Forever Begins Tomorrow

by Bruce Coville

  “From Genesis to Revelation,” said Rachel with a nod. “I’m also putting in the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Sayings of Confucius, the Elder Edda, the—”

  “Okay, okay, I get the point. But what for? I thought we just wanted to give the computer factual material.”

  Rachel placed a book face down on the scanner and waited for the machine to take in the text. When the red light at the side of the scanner indicated it had “read” the material, she lifted the book, flipped the page, and repeated the process.

  If she had been willing to cut the spines off the backs of the books it would have been possible to place the pages in a sheet-feed mechanism that would have accomplished all this mechanically. But Rachel couldn’t bring herself to perform the necessary mutilation.

  “I’m not ignoring you, Ray,” she said after a moment. “I’m just trying to figure out the best way to explain.”

  Roger crossed to join them. “Well, to begin with, we want to give the computer the necessary background to deal with other material we feed into it. Literature—even technical literature—is crammed with references to mythology and religion.”

  “Sure,” said Trip. “Heck, the official name for the mainframe is straight out of the Old Testament.”

  Ray looked more confused than ever. “I thought ADAM stood for Advanced Design for Artificial Mentality.”

  “It does,” said Rachel. “But they didn’t pick that acronym without a reason. And the reason is that in the biblical version of creation, Adam was the first man—the first thinking being. That’s why they decided to call the mainframe ADAM. They’re trying to create the first of a new kind of thinking being, a new form of sentient creature!”

  Ray looked a little nervous. “I never really thought of it that way. What happens if they succeed? Or if we do? Does that make us like gods?”

  An uneasy silence settled over the room. No one seemed willing to answer Ray’s question.

  “I’ve been wondering about that kind of thing myself,” said Hap at last. “To tell you the truth, sometimes I’m not so sure this whole thing is such a good idea.”

  “Well, it doesn’t make much difference one way or the other,” said Roger.

  Hap looked at him questioningly.

  “What I mean is, there’s no way to stop it. You can’t turn back an idea. If it doesn’t happen here, it will happen somewhere else. If it doesn’t happen this year, it will happen next year, or the year after. If you somehow got the whole world to forbid the creation of a sentient machine, the only thing that would do is ensure that when such a machine was finally invented, it would be by someone who didn’t believe in following the rules.”

  It was only a matter of chance that Black Glove stumbled onto the strange log of radio transmissions. They came up during the run of a program that checked the computer’s standard functions. The spy had been using it to make sure the latest attempts to build a back door weren’t going to show up in some unexpected way and alert one of the project scientists to what was going on.

  Among the functions the program checked was the reception and transmission of radio messages. Given the island’s communications embargo, it was a utility that shouldn’t be in use. Black Glove had expected ADAM simply to confirm its presence, then move on to the next utility.

  So when the monitor displayed a notice that there were 845 messages on file, it caused the spy to stop and examine it more closely.

  UTILITY: Radio Transmissions Received

  There are 845 messages on file

  Press R to read

  Press N to move to next message

  Press to return to top of menu

  When the probable explanation struck, Black Glove felt foolish for not having realized it at once. It must be messages from Euterpe! I forgot we cleared a special channel to receive its broadcasts.

  Wondering if the long hours were starting to take their toll, the spy typed a series of commands that would make it possible to examine the data Euterpe was sending back.

  Even after the information appeared, it took several moments for Black Glove to realize there was something strange about the transmissions. The spy stared at the screen, feeling something was slightly off, without being able to identify it. Then it hit. There’s too much! I’m getting more information than I should!

  Leather-covered fingers typed a new command; glittering eyes narrowed suspiciously at the response.

  A possible answer—not nearly as simple or obvious as the initial realization that the radio transmissions were coming from Euterpe—began to nudge its way into Black Glove’s mind.

  Korbuscek.

  Black Glove grinned. It had to be Korbuscek! Something the rival spy had done to the robot before it was launched was responsible for this situation.

  Black Glove’s mind began to race. If this involved Korbuscek, it had to be big.

  A new idea presented itself. Though Black Glove first rejected it as too outrageous, it kept coming back:

  Euterpe was designed to create orbits. But we had nothing on board that would allow it to actually implement those orbits. Could Korbuscek possibly have planted something that would let the robot control other satellites?

  It would be easy enough to find out.

  A new series of questions was fed into the computer.

  The answers that came back made the unlikely suddenly seem quite possible.

  Black Glove began to tremble. If I can establish contact with whatever that fool planted on board the rocket…

  The spy pulled back from the thought. Korbuscek’s device might allow whoever could use it to control virtually every nuclear weapon orbiting the earth. The idea of having that much power was almost too much to bear.

  Almost.

  But not quite.

  The Outside World

  “Mail call!” shouted Henry Swenson one day in early December as he staggered into the island canteen with a seven-day bundle of newspapers, magazines, and letters for his family.

  Hap and his mother came running from behind the counter to dig through the pile. Since the Air Force supply plane landed on the island only once a week, news and mail from the outside world were a major event.

  Mrs. Swenson cried out