The Turing Option

“Not too sad. Not everyone can phone up the President and have a chat—”

As if on cue the telephone rang and Brian picked it up, listened then nodded. “Right. Tell him to come up.”

“And I’ll be going,” Ben said. “I already made that lawyer you had on the phone just now wait an hour until I was through.” Ben laughed at Brian’s shocked expression. “The President’s investigator is all-seeing — never forget that. Part of that job is seeing that you stay alive. All visitors are screened. For the time being privacy is out.”

As he said this Ben put his finger to his lips, then pointed upward and shaped his mouth to silently say General Schorcht. Brian nodded understanding and Ben left.

He should have thought of that for himself. His terminal led right to the General and here, on a military base, it stood to reason that the room was probably bugged as well. That was something else that he had to keep in mind.

“Come in,” he called out when he heard the knock. His eyes widened when the uniformed Army officer opened the door. His name tag read Major Mike Sloane.

“You asked to see me.”

“Not knowingly. But I did want to see a lawyer.”

“Then that’s me.” He smiled, an easy grin on his lean, tanned face. “Adjutant General’s office. Cleared for Top Secret, which is how I got to read your file. So tell me, Brian — what can I do to help?”

“Are you, well, sort of cleared for civilian law as well?”

Mike laughed. “There is only one kind of law. I slaved in the legal snake pits of Wall Street before I opted for travel, education and career.”

“How are you on contracts?”

“A whiz kid. That was one of the reasons I enlisted — to get away from corporate law.”

“An important question then. Will you be helping me — or the Army?”

“A good question. If there is an overlap the military comes first. If this is strictly a civilian matter it is confidential between us, or until you hire civil counsel. Going to tell me what it’s about?”

“Sure. As soon as I know that it is confidential. I know that my terminal is bugged — is there a chance that this room is bugged as well?”

“Now that is what I call an equally good question. Give me a few minutes to make a call and I’ll see if I can give you an answer.”

It was more than a few minutes, closer to an hour before the Major returned.

“Right, Brian, what can I do for you?”

“Was the room bugged?”

“Naturally I cannot answer that. But I can assure you that our talk is confidential.”

“Good. Then tell me — can I sue Megalobe for not protecting me, for putting me in a situation that was hazardous to my health?”

“My first reaction is to say ‘Not easily.’ The government owns a good share of the company and no one ever got rich suing city hall. Then I’ll have to see a copy of your employment contract.”

“It’s on the table, right over there. That is what got me upset. And I don’t really want to sue them, the threat will do. Any threat to get a better contract than that one. Do you know all about me — about my memory?”

“Affirmative. I read the complete file.”

“Then you will know that I have no memory of the past few years. So I was reading some of my correspondence and I discovered that far from being a benefactor, Megalobe put the financial squeeze on me when I ran out of money to finish developing my AI. I discovered, unhappily, that I was almost completely bereft of any financial sense. But I wanted to finish the work so much that I let myself be bullied into signing that contract. Which appears to give the company a lot more than it gives me.”

“Then reading it takes top priority.”

“Go to it. I’m getting an orange juice. You too? Or something stronger.”

“Not on duty. Juice will do fine.”

The Major read slowly and carefully. Brian read as well, a copy he had printed out of a tutorial article by Carbonell about the new mathematical field of excluor geometry. It was a subject of psychology, concerned basically with the question of why people begin to use diagrams whenever verbal explanations get too complicated. This was because language is still fundamentally serial and one-dimensional. We can say former or latter — but there is no easy way to refer to four or five things at the same time. With AI always in the front of his mind he realized that just because human intelligence worked this way did not put any limitations on artificial intelligence. Instead of three or four pronoun-like ideas, an AI could handle dozens of “pronomes” at the same time. He blinked and looked up when he heard the lawyer laugh as he put the contract down. He shook his head and drained the glass of juice before he spoke.

“As we used to say back in law school — you been screwed without the benefit of being laid. This contract is worse than you said. I really think you wouldn’t profit at all from your work if you left their employment. And as long as you worked for them the profit would be all theirs.”

“Can you write me a better contract?”