Catalyst (Breakthrough Book 3) (3 page)

Next to Clay, Borger raised an eyebrow and spoke loud enough for Caesare to hear.  “You do understand we actually need DeeAnn
on
our side
.”

“Piece of cake.”

Clay wasn’t so sure it would be that easy.  “All right then.  Borger and I will see what else we can find out on this end.  When are you leaving?”

“I’m not sure,” Caesare replied.  He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead.  With the phone still to his ear, he turned back to face the glimmering skyscrapers of São Paulo in the distance.  “I need something first.  I need to know where Miguel Blanco’s family is.”

From his chair, Borger stared at Clay’s phone with a puzzled look.  “You want to know where Blanco’s family lives?”

“No,” he replied dryly.  “I need to know where they are right now.”

3

The bright Puerto Rican sun shimmered over the top of the salt water tank, creating a curtain of glistening sunlight waving gently through the water.

On the other side of the thick glass stood Alison Shaw, watching as the two dolphins, Dirk and Sally, occupied the far end of the tank.  A group of children stood packed together there.  Both dolphins floated close, playfully bumping their noses against the glass at the spots where the children were pressing their hands.  They screamed with excitement when Dirk impulsively turned sideways, placing one of his flippers against the glass.

Alison was happy.  Really happy.  She looked down and gently rubbed the bandage wrapped around her wrist.  They had returned from their harrowing trip through the Caribbean, all in one piece, with only scrapes and bruises.  Chris Ramirez and Lee Kenwood had taken the worst of it, but they were home and healing quickly.

Dirk and Sally had returned with them, even though they were free to come and go as they pleased.  Dirk was especially eager to return to the lab in Puerto Rico, which surprised Alison.  She was sure it had something to do with how much he was fed.  Without having to spend any effort hunting for fish, she suspected her lab was becoming something akin to a vacation for Dirk.

Best of all, Alison was in love.  She had found the man of her dreams.  John Clay was the most amazing man she’d ever met, even if the men she previously dated had set that bar fairly low.  But John was nothing short of a phenomenon.  Handsome, strong, smart, and a man who could really communicate.  He was every woman’s dream.

“It’s almost feeding time,” came Chris’s voice from behind her.  “Which means it’s time for us to start arguing about lunch.”

Alison turned and eyed the mug in his hand.  “Isn’t it getting a little late for coffee?”

Chris smiled.  Most of the bruising along the left side of his face was gone.  “It’s never too late for coffee.”  His obsession had now become an ongoing joke between them.  It stuck from the early days of their working together, sometimes spending all night at work.  Like her, Chris’s specialty was marine biology and he’d joined her team early in its formation.

Chris emptied the rest of the cup and set it down on his cluttered desk.  “I’ll see if the IT boys want to go.  Are you in?”

“No, you guys go ahead.”

Alison watched him cross the room and climb the wide stairs up to the second floor.  When he disappeared around the corner, she turned back to the tank.  The children were waving now, saying their goodbyes and being pulled gently away from the glass by their teachers.  Another class visit was scheduled for that afternoon.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.  There was only one thing that kept her from full contentment.  And Alison was trying to remain in denial about it for as long as she could.

She glanced at the far end of the room where their massive, and now infamous, IMIS computer system covered the entire wall.  Short for “Inter Mammal Interpretive System,” the original version was what allowed for the incredible breakthrough back in their Miami research center.  Since relocating to Puerto Rico, and closer to Dirk and Sally’s natural habitat, the IMIS system had been radically improved.  What that improvement led to next was a leap forward that not even they were prepared for.  It not only expanded IMIS’s translation capabilities beyond dolphins to primates, but it had done so in a way that surprised even their computer experts, Lee and Juan.  And on top of it all, during a near crisis, IMIS had successfully translated pieces of language in a way that none of them had ever anticipated, or even programmed for.

She stared at the massive wall of servers, humming quietly with its hundreds of green lights blinking away.  The system was silently crunching data and looking for more relationships between already established language patterns.

