Kill Decision (5 page)

Strickland stepped up onto an office chair as someone steadied it for him. He raised his glass and Lei Li, their mentor, called out for quiet—with everyone suddenly shouting, “Speech! Speech!”

In a few moments the music got turned down, and in the sudden silence Strickland raised a plastic cup sloshing with champagne. “Guys, I want you to know what an honor it’s been to work with this team. I’m aware that the brilliance lies not with me, but with all of you”—he pointed—“Sourav, Gerhard, Bao, Nik, and of course, the inimitable Vijay.” There was applause and cheers with each name.

Prakash stood near the wall, arms crossed, watching Strickland with something approaching disdain. Prakash wore his trademark khaki pants and blue Oxford button-down shirt. His hair, as always, closely cut and perfect. Bollywood good looks.

What was the deal with this guy? Why couldn’t he just loosen up? Strickland tried to ignore him. “I think it’s fitting that in a building where Google was born—bringing Web search to the world—visual intelligence would also be born, bringing the ability to search reality in real time. You guys will make history, and I’m just glad to be along for the ride.”

“Hear, hear!” Another cheer went up and glasses were drained. The music came up again, and the crowd resumed shouted conversations, while lab members mugged before the video cameras.

Strickland noticed Prakash still staring daggers at him, so he waded through the crowd to him. “Vijay, what’s wrong with you, man? You look like Kolkata just lost the cricket finals or something.”

Prakash eyed him. “Speaking as one of the ‘brilliant’ team members, I don’t appreciate you monopolizing the conversation with DARPA. We make decisions as a team, Josh. The only reason you have the title of ‘team lead’ is because you’re good at dealing with suits, and it keeps you out of my way.”

“I was just setting a date for the next meeting. We’ll confirm it by e-mail later.”

“We need to be involved in every decision that occurs—no matter how small.”

“We’re not a hive mind, Vijay. Occasionally tasks need to be delegated, and I don’t see the point of bothering you with—”

Prakash got in his face, finger jabbing. “This is not the first time I’ve had to remind you. I do not work for you, Josh, and I expect you to represent the interests of the team, not just yourself.”

“Whoa, whoa! Hold on a second. We all agreed from the get-go that since I’m the extrovert that it would be best if I did the talking, especially with the defense folks. That’s what I’ve been doing.” He gestured back to the chair he’d been standing on. “Did I not just lay literally all of the credit onto everyone else’s shoulders?”

“And rightly so. The next time we communicate with the U.S. government, I expect to be copied, Josh.”

He studied Prakash’s face. Did he know? There had indeed been a few other communications, but it had only been an oversight. “Look, I don’t know what you think I’m up to, but in case you haven’t noticed, you’re sort of critical to this project. I can’t screw you without screwing myself. You’re on the patent applications.”

Strickland wondered if Prakash’s highly competitive upbringing was behind this. He knew that the guy’s father was a real type-A businessman—a real ballbuster who practically rode his sons with a riding crop. Old school. Very class conscious too.

Was that it? Strickland sometimes wondered if Prakash thought less of him simply because Strickland was straight middle class—the son of schoolteachers. He’d seen photos of the Prakash summerhouse in the south of France, and photos of Prakash literally in a polo outfit, holding the reins of a pony—like he was friends with the British royals or something. It was easy to forget that this guy might just look at him like he was one of the help.

The more he thought about it, the more it irritated him. He raised his cup again to Prakash and gave him an obnoxious wink, aiming a finger pistol at him in oily salesman fashion. “Who loves ya, guy? Eh? Who loves ya!”

Someone came up from behind and ruffled Prakash’s hair, laughing. Strickland took the opportunity to step away, heading outside for some air. He worked the room on the way out, and by the time he made it to one of the hallway doors, he could see the light on in one of the tiny, windowless offices that surrounded the lab cluster. There sat the childlike form of Nikolay Kasheyev, their visual processing expert, sitting at his desk.

Kasheyev had some sort of pituitary condition that gave him the appearance of a twelve-year-old, even though he was in his mid-twenties. He was often told he was a child prodigy, and every time people made that mistake, Strickland winced on his behalf. But the Russian seemed used to it.

