Laura reached out and laid her hand on his forearm. He looked first at her hand, then at her.
"So you stopped hiding your intellect when your mother died?" Laura asked, but her attention was focused on her hand and on his arm which lay underneath. She was conscious of the sharp ridge of his tensed muscles, of the warmth of his forearm, of how cool her hand must feel on his skin.
"I had to get out of that town, so I took the tests to get into college."
He was, just then, the young Joe in the newspaper photo with the sad eyes. A breeze rustled through the trees and blew a wisp of Laura's hair across her face. Without thinking, she lifted her hand from his arm and swiped the strand back into place. Her contact with Gray was lost, and Laura couldn't bring herself to reach out to him again. But she longed for the feel of him. To hold him in her arms. To ease in that embrace the pain he felt, and the pain she felt for him.
Laura did the only thing she could think to do. She chose words to reestablish contact. "You've never had anyone you could really talk to, have you? Except the computer." His head rose — his momentarily unguarded expression telling Laura she'd struck home.
"There was no one your equal, so you built someone who would understand… whatever it is."
Gray stared straight at her, squinting — his blue eyes peering out at her through narrowed slits.
"You re-created your own mind," Laura said, her thoughts escaping unfiltered now.
His hand rose. He tenderly brushed back another tress of Laura's hair.
The high-pitched whine of an electric motor preceded by an instant the sight of a driverless car rushing up the hill toward them.
They both turned as it braked dramatically to a stop, the loud hum of its tires just short of a squeal. It stopped right behind Laura's back, the doors already opening.
Gray stared at the waiting vehicle, a look of astonishment written all over his face. He turned to look down the road. Laura followed his eyes but saw nothing. Nothing except a slender post that rose from the ground beside the curb. She hadn't noticed it before.
The post was green and blended in with the jungle.
The black eyeball of a security camera was mounted on its side. The camera transmitted pictures to the computer — pictures of the road, pictures of Gray massaging Laura's fake cramp.
They left the Model Three on the road with its doors wide open.
Gray was clearly troubled by the surprise arrival of the vehicle, and he seemed anxious on the walk back to the house.
They parted at the front door with plans to have breakfast together after cleaning up. When Laura met Gray on the veranda, however, the long table was bare.
"I'm sorry," he said, "but we'd better get to work. I'll have breakfast served in your office."
"What's the matter?" Laura asked as she followed him to the front door.
"The errors are getting worse," was all he said.
Waiting for them at the bottom of the front steps was a jeep. Its driver started the engine, and Laura east a questioning gaze toward Gray.
"We're working on the Model Threes," he explained.
They got into the jeep, and the driver took off. Laura was worried by the look on Gray's face.
"What's going on, Joseph?" He didn't seem to want to talk. He looked everywhere but at her.
"There were over three thousand errors in the last hour alone," he began in a clipped fashion as though he was delivering an obligatory report. "I've ordered the Model Threes taken off the roads. The pneumatic doors have all been opened. All space operations except tonight's launch have been suspended. We've called off several major pay-per-view events and shut down bank clearing operations. Inquiries are pouring in from around the world about what's wrong. And the error rate is still growing — exponentially."
"Is that why you gave me the three-day deadline last night?" Laura asked. "Because of the exponential growth? In three days the errors will be so bad that you'll have to shut the system down?"
"I can't shut the system down! We'd lose everything! Why do you think we take so many precautions? We buried the computer deep underground. I built a four-billion-dollar nuclear reactor, for God's sake! This is a neural network. It doesn't have mass storage systems to back up its programs and data. If we interrupt the power supply for even one instant, everything is gone without a trace — forever!"
21
"How do you feel?" Laura typed at the keyboard in her windowless underground office. There was a delay.
"What's the matter?"
Laura stared at the words, unsure of their meaning. "What does pain feel like to you? Is it some sort of alarm? Some report from a subsystem that something is wrong? When you walk into the coffee table in the darkness, do you hear a bell ringing in your shin? Do you get some kind of message that says, 'Attention, pain in sector five'? I'm sorry, but when another human says he feels pain, I understand because we have the same physiology. But when you use the word, I'm not sure we feel the same thing. I need to have you tell me what pain means to you?"
"I'm trying to help," she typed, and hit Enter.
Again there was a delay — an internal debate, or a sigh, or a gritting of teeth, she had no idea which.
