Fate (Wilton's Gold #3) (13 page)

The screen flipped, and Jeff was faced with his first question: “On whose property was the first gold found that kicked off the California Gold Rush?”

Dexter led Jeff down a long corridor with glass on either side. They were three floors beneath the atrium of the USTP, at server level. On their left through the glass were rows of cubicles filled with bureaucrats pecking away at their stations. He’d never paid much attention to what these people did on a daily basis – he’d only thought that there were simply way too many of them for what the program needed. He couldn’t imagine that what the USTP did on a daily basis created
that
much paper to push, but he’d also been working in and around government enough in his life to know that elected officials needed patronage jobs to fill. Here was a room full of them. He often wondered if they had any idea what actually
was
going on a few floors above their cubicles.

On their right was something much more impressive – the USTP server. Row after row of high-powered computer systems indefatigably churning billions of bits of information. He’d been told that it was the second most powerful government server in the nation – which probably meant the world – lagging behind only those deep beneath the Pentagon. Given what they were attempting to accomplish, that seemed believable. While his involvement with the computer system was relegated to analysis of participants in the program, he knew there were much bigger things happening.

Because of the impressiveness of the system, the USTP folks had installed a viewing area for financiers and other folks – such as engineers and academics – looking to take on projects of vast magnitude. It was into this viewing area that Dexter led Jeff, standing at the top of a short flight of stairs which enabled onlookers to see the entire system.

From above, an arced glass allowed for a view of at least sixty rows of servers, each about as long as a grocery store aisle. The glass was soundproof, which was fortunate, as Dexter had been told the noise inside the server room was intolerable. Even as they looked, Dexter could see several uniformed operators tending to various sections of the server, all equipped with noise reduction headphones. Dexter had been on the server floor once, but before it was operational, so he hadn’t experienced the murmur of the drives. He smiled thinking about it, because he’d been standing next to Dr. Jeff Jacobs as they’d done the walk-through.

He looked at this Jeff, who was staring at the system in awe. He had no way of knowing his friend’s expertise in computer hardware, but found it hard to believe there was anyone who wouldn’t have their breath taken away by the sight before them.

“How much did this cost?” Jeff finally asked, still gaping from left to right.

“The building or the system?”

“The system.”

“It was $750 million.”

“Sheesh,” he said. “Could’ve done a lot of good with that much money.”

“They believe they have.”

“Tell me about what I’m seeing.”

Dexter took a breath. “Well, I’m not the expert, so you’re going to get the sales brochure version. There are sixty-three rows, each holding approximately 1,600 servers. Over three trillion pieces of data are processed here every twenty-four hours. The servers interact through an algorithm that was actually developed by Dr. Bremner, who before he became head of the Time Program was considered one of the top mathematicians on the planet, and had started what became the world’s largest data security company. Every server in this room is running at the same exact speed – it’s an incredibly fast speed, but they’re all aligned so that each one is reading from all of the others at any given moment.”

“What’s the significance of that?”

“Well, remember what I told you about the PCS system,” he said, still looking out at the server room. “It’s all about relationships. Think of it like your family. So you have two cousins that are not cousins of each other – maybe one on your mother’s side, one on your father’s. But they have a relationship because of you. So if we’re evaluating each of their existing relationships, it’s an important link. Now each of them have cousins that may have the same connection. Those relationships all become a part of the analysis. That’s just one quick example. You can see how the calculations can multiply quickly.”

“Yes, I know what you’re saying, but-”

“Because of the alignment of the servers, it enables us to pull any possible relationships at any given time. The one between you and your cousin, between you and his cousin, or you and his cousin’s cousin. You and I are sitting here going on and on in order to figure this out in only a hypothetical view. The server doesn’t need to do that.”

“So it happens instantaneously?”

Dexter laughed. “No – it’s still trillions upon trillions of pieces of data. It takes some time.”

“Is the system running my data now?”

He shook his head. “I don’t believe so. Not yet.”

“So what’s it doing?”

“When the system’s not doing a specific task, it’s analyzing relationships to prepare itself for the next task. It’s a learning computer, so when it discovers a relationship, it doesn’t forget it.”

Now Jeff looked at him. “So it’s just assessing random relationships? Every day, this is what it does?”

“You’re getting a little over my head,” Dexter said, holding up his hands. “But my understanding is yes, that’s what it does.” Jeff looked at the floor for a moment before looking back at him, then returned his gaze to the servers. He had something on his mind. “Something wrong?”

He shook his head. “No. This is just pretty incredible. I’m curious what relationships it’s finding when it’s not doing a specific task.”

“You’d have to ask Bremner that. Or Abby. She may know.”

“I may do that. Is there a control room?”

Dexter nodded. “Yep. The next stop on our tour.”

He ushered Jeff away from the window and back down the stairs. They turned right and continued down the glass hallway until they reached a set of double doors. Dexter slid the security badge hanging on his belt through the reader and then placed his thumb on the screen next to the door. The lock clicked.

“Did I have one of those?” Jeff asked.

“You
did
, yes.”

The followed a dark brown hallway along the width of the server room, and then ascended two flights of stairs that put them on the other side. Dexter again badged and thumbed through another security lock, which let them into a room filled with monitors containing read-outs of various colors, itemized lists of data and, finally, tracking frequency graphs. The room was dark, almost like a television production studio, and was staffed by four people, one of them Abby and one of them Dr. Bremner, who turned in his swivel chair to greet them.

Just as Bremner extended his hand to Jeff, Dexter winced. “Ah, I forgot to tell you Dr. Bremner’s favorite talking point about the servers. Fifty percent of the energy powering the servers derives from the man-made waterfall behind the building, which you probably haven’t had time to see yet. It’s actually quite beautiful.”

