Anna To The Infinite Power

by Mildred Ames

  “What’s the potential?” Anna asked loud and clear, to Rowan’s dismay.

  The man’s disapproving eyes rested on her briefly, then he went on. “The amount of scientific information has increased so fast, with so many published papers, that it is now impossible to even do a literary search for everything relating to a new research project. Only an intelligence-amplifier can bring together all of the data for use. This machine possesses the potential to unravel every scientific mystery yet conceived. And what’s more--” He paused to consult a card he was holding.

  Anna said, “Yes? What’s more?”

  He glared at her for an instant, then as if she had made him lose his train of thought, glanced again at the card. “Oh, yes--although we’re not there yet, ultimately we hope to reach the point where we can program the machine to write books in the style of any given person, or music in the style of any given composer.”

  God forbid, Rowan thought. If that ever became possible he would be wiped out. Everything he had worked for, everything he had learned--all for nothing. When the day came that machines took over the arts and began creating, Rowan wasn’t sure he wanted to be around.

  The demonstrator said, “Now, before I show you some of the intellectual novelties the machine can handle, I think we’ll start with a look at the more traditional uses.” He picked up a small microphone that was attached to the computer. “What I want you to notice is how the machine responds to my voice.” He flipped the switch on the microphone and said, “Three hundred four.” Immediately the figures flashed on a screen. He continued reading numbers into the machine until Rowan counted seventy of them. “Add them,” the man said into the microphone.

  “Seven hundred fifty-four thousand, two hundred ninety-one,” Anna said.

  In the next second the machine printed 754,291. All eyes fastened on her, the group’s in amused perplexity, Rowan’s in disgust. The demonstrator frowned at her. When he recovered from what appeared to be indignation and shock, he gave a flicker of a smile and said to the audience, “We have all witnessed a mathematical rarity. Can you imagine what the odds must be in guessing that particular number?”

  Anna said, “About the same as in that old saw that says if an infinite number of monkeys pounded on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, one of them would eventually produce Hamlet. And I didn’t guess, I added.”

  The demonstrator gave the kind of smile that merely indulged another obnoxious youngster. “Well, let’s carry on.”

  Rowan whispered, “Anna, if you open your mouth one more time you can just find your way home by yourself.”

  She ignored him as the demonstrator flicked a switch that erased the numbers on the machine. Then he again spoke into the microphone. “Find the sum of the first thousand prime numbers where each one is raised to the hundredth power.”

  As Anna’s mouth opened, Rowan quickly clapped a hand over it, not releasing her until the machine printed the answer. Then he grabbed Anna by the arm and dragged her away from the group.

  “What did you do that for?” she demanded.

  “You may not care if everyone knows what a freak you are, but I do. I’m not going to stick around here and let you embarrass me, you . . . you idiot savant.”

  Anna mulled that over. Finally she said, “I know what that means and you’re wrong. An idiot savant is brilliant in only one area. I know a lot. And I can’t leave now. That’s all the old stuff he’s doing. He hasn’t gotten to the new things my teacher wants me to see.”

  Rowan sighed. “All right. Stay, then. I can do an errand. When he finishes up, you can meet me. There’s a Greenwich Department Store about a block from here. I’ll be in the book department on the main floor.”

  “But you never checked with INAFT about going there.”

  Rowan pondered. “That’s right, I didn’t.” He shrugged. “Well, I guess sooner or later you’ve got to take a chance.”

  Anna agreed to meet him and Rowan left. He made for a music store he knew was only a few blocks distant. There he looked around for some time, bought some rosin and a couple of E-strings, then headed back toward the department store.

  When he got there he made for the book department. Anna had not arrived yet. He browsed for a while, then inadvertently glanced across to what turned out to be Junior Ms. Sportswear. There was Anna. And wearing a completely different outfit.

  Oh, my God, no! He should have stayed with her. Anna had a way of picking up any little thing that caught her fancy and never paying for it. That was another of her many charming characteristics. Now she was about to walk out of the store with new clothes. And there was absolutely no way she could have paid for them. They didn’t even have a charge at The Greenwich. Rowan dashed across the aisle and stormed into Junior Ms. Sportswear.

  Anna was going through a rack of slacks when he reached her side. Angrily, he wrenched her around to face him. Trying to keep his voice low and controlled, he said, “Anna, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you just get yourself back into the dressing room and put on your own clothes.”

  She stared at him strangely. “How do you know my name?”

  “How do I know your name? What do you mean how do I know your name? Stop being funny and do as I tell you!”

  She backed away. “You’re crazy. You leave me alone, or I’ll scream for help.” She glanced frantically around.

  “Oh, knock off the act, Anna.” He moved toward her.

  “You come one step closer, and I will scream!”

  To his surprise, Rowan could see that she really meant what she said. It crossed his mind that, even for Anna, her actions were peculiar. What a weird way to try to make off with stolen clothes. Suddenly he felt absolutely fed up with her. Enough was enough. “All right. If you don’t know me, then I’m not your brother, and I don’t have to take you home. You can just find your way by yourself.” She shook her head. “You really are crazy.”

