"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray,
Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right
answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of
confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
======
The elevator doors hummed opened and Marckham stepped out, only to hit another security checkpoint. She stopped, sighed, and raised her arms obligingly as the guards came forward with the detection gear. "Is this really necessary?"
Collins nodded. "I'm afraid so. Word has leaked out, and there are some people out there who aren't too happy about what we're doing. If somebody managed to smuggle something in -- well, we can't exactly run Norton on him, can we?"
Marckham raised an eyebrow. "Him?"
"Gender is determined at the cellular level. Remember, X-chromosomes? Y-chromosomes?"
Marckham frowned. "Of course, but --" She frowned again as the guard with the detector gave her a nudge in an uncomfortable place, then glanced around the room. "How did you get funding for all this, anyway?"
Collins smiled. "DARPA grants, mostly. The DoD wants to build the hands-down fastest supercomputer ever and we've pushed silicon about as far as it can go. Blue Gene/T may be the fastest pile of junk ever assembled, but it's still Tom Swift and His Giant Electric Idiot. We promised them a radical new biotech solution to the petaflop problem."
The guards made Marckham lower her arms so they could get a detector closer to the side of her head. She said, "But now you've got an entirely new problem, and that's why you called me. You never dreamed that your staff would need to include...
a research and growing operation. He's a damn cokehead. IBM worked so hard to meet your benchmarks and make an acceptance that they overclocked him and addicted him to a whole potpourri of uppers and downers and now I get called in to put out the fire Big Blue started. They'd clean up their own mess, if only Congress wasn't inside IBM's deep pockets."
Collins bowed his head. "Yeah, we've got the DEA breathing down our necks and now he needs more drugs, newer and better ones. We had him smoking pot at night to ease off his buzz, but now the researchers are complaining he responds to 'Hello, World!' ten seconds slower. Some fool we recently fired tried offering him a hit of acid hoping it would help and now our simulations are getting wrong answers, too. You just can't win, Becky."
A guard waved them on. "That's where you're wrong." Marckham grinned behind her thick plastic glasses and turned away. She left it there as they marched through the facility. Cameras craned their necks as their lenses followed the pair down a corridor bathed in light like the concrete wing of a sanitarium. Collins stopped at a large door to have his retina scanned and waved to a mirror of one-way glass. When the door slid open, a mist of tropical humidity rushed out into the cold wing.
"This is our makeshift greenhouse. His needs have become so great that we had to convert some office space to enlarge our budding operation," Collins laughed at his own pun. "We have here enough cocaine to make a line from here to Panama. We would be happy to give it all to him to advance our research, if we didn't fear the risk of a serious crash. His physical dependence is growing and we feel it's only a matter of time."
They walked past long rows of coca plants in various stages of development. Collins aimed them down a narrow hallway at the back. "Your office is in the synthesis lab. We only bought you the best gear, both chemical and genetic manipulation tools. I hope you find it sufficient for your research."
"They haven't even told you what it is yet, have they?"
Collins shrugged. "Need to know basis, you know."
"But I work for you. How are you supposed to supervise if you don't know what I'm doing?"
"Becky, all I need to know is that you're working hard on cleaning up our resident junkie and if you have any issues with the research, you'll let me know what you need."
Three weeks passed with relative quiet while Rebecca Marckham worked feverishly in her lab poring over papers and marking them up. The day she finally came before his desk again, he'd expected her to request a vacation or a sick day. Instead she made a more abnormal request.
"I need a tissue sample," Marckham blurted out. "About a cubic centimeter of his brain tissue."
And leaving with only that small sample, she returned to the grind. Piles of petri dishes grew on her shelves like cylindrical fungi. Several times over the next few weeks, Collins believed she would crack under her own ambition, but he stood his distance.
Finally one day, she stepped out of her lab with a tray of petri dishes in her arms and an unusually exuberant smile across her face. "The gene therapy is ready," she announced.
The therapy seemed daring and maybe a little too experimental at this stage, but her colleagues concurred that enough testing had occurred in her small laboratory on vat-grown brain tissues. Their urgent need for a solution to imminent overdose trumped safety concerns. They voted to go ahead.
Becky Marckham explained it this way. "The new transgenic brain cells will express adrenaline during the day, endorphins in the evening, and THC at night. This solves normally unaccounted-for human needs in biological computers. He'll wake up pumped to work, relax to a raging sex drive and high bandwidth net pornography from a dedicated OC-48, and then be happily stoned to sleep. By only expressing the chemicals in limited quantities at limited times, we avoid a strong physical dependence, allow him to beat back an acute cocaine addiction, and let him sleep at night with a healthy appetite. If this experiment is a success, we might license the technology to IBM for future models."
The gene therapy was supposed to take effect in only two weeks from the time the modified cells were introduced to the subject. In fact, the first signs came about a week and a half later. At about 7PM, all kinds of unusual activity showed up on the brain monitor. The administrators were about to shut him down with tranquilizers until the intern admin noticed a sudden spike in network traffic. "He" was getting his virtual rocks off to hardcore erotica. Even the report printer started to whir and luckily the intern caught it and turned off the printer before the red ink supply was quickly exhausted.
The other chemicals likewise began to express themselves at the times promised, they successfully lowered his cocaine dosage, and the scientists were just about ready to pat themselves on the back and call it a job well done. There was only one thing left though. They needed a final test of his computation ability. For this, they chose a standard battery of the HPC Challenge benchmarks.
Three top-notch engineers spent several days and nights porting the benchmarks to his wetware architecture. A Department of Defense quarterly review was fast approaching and the bigwigs wanted results. When the software was finally ready, night had fallen and the meeting was to happen the next day. They had to get some preliminary numbers now, even if he was half-baked at the time.
The engineers started up the benchmarks and fed in the data. One cracked open a beer. It was going to be a long night. By the time he'd finished sipping off his beer's head, he noticed a blinking light on his monitor and spilled beer on the console. The benchmarks were already completed. A quick double check revealed that the matrix arithmetic was correct. They'd broken out of the petaflops and entered exaflop territory. It was a new record.
Not believing it, he tried his benchmarks again. The brain monitor showed intense activity and then two minutes later, the correct results showed again. They called and woke up Rebecca Marckham, who was getting sleep for her big presentation tomorrow. "This had better be good," she made them promise before she left home still wearing a bathrobe over her pajamas.
"Good morning, Becky," he called to her as she entered the machine room.
"Morning, Mark. I hear you've been giving your programmers some amazing results. Could you show me?"
"Sure, but I want some Krispy Kreme." He fired up the benchmarks once more and Marckham watched the brain monitors.
"There's something wrong," she said. She switched over to the virtual program stack and watched. "He's supposed to be performing matrix arithmetic, but he's computing pi digits. Mark, stop."
"Yes, Becky?"
"Run the same benchmarks, only change all the inputs with a random epsilon between 0.0 and 1.0."
The benchmarks restarted and again, he worked on anything but the problems at hand. After two minutes, the results came out the same.
"I'm tired of playing. May I have my Krispy Kreme and sleep?"
Becky smirked. "Yes, you may sleep. Don't run so fast tomorrow or you may embarrass all of us, though. Who ever knew the fastest computer on earth would simply be a fratboy with a copy of the answer sheet?"