Bremner shook his head as he shook Jeff’s hand. “Everyone seems to forget that little ditty,” he said. “This system, as enormous as it is, uses less base load energy than private sector servers a tenth of its size.”

“I’m not an energy guy,” Jeff said, “but that sounds impressive.”

Bremner laughed. “Come and let me show you around.” He led them to the main windows of the room, where they looked down on an alternative view of the server room floor. They could see the viewing alcove where they’d been standing minutes before. “This is where the magic happens,” he said. “When you were working in your lab in New Jersey, did you envision anything this grand?”

“Honestly, no,” Jeff said. His tone was sallow – in his mind, Dexter finished his thought for him:
“I hoped it would never be like this.”

“Well, we wouldn’t be here without your foresight,” Bremner said, giving him a car salesman slap on the back. “This is my vision that I built off of your and Dr. Murphy’s and Abby’s original vision for safe time travel. A supercomputer working to analyze every possible relationship in history going back hundreds of years. Now, I’m sure you’re asking why this is necessary – to be honest, the other version of you asked the same question. I can assure you, there’s much more important work being done here than sending people back in time for their jollies.”

“I assumed that was the case,” Jeff said.

Dexter had heard the speech before, but in truth he always had the same questions Jeff was asking – or that Bremner was answering without Jeff actually asking them. The research being done in this facility was incomparable, but to what end? It was well understood that everyone in the civilized world was now linked through data – every time anyone shopped, posted a “selfie,” or got on a plane, their behaviors were being collected and analyzed, and it was accepted. But what he understood about what Bremner’s machine was able to do took that concept to a whole new level. People’s relationships were now being weighed irrespective of their consent and using criteria that made little sense outside of the scope of the Time Program. Which was why he hadn’t been able to explain it very well to Jeff when he’d started to ask.

Bremner motioned for the two of them to take a seat in empty swivel chairs, which they did. “You see the Time Program as a mechanism for tourism,” he said. “We can send people back to the Wild West or to the Great Depression so they can experience history for real for a few hours. It’s a revolutionary idea, and it
has
drawn great interest so far. Aside from Dexter’s account of Benjamin Kane, the program has run flawlessly, and has been a nifty fundraiser for the research.

“But you’re asking yourself why the U.S. government would spend $750 million to build a server to analyze whether you’re going to run into your great-grandfather and slip him the secret plans for the internet? We didn’t. The on-going analysis of relationships, which is what’s happening out there as we speak – that’s this rumbling underneath our feet here – has a much deeper application. The way this system assesses relationships, we can anticipate threats to national security long before they become a reality. The vast amount of information that’s available can be analyzed instantly by our servers, to create algorithms that can-”

“Predict the future,” Jeff said.

“Yes,” Bremner said with a grin. “Well, in a way. Obviously, we’re not going to go arrest someone because the server says they’ll do something bad. But it can provide leads, which we share with other governmental agencies.”

“And how do you not have activists outside picketing the place for invasion of privacy?”

“This is all information that’s already out there,” Bremner said. “We don’t need to invade privacy. People have already made the choice to share. We’re just doing some additional math.”

“Jeff,” Dexter said, jumping in, “I’ve asked a lot of the same questions as you’re asking here. I wholeheartedly believe this system is going to be in a position to save lives in the not too distant future.” He did feel that way. Even if the government watching his every move was pretty creepy, he’d reasoned that he had no intention of doing bad stuff, so he didn’t have anything to worry about.

Jeff was smiling. “It’s a good cover, the Time Program,” he said. “I’m guessing not too many people know what’s happening here.”

“Dr. Jacobs, not too many people know what’s happening in any area of national security,” Bremner said. He was stern, but with a hint of sarcasm at Jeff’s naiveté. “It would be foolhardy to have it any other way.”

“I suppose.”

“Here, I’ll show you,” Bremner said, directing their attention to the screens hanging on the far wall, nine of them in total, arranged like a tic-tac-toe board. “The top screens, three across... Those are listing relationships at a count of about 36,000 – Abby, is it 36,000? – per second. You’ll notice they are all green, which means the system hasn’t stumbled on a relationship that’s a concern. Those would show up as yellow or red. Oh, there’s a yellow one, now – good, let’s see what happens. That piece of data is isolated – you can see how it’s pulled out of the list and it moves down to the middle screen, where it’s dumped into a file to be analyzed. Since it’s yellow, which, like anywhere else on the planet means ‘caution’ and not ‘danger’, those data points are analyzed on a bi-weekly basis. Data that comes up red is analyzed immediately by the person sitting at... that station right there.” He pointed to a young man with a crew cut, who didn’t look up from his monitor. “That’s Lt. Nathan Marks, U.S. Marine Corp. That position is always staffed with military.”

“What would make a piece of data come up red or yellow?” Jeff asked.

“Well, it coincides with whatever we’re looking for at the time. If we’re looking for relationships that could lead to possible acts of terrorism – which, as you can understand, the system is always looking for – then it will flag those. If there’s a specific governmental advisory looking for, say, smuggling, we could have the system address that need.”

“Why wouldn’t you always look for everything?”

“We don’t need to. The system learns. Once it analyzes a relationship, it knows that relationship for good. We can set the criteria at any time at the directive of the White House, and it picks up right where it left off. Too much criteria at one time will slow down the system.”

“Slow it down?”

Bremner laughed. “Well, not slow enough that a layperson would notice, but when you’re analyzing trillions of bits of data, every microsecond counts.”