Lock In (Lock In, #1)(73)

“The code,” Vann said.

“Yes,” Tony said. The schematic disappeared, replaced by lines of code. “How much do you know about Chomsky?” he asked. “The programming language, not the man.”

“I don’t know anything about either,” Vann said.

“Chris?”

“I got nothing,” I said.

Tony nodded. “The programming language was called Chomsky because it was designed to talk to the deep structures in the brain. It’s a ‘deep language’ pun. The great thing about Chomsky as a programming language is that it’s amazingly flexible. Once you know it—once you really know it—you find out there are all sorts of ways to address any problem, or issue, or goal. This is essential for neural networks. They have to be flexible because every brain is different. So the language you program them in has to have the same sort of flexibility. You’re keeping up with me so far?”

“It’s a little esoteric,” I said.

“Which is my point,” Tony said. “Chomsky is a language that has to be esoteric, because it’s interfacing directly with the brain.

“Now, a side effect of this is, because Chomsky allows so many different ways to tackle any one specific problem, programmers who are truly fluent in Chomsky end up developing their own voice. By which I mean they address goals and parameters in a way that’s idiosyncratic to them. If you spend any real time looking at the code, eventually you can tell who wrote it.”

“Like someone who writes novels.”

“Yeah, precisely,” Tony said. “Like one novelist puts in a lot of description while another one is all dialogue. Same thing. And like novelists, some Chomsky programmers are good, some are competent, and some suck. And if you’ve seen their code before, you can tell which programmer it is from the first line of code.”

He pointed to the code on display. “This is the code in Brenda Rees’s brain that’s variant from the latest point release and patching for the Ovid 6.4,” he said. He pulled up some more code. “Here’s the code of the software in Johnny Sani’s head. It reads the same. Whoever wrote Sani’s code wrote Rees’s code.”

He pulled up a third column of code. “This is code Hubbard wrote back in the day, when he was still pushing out patches and updates at Hubbard Systems,” he said. “Believe me when I say that if you ran all of this through the Chomsky equivalent of a semantic and grammatical analyzer, it would light up across the board. All of this was written by the same person. All of it was written by Lucas Hubbard.”

“Is that something we can use in a court of law?” Vann asked.

“You’d need a lawyer to tell you that,” Tony said. “But if you put me on the stand I would tell you, hell yeah, this is all the same guy.”

“Is that enough?” I asked Vann.

“To bring him in?” Vann asked. I nodded. “For what?”

“For killing Brenda Rees, for one,” I said. “For Johnny Sani, for another.”

“We don’t think he killed Rees,” Vann said. “We think Schwartz did. We still don’t have anything court-worthy connecting him to Sani, either.”

“Come on, Vann,” I said. “We know this is our guy.”

“We go in with what we have and Hubbard’s lawyers from Schwartz on down are going to blow our heads off,” Vann said. “And I know you don’t really need this job, Shane, but I kind of do. So, yes. Hubbard’s our man. Let’s make absolutely sure we can get him.” She turned to Tony. “What else you got.”

“Two more things,” Tony said. “The first is about Rees’s code.”

“What about it?” Vann said.

“It doesn’t bypass her long-term memory,” Tony said. “Either Hubbard couldn’t find a way to make it work, which is possible because the neural network layout is non-trivially different, or he decided not to waste his time because—” He paused.

“Because he didn’t plan on keeping her after he or Schwartz was done using her,” I said.

“Yeah,” Tony said. “And now you know why she was carrying around a grenade.”

“So she was aware the whole time,” Vann said. “Aware and awake and unable to stop her body from doing anything.”

“That’s right,” Tony said. “And no way to get the client out of her head.”

“Fuck,” Vann said and turned away for a second. Tony looked over at me, confused. Later, I mouthed.

“You okay?” I asked Vann.

“If we go in to wheel out Hubbard’s body after all this is done, I’m going to need you to watch me very closely,” Vann said. “Otherwise I’m going to punt that * hard right in the balls.”

I grinned very widely. “That’s a promise,” I said.

Vann turned back to Tony. “What’s the second thing,” she said.

“Once I figured out how Hubbard hacked Rees’s brain I went back into Sani’s brain to see what things I missed before because I didn’t have context,” Tony said. “And I got this.” He scrolled very quickly through the code until he came up with a sizable chunk of it.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I didn’t know at first,” Tony said. “Because it didn’t make any sense. What I think is that it repurposes part of the neural network into a relay.”