Dark Matter. Greg Iles
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do you mean?”
“Everyone wants to build a computer that works like the human brain, but we don’t understand how the brain works. Everyone concedes that. Well … two years ago, one man realized this didn’t have to be the obstacle everyone thought it was. That we might be able to copy the brain without actually understanding what we were doing. Using existing technology.”
“Who was this man?”
“Peter Godin. The billionaire.”
“Godin Supercomputing?”
Now she’d surprised me. “That’s right.”
“They have a Godin Four supercomputer in a basement at TUNL, the Duke high-energy lab.”
“Well, Godin is the man who conceived Project Trinity.”
Rachel looked as though the accumulating details were starting to persuade her. “What kind of existing technology can copy the brain?”
“MRI.”
“Magnetic resonance imaging?”
“Yes. You order MRI scans every week, right?”
“Of course.”
“There’s a lot of information on those scans, isn’t there?”
“More than I can interpret sometimes.”
“Rachel, I’ve seen MRI scans that contain a hundred thousand times the information of the ones you see every day. A hundred thousand times the resolution.”
She blinked. “But how can that be? How much more can you see?”
“I’ve seen reactions between individual nerve synapses, frozen in time. I’ve seen the human brain working at the molecular level.”
“Bullshit.”
Any doctor would have said the same. “No. The machine exists. It’s sitting in a room ten miles away from us right now. Only nobody knows it.”
She was shaking her head. “That makes no sense. Why would a company keep something like that secret?”
“Because they’re legally bound to by the government.”
“But an MRI like that would make whoever developed it hundreds of millions of dollars. It could detect malignant cells long before they even become tumor masses.”
“You’re right. That’s been my main problem with this project. It’s unethical to keep that machine from cancer patients. But for now, just accept that there’s an MRI machine that can produce three-D models of the brain, with resolution to the molecular level.”
“Molecular snapshots of the brain.”
“Basically, yes. Ravi Nara calls them neuromodels.’”
“Neuromodels. Okay.”
“Rachel, do you realize what one of those neuromodels is?”
“I know that a single one of them would revolutionize neuroscience. But I get the feeling that’s not what this is about.”
“A neuromodel is the person it was taken from. Literally. His thoughts, memories, fears—everything.”
“But … it’s just a scan, right? A high-resolution map of the brain.”
“No. It’s a coded facsimile of every molecule in the brain, in perfect spatial and electrochemical relation. Which means that—”
“Hold on. Are you about to tell me they can load one of these neuromodels into a computer?”
“No. But that’s what they’ve been working around the clock for two years to achieve. Godin predicted it would take fifteen to twenty years, but they got halfway there in nineteen months. I’ve never seen anything like it. The only historical precedent is the Manhattan Project during World War Two.”
Rachel started to speak, but I held up my hand. High above us, a pair of headlights was cruising past at less than half the speed of the other cars. They slowed still more, then sped up and disappeared.
“We need to hurry.”
“If Trinity is everything you say it is,” she said, “then why in God’s name would it be based in North Carolina?”
This I hadn’t expected. “Aren’t you the top Jungian analyst in the world?”
“Well … one of them.”
“Why are you based in North Carolina?”
She frowned. “Because Duke University is here. That’s different.”
“Not so different. Peter Godin wanted Trinity based at his R and D lab in Mountain View, California. The NSA is footing the bill, and they wanted it based at Fort Meade, Maryland. Research Triangle Park was the ultimate compromise. High-tech, but out of the way.”
“What’s the end point, here? What does the NSA want to do with Trinity?”
“Our government sees most scientific revolutions in terms of weapons potential. If such a machine can be built, our government wants to be the first to do it.”
“What kind of weapon can this computer be?”
“Think Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq. Everything’s computerized in modern war. Code-breaking, nuclear weapons testing, information warfare, battlefield systems. But a Trinity wouldn’t be merely an advance. It would make today’s supercomputers as obsolete as Model Ts. And if Fielding was right about it having quantum capabilities … then present-day encryption is gone. That’s why the NSA has spent close to a billion dollars on Trinity.”
Rachel processed what I’d said. “But this isn’t just a faster supercomputer. We’re talking about a computer that thinks like a person.”
I shook my head. “We can’t build a computer that thinks like a person. We’re talking about copying an individual human brain. Creating a digital entity that for all practical purposes is a person. With his or her cognitive functions, memories, hopes, dreams … everything except a body. Only it would run at the speed of a digital computer. One million times faster than biological circuitry.”
She spoke almost to herself. “This is why Andrew Fielding and Ravi Nara would be working together.”
“Exactly. Nobel laureates in quantum physics and neuroscience. Peter Godin brought them together.” I checked to see that the spools on the recorder were still turning. “But I’ve only told you part of Trinity’s potential. Once your neuromodel is loaded into the computer as Rachel Weiss, speed isn’t the only advantage it will have over you—the original.”
“What do you mean?”
“Say I decide to learn to play the piano. It takes me three years of intensive study. You’re impressed by that. You want to learn to play the piano too. It’s going to take you three years as well, give or take. That’s the disadvantage of the human brain. Each one has approximately the same learning curve. But the computer model of your brain doesn’t have that problem. The sum total of music theory can be digitized and downloaded into its memory—your memory—in about three seconds. There’s no learning curve at all.”
She shook her head. “You’re saying you could download the sum of human knowledge into this computer—into me—all in a few hours?”
“In theory, yes.”
“David, you’re talking about something like … like a god, almost.”
“Not almost. Because that computer model would not only be Rachel Weiss. It would be Rachel Weiss forever. It could be backed up and stored, or downloaded into another Trinity computer. It would never have to die.”
She pursed her lips to speak, but no words emerged.
“Are