- CHAPTER 21: The White Room - © 2.15.2007

The room was unlike anything Shawn had ever seen before.  In a large lecture hall resembling an amphitheatre were neatly stacked rows of large plasma monitors, laid out to form a 360 degree cylinder of screens seamlessly connecting the floor to the ceiling.  The ceiling was encompassed by a giant dome-shaped monitor looking like a concave IMAX movie screen. It was a sight that made Shawn feel miniscule, like he was in a giant planetarium or fish tank.

One of the speakers fixed on the floor came alive with a human voice.

“Okay son.  You’re in the room which not even leaders of great nations have seen. Let me explain a few things,” the voice continued.  It was a low baritone Shawn had heard once before, but couldn’t place when or where.

“This room is designed to keep you in the center of all the scenery that will revolve around you.  When the screens turn on, you might be temporarily blinded so just close your eyes if it gets too bright.  You don’t want to look directly into the sun, you know.”

Before entering the room, Shawn had been told this was the secret room that not even the CIA or NSA had access to, unless it was a matter of absolute national security.  How the detective agency kept this arrangement with Big Brother was very simple.  If the Feds ever wanted to take control of this room or equipment, the detective agency made it clear they would simply self-destruct the software.  With no backup in existence, the program and the white room would simply be erased forever.  For the CIA, this room was not to be touched or endangered in any way, and it was rumored they even placed secret agents in buildings along two square blocks surrounding the agency in case there was any threat to the facility.  It was a very special relationship only elite organizations could have with government bodies that acted with invisible impunity.

The room was called the White Room because of its original concept, and the blinding white light that was at the beginning of any event sequence that played on the monitors.  The monitors conveyed images from a highly-refined, super-secret algorithm which enabled visual and aural recreations of physical events.  Re-creation, in this case, meant a reconstruction of events that occurred at any time in civilization as long as there was some recorded information about the people, places, objects, and ideas surrounding the event.

Everything happens for a million reasons, and this room was powered by an array of Cray supercomputers the agency bought for virtually nothing when the Juggernaut Aeronautics Corporation held their bankruptcy auction in 2001.  With a clear vision set out by Dr. Paul Lindgren, the Director of Information at the detective agency, the computers would spend the next 28 months gathering all the information the world had ever recorded or encoded from the human mind into a digitally identifiable, and thereby transferable, format.  This information, being the sum total of virtually all information in the world including laborious census reports, human accounts of events, news clippings, magazines, books, movies, entire websites, documentaries, news programs, home videos, drawings, paintings, music recordings, sounds, animations, and every type of media you can imagine, was pumped into the main database for categorization and storage.  Then the data would be run through a truth detector.

The latest genre of data to include for processing were the new wave of blogs, network mashups, and social commentaries that popped up on millions of internet pages all over the world, and virtually overnight.  The blogosphere was considered of supreme importance in capturing the true thoughtmosphere of the world and every individual trapped within it.  It was the synergy the blogs created in merging opinions with facts and fiction that the agency treasured most.  To the agency and Big Brother, a blog was only 1.64 degrees of separation away from tapping into any individual’s mind.  If the blog was purely fiction, the computer could easily identify fact, fiction, sentiment, and emotion in under one nanosecond.

While all this information was being gathered and digitized, no one at the agency really knew what the special project was for.  Some joked it was Dr. Lindgren’s hair-brained scheme to back up the entire world wide web for a rainy day.  Then one day, the senior partners all seemed to have life changing epiphanies after a weekend executive summit somewhere near the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, also known as SLAC.  At the end of this annual management retreat, Dr. Paul Lindgren ceremoniously announced to the rest of senior management what the secret massive mainframe data program was all about.  It was the beta version of the human time machine, nicknamed the White Room.

No one could believe this was possible until the demonstration began.  While a technician was casually entering data in the adjacent room, Dr. Lindgren tried to hide his excitement by repeating the agency mantra.

