by Brian Daley
The scoreboard blanked and the word RECORD!!! appeared, blinking, as a tone-siren wailed and the crowd threatened to go mad, cheering, whooping, the bolder ones among them pounding Flynn on the arms and back. Lora, watching and reminding herself that this was Flynn’s, wondered if she hadn’t just seen him set a world’s record.
Flynn, hands up, was laughing and trying to quiet his admirers. “ ’S all in the wrist, friends!” They hooted at his assumed modesty. Someone else stepped up to the Space Paranoids game while others drifted off to try some other. Flynn turned from the dissipating crowd and saw Alan and Lora.
He laughed again, raising his voice to be heard. “Hey! Good to see you guys!” And he meant it, they saw. Alan found, as he had before, that it was difficult to dislike Flynn in person. Lora was thinking that he hadn’t changed much.
“Nothing classes up the place like a clean-cut young couple,” Flynn finished. Seeing Lora again tugged at him with a force that surprised him though he’d long since come to peace, he’d thought, with losing her. She’d had real affection for him then, and he for her, but it seemed very long ago—or had, until now.
“We have to talk,” Lora hollered over the din. Flynn smiled. Just her style: no windup, no fooling around.
“Good luck!” He grinned. “You can’t even think in here!” But he saw that she was serious, as was Alan. Flynn had a feeling that he know what it would be about, and led them off with a beckoning gesture. “Come on.”
Alan and Lora preceded Flynn upstairs while Flynn paused to make sure everything was going smoothly and to lock the downstairs door. “So how’re things going in the world of serious science?” he called up after them.
Alan looked around at Flynn’s morning-after of a room, sizing up his life. The room opened onto the high-ceilinged arcade on two sides, over waist-high partitions; an L-shaped pillow sectional occupied the corner between them. Blinds had been lowered, muffling the din from below. There was a computer terminal, a scattering of videogames in various states of repair, a bed that hadn’t been made in a while.
Alan arched his back, stiff from the ride to the arcade and hours at his terminal. He gazed down through the blinds at the arcade. “The best programmer ENCOM ever saw,” Alan half-sneered, “and he ends up playing space cowboy in some sleazy back room.”
Lora had found a seat on the pillow couch. Flynn’s footfalls clapped on the staircase. “Alan, let me handle this.”
He relented as Flynn entered the room, abruptly aware that he had no real wish to insult Flynn, even if he could—which he doubted. It’s just that Flynn’s got such a gift, he fumed. Alan hated waste, particularly the waste of a good brain.
Flynn plopped down in the corner of the couch, stretching, clasping hands behind his neck. He’d heard Lora’s remark. “Go right ahead,” he leered.
She ignored the leer, determined not to be goaded. She asked, “Have you been sneaking into the ENCOM system?”
Flynn blew his cheeks out. “Whew! You never were much for small talk!” There was admiration in his statement. But she saw that she’d scored with the question. A little too quickly, a little too glibly, he swung to Alan and asked, “She still leave her clothes all over the floor?”
The change of subject caught Alan off guard. Lora, blushing, cried out, “Flynn!” Flynn, sniggering, recalled, algorhythms!
Alan managed, “Uh, no. I mean, not that often.”
“Alan!” Lora exploded. Flynn chuckled; Alan, scowling, wondered why he’d bothered to come.
Lora, pointing to the arcade, told Alan, “You can see why all his friends are fourteen-year-olds.”
Flynn picked up a handheld videogame, pointedly ignoring the barb. From the little plastic case came the sounds of miniature struggle. He grinned ruefully. “Touché, honey! Yeah; I’ve been doing a little hacking up here.” He looked up defensively. “Which I’ve got every reason, as you well know—”
“Did you break in?” Alan interjected.
Flynn made a face. “Tried to.” He indicated the terminal with a tilt of his head. “Can’t quite make the connection with that sucker, though.” He sighed. “If I had a direct terminal . . .” He let the sentence trail off, the broadest of hints.
Alan met his gaze squarely. Flynn was surprised to find himself thinking that different circumstances might have made Bradley and himself friends. The man had no use for lies or evasion, non sequiturs or dishonesty. Alan sat down to Flynn’s right and asked, “Flynn, are you embezzling?”