He could see Kasheyev examining multiplexed video streams, tiled into squares on his screen. Strickland rapped his knuckles on the office doorframe. “Hey, Nik, why aren’t you joining the party, man?”

Kasheyev spoke without turning around. “The ravens are back.”

“What ravens?”

Kasheyev finally bothered to turn around. “You never listen to me, do you?”

Strickland was too busy wondering how much Kasheyev’s eyeglasses cost. It seemed that among the team members, only Strickland had come from humble circumstances. Everyone else seemed to have parents with money. No one else had had to work through their undergraduate years. At least not at menial jobs. It seemed like Kasheyev wasn’t even aware that they’d probably laid the groundwork for becoming wealthy men today. It was as though it barely mattered to him.

“Josh.”

“Ah. Of course I listen to you. I just don’t retain what you say.”

Kasheyev pointed to an array of six video images tiled on his screen—surveillance cameras that Strickland knew were being “watched” at all times by Raconteur algorithms. They’d had the system running more or less continually (in progressive versions) for almost two years, watching the public spaces all around the Gates building. Watching the comings and goings of students, automobiles, everything. That was part of the power of this system:
persistent surveillance
. Watching over time. Noticing patterns and changes to those patterns. Continuing to deduce meaning from what was seen, storing the symbolic representations, and sending alerts—in this case to Kasheyev’s iPhone—whenever anomalies were detected. Specific alerts could be created, and apparently Kasheyev had started fixating on these birds. It was the least of his eccentricities.

Kasheyev tapped at one of the images, where what appeared to be a black raven gazed at their offices from a tree branch. Clearly the video was running, because Strickland could see the leaves of the tree swaying in a slight breeze.

Strickland leaned in to examine the screen, and then examined the Raconteur log, highlighted for the entry.
Raven perched in tree.

“Okay, Raconteur recognized a species of bird. We’re amazing.”

“That’s because it searched tagged Web images for comparisons—object identification is not really my point. It’s that there have never been ravens in these trees. And, look, there’s another raven here, up near the Packard Building to the south. . . .” He clicked around the screen and brought up a larger image of another raven perched on the parapet of the architecturally modern electrical engineering building across the street. He scrolled backward in time, and Strickland could see that as the sun rose and set, the twin, but lone, ravens returned day after day—but then one day, they weren’t there. “It started a week ago. And they’ve come back every day since.”

Strickland recognized that this was one of the problems inherent in working with brilliant people: They were half-mad. Fixations on details or finding links between disconnected phenomena was a mania with some of them. He patted Kasheyev on the shoulder. “There’s this thing called ‘migration,’ Nik.”

Kasheyev looked at Strickland like he was an idiot. “Ravens don’t migrate. Adult birds like this have a range that spans miles. They don’t stay in one spot unless they’re a mated pair with a nest. And I don’t see a nest.”

“Fascinating. These birds are way more interesting than our new research funding. I say we drop everything and—”

“Look . . .” Kasheyev zoomed in on one of the ravens sitting in the tree, and then up to one of its legs. There was some sort of tag or transponder on it.

Strickland shrugged. “Okay, someone’s doing research on ravens. This is a university.”

“That’s what I thought too. Ravens are very bright birds, Josh.”

“Maybe they’re here on a scholarship.”

“No one is doing research on raven populations here. I checked.”

“Jesus, I thought we were working on visual intelligence software, not stalking ravens.”

“Take a closer look at the tag on its leg. . . .” He zoomed in the high-def digital image. Then he split the screen and showed a close-up of the other bird on the opposite side of the building.

The objects on their legs looked like identical black squares.

Strickland sighed, and was happy when he noticed Wang Bao-Rong, their twentysomething Taiwanese narrow-AI expert, motioning for them to follow as he walked past in the hallway.

“What’s going on?”

Wang was tossing a brain-shaped squeaky toy in the air as he walked. “Conference call with the lawyers.”

“Oh!” Strickland pulled Kasheyev from the seat. “C’mon, Nik! The birds can wait, man.” He fell in with the rest of the crew, still sipping champagne.