Alison looked away as she spotted a familiar face entering from the long hallway which connected the lab to their outdoor habitat.  DeeAnn Draper smiled and looked curiously around the silent room.

“Must be lunch time.”

Alison grinned.  “How’d you guess?”

“I love predictable men.”  DeeAnn smiled and watched the last of the children wave goodbye to the dolphins at the other end of the tank. 

Alison’s face took on a worried expression.  She frowned and lowered her voice.  “Are you still sure?”

“Yes,” DeeAnn nodded.  “I talked to Penny again this morning.  They’re getting things ready at the Foundation.”

Alison sighed.  She understood why DeeAnn was leaving.  The last month had been devastating for her, both emotionally and physically.  She had embarked on a trip that began as a cause to help find a friend, only to end up nearly perishing herself.  If it weren’t for Steve Caesare single-handedly saving her, she wouldn’t have been standing in front of Alison now.

A serious brush with death had a habit of changing people.  Alison understood that.  And DeeAnn was one of them.  She was alive and grateful, but she was done with adventure.  She wanted nothing now but to live a simple life and to keep a single person safe.  At least to her it was a person.  And now, thanks to the IMIS system, she was absolutely sure about that.

“So…”

DeeAnn answered the question before she could finish.  “We leave a week from Friday.”

Alison pressed her lips together and nodded.  She reached out and hugged DeeAnn.  Over the last several months, the woman had become her mentor.  An amazing woman in so many ways, who also had changed the world as much as Alison and her team ever had.  The world just didn’t know it yet.

“When are you going to tell the guys?”

DeeAnn cleared her throat.  “Today or tomorrow.”  She managed another smile and glanced over Alison’s shoulder to see Dirk and Sally approaching.  They glided smoothly up to the glass, watching the two women.

Hello D Ann.

She blinked a tear away and turned her smile to them.  “Hi, Sally.  Hi, Dirk.”

Dirk stared at her, quizzically. 
D Ann sad.

“A little.”  DeeAnn still couldn’t quite get used to the way IMIS pronounced her name during a translation.  According to Lee, the computers seemed to have trouble resolving a double “e” following the letter “d.”  He didn’t understand it either, but the resulting pronunciation sounded more like “D-an” with a stutter.  It wasn’t a big deal, but it always reminded her that a machine was ultimately behind the translations.

Why sad.

DeeAnn looked at Alison.  “It’s a long story.”

A loud buzz sounded from a monitor on the main desk.  On the screen, a red error message displayed “unable to translate – story.”

“It’s all right,” Alison said.  She changed the subject.  “Are you ready for food?”

Dirk became noticeably excited once Alison’s words were translated into a series of clicks and whistles. 
Yes, food now.

Alison turned to Sally, who was hovering slightly closer than Dirk.  “How about you, Sally?  Are you hungry?”

The women heard their translation emitted from the underwater speaker, but Sally did not answer.  Instead, she simply stared at them with her dolphin’s perpetual smile.

“Sally?”

Again the speaker sounded.  After a long silence Sally finally replied.

You leaving.

Both Alison and DeeAnn’s eyes widened in surprise.

“That’s…right, Sally.”  DeeAnn answered.  “How did you know that?”

Why you leave?

She frowned. 
How could she explain human emotion to a dolphin? 
It was a lot of things.  Depression.  Grief.  Fear.  Fear of somehow losing the purest thing she had ever known.  And the love of finally feeling like a mother.

“It’s…complicated.”

The translation system buzzed again, unable to translate “complicated.”

DeeAnn tried again.  “It’s hard to tell you.”

Her response was successful, but Sally didn’t answer.  DeeAnn wasn’t sure whether that meant Sally was satisfied with the answer or not.  Dolphins were not human, but even with her limited time speaking with Dirk and Sally, she was surprised at how human-like some of the communication felt.  She wondered if much of what we considered unique human communication actually had more underlying commonalities with other forms than we knew.

How you Alison?

“I’m good,” she smiled.  “How are you?”

How you hurt?

