Read Online Brain Storm by Richard Sapir, Warren Murphy - Free Book Online

then. He grinned at the thought.
    "Have you learned anything about the old man so far?" he asked Newton.
    The scientist continued typing at his workstation as he spoke. Monotonous sequences of zeros and ones flew by at breathtaking speed. "We know his name is Smith."
    "How did you find that out?"
    "We've programmed the computers here to recognize patterns of a certain type. Other information is more difficult to decipher, but the clearest patterns always start with numbers, which really govern people's lives in a lot of ways. In a literal sense—telephone, social security, addresses, birth dates. But also in a more esoteric sense. The basic alphabet can be seen in numerical terms. There's the finite number twenty-six, which in combination yields a virtually infinite number of possibilities. Infinite in terms of our capabilities, anyway," he added. "Computers read things in numbers. My theory is that the human brain does, too. I link up numerical sequences. It's that simple."
    "And that told you his name was Smith?" Holz still sounded skeptical.

    "Absolutely."
    "So what's his first name?"
    Newton was vague. "I'm not quite sure. In test subjects, that has generally been one of the easiest things to determine, the human ego being what it is.
    But this man has virtually no ego whatsoever. It seems that even in his own thoughts he hardly every refers to himself by his first name. And without many like references, it's going to be a while before we discern a pattern that our name file recognizes."
    "So you've stalled." Holz seemed pleased that the brilliant Dr. Newton had stumbled.
    "Only as far as that's concerned," Newton admitted. "But we've learned other stuff that tells us more about him."
    "Like what?"
    "Well, for starters, he's from New England originally. Right now I'm willing to bet Vermont. He had a strict upbringing. He lives somewhere in south-eastern New York. And he's into computers...
    perhaps much more than he imagines."
    Newton pushed against his desk. His chair rolled on its casters to a console several feet behind him, where two lab computer programmers were working on the background information on the test subject.
    "Stern and Geist have found a few interesting items," he said as he bumped to a stop against the new workstation.
    The two men looked up at Holz, who had followed Newton over. "There's a lot of morbid stuff in here, Lothar," the first technician, Ron Stern, said. "A lot of stuff about death, dying. It's a recurring pattern.
    Almost an obsession."
    "But he's pretty old, so that probably makes sense," Geist, the youngest of the programmers, suggested.
    "What's that?" Holz asked, pointing at the screen.
    Stern shook his head. "It's a neural symbol that we can best match up to mean destroyer. We're finding it a lot."
    "Maybe he was in the war," Geist said.
    Holz raised an eyebrow.
    Stern snickered. "Which one, the Revolution?"
    Geist chuckled, and both men returned to their respective keyboards.
    Newton tapped his balled fist in nervous excitement on the table a few times as he watched the raw neural data stream across Geist's green-tinted monitor. As if the endless lines of linked numbers were some sort of encouragement to his own work, he slid back over to his own workstation and attacked his keyboard.
    He was doggedly followed by Holz. "I sincerely hope, Doctor, that all of the effort you're expending on this one man does not prove to be a waste of valuable PlattDeutsche time."
    "I am saving PlattDeutsche more precious time than you could possibly imagine." Newton didn't look up from his computer screen.
    "I hope that you are. I've been called in front of the board this afternoon to justify the expense of this project. The higher-ups had a slight problem with our bank deal and decided to review the entire interface project."
    Newton stopped typing and spun his chair around, wild-eyed. "They're not thinking of cutting funding?" he demanded.
    "It's a possibility. I sold them on the project in the first