Flynn looked to the game again and did his best to sound like a B-movie shyster. “Embezzlement is such an ugly word, Mr. Bradley.”
Alan looked vexed and Lora clicked her tongue impatiently. Flynn finished in a normal voice, “No. Actually, I’m trying to get some solid evidence together.”
Alan kept that level stare on him. “I don’t get it.”
Flynn looked at him, then turned to Lora, to his left. “You haven’t told him?”
She shook her head, and Flynn understood then that he hadn’t been a popular topic between them. He went on, more or less, in the voice of Mr. Peabody, the time-traveling canine genius. “ ‘Sherman, set the Wayback Machine!’ ” He gave them a dumb-but-happy look. “Five years ago, Kevin Flynn,” he indicated himself and inclined his head modestly, “one of the brightest young software engineers at ENCOM.” Flynn snorted in derision. “He’s so bright that he starts going in there at night, and sets up a private memory file, and begins writing a program for a videogame he’s inventing, called—” with an elaborate wave to one of the games in the room, with its Recognizer stencil, “Space Paranoids!”
Flynn rather enjoyed the astonishment on Alan’s face. Lora, lips pursed, watched the performance with displeasure. Alan demanded, “You invented Space Paranoids?”
Flynn’s smile was lopsided. “Yep. And Vice Squad; a whole slew of ’em.” He held up thumb and forefinger. “I was this close to starting my own little enterprise.”
The hand fell; Flynn became less casual. “But, enter Ed Dillinger. Another software engineer, not so young, not so bright, but very, very sneaky. One night our boy Flynn goes to his terminal, tries to read up his file, and—nothing. A big blank, man!
“We now take you to three months later. Ed Dillinger presents ENCOM with five videogames he has ‘invented’; the slime didn’t even change the names. And he gets a big fat promotion. Thus begins his meteoric rise to—what is he now, executive VP?”
“Senior exec,” Alan supplied. He found himself believing Flynn absolutely, as much because of his own estimate of the man as because of Lora’s confidence in Flynn’s honesty, or Flynn’s engaging style.
Much of the lightness had left Flynn’s voice. “Meanwhile, kids are putting eight million quarters a week in Space Paranoids machines and I’m not seeing one dime except what I can squeeze out here.”
And Dillinger had won a promotion for it, profit shares, stock options—professional success and a personal fortune. Alan set aside the injustice of that for the moment, doggedly keeping the conversation on track. “I still don’t get why you’re trying to break into the System.”
Flynn leaned forward now. “Because somewhere in one of those memories is the evidence. If I get in far enough, I could reconstruct it.” He’d come close before, had only missed because he’d been crashing from an outside terminal. He’d thought of a new avenue of attack; with both Alan and Lora listening sympathetically he began to hope. “My password; Dillinger’s instruction to divert the data—”
Lora cut off the list of evidence. “I’m afraid it’s a little late for that. Dillinger’s shut off all Group Seven access. He must know what you’re up to.” Alan found himself not minding the concern in her tone.
Flynn slumped back, moaning, “Oh, great! So now nothin’ can stop him.” He spread his hands. “Just Dillinger and his Master Control Program, runnin’ things from on high, man!”
“Not if my Tron program was running,” Alan declared excitedly. It surprised him a little, h
ow quickly he’d gone from neutral to sympathizer, from there to ally. But what Dillinger had done to Flynn, what Dillinger was doing now, those things were wrong. “That would seal the System off. If your file’s in there—”
Flynn’s eyes were eager, conspiratorial. “Man, if we were inside, I know how to forge us a Group Six access!”
They looked at one another, Flynn hungry for another shot at the System, Alan reserved but decided, and Lora recognizing the expressions on both their faces from experience. She held up the keys to her van. They twisted and jingled, a challenge.
“Shall we dance?” she invited.
DILLINGER WAS SEATED once more at his console desk, with its endless projections of information and images, culled from wire services, industrial and military telecommunications systems, and ENCOM’s far-flung enterprises. But he ignored those now; before him stood Dr. Walter Gibbs.
