

He paid a friend to knock the site offline, which was a waste of money. It came back with the same error page. Priya wanted to know what he had expected to happen. He told her he had been trying something, and she told him a 404 just meant the page wasn't there.

The domain could receive mail. Gideon sent a blank message to an address he made up and got it back as undeliverable. Messages to the names from the project didn't come back. That wasn't proof that they were using it; it might just be a catch-all. Still, he had something else to put in his notes.

Gideon cracked his wrists and bit his lip, thinking. What the hell is Company 5349? He did a search for the number. He searched for any major events on May 3rd, 1949, and on March 5th, and in the year 5349 on any calendar he could find. Then he split it into two hexadecimal bytes. In ASCII, 53 was S and 49 was I.

S. I. Semantic Interpreter.

He tried patel@, and nothing came back. Then feld@, and reyes@, and finally isis@, and none of those came back either. He sat and looked at the last one for quite a while.

He thought it might be a dead drop. Patel had registered the name just before the public project vanished. Maybe the four of them still talked there. Maybe one had left something behind. The possibility was enough to keep Gideon at the desk until four.

He wrote it all up in a text file at four in the morning, everything he knew, saved it to the rack in his closet, and went to sleep on the couch with his shoes on.

At four in the morning Atom was in Alius, trying to make a hand work. He had finished a version of the taste project weeks earlier and sent it to Jeff. Jeff said it was disturbing and asked for the source. Atom was rather pleased about that, although he had already begun to lose interest in it. He had another idea that was taking most of his time.

He called it the Direct Interface. It was really an extension of what the Link did already. When he moved his arm he didn't have to think about all the muscles involved. He wanted to move it, the Link read what he meant, and the game moved the arm. Learning to speak had worked much the same way. For the first week after the implant he could scarcely get a word out, and now he talked without giving it any thought. He couldn't see why writing code ought to be any different. Having to type everything on a floating keyboard seemed like a ridiculous waste of time.

Most of the autumn had gone into teaching it. He could write a function easily enough until he tried to pay attention to how he was doing it. Then he would lose what he wanted to write. Soph thought he was talking about his fingers. He had tried explaining that the useful part came before he had anything to type, but by then he'd lost her too. Tonight he had managed to ask for a function to put a hand on a mesh without touching the keyboard. There it was. He ran it.

Two thumbs. He turned the hand over, hoping the second one was something else. No, he'd trained it on his left hand and asked for a right. It took him another hour to find where it had gone wrong. He ought to have been annoyed, but he kept going back to the beginning of the function. He hadn't typed any of it.

His code ran on the development rack at The Lab. The machines keeping his biological brain alive were separate. He knew there were a lot more computers he could use if he asked, and then there were the frames and suits: forty million pairs, most of them with a chip doing nothing for most of the day. He had an idea for using the idle chips to run little pieces of a bigger program. There ought to be enough of them available at any time to do a ridiculous amount of work. He wrote a request for time on one of Jeff's clusters so he could try it on a smaller scale first, then left it unsent. He wanted to have something working before Jeff saw it.

He was also working on Gideon's problem. For two weeks Gideon had talked about practically nothing except this mail server. Atom, listening through Soph's frames, had heard all the names and the domain and the passwords that hadn't worked. It sounded interesting, and he had begun poking around on his own. He wasn't especially good at this yet. The Interface saved him some typing but he still had to figure out where to look, and for the first two nights he didn't find anything Gideon hadn't already tried.

Then he got lucky. Patel had left an import credential in a public copy of the old release scripts. Atom had nearly skipped the file; he went back because the name looked familiar, and there it was. He tried it on the archive service and got in. He knew he probably shouldn't be doing this. On the other hand, Gideon had been trying to do exactly this for weeks, and Atom wanted very much to be the one who succeeded.

He could see four mailboxes. He opened the first three and found nothing. Patel's had a single message addressed to the other three, sent the week they had all disappeared from the project. There was no message body, just an attachment with a date for a name. It was huge. Atom looked at the size again to make sure he hadn't misread it.

He downloaded the listing so he could show Gideon, but left the attachment on the server. The access log had recorded him and there wasn't anything he could do about that. He disconnected and went back to the listing. This was going to be fun to tell.

Rat and Daun were sitting on a wall outside a village in Hongcheon, waiting for the next six farmers. It was raining in Korea. Rat had never been there in person, and sometimes she had to remind herself how far away she was. She could see the rain on Daun's hair and on the wall between them, but she couldn't feel it. Her retail Link didn't do that.

"So what do you look like?" asked Daun.

"What?"

"When you aren't playing. Do you look like this?"

"No. Not much."

"I thought you might. Some people make themselves."

Rat looked down at her character's hands. "I'm tall and skinny. I've got a long face. Nothing very interesting."

"How tall?"

"Over six feet."

"Really? You would hate my house. You would hit your head on things."

"I do that here."

Daun laughed. "I'm short. You probably guessed. Everybody in my family is short. I'm the only one who fights, though. My mother thinks it's stupid."

"What does she want you to do?"

"Something where I don't get hit. You never ask me things like this."

"I didn't want to be rude."

"It's not rude. We're friends, aren't we?"

"Yeah," said Rat. "We are."

She was glad Daun had said it, although she didn't know what else to say herself. She could have told her more. This would have been a good time, with nobody around, except that when she looked up the new farmers were coming down the road. Daun had seen them too.

"Finally. Come on, we have to get going." Daun hopped down from the wall and took her shield off her back. Rat followed. The farmers all had new equipment and looked pleased to be there. They would be less pleased in a little while. Daun was going to walk them very fast.