Discovery Ch. 05

*** Authors Note: Any similarity to real persons or places described within this story is probably not an accident, although I've made the effort not to expose anybody too much. The story circulates around a girl I met once, who told me some of her story. I will always regret not having spent more time with her. Enjoy they had lost him and Ireland was all behind them.
"Liam found a regular income working the fishing boats out of Gosford up north and also a part time gig tending the oyster shoal farms that speckled the Hawkesbury River.
"As payment for this, one of the local oyster farmers let them settle down in an old shack near Wondabyne. Christ Sam, such a beautiful and also abandoned part of the world you never did see, if you've ever taken the train to Newcastle! But it suited them fine for a time and they were happy the small family.
"Anyway. One day, Liam's fishing boat never came home, along with the 4 men aboard it. And as Conor would say, his mum never was the same again.
"But the oyster farmer was a kind man and let Grace and the young Conor stay, free of rent, in the old house.
"Soon, Conor was proving himself to be a little different. His maths teacher at his school in Gosford, as luck would have it, wasn't just your average high school teacher. He was a retired professor recently returned from Oxford who was just keeping his hand in, whilst enjoying a semi-retirement on the Woy Woy peninsular. He picked out Conor straight away as being a little bit special."
*****
Wondabyne on the Hawkesbury, Australia, June 1998.
"Mama, I'm ready to go. The train will be here soon and the dinghy is out of fuel so I'll be rowing to the station."
She turned her face to him then and the effort behind her smile was not lost on the boy as he threw his bag over the railing of the small cottage's verandah into the boat awaiting patiently below.
Grace looked up from her journal and tiredly waved a pencil in his direction as she spoke. "That's OK lad, when you get back we'll get some more petrol for the boat."
She blinked then and closed her eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. Then she opened her eyes again. "I'm sorry your father is not here to see you off. He'd have been so proud of you".
She closed her eyes again before the young man spoke as he sat down Otele gelen escort on the rough-hewn planks that formed the ramp down to their small jetty.
"Tell me again mama. Of the fishing boat?" She smiled as he knew she always would at the memory.
"Your father had the blackest hair and the greyest eyes. I swear I could see them all the way from Dublin when I was away at school. On holidays in the Arans, the girls would tease me endlessly at the look he would give me as his boat was coming into the docks..."
As her voice trailed out into the drug induced sleep that was most of her days, the boy stood again and wandered down to the small jetty that serviced their property. Within 15 minutes or so, he'd moored the small boat and was watching the incoming intercity train pull into the single carriage length platform that was Wondabyne station.
As the door of the carriage opened a welcome face stepped out to meet him.
"And a grand morning it is Conor. Welcome to the train that is come to change your life!"
"Mr Beatty! I didn't expect you to be coming at all today!"
"Nah Conor, I'm not coming with you. I promised Mrs Beatty that I'd look after your ma, while you were gone. On you go then and feel comfortable that she'll be well watched over."
"Thankyou Sir. Michigan eh? I can't wait!"
"I bet you can't boy. Eh, door's about to close, quickly now..."
*****
Sarah continued "Conor was 14 when he was accepted into a mathematics program at MIT. The 2nd youngest ever as I understand it and the youngest by a long way to finish the program at 16. He actually completed his Australian high school graduation via the post, in the first few weeks he was in the US, with the help of Mr Beatty that is. Conor never told me how this whole thing was paid for, though I suspect this Mr Beatty had a large part to play in that too.
"Ah Sam. It doesn't get any better from here. Conor's mum died only a month or so after he had left. She knew what was coming and had made Mr Beatty promise not to tell Conor until he had finished the first part of the program a few months later and returned home.
"She had been in the final stages of breast cancer you see, when Conor had left, though he never knew just how sick she was. She wanted him to focus on the opportunity Rus escort that fate had delivered to him.
"Conor refused to speak again to Mr Beatty till last year when I talked him into returning to his old digs and making his peace. I went with him. The old man was in a nursing home in Woy Woy and didn't even recognise Conor. Mrs Beatty did though and it was not a good experience for her or Conor or me.
"Anyway, after he had buried his mum, he went back to the states and spent the next several years moving between MIT and Sydney University, pursuing several research programs of a kind. I won' pretend to understand what they were, but I do know he was doing ground-breaking stuff, researching the first early stages of artificial intelligence and stuff like that ..."
*****
University of Sydney, Australia, January 2001
"Well then Conor, what is this?"
"It's the solution paper you asked me to compile Bob and a nice piece of work too, if you don't mind me sounding a bit arrogant. And something else I came across whilst I was at it. You see if you take the logical routines from that lot and create a stubbed "passive" input, then you can start to create logical deductions that would self-create new ones with the right programming, as long as you had the means to circulate back to replace the stubs with a new input value. Kind of a basic artificial reasoning if I can put it that way..."
"A.I. Conor, really? Now that is arrogant!"
"No Bob. I said artificial reasoning. That's still On/Off binary. But it's not a big step to that Holy Grail you are so scared of playing with!"
"Ah Conor, be careful for what you wish for mate. That 'Holy Grail' you speak of has all sorts of 'brave new world' things entombed within its very whispered utterance."
The old mathematics professor winked then, even as he said his piece. After all it was his duty to encourage as well as promote restraint. "But seeing we are talking about grails, tell me more about your ideas."
"Well, for mine the secret it how we expand the idea of artificial reasoning is to create a feedback loop, so that every time the algorithm comes to a consensus, it starts again with the last outcomes as the primary inputs for the next evolution of calculations. Just like the human brain does, but much quicker, Sincan escort obviously. Essentially it becomes a logarithmic expansion of mathematical outcomes from each logical end.
"The problem we have is that the technology we have now can only deal with maybe 5% of the computational power we need to run each range of new variable inputs."
"And another is we would do this without the control of the pathos that makes us human Conor."
The student weltered for a moment under the stern eyes of his mentor. "Yes that is true, Bob, that is true."
"Well Conor, this route you seek may well make you rich and famous, but it is also the kind of tool that uncontrolled, could make you the father of a monster. Is this what you mum would have wanted for you?"
The student sighed then deeply. "I don't really know what mum would have wanted. Or my da for that matter. He was just a fisherman at the end of the day. And she was just a woman who loved a fisherman and died all too soon nonetheless."
Then as he had all so quickly learnt to do in recent years, he matched his quick mind to an equally cruel retort.
"Mr Beatty once told me that he had been speaking to you a long time to set me up for the program that set me on this course Bob. If you are so keen on the human pathos, why don't you tell me what a fisherman's wife would have wanted for her only son?"
Professor Robert Petrovsky just sighed then as he often did when talking with Conor and returned to his papers, knowing there was no comforting answer to Conor's request. He had seen his entire family slaughtered at the hands of the Nazis in Poland 57 years previously when he was a boy himself. But then, what did he know against the seemingly tireless will of the angry young man?
*****
"I never met Bob Sam. He died several years before I met Conor and, from all reports, Conor was beside himself. And so was Charlie, Conor's research partner.
"Oh yeah Sam, I haven't got to him yet. Ah, Sam. Poor Charlie. Of all those left behind, he is my own personal regret. I treated him like shit. From day one, I just saw him as a means to an end.
"In those days, I just wanted another way to get my fix and Kate wasn't far behind me on that score..."
*****
Erskineville, Sydney, Australia, March 2009.
"Conor, we've done it, we've done it, we are fucking rich and fucking famous and I am never going to have to do online dating ever again for the rest of my fat fucking life my man! Ah ha ha ha." The last was the worst version of a Bond villain laugh that Conor had ever heard.