“Gentlemen and distinguished protectors of intelligence, I am happy to announce after three years of grueling, around-the-clock work by our team of programmers, data entry specialists, and technical reviewers, we have created a self-verifying database of all the world’s information.  Using this information and our highly specialized code and algorithms, the computer under this building has created a visual record of every event that occurred since the beginning of human record, and civilization.  In other words, this computer takes all input -- pictures, movie clips, written transcripts, historical records, and even recorded thoughts that humans have had about any event, time, place or person -- and creates a realistic, visual reference for that tag.  With all the information combined and now continuously updated in real-time, the computer can recreate moving images of all places on Earth going back to 5,000 B.C.”

The room began to chuckle and look around at one another, waiting for what other absurdity this doctor could be talking about.

“For example, if we want to look at the construction of the Eiffel Tower, we can just command the voice recognition control panel to … Eiffel Tower … construction day one.”

No sooner than those words were spoken, the room turned into a blinding white ray of light for several seconds.  The 12 partners in the room were a bit stymied by this, but they would be overblown with what they were about to see in the monitors that suddenly came to life with color.  The partners were stunned into silence as the monitors created a seamless panorama of Paris on July 1, 1887, when the construction of the Eiffel Tower was just about to begin.  The streets were lined with carriages and pedestrians, peasants and the bourgeoisie strolling to the center of a patch of land designated for a lasting landmark to France’s engineering prowess and artistic legacy. Voices of Parisians, adults, vendors, children, birds, dogs, horses, hooves, shoes, the clanking of metal and wooden mallots… all blended into the scenery that was moving with more energy than a sidewalk in New York City on a summer day.

“Viva la France….mon dieu….. ca c’est bien, n’est ce pas? Allons y a la tour de la vie!”

The raucous of the Champs de Mars was broken by Dr. Lindgren’s interjection.

“Zoom tower thirty degrees northwest, eight degrees up.”

The monitors began to change all around, and just like a television screen zooming in on a favorite movie scene, the room began to move.  At least it seemed like the room was moving when it was really only the images all around the round wall that were changing.  Everyone in the room could see a close-up of the tower’s foundation, from the viewpoint of a passerby in the park below.  Voices and sounds began to fade from the collective whole to a few voices excitedly talking about how to measure the perimeter of the foundation.   The sophisticated wardrobe of the four gentlemen in conversation made it obvious they were professors of engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique, a part of the vast construction team destined to make one of France’s great landmarks that would later withstand two devastating world wars.

Dr. Lindgren continued to explain.  “If this weren’t a demonstration, and you were the only person in the room, the scenery will change based on your eye movements.  If your pupils dilate to focus on a specific area, the sensors along the bottom of every monitor will relay that information to the computer in real-time, and adjust the focus level of the scene.”

When the demonstration was paused, there was a flurry of questions from the veteran detectives in the room.

“How do you generate live scenes from Paris, 1887 if film wasn’t invented until 1892?”

“How do you recreate conversations from a time when there was no voice recording?”

“Can you move from Paris to say…Mexico 1456 where there is no written language?  How about Sri Lanka in 754 B.C.?”

The room was asking twelve different questions at once for a good thirty seconds before the director responded.

“Gentlemen, the answer to all your questions are based on the artificial intelligence engine we created for the database.  The database is constantly updated with feeds from 12,000 sources all over the world to see if there is new information that either confirms or denies the preponderance of information already tagged as verified, accurate, or accountable.  You would be amazed at what this computer can pick up from a nursery rhyme written in 1934, or ancient texts written in languages no human speaks today.  Add to that the fact that human beings and animals don’t change in appearance too greatly over time, the AI engine recreates the scene as accurately as all the information it has been given to assimilate up to that moment.”

After a predictable silence, Lindgren added, “Even this demonstration and your reaction is already entered into the computer’s intelligence engine.  We can even replay this whole demonstration and you can watch yourselves watching yourselves again and again if you want.”

Everyone in the room was glued to their leather chairs.  The thought of having their actions and images recorded in real-time was nothing new to the veteran detectives, but the fact this supercomputer was processing this information almost as fast as they were feeding it data unknowingly, made for a striking revelation.

Dr. Lindgren took this moment to explain.

