The Gift by Dave Donovan Read Free Book Online

program, “You want to do the honors?” He asked Dan.
    “No thank you. You found it, you run it," Dan replied.
    Sam pressed the button, then looked from the screen to Dan, “Well, that’s disappointing.”
    “We knew it might not be a program, or a complete one," Dan responded.
    “Yeah, I know. I’m just thinking of all the time we lost debating whether or not to try it. We could have been working on alternatives for the past hour.”
    “It was not the kind of decision one person can make, Sam.”
    “But it always comes down to one person. In bureaucracies, it just usually comes down to one person who knows much less about the problem at hand or the nature of the solution. Politicians and bureaucrats believe they’re better qualified to make decisions than the rest of us. Nothing in my life has shown that to be true. If we waited for Web to get permission, we’d end up running it too late to explore alternatives if it failed to work, like it just did, and that’s if we got permission to run it at all.” Sam stopped and took a deep breath. He realized he was taking it out on the wrong person.
    “Sorry, Dan. You didn’t deserve that.”
    “Don’t worry about it. We all have the right to be a bit stressed right now," Dan replied.
    “Thanks.” Sam closed his eyes, took another deep breath and let it out slowly.
    “Okay, then; back to the matter at hand. I’ve been thinking about the possibility, probability if I’m being honest with myself, that the first program we put together wouldn’t work since my conversation with Web and Jack before Rui’s meeting. I can think of three potential causes. One, I could have selected the wrong subset of data as input; two, my code could be flawed in some way; or three, the similarity of the data to the structure of a program file is coincidence. You know I don’t believe in coincidence, so let’s start with that one.
    “Has your team run an analysis of the statistical probability that we’d find this pattern repeating randomly as frequently as we’re seeing it?” Sam asked.
    “We have. It’s highly improbable that the sequence would appear as frequently as it does randomly. That does not preclude the sequence having a meaning to the sender that differs from how we would interpret it. We’re assuming they are intelligent enough to send us a message we are capable of understanding in time to matter. That seems logical to us. It may not seem as logical to them. They could also be overestimating our intelligence, as humbling as that thought may be," Dan replied.
    “There’s nothing we can do about it if they’ve overestimated us, so I don’t see any upside to worrying about it and I will leave pursuit of other interpretations of the pattern in these sequences to your team. I vote the two of us ignore option three.”
    “I agree.”
    “On to option one, then. I think this is where we’re likely to find the problem. There’s a tremendous amount of data and I did not spend a lot of time selecting the first chunk of it to evaluate. I’ll run a few copies of my existing script against my lower probability candidates, but I’d like you to select another dozen or so sets that you think are promising. I’ll run the program against them as well while you look for more, or for a better method of finding higher quality sets. My selection algorithm is in the code I sent you.”
    “Last and perhaps least, option two, my code could be flawed. I’ll start reviewing it right after I update Web, but I think you should have someone on your team do so as well.”
    “I agree. I’ll get someone on it before I start looking for better candidate sections of the message.”
    “Can you think of anything else we should be doing right now?” Sam asked.
    “No, but you’ll have to tell me about that conversation later.”
    “If we all survive the next few hours, I promise I’ll catch you up on office gossip," Sam replied.

    Web’s door was closed. Normally, Sam would