His leg was still sore when he got out of the car to pump gas at Weaverville. The white static didn’t flare in the minivan with its wide windshield and panoramic views, but it rose up hard when he limped into the mini-mart to pay. He didn’t know if it was the fluorescent lights or the plastic windowless interior or maybe just the caustic smell of burnt coffee, but his shoulders clamped up immediately. In the time it took him to grab a few bags of trail mix, a case of bottled water, and a good road atlas, he was sweating hard and beginning to hyperventilate. The wide-eyed attendant stepped back from the counter as if Peter were a meth monkey looking to rob the place.
Peter held up Al’s money, noting the slight tremor in his hand as he sorted through the bills, then pushed through the door to the open air, where he could begin to catch his breath.
I’m going to have to figure this out, he thought as he limped back to the minivan.
The white static. My war souvenir.
If I’m going to be of any use to her at all, I’m going to have to figure this out.
14
North of Ashland it began to get dark. June yawned and stretched, then clambered forward between the seats to sit beside him, combing her hair with her fingers and checking her fat lip in the rearview mirror. When she saw a mile marker, she announced that they would stop for Mexican food in Medford, one of her favorite stops on her regular drives between the Bay Area and Seattle.
She lobbied hard to eat inside, and Peter gave in. He had to try. But after watching Peter’s face turn pale across the table, she sent him limping back out to the car and told the waiter to make their order to go. They ate at a picnic shelter at Bear Creek Park while the rain streamed down around them.
“You’ve really got it bad,” she said.
“I thought it was getting better.” Peter shivered in the cold. He still had only the clothes on his back, and his T-shirt wasn’t quite up to the Oregon weather. “But now I’m not so sure.”
“I noticed your leg is getting worse, too,” she said. “It looks like it’s swelling.”
“I don’t know about worse,” he said. “But not better, not yet.”
June looked at him thoughtfully and took another bite of her enormous steak burrito.
“Tell me about your mom,” he said, changing the subject to something useful. “You said someone broke into her office and took some computers. Do you know what she was working on that someone would want to steal?”
“Not specifically,” June said through a mouthful of burrito. “She was very secretive. Especially with me, because I’m a journalist. But in general her work had a great deal of potential value. She was on the bleeding edge of research into neural networks, machine learning.”
“I don’t know what any of that means,” said Peter. “Remember, strong back, weak mind.”
“I’ll use small words,” she said with a freckled smirk. “Neural networks are large arrays of computer processors, each working on separate facets of a complicated problem. The idea is to simulate the node structure of the human brain. Object recognition, for example, where you might take a real-world photo of an object, then use that photo to identify the object, is immensely complicated. The most successful solutions use neural networks. Speech recognition, too.”
“So what’s machine learning?”
“Conventional neural networks need to be taught to do their job. With facial recognition, for example, programmers design the problem-solving pathways. But for really large problems, it’s too big a task for people to program line by line. Machine learning, especially a sub-area called unsupervised learning, looks at ways for software to teach itself how to best solve the problem.”
“That doesn’t sound like a good idea,” said Peter. “Isn’t that how we ended up with the Terminator?”
She raised her eyebrows. “If you’ll recall,” she said, “that was a movie.”
“That was a documentary from the future,” said Peter. “I’m extremely concerned about the robot uprising. Those little self-directed vacuum cleaners are only the first wave.”
“You’re worse than my crazy dad.”
She’d mentioned him before. “Where does he live?”
June looked away. “Up in the mountains,” she said. “He’s kind of a hermit.”
“So he’s not in the picture, with your mom.”
“God no,” she said. “I haven’t seen him in years.” She looked at her half-eaten burrito. “This is really good, but it’s cold already.”
She was clearly uncomfortable with the topic of her dad. Although why did she keep bringing him up? Peter let it go for the moment.
“Me too,” he said. “I’m freezing my ass off.”
“So here’s the plan,” said June. “We need some clothes, and we need a hotel room.”
“We should keep moving,” said Peter. “More distance is better.”
“I thought I was the boss,” she said.
“You most definitely are the boss,” he said. “But I’m your highly paid security consultant.”
“Hmph,” she said. “I stink. I need a shower. And so do you, mountain man. I can smell you from here. Consult on that.”
Peter sighed. She wasn’t wrong. “Yes, ma’am. But cash only. They might follow a credit card trail.”