“In 2002, governments around the world realized that there are two things in the human sphere of influence that needed to be controlled -- memory and identity.  Countries like Singapore and advanced city-states with a wealth of capital were busy creating identification systems and tracking devices to monitor their entire population.  Of course, this kind of privacy invasion from big brother would never be accepted in the states.  Even phone calls, which any one of us in this room can easily pick up and monitor with free software, still require court orders and subpoenas to carry out for anyone in uniform.  Of course this is important, since otherwise, we would all be monitored by the powers that be.”

“This isn’t China…yet,” a sarcastic voice shot out as Lindgren waved his hand.

“Since the beginning of the ARPAnet and internet, our big brother agencies and friends at the NSA have been monitoring all electronic communications occurring within the territorial lands of the United States of America.  Since the internet sends information using a combination of underground cables and satellite transmissions, the NSA received authorization to monitor each and every keystroke entered on any computer as long as it was physically located inside the United States at any given time. Not even diplomats or visiting students were exempt from this mandate.”

The Operations Director agreed and added, “We all know this much. But not even the Russians can come close to the virtual time machine in recreating past events.  The accuracy of output in the White Room is 98%.  Our goal is 99.9% accuracy as more information, some lost for hundreds and thousands of years, are recovered and added to the database.”

“Let me show you how you look to the machine,” Lindgren whispered.

The room began its now familiar glow of white before a humming noise permeated the cylinder room.  The entire cylinder wall, chock full of monitors, began to spin counterclockwise, slowly at first, then with greater torque and momentum making the room feel slightly dizzy.  The monitors synchronized into a perfect 360 degree depiction of the board room.  The department heads in the secret boardroom were all looking through the one-way mirror into the White Room.  Then multiple beams of light created a thin circle of colors stretching from the ceiling to the ground.  Within the rays of light, colors began to shift around until the light beams created what looked like three dimensional images of everyone in the room, all the furniture, computers, water glasses and equipment, were all vividly represented through the lights.  The gentlemen were all looking at each other, looking at themselves, looking into the White Room.  The white room was clearly represented in the background on the wall of connected monitors.  It depicted the same Parisian street scene, except now there were 13 ghost-like images of Armani suits huddled around the table and staring intently into what looked like a room full of monitors showing the streets of Paris almost 200 years ago.

“When people close to us are involved, or in cases like this where we ourselves are involved in the recreation, holographic projections come to life.”

The youngest partner in the room asked, “Can we look at ourselves looking at ourselves looking at the Eiffel Tower being constructed?”

Without a pause, this being another inevitable question, Dr. Lindgren chuckled.  “As I said earlier, we can do that if you wish, but your own brain might get overloaded if you get inside an infinite loop.  We learned early on to divide actual events with their reviews or observations, unless that’s the purpose of the event itself. If you really want, we can look at this again tomorrow.”

The young man was a bit unnerved at the comment about his brain.   “Why don’t we just all look at it now?  We’re all adults here,” he added for comic relief.

“Unfortunately we have to end this demonstration in about two minutes or the entire city block will have another power outage.  This can only run for a maximum of thirty minutes a day, since running the program requires enormous levels of energy.  More importantly, watching anything on the time machine affects the future output of all events in the database. We don’t know yet how long the system can add self-observing behaviors without getting overloaded.”

The room, based on a few entries into the keyboard, could whisk any spectator into a world of visual reconstruction based on all scientific data known and constantly corrected with new information that was verified and entered into the scientific cauldron of information, an almost perfect reconstruction of any time and space within the confines of earth.  Even the darkest basements and dinner conversations could be revisited with the recollection of all information ever beset into human memory, or the collective consciousness.

None of this detail was explained to Shawn, since he was still a civilian.  Even the incredible contribution of voice reconstruction software the kid invented, would be used in secret for high-level matters until voice reconstruction capabilities became a mainstream gimmick.  Then they would use other authentication and fabrication devices to stay ahead of the curve. As far as Shawn knew, this room would show him what the agency had uncovered about his actions over the past two weeks.  He never expected what was about to happen next. Shawn had no way of knowing this, but the White Room was preprogrammed that day to unlock a secret and a strange hunch Shawn had carried with him ever since he was a child growing up in Evanston, Illinois.

Continued...