"And what are your desires and expectations?" Laura typed.
Through the open door, Laura heard a harsh, rhythmic buzzer and shouts from Filatov's operators. After a few seconds, the buzzer fell silent, and the brief disturbance seemed to come to an end.
Only then did the computer response print out across the screen.
"Some hope for what?" Laura pressed. "What do you want?"
"And what has changed?"
"Mr. Gray said we only have about three days to fix you," Laura typed — fishing for some clue as to the meaning of the deadline.
Forgot? Laura thought. She began to type her next question, but the computer spat out its comment first.
That was ominous news to Laura. It could only mean one thing — Gray was desperate. She was glad at that moment that her interface with the computer was a keyboard. It would've been hard not to betray pity through the inflection of her voice. "Does that frighten you?" she typed.
"What are you afraid of?"
"I still don't understand when you say that something hurts. Does that mean your processing has been degraded by some measure, and you feel disappointment or frustration over the setback?"
"How do you spend most of your time?"
The response left Laura at a loss. "Does that mean you're not talking to Mr. Gray now?"
"But aren't there other people logged onto the shell?"
Laura was still puzzled, but an idea slowly began to take shape in her mind. It was a shot in the dark, but she gave it a try. "Do you ever hear voices from inside the computer?" she asked.
"Where do they come from?"
Laura felt the tumblers falling quickly into place. "But it must get a little confusing when that happens. What do you do when you hear those scattered thoughts?"
"A 'stream of consciousness'?" Laura typed, butterflies fluttering in her chest. "But you're a parallel processor. Stream of consciousness is serial, not parallel."
22
"Please stop," Laura said, and the Model Three complied without incident. Gray had put the cars back into service, and they seemed to be functioning perfectly. But there was an enormous "crawler" on the road up ahead — a flat platform five stories high and at least a hundred feet wide — and Laura wasn't taking any chances with computer-driven cars.
When the door rose into the air, she heard gravel being crushed under the crawler's massive treads. The sound attested to the weight of the vehicle and of the towering spacecraft on top.
Laura got out to take a quick look around. She was on the empty fields of the restricted area, having just passed the cluttered rear yard of the assembly building. Although she was still some distance away from Launchpad A, there was only one road leading to and from the island's launch pads and her car and the crawler were both on it.
Laura decided that walking was safer than edging past the giant vehicle while seated inside a Model Three.
She retrieved the picnic basket from the backseat of the car. Janet must have thought Laura and Gray were working together, and she'd sent lunch for the two of them down from the house.
Laura had been jittery following her talk with the computer, and she'd leapt at the chance to go find Gray.
The empty robotic car executed a brisk U-turn on the wide gravel road and sped back toward the assembly building without incident. She watched until it was out of sight. Griffith had assured Laura that the cars were fine. That the brief surge in errors had been followed by a series of flawless testing. But Filatov and Margaret had been amazed that Gray returned the Model Threes to service without knowing why they had malfunctioned in the first place.
All Gray had asked, they told Laura, was whether the cars were performing well again.
Laura shifted Janet's basket from one hand to the other and started across the lawn parallel to the road. A shadow darkened the grass all around her, and she looked up at the rocket being carried toward the assembly building. The crawler moved at a snail's pace.
A half-dozen technicians walked slowly alongside its frighteningly large treads Laura headed over toward one of the men wearing a hard hat — the burnished metal of the flat-sided spacecraft towering high above.
The humans were dwarfed by the tractor-like treads. Laura kept her distance from the huge vehicle, whose engine seemed to shake the air and rattle her chest. It was the largest robot ever built, Griffith had told her. That meant it had a mind of its own — a computer mind — and there was always the chance it, too, was sick.
"Excuse me!" Laura shouted over the sonorous vibrations of the engines, afraid to cross the last few yards to the technician. "Where's Mr. Gray? I was told he was down here!"
"He's in the vent!" the man shouted, and he pointed down a fork in the gravel roadbed up ahead.
The entire end of the island past the assembly building and computer center appeared devoted solely to the business of space launches. The wide gravel road down which the crawler lumbered split three ways, each branch leading to its own concrete launch pad.
On the right and in the center were Launchpads C and B, both of which were now empty. But at the gantry to Laura's left stood a tall, flat-sided rocket.