Alison glanced down at her bandage.  “I’m getting better.  Thank you.”  Since they had returned, both Dirk and Sally were surprisingly curious of their injuries, including those of Chris and Lee.  In fact, curious wasn’t quite the right term.  They were more “attentive.”  She was very touched by their concern and wondered if they were somehow feeling responsible.  They may have been there when it happened, but they certainly were in no way responsible.  Still, at times it left her with a distinct feeling of not only sympathy from the dolphins but a sense of
empathy
.  It prompted her to ask them on multiple occasions if they had been hurt by the explosion.  They insisted they hadn’t, but she wasn’t so sure.

Where man?

Alison gave Sally a sly grin.  The dolphin was asking about John.  He had spent a few days with her on the island after their return and spent some time talking to Dirk and Sally.  Being an expert in technology, he continued to marvel at what they had done with IMIS.  He was particularly impressed with the vests Lee and Juan designed.  Clay warned her that it was just a matter of time before the world truly understood what she and her team had achieved.  He warned her to prepare for that.  The wave of publicity they’d received in Miami after the first breakthrough would be nothing compared to what was coming.

Alison brushed her dark brown hair back behind an ear and answered Sally with a girlish chuckle.  “John had to leave.  He had to go home.”

Sally made the familiar sound that IMIS had long ago identified as laughter. 
He come back.

Alison sure hoped so.  And maybe one day he’d be back to stay.

Upstairs, Chris was sitting with Lee Kenwood and Juan Diaz in the computer lab.  It was comfortably sized and well organized with metal tables along the wall. Neatly stacked shelves hung above them, filled with books, a wide range of computer parts, and mounds of magnetic backup tapes.  Another larger table rested in the center of the room, illuminated by a bright lamp overhead.  On the table lay a new vest with various cables strung to a nearby computer.

Positioned in the middle of the vest was a large speaker with a much smaller microphone and digital camera embedded just a few inches above it.  It was a replacement for the damaged unit that DeeAnn had brought back from South America.  The system data had still been intact, but the small motherboard and processor were not worth salvaging.

Chris watched Lee and Juan, patiently waiting for an answer on lunch.  Both were distracted and staring intently at the monitor atop Lee’s desk.

“I take it you’re still looking for the ghost in the system.”

“It’s not a ghost,” Lee mumbled, moving the mouse and scrolling down. 

“Sorry, I mean “anomaly.”

“It’s not an anomaly either.”

“Riddle?”

Juan turned and rolled his eyes while Lee, still facing forward, shook his head.

“Come on!  I’m joking.”  Chris reached down and picked up a thick textbook from Lee’s desk.  He thumbed through it.  It advertised itself as the bible of computer algorithms.  He believed it.  The contents looked completely unreadable.  “So what’s wrong exactly?”

Lee took a break and turned his chair around.  “It’s not that something is necessarily wrong.  It’s more that something isn’t right.”

“Is it part of the log problem?”

“I think so.”

The log problem to which Chris referred had in fact been a serious problem.  Before their harrowing trip to the Caribbean, Lee discovered that the IMIS translations and the related video feeds were falling increasingly out of sync.  The logs on the servers showed the frequency of errors to be increasing rapidly, leaving Lee worrying that thousands of new lines of computer code had seriously broken something.

But after several sleepless nights, they discovered that IMIS was actually picking up on very subtle cues outside commonly recognized audible patterns.  In other words, IMIS, a machine, was literally learning “nonverbal” communication.

However, Lee and Juan couldn’t figure out how it was doing it.  The vests were working almost
too
well. 

Chris listened as Lee explained what they were looking for.  “So, you’re saying IMIS shouldn’t be as effective as it is?”

“More or less.”  Lee walked over to the table and held up their new vest.  “When IMIS detects speech patterns from Dirk and Sally, it digitizes the signal and compares it to the database of words it has identified.  When it has a match, it sends those translated words back through the speaker.”

“And then in reverse order when
we
speak, right?”

“Exactly.  It works as expected with the dolphins because their language is mostly verbal.  But that changes with a primate.  Remember, DeeAnn says primate communication involves a lot of nonverbal communication like gestures and facial expressions.”