Stanford University graduate science teams had already founded Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Yahoo!, and, of course, Google. And the five patent applications Strickland’s team had filed for Raconteur were potentially worth billions—especially now that the federal government was signing on to fund their work. This was the culmination of everything he’d worked for.

The team piled into a conference room, where Prakash was already standing, arms akimbo, in front of a speakerphone. Strickland was the last in and closed the door behind him.

Prakash barked at the phone. “Okay, John. The team’s all here.” Prakash looked up. “Guys, this is John Wolstein at Hartmann, Blithe, and Peale.”

A voice came over the speaker.
“Hey, guys.”

Everyone chimed in greetings.

Strickland spoke up. “Tell us the good news, John.”

There was a moment of silence. Then,
“Well, I wish I could do that, but I’m afraid there’s a problem.”

A hot flash ran across Strickland’s skin. Adrenaline surge. The intellectual property was everything. They’d already done a preliminary patent search. The path was clear. No one had ever taken Prakash’s novel approach.

Prakash frowned at the phone. “What do you mean, ‘problem’? What problem?”

Strickland realized that this was what Prakash was good at. He’d chew this lawyer a new asshole.

“You have prior art problems, Vijay. Big sections of your source code base are already public knowledge—available online.”

The room went utterly silent. The static on the phone line was the only sound.

“You guys still there?”

“What the hell are you talking about? That’s impossible! Where online?”

“Several forums. A code search turned up a half-dozen sites that carried parts of your source code verbatim. Even some of the comments were there in the code. I don’t know how it got there or—”

“Goddammit!” The words burst from Prakash as he glared around the room.

“Vijay, I’m just telling you what the facts are.”

“I designed this code from scratch. There’s no ‘inspiration’ from somewhere else. It is mine.”

Strickland might have argued for more credit under different circumstances, but right now he felt like he’d been Tasered. He was just staring at the speakerphone, hearing the pounding of his heart in his ears. Hearing his future evaporate. He could see Prakash’s tanned face turning red, veins appearing—as though the man were about to explode.

Gerhard Koepple, always even-tempered, looked ashen-faced. Wang, Kasheyev, and Chatterjee were sitting down, running their hands through their hair as if they’d just heard a close relative had died.

Strickland croaked out, “Where? Where online, John?”

“I’m sending you a link right now—”

Prakash broke in. “You’ll send it to all of us. Not just Josh. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, okay, fine, Vijay. Listen, getting mad at me isn’t going to help.”

“Just send the damned message.”

“Okay.”
A pause.
“It’s headed your way.”

Strickland chimed in again. “John, where does this leave us? What happens now?”

There was silence for a moment.
“Nothing happens. I’m going to submit a report to Doctor Lei that the patents are not enforceable. And I expect the patent office will come to the same determination. I don’t know what, if any, effect this will have on your Ph.D. theses, but that’s the situation. My condolences. However this happened—and I’m not saying that you guys copied work from somewhere else—but however it happened, this code is now public domain. You won’t be able to patent it unless this prior art issue is resolved.”

Prakash grabbed the phone and ripped it off its base on the table—tearing out the phone cord—and hurled it against the window. The glass vibrated with a thud as the phone blasted into pieces.

“Jesus, Vijay! Calm down! I wanted to ask him more questions!”

Prakash ignored Strickland and stormed out of the conference room to the office nearby that he shared with Wang.

Strickland was right on his heels, closely followed by the rest of the team. “Vijay.” He felt his iPhone vibrate in his pocket, meaning he’d probably received an e-mail, but he wanted to deal with Vijay first.

Prakash was logging on to his computer and opening e-mail. He double-clicked on the top message as the others gathered around. There was verbiage from their lawyer, along with several links below the words “Prior Art.” The first one was for a website somewhere in Russia, judging by the “.ru” domain.

Chatterjee leaned in and placed his hand between Prakash and the screen. “Not directly! Use a VM, dude.”

Prakash looked like he was about to bite Chatterjee’s head off for a moment before he took a breath, nodded, and copied the first URL to the clipboard. “This is a just a bloody Xenon connection, Sourav! And the machine’s got nothing critical on it.” But he nonetheless launched a virtual machine, opened a browser, and pasted the address into the URL line.