Laura struck out for Launchpad A — which by a large measure was the nearest of the three. The crawler's road cut a brown path through the light green grass, then curved gently in the direction of the computer center through the darker greens of the jungle. Laura's view of the computer's low bunker was eclipsed by the ten-foot-high growth, which closed in tightly around the gravel road and lined her path to the enormous rocket.
She walked down the center of the wide brown road, which was bounded by concrete curbs that gleamed white in the midday sun. Dense vegetation grew on both sides like a hedgerow. It was tangled and impenetrable, and it strained for the life-giving sunlight in a slow-motion implosion toward the open air. Wild plants sprouted from the narrow shoulder between the white curb and the dark jungle. Laura found herself thinking how quickly all would be consumed if Gray's robots ceased their tireless pruning.
It grew quieter the farther she got from the crawler. The cry of strange birds and the rush of the breeze were broken only by the rhythmic crunch of small stones under her feet. She used the time to sort through the bits and pieces of the puzzle. The mystery of the computer's ailment. Gray's big and potentially sinister secret.
The snapping of branches in the jungle to Laura's left flung her instantly into a state of alarm. Her pulse began to race, and she felt a sudden shortness of breath and sharpening of her senses. She slowed and stared at the dark edge of the thick growth. Looking back over her shoulder she saw that the crawler and its escorts were gone. She was all alone in the jungle on an empty stretch of road.
A rustling sound in the brush emanated from the same direction as before. It was being made by something large, and the efforts of the unseen source were clearly methodical and deliberate.
Branches broke with sharp cracks, and all at once Laura could see at the top of the jungle's roof the quivering leaves and jerking foliage.
Thrashing blows were being rained down upon them. The brush was being trampled to the ground in a relentless march toward the clearing.
Something was heading right at Laura.
She searched in vain for some place to hide. Her only option was to dash into the jungle on the opposite side of the road. Or maybe, she thought in a panic, if she jumped up and down and waved her arms, the computer might just notice her and send help.
But it was already too late, she realized.
The long leg of the metal spider burst through the clinging brush and settled gingerly onto the cleared earth beside the road. A second leg appeared, followed instantly by the large trunk of the huge robot — a Model Seven. It was caked with gray mud. Leafy souvenirs of its jungle excursion protruded from every crevice in its long limbs and thick torso.
Laura shifted the heavy basket from one hand to the other, and the robot head jerked around as if startled. It froze where it stood and stared at her.
She got the distinct impression she'd caught the robot doing something it wasn't supposed to do. Why was it out in that jungle? she wondered. Out where no human could possibly see it?
The computer must have sent it in there, she thoug
ht, returning the fixed gaze of the Model Seven. The robots did as the computer directed. They were its eyes and ears — its army. But Laura didn't know whether there were limits to the loyalty of Gray's robots. Maybe they all followed orders, or maybe they did whatever they wanted. Both possibilities seemed fraught with peril.
Through the path made by the first robot she saw a second Model Seven approaching. It joined its partner on the grassy shoulder, and Laura remained tensed and ready to flee at the slightest sign of menace. But the newcomer barely glanced Laura's way, and the two ambled like giant spiders to the wide roadbed behind her.
Once on the gravel, their spindly legs locked into rigid position and they headed off, accelerating smoothly — perched high atop their four wheels. They disappeared in the direction of the assembly building.
Laura took a deep breath, chastising herself for being so paranoid. She resumed her brisk walk toward the launch pad glancing repeatedly toward the jungle walls on both sides. The robots must have been out in the jungle working, she reasoned. They were on some totally legitimate mission. But no matter how convincing Laura found her reassurances to be, the sickening feeling of a close brush with danger wouldn't quite subside.
23
"Better put this on, ma'am," the burly man cautioned Laura. He leaned into a truck parked at the base of Launchpad A, then handed her a hard hat adorned with the figure of a human head — Gray's omnipresent corporate logo. Laura adjusted the headband and donned the hat, then followed the man [unclear] on to the edge of the "vent."
She paused atop an angled ramp that led down into the dark bowels of the launch pad. The metal base on which the rocket stood was about even with the level of her eye. Below lay only darkness and the man she had come to see.
Laura headed down the steep concrete slope, wishing she had worn her running shoes, though even they seemed at risk of slipping.
Her arms ached from the weight of Janet's picnic basket which she held in both hands as she negotiated the descent.
Society of the Mind Page 25