Dillinger chose to conceal most of his irritation, where he might have hidden it all. In this manner he portrayed a busy man who, needlessly bothered, still behaved with gracious restraint.
Gibbs, for his part, was confused. His dealings with the upper echelons of the corporation he’d helped found had never been so difficult; ENCOM had always acknowledged its debt to him. But he’d come to see, as he’d confronted the maddeningly evasive Dillinger, that matters were no longer as they had been.
Gibbs tried one more time.
“Ed, all I’m saying is, if our own people can’t get access to their programs—” He stopped for a moment. The implications of such a state of affairs seemed so obvious to him that he didn’t understand why Dillinger didn’t leap up at once to rectify it. He couldn’t see how the Senior Operating Executive had allowed the situation to exist in the first place. “You know how frustrating it is when you’re working on a piece of research—”
Dillinger cut in at the precise moment when Gibbs was trying to formulate the end of his sentence, amputating it as a surgeon might. “Walter, I sympathize.” But there wasn’t much in his voice to indicate that he did. “But I have data coming out of the Master Control Program saying there’s something screwy—”
“That MCP; you know,” Gibbs broke into Dillinger’s smooth performance with unexpected heat, “that’s half the problem right—”
“The MCP is the most efficient way of handling what we do,” Dillinger said, by way of regaining the initiative. Above all, he mustn’t let the matter devolve into an attack against Master Control. The thought of what the MCP might do if it felt itself threatened was something that didn’t bear prolonged consideration. Harboring Dillinger’s own fears and insecurities multiplied many times, it would be capable of anything. The thought put even more force into the Senior Executive’s counterattack. “I can’t sit and worry about every little User request that—”
“User requests are what computers are for!” Gibbs railed with absolute certainty; Dillinger saw that the old man was now upon ground where his attitudes were unshakable. There was nothing to do but get tough.
“Doing our business is what computers are for!” he returned icily, then went on in a voice of reason. “Look, Walter. With all respect, ENCOM isn’t the business you started in your garage anymore.”
He sent commands via the touch-sensitive controls on his desk. Like a conjurer, he made of it a mosaic of screens and readouts. Despite himself, Gibbs looked down and saw the displays, upside down from his viewpoint.
They showed him the overwhelming scope of ENCOM: banks of computers, row after row of magnetic disks, and the corporate trademark, a globe spinning in space, covered with a glowing gridwork. Gibbs watched as electronic billing was displayed, myriad accounts receivable and payable. The Carrier used by Sark was shown there as nothing more than a simulation model for a craft in one of ENCOM’s newest videogames. The desk showed them a simulation for another vessel as well, now under development, fashioned after a solar sailing vehicle. It was a delicate, dragonfly ship, regal and swift, pleasing to the eye.
Stacks of numbers appeared: assets, transactions, cash flow, holdings, and personnel—for people, too, were numbers to Dillinger’s desk.
“We’re billing accounts in thirty countries,” Dillinger informed him grandly through it all. “We’ve the largest system in existence.”
Gibbs turned away, feeling fatigued. He’d seen it all before, had watched it grow from nothing but his own drive and that of a few others, the desire to put intelligent machines in humanity’s service. There were now, in the form of artificial intelligences, the equivalent of more than a trillion people alive; the number was increasing all the time. That was the kind of help computers could provide, how much of the burden of drudgery, rote calculation, algorithmic functioning, and information processing they were capable of shouldering for human beings. Gibbs had hoped for nothing less than a grand disencumbrance of humanity. But to the Dillingers, he saw, it’s nothing more than the largest, most profitable business in the world.
And when he asked himself if people were that much better off, he shied away from the question. “Oh, I know all that,” he told Dillinger wearily. “Sometimes I wish I were back in that garage—” The dream had been unalloyed then, unspoiled.
“It can be arranged,” the Senior Executive announced dispassionately.
Gibbs spun; the lined face took on a weathered strength that surprised Dillinger. “That was uncalled for.” He took a step closer to the desk, and Dillinger saw that the dreamer and idealist hadn’t been ground and buffeted out of Dr. Gibbs, as they had been with so many others. “You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from this System, but we helped create it. Our . . . our spirit remains in every program we’ve designed for the computer.”