  He opened his mouth to object, then clamped it shut tightly. Without a word, he turned on his heel and strode off. Who cared if his mother got mad at him for abandoning his idiot savant--mostly idiot--sister? This was more than anyone should have to take from anybody.

  He’d covered only a few steps along the aisle when the automatic eye opened the glass entry doors and--No, it couldn’t be. He stopped in his tracks and glanced back to where he thought he’d left her. And there she was. She was in Junior Ms. Sportswear and, at the same time, she was coming up the aisle wearing the same outfit she had left home in that morning.

  The Junior-Ms.-Sportswear Anna was right. He had to be crazy.

  4

  Anna knew little about getting around by herself in the world outside the Apollo. Even the physical exams she had to take every six months because of her allergy were handled by a doctor in the complex. It was a rare occasion that found her outside, and rarer still, alone.

  As soon as the demonstration ended, she hurried toward The Greenwich Department Store, feeling a need for the security of Rowan’s company, completely dependent upon his knowledge of a transportation system she seldom used. She also felt uneasy because he had not checked out the store visit with INAFT. Never in her life had she gone anyplace without getting the “All Clear” first. To make matters worse, she saw a large dog coming toward her. Although he was on a leash, Anna ducked quickly into a store entryway to wait until the beast had passed. Not only was she allergic to animals, she was frightened to death of them. When the dog finally disappeared she went on.

  Inside the store she felt relieved when she immediately spotted Rowan. Then she noticed the strange expression on his face. Instead of coming toward her, he seemed rooted to the middle of the aisle.

  She hurried up to him and said, “Don’t just stand there like a dummy. Come on, let’s go home.”

  “Anna?”

  “What?”

  “Is it really you?”

  “Are you crazy, Rowan?”

  “I think maybe I am. It is y
ou, isn’t it?”

  “Stop being silly.”

  He persisted. “You’re Anna Hart? Anna Zimmerman Hart, my sister?”

  “Oh, Rowan, quit fooling around. You’re not funny.”

  “All right, I’m not funny, but if it’s really you,” he stabbed a finger toward the Junior Ms. Sportswear Department, “then who is that?”

  Anna’s glance followed his finger to alight on the back of a girl who was looking through a rack of clothes. “How should I know who she is?” Then the girl turned slightly. Anna saw her profile and realized what Rowan was talking about. “I see what you mean. She looks something like me.”

  “Something! She looks exactly like you. Exactly!” Anna took another look. It was an illusion, of course. Probably caused by distance. If the girl were closer she would take on her own identity. Now Anna felt compelled to move toward the girl, hardly aware Rowan was trailing her. Before they reached her, the girl turned fully around. She frowned when she saw Rowan, then her eyes flicked to Anna. In the next instant, her mouth dropped open. Anna, in a perplexed daze, quickly closed the distance between them, and the two stood staring at each other for a long moment. As if of one mind, they both turned to a nearby full-length mirror to scrutinize each other in it and confirm what Anna already knew but couldn’t believe. They looked enough alike to be twins. Identical twins. It was uncanny.

  Anna’s hand rose to a small dark birthmark to the right of her mouth. “You even have a mole like mine, and in the same place.” Then she noticed one difference and pounced upon it. “You’re taller than I am.”

  Relief sounded in the girl’s voice as she said, “You’re right. I’m much taller.”

  In the next moment, Anna followed the girl’s glance as it traveled down to their shoes. The girl wore heels, Anna flats. “You’re not taller,” Anna murmured.

  Rowan said, “I’ve heard of doppelgangers, but this has got to beat any of them.”

  Doppelganger. Anna remembered that in German the word meant a ghostly double. Was it possible for two unrelated people to look so much alike? “What’s your name?”

  “Anna Smithson. What’s yours?”

  It can’t be, Anna thought. That was really straining the laws of probability. “I’m Anna Hart,” she said, then told herself that this just had to be some eerie coincidence. She couldn’t yet come to terms with a situation that was threatening her uniqueness. Undoubtedly her likeness to the girl ended with physical appearance. And even though they had the same first name they had different last names, different families. Anna felt a sudden need to pursue their differences. But where to start? From the beginning, of course. That was the logical place, and Anna was always logical. “My full name is Anna Zimmerman Hart. What’s your full name?” From the stricken look on the girl’s face Anna guessed the answer. She said in a small voice, “Anna Zimmerman, too?”

  The girl nodded.

  Anna’s eyes shot to Rowan in desperation. There was something awfully wrong. Tell me it’s some kind of joke, she silently asked him. His answering gaze held only mystification. Anna glanced back to the girl, suddenly afraid to probe further.

  The girl must have felt the same. She edged away from them, saying, “I think I’d better go now.” She glanced quickly at her wristwatch. “I’ve got to meet my mother in five minutes.” She turned and fled down the aisle, in her rush, almost smashing into the glass exit doors. She caught herself up just as the automatic eye began to move them, then when the opening was just wide enough to accommodate her, dashed through.

  “You’d think someone was chasing her,” Rowan said.

  In a worried voice, Anna said, “What’s it all about, Rowan?”

  He shrugged. “Beats me. You not only have a doppelganger, but you’re both named Anna Zimmerman Something. That’s a big coincidence.”

