The Turing Option

“Tell him to speed it up!”

“Patience — this is best done at a leisurely pace. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

He pulled out and passed the truck where the road flattened out, got to the gate of Megalobe before it. Major Wood looked on suspiciously as the crate was pushed onto the loading dock.

“You sure you know the contents?”

“I watched them clamp on the seals myself — and the numbers match.”

“Easy enough to seal a ringer. I want this thing through the SQUID imager and the explosive sniffer before anyone tries to open it.”

“You’re not thinking that someone got to it in transit, opened it and planted a bomb — then resealed it?”

“Stranger things have happened. I like to be suspicious. Gives me something to do and keeps the troops on their toes. There might be anything in this box — including what you put in it. I still want a check.”

The sniffer machine sniffed and found nothing suspicious, as did the proton counter. Benicoff used a crowbar to verify the contents, resealed it so Bug-Off could not be seen, then drove it to the lab himself.

“Let me at it,” Brian said when he opened the door. “I’ve read that brochure you faxed me at least a hundred times. I think it’s mighty suspicious that it was wired to burn its brains out.”

“Would have been more suspicious if it wasn’t. Without a patent anyone could copy it. There’s nothing suspicious about a normal industrial espionage ploy. ARE — that is anti-reverse engineering. You can just unbolt it now. It should come apart with no trouble. The bomb squad have disabled all the booby-trap switches.”

“Let’s see it work first,” Brian said. “Does it have to be programmed?”

“No, just turn it on.”

The metal arms hummed up and out, the many-fingered hands extended. The machine rotated slowly in a circle, beeped unhappily and shut itself off.

“That didn’t take long,” Shelly said.

Brian looked closely at one of the fingertips. “I’ll bet it was looking for a specific wavelength — probably that of chlorophyll. Anyone got a potted plant?”

“No,” Shelly said, “but I have a vase of flowers in my office.”

“Perfect. I want to see Bug-Off off a few bugs before we strip it down.”

This time the machine was more cooperative. It rolled toward the vase, started at the base and quickly worked its way up the stems to the flowers. Once it was finished it bleeped with satisfaction and shut down.

“How do we get to see the bugs?” Brian asked.

“I’ll show you.” Ben twisted the lower segment of each arm and removed the containers built into them. “I’ll shake these onto a sheet of paper and we’ll take a look at the catch.”

He clicked open the lids and carefully tilted the contents out onto the paper.

“All those were on my flowers!” Shelly was horrified. “Spiders, flies — even some ants.”

“All dead too,” Brian said with admiration. “This spider has had her head neatly cut off! That takes great precision and discrimination. Let me get a magnifying glass and look at the rest of the debris.” He bent close and poked the dead bugs around with a pencil point. “There are very small aphids here, and some kind of insect that is even smaller, like powder, parasites or mites of some kind.” He straightened up and smiled. “I don’t think you could do all this with anything less than my AI techniques — though I could be wrong. Let’s look inside the thing and see what we have.”

The metal canister came off easily, obviously designed only for protection of the working parts. Brian used a screwdriver as a pointer to trace the circuitry.

“Here’s the power line, coded red, a five-volt power pair. Standard. And a single two-way fiber-optic signal pipe. Everything looks right off the shelf — so far. Standard voltage-to-voltage converters along with interface chips. They’ve been disconnected.”

“The FBI must have done that,” Ben said. “I bet you’ll find the matching plug on whatever passes for a central processor.”

“There it is,” Shelly said, pointing to a square metal box mounted on the side of the frame.

Ben examined the canister from all sides, using a minor and light to see behind and under it. “Since I’ve been involved with industrial security I’ve seen this kind of thing pretty often. Sealed shut and meant to be kept that way. Whatever is inside generates heat — see the heatsink there. But the fan blows over these ribs on the heatsink so there is no need for an opening into the thing. See this seam? Welded shut with one of the super-adhesives that end up stronger than the metal. We’re not going to get into it easily — so let’s not try. There is a lot we can find out without taking a hacksaw to it. But you’ll have to go in eventually,” Ben said.

“Maybe — but I’ll try not to. There has to be a backup battery inside to hold whatever is programmed in DRAM whenever the main battery is disconnected. Considering all the other booby-trap switches in this thing, there is bound to be another one to detect any attempt to open it.”

“Which will short the battery through the circuitry inside?” Shelly said.