Dillinger let no hint of it show through the steely façade, but that touched home, and brought the MCP back into his thoughts. But he forced himself to discard that line of thought.
“Walter, it’s getting late. I’ve got better things to do than discuss religious matters with you. Don’t worry about ENCOM anymore. It’s out of your hands now.” And out of his own as well, came the cutting realization.
Departing the office, slowly retracing his steps down the corridor, slump-shouldered and ignoring its art treasures, Gibbs conceded to himself the truth of Dillinger’s words. He wondered when it had happened.
Slowly, so slowly you never even realized, those few times you looked up from your experiments, it came to him. And if you’d noticed, what would you have done? Thrown aside science? Jumped into the corporate wolf pit, manipulating and maneuvering?
That was how a man became an Ed Dillinger. No; maybe I could’ve found a third way, he thought. There was some consolation in that. Or maybe there still is one?
Walter Gibbs mulled that over as he made his way from the skyscraper labeled ENCOM.
The black van pulled to a stop behind the ground-level entrance at the rear of the ENCOM building, Lora’s parking sticker having taken them that far. Lora, Alan, and Flynn hopped out and stood there before the only entrance where they wouldn’t face a disastrous security check, the shield-door that gave access to the laser lab area.
The door needed no guard, according to in-house and outside consultant security evaluations. It was immune to forced entry, even by someone using a self-propelled fieldpiece, and its locking mechanism was presided over by ENCOM computers.
Flynn let out a chuckle, seeing it: immense, red, marked with the trefoils of radiation warning. Lora inserted her ID card in the slot set in the electronic lock at the side of the massive door. She quickly tapped out a code on the twelve-button touch pad. Nothing happened.
“I don’t think I’m cleared for after-hours entry,” she confessed, and began to worry. Someone from security would be dropping around the laser lab tomorrow to find out why she’d been trying to gain admission in the middle of the night. Their adventure suddenly seemed like less of an inspiration.
“I’m certainly not cleared,” Alan declared.
Flynn smirked, pulled a small device
from the pocket of his windbreaker, and drawled, “Move aside; let The Kid have some room.”
They looked at one another, then moved back. Flynn sauntered up to the ID device and held his mysterious gadget, no larger than a handheld electronic game, up to the instrument.
“This guy’s like Santa Claus,” Alan snorted, and Lora giggled. They exchanged smiles; Alan liked making her laugh.
Flynn hunched over his gadget, working with utmost concentration. Alan and Lora began to get nervous; neither had ever considered a life of crime before. Flynn was no more tense than when he’d set the intergalactic record for Space Paranoids.
There was a soft click, followed by the sustained hum of brute servomotors. The three stepped back out of the way as the door began to swing open. Flynn moved to it eagerly, like a cat waiting to get out of the house. But the door continued to reveal its cross section; bevel after bevel of superhard alloy swung past and Flynn’s amazement grew with each moment. Ten feet thick, fifteen, and still it wasn’t open. Flynn began to whistle a casual tune, as if waiting for a bus. Anytime, door, his attitude said. Alan and Lora watched in amusement.
Twenty feet thick, the door finally showed an opening. Flynn stood back and ushered Lora through first, then followed behind with Alan; she would be a familiar face in the subcellar, while neither of them would. Flynn was acutely aware that none of them was wearing ENCOM picture-ID security badges, Lora and Alan having turned theirs in upon leaving the building earlier. He invoked a prayer drawn from The Treasure of Sierra Madre: Bodges? We don’ need no steenkin’ bodges!
They passed down silent stairwells and corridors of ENCOM’s subbasements, hearing only the whisper of the ventilation system. Then they descended a staircase and found themselves face to face with a security guard.
The trio had the presence of mind to keep walking. Lora came to an instant decision that neither of the men with her would be hurt, nor harm anyone else. Alan kissed his career good-bye, and wondered what jail would be like. Flynn congratulated himself for having worn his running shoes.
