“Confessions” Serial, Tech Wars 3
Zoltan received a call from Igor, his man in New York.
“Hey there, Boss. What d’you want, the good news or the bad news?”
“Just tell me. Have you found him?”
“Er, no. We couldn’t get a view of his passport at passport control, so I figured he’d either take a cab or be picked up outside the terminal. I had three guys patrol the sidewalk with a copy of the photo you sent me. Szolt saw him get in a cab. I was in a car nearby. Szolt signalled to me, so I followed the cab hoping he’d head home. Instead, he got out at a Walmart. By the time I’d parked and followed him into the store I reckon he was long gone.”
“So, he picked up your tail?”
“Dunno, Boss. Maybe he was just being careful.”
• • •
In fact, Brett had realized that he had been videoed during the attack on the trailer. Putting himself in the attackers’ shoes, he had worked out that they would try to pick up his trail at the airport. He had left his cab, entered Walmart and exited immediately on the far side of the building. He had spent a few minutes in a nearby café watching the Walmart’s entrance but saw no one come out and look around for him.
Brett took the nearest subway and went home, confident that he was clear of any surveillance. Home was a small but comfortable apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. There was a message waiting for him on one of the burn phones he had left behind on his trip to Africa. It simply said, “Contact me.”
• • •
Amanda handed their burn phone to the Professor.
“It’s Brett,” she said.
Arthur took the phone and dispensed with any formalities. “Are they watching you?”
“No. Just in case, I took evasive action after I landed at Kennedy. I’m clear.”
“Good. We need to meet. Can you take the red-eye (flight) to LA tonight?”
“Sure. Where d’you want to meet?”
Arthur gave him an address on Sunset Avenue, Venice Beach and rang off. Brett wryly looked around his apartment, wondering when he was going to spend some home time.
• • •
Arthur had kept his apartment in Venice Beach long after leaving his post as resident professor of Information Technology at UCLA. He and his wife Sally had used it as a holiday getaway when Arthur moved to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. After Sally died, Arthur had quit the academic life and had bought a ranch on the Russian River in Alaska. By then he had acquired a controversial reputation for pushing the envelope in respect of exploring ways of moving Artificial Intelligence forward. He had bought the ranch under an assumed name so that he could continue his research and development in relative peace and quiet.
He greeted Brett warmly. It was the first time they had actually met face-to-face. Brett had been recommended by a friend in New York when Arthur was looking for someone who could pull off the subterfuge in the Namib Desert. Brett was a former Navy SEAL who had moved to military intelligence work for some years before going on his own and becoming an expert in uncovering industrial espionage.
They settled down on the patio of the apartment with some beers. Arthur began by filling in the six-foot, four-inch, lean and muscular former SEAL with his reasons behind the Namib excursion.
“As you know, industrial espionage has become a massive facet of the criminal underworld. I was forced to fire a young assistant programmer who was doing some of the development of my Erskine Estimator program. Fortunately, he only dealt with me online and had no idea where my base was located. I started to become suspicious when this guy began asking questions about elements of my program that had no relevance to what he was directly working on.”
“Did you confront him?”
“No. He was obviously only a minor cog in the bigger wheel, so I fed him some false but workable data which appeared in an academic paper a few weeks later. I confronted him and he broke down saying he was desperate for money to support his ailing mother. Dunno if I believed him but he told me all he knew in exchange for my not charging him with fraud. It wasn’t much. He was dealing with a Hungarian in New York, whose boss is based in Budapest. He never got the boss’s name, but the New Yorker’s name is Szolt.”
“Is that how come you set up your Namibian scam?”
“Yeah. I figured that if I could distract these guys for a short while, I would be able to launch my new product without interference – Murphy’s law: we encountered a glitch in the program a few days later so I’ve had to postpone the launch – and my distraction in the dunes was a wasted effort.”
“Not entirely. You now know these guys are serious and they’re based in Hungary. I can work with that and do some digging.”
Brett drained his beer and looked at Arthur reflectively. “Look, I’m not that IT-literate so it’s difficult for me to assess how valuable your invention is. Can you give me an overview of the whole thing?”
Arthur nodded. “Perhaps the best way of explaining it is to liken it to Formula 1 Grand Prix motor racing.”
“I’m intrigued, carry on.”
“Winning and losing in Formula 1 depends on two things, the quality of the driver and (in many ways, more importantly) the quality of the car he drives. Millions of dollars are poured into making the cars as fast as possible. But in order to make racing competitive the authorities impose all kinds of restrictions so that one car cannot suddenly wipe out all the others with superior technology. Therefore, the designers and mechanics are left with making small changes within the rules, to give them an edge over the competition. The driver’s skill is the other factor, of course.”
“Now, in the case of computing we also have restrictions which have been with us since the earliest days over seventy years ago. Programmers are faced with a frightening task which grows more complicated every day. The complexity of programming grows exponentially all the time. Even small changes to a program can now require more and more code and it’s growing ever more complicated. That’s primarily why major software developers aren’t coming up with radical new developments. Even my own Erskine Estimator will have its limitations, even when we’ve ironed out the glitch.”
“I have to ask you, is it worth the effort?”
Arthur chuckled. “Fair question. I’d say yes. My Estimator has majorly simplified the entire Supply Chain system. It’ll save millions of dollars. The only thing we’ve been unable to do so far is to create a Closed Loop system.”
“Which is?”
“No matter what we’ve tried to do, our system, like any other AI system, has to be controlled by humans at this stage. Try as we may, we cannot create a system that can be completely controlled by the program itself. It’s something that’s been driving me nuts for years. Nevertheless, our Estimator will prove to be far more efficient than anything else on the market – and is therefore still a valuable product.”
“Yup,” he continued, “I don’t know if the baddies want to steal the system and market it, or if they would use it to steal from the Supply Chain or even sabotage the Supply Chain for political reasons. Whatever. I just know that I can contribute to improving the nation’s economy.”
Arthur stood up. “Come. Gjusta Restaurant’s just down the road. If you like Italian, it’s the best. We’ll eat and plan our next step. That’s if you’re still on board.”
“You had me at ‘Italian’!”
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.