  “You don’t know how big.” Anna’s mind was already figuring the odds and all they told her was that something was very wrong.

  “Come on,” Rowan said. “Let’s go home and see what Mom and Dad have to say about it.”

  Anna wasn’t sure she wanted to find out, but she followed him, lost now in her own thoughts. On the long trip home she said hardly a word, too caught up in the disturbing dilemma to think of anything else. She was a twin. There was no other explanation. Whether she was a Smithson twin, a Hart twin, or the twin of unknown parents, she had no idea. Someone had given her away at birth. Either that, or the Harts had given away her sister. Or someone else had given away both of them. Yet why did they have the same first and middle names? Had someone mixed them up? And there was something else that bothered her, something about the girl’s looks, something she’d heard about identical twins but couldn’t quite put her finger on. Her mind refused to work properly. And that was unlike her. It was also unlike her to feel so threatened.

  Before any other emotion could steal in upon her, numbers began flooding her head, gigantic columns of them to add, subtract, multiply, divide, enough to keep her busy for the whole journey home. Her riches. An embarrassment of riches. Anna felt a little better. Almost safe.

  “I suppose I’ll have to tell you the whole story now,” Sarah Hart said to her daughter as they talked privately in Anna’s room. “I was going to wait until you reached puberty. We felt you would understand better then. That was when I was supposed ... when I was going to tell you.”

  “What’s puberty got to do with anything? And I already know what you’re going to tell me. I’m a twin.” Anna had the feeling that she didn’t want to hear what was coming. Had it not been for Rowan she might have never even mentioned the experience in The Greenwich. At least she would have thought about it longer before saying anything. Rowan hadn’t even waited until Dad came home. I hope he’s dying of curiosity now, Anna thought. Her mother had excluded him, insisting on talking to Anna first and alone.

  “Did you say twin?” Sarah Hart asked, sounding as if she was stalling, giving herself time to think.

  “Yes. I saw her.” Somehow Anna couldn’t warm to the idea of having an identical sister. At the moment, she had no wish to see the girl again. It occurred to her now that the disturbing feelings she experienced so often always left her with something she’d thought of as a sense of incompleteness, as if there were cloudy flashes of memory that never quite came into focus. Could that possibly have anything to do with her birth? Had she always carried deep inside her the knowledge that somewhere she had a twin? It was almost like having another self, a missing self.

  Sarah Hart turned Anna’s desk chair around and sat down on it. She leaned forward and patted the edge of the bed. “Sit here, Anna, where I can look at you. I’ve got so much to tell you, and I want to be sure you understand.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to hear it.”

  Her mother sighed. “I’m afraid you must after today. Don’t be frightened. What I’m going to tell you will make you feel proud.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re very privileged. You’re part of a unique experiment.”

  “An experiment?” Anna shifted uneasily. “What kind of experiment?”

  “Now, let me tell it in my own way. I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I’ve practiced this in my head so many times, yet it doesn’t seem to be coming out right. Well, I’ll just start from the beginning.” She took a deep breath and settled back in the chair. “Before you were born there was a woman named Anna Zimmerman.”

  Another Anna Zimmerman? A relative? Or only a namesake? Now Anna gave her mother rapt attention.

  “She was a brilliant physicist who was doing terribly important government work when she died accidentally in a laboratory fire. They pulled her out but were too late to save her, as well as much of her work.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No, I didn’t. But I knew of her and of her work.”

  “I don’t understand what all this has to do with me. Why do I have her name?”

  “I’m getting to that. I told you she was doing important work.
When she died, she was supposed to be close to a real breakthrough that would have made a fantastic replicator possible.”

  “A replicator?”

  “Yes, a machine that could produce food from basic elements--nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen--or produce any other three-dimensional object ... a machine that could even duplicate itself so that everyone could have one.”

  Yes, that certainly would be important, Anna had to admit, but right now her mind was too concerned with the mystery of herself to focus on an idea that, ordinarily, would have seemed exciting to her. “I still don’t understand where I come in.”

  “I’m coming to that. You’ve heard of genetic engineering.”

  That wasn’t the branch of science that really interested Anna, but she was aware that scientists, for years, had been experimenting with living cells in the hope that they might someday find cures for inherited diseases or improve plant or animal life. “Of course I know what genetic engineering is,” Anna said. “They haven’t gotten too far with it, though--at least, not as far as people are concerned.”

  “Ah! That’s where you’re wrong, Anna.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A little more than twelve years ago scientists duplicated their first human being from body cells only, an asexual reproduction.”

  Anna’s stomach tightened. Her mother had to be mistaken. “It’s not in any of the science books. My teachers would have mentioned it if that were true.”

  “Your teachers don’t even know about it. Only the few people involved know. There was such a clamor against genetic engineering that the government deliberately kept it secret. No one could be sure of how it would turn out. Anything could have gone wrong. It was an experiment. They were breaking new ground. They had to move cautiously until they were certain it worked. With this kind of knowledge, there are as many possibilities for bad as there are for good, you know. Everything has to be weighed no matter how long it takes.” She leaned forward, took both of Anna’s hands in hers, and stared deeply into her eyes.