Catalyst (Breakthrough Book 3)(10)

Chris watched Lee and Juan, patiently waiting for an answer on lunch. Both were distracted and staring intently at the monitor atop Lee’s desk.

“I take it you’re still looking for the ghost in the system.”

“It’s not a ghost,” Lee mumbled, moving the mouse and scrolling down.

“Sorry, I mean “anomaly.”

“It’s not an anomaly either.”

“Riddle?”

Juan turned and rolled his eyes while Lee, still facing forward, shook his head.

“Come on! I’m joking.” Chris reached down and picked up a thick textbook from Lee’s desk. He thumbed through it. It advertised itself as the bible of computer algorithms. He believed it. The contents looked completely unreadable. “So what’s wrong exactly?”

Lee took a break and turned his chair around. “It’s not that something is necessarily wrong. It’s more that something isn’t right.”

“Is it part of the log problem?”

“I think so.”

The log problem to which Chris referred had in fact been a serious problem. Before their harrowing trip to the Caribbean, Lee discovered that the IMIS translations and the related video feeds were falling increasingly out of sync. The logs on the servers showed the frequency of errors to be increasing rapidly, leaving Lee worrying that thousands of new lines of computer code had seriously broken something.

But after several sleepless nights, they discovered that IMIS was actually picking up on very subtle cues outside commonly recognized audible patterns. In other words, IMIS, a machine, was literally learning “nonverbal” communication.

However, Lee and Juan couldn’t figure out how it was doing it. The vests were working almost too well.

Chris listened as Lee explained what they were looking for. “So, you’re saying IMIS shouldn’t be as effective as it is?”

“More or less.” Lee walked over to the table and held up their new vest. “When IMIS detects speech patterns from Dirk and Sally, it digitizes the signal and compares it to the database of words it has identified. When it has a match, it sends those translated words back through the speaker.”

“And then in reverse order when we speak, right?”

“Exactly. It works as expected with the dolphins because their language is mostly verbal. But that changes with a primate. Remember, DeeAnn says primate communication involves a lot of nonverbal communication like gestures and facial expressions.”

“Right.”

“Well, that’s where it’s not making sense,” Lee shrugged, looking at Juan. “IMIS is now picking up on nonverbal cues –– we’ve already established that. We’re not exactly sure on how that’s happening. But the more obvious problem is that while IMIS is picking up on those nonverbal cues, it has no way to convey them.”

“That we can see,” corrected Juan.

Chris squinted. “I’m not sure I’m following.”

Lee thought for a moment. “Let’s say, for example, that a nonverbal cue IMIS picks up from Dulce is a shrug. It sees that from the video feed and matches it with the audio. But how does it convey that?”

Now Chris understood. “I see. So while IMIS can observe a shrug, it has no way to actually transmit that gesture through the vest’s speaker.”

“Bingo!”

“Wow. That is weird.”

“It shouldn’t be able to translate gestures in both directions, but it does. And we don’t know how.”

Chris thought it over. He didn’t know the answer either. He had a suspicion but nothing concrete. It was a topic that Alison and he had discussed several times over the last couple years and were sure others had too. After years in the field, working with different creatures, they had eventually come to the same conclusion: there was something deeper and unknown happening when it came to communication. Especially in less cognizant brains. It was something many people had wondered about at one time or another. How animals knew so much instinctively, even things they had never been taught by a parent.

Communication was the means to knowledge. But Chris and Alison, as well as other researchers, even veterinarians, were sure there was something else happening at a deeper level. A level that humans could not yet understand or measure.

But maybe IMIS was doing just that.





4





Tiago Otero raised his head upon hearing a soft knock on the door. A moment later it was slowly pushed open and one of Otero’s assistants apologetically poked his head inside, interrupting the discussion.

Otero displayed a pained expression and apologized to the man across the small table. With dark eyes topped by a head of stark white hair, the other man appeared older than Otero. He was dressed in the familiar dark green and brown fatigues of the Brazilian Army. Silently, he watched as Otero rose from his leather chair and followed the assistant out.