Yeah, but the connection is so damn tenuous.
He had Mike. He had aleph-null. He needed more to help pull them and the Daedalus together. He leaned forward and said, 'Explain to me what the lab was doing. What happened to it?'
Nolan pulled a wad of tissue from a box on an end table and wiped his face, coughing again. 'Why? Why the hell should you be digging into this? Ancient history, and out of your jurisdiction.'
Gideon debated if he should be completely forthcoming. Nolan was part of the ET Lab, and for all Gideon knew, he could be part of whatever was happening.
Gideon found his own paranoia disturbing, justified or not.
'Are you familiar with the recent theft of a Daedalus supercomputer outside Arlington?'
'I don't live in a cave—' He hacked into his tissue. 'And you're going to explain why that has anything to do with the lab?'
'I think someone from the lab, probably more than one person, may have been involved in the theft.'
Nolan shook with his ironic laugh again. 'That wouldn't surprise me. God help anyone who stands between Julia and anything she wants.'
Gideon looked into Nolan's face, and saw what had to be a trace of amusement. Two thoughts occurred to Gideon, one was that Nolan really hated Dr. Zimmerman. Second, that if he was involved in the theft, he was one hell of an actor.
'Tell me about the lab,' Gideon said.
'Have you ever heard about the genetic algorithm?'
Gideon shook his head. 'Outside a few papers I copied today, no.'
'The genetic algorithm has been used for decades in the computer sciences,' Nolan said. 'Putting the idea in layman's terms—you start with a large pool of computer programs with random instructions. The person running the experiment grades each program proportionally on the extent each is able to complete some task. Those that grade in the top ten percent are allowed to 'breed' to create a new pool of computer programs—'
'Breed?'
'In the most basic example of the algorithm, a pair of high scoring programs are split at the same point, a point chosen at random, in their instructions. Their 'children' are produced by appending the end of one set of instructions to the beginning of the other's.'
'How the hell can something like that work?'
'How does evolution work? The genetic algorithm is probably one of the most powerful computational tools developed in the past fifty years. There are trading programs on Wall Street that are generated by using a genetic algorithm. Any problem where someone can give an objective numerical score to success can be attacked with the genetic algorithm.'
'So it works? Does something like this require a large computer?'
Nolan smiled, it looked like a grimace. 'Like the Daedalus? No. The first practical application of the genetic algorithm was run on an Apple II. All the ET Lab's experiments were run on our own small network. Ten desktop machines, and a server running at 200 megahertz—kids play video games on faster equipment.
'What the lab was, what it did, was all thanks to Zimmerman. She was the mathematician. Everyone else was Comp. Sci. All credit, and all blame, go back to her. She came to MIT to start the lab, and I had the bad sense to hook my wagon to her star.
'She had a reputation for genius before I ever met her, and she had published papers in number theory that made a few people say she was another Ramanujan. By the time she came to me with the idea for the lab, she hadn't published anything in at least three years. At that point I didn't care about that—though I think now it may have been the first sign of her instability.'
'Why's that?'
'Mathematics is one of the few sciences where publication is relatively easy. Many papers are distributed on the Internet. But here we have a reputed genius in the field, who hasn't published any original work in three years. She enters Computer Science out of left field.'
'But you worked with her?'
'I'm riot a genius, Mr. Malcolm.' Nolan shook his head. 'My sin was to be discontented with my own mediocrity. To have someone of that reputation . . .' He shook his head. 'I was a fool.'
'What was she trying to do? '
'The application of the genetic algorithm to pure mathematics. She needed the lab to do what she had envisioned. She didn't, then, have the expertise in Computer Science to do it on her own.'
'You make it sound as if she'd prefer to work on her own.'
Nolan snorted. 'That is understating Julia's arrogance by several orders of magnitude. She was working on her own in a room of twenty people. It was her own private world, and everyone was there only on her sufferance.'
'But you both ran the lab—'
Nolan shook his head. 'Only on paper. My work in the lab was the unenviable task of distilling the work of Julia Zimmerman and her clique into some sort of publishable form. It wasn't easy. Her disciples' work was as scattershot and random as the genetic algorithm itself.'
'Disciples?'
'I'm not the only one, or the last one, to've believed in her genius strongly enough to throw a career, a life, to her whims. I just came to my senses, a little too late.'
'She had a strong following?'
'The New Pythagoreans,' Nolan said. His voice broke with the weight of his distaste, and he started coughing again. He shook his head, his face showing the creases of a painful memory. Gideon was too aware of the dust in the very still air.
'I saw that name in a campus newspaper.'
Nolan nodded, slowly, as if all the angry energy had suddenly left him. His voice had become shallow and tissue-thin. 'The core members of the lab. They shared a worldview that was shaped by Zimmerman's arrogance. They were going to change mathematics forever. Some of them thought they would change the
world,' Nolan closed his eyes. 'They all followed her into an oblivion more obscure than the one I'm destined for.'
The air was still and quiet. Gideon pictured the tall athletic woman with the intense gray eyes. After a minute or so, Gideon leaned forward and said, 'Are you all right?'
Nolan nodded without opening his eyes. 'Fine . . . Just the drugs . . .'
'What was 'the Riemann debacle,' Dr. Nolan?
'What happened?' Nolan sighed. 'Zimmerman happened. That's what. The woman was paranoid and probably delusional, and my chief regret is that I never realized it until it was too late.' He sat up, and his eyes looked tired. 'Many mathematicians see new work as a discovery, not as something created by the human mind. Zimmerman took that view to an extreme.'
'I don't quite follow you.'
'She believed the programs generated by the lab were windows into an alternate universe, that the entities in her mathematics had an independent existence. After five years working with the genetic algorithm, she acted as if the programs we created were living creatures—'
Gideon tried to tell how seriously crazy Nolan thought Zimmerman was. When Gideon saw the expression in Nolan's eyes, the answer was very.
'But what was the 'Riemann debacle?' ' Gideon asked.
'She saw no point to independent verification. She was revealing truth. God help anyone who disputed it. She attacked even the slightest criticism with unintelligible babble about the 'reality' of her mathematics.'
'So what is the Riemann Hypothesis?'
Nolan put a hand to his forehead. 'I don't think I can describe it to a layman.'
Gideon shrugged. 'Try.'
Nolan slowly got up and walked over to a bookshelf. He pulled out a thick volume and leafed through it, hunched over so far that Gideon thought he was in danger of toppling. It was so dim in that corner of the room that Gideon wondered how he could discern the pages. Despite that, Nolan found what he was looking for and thrust the book into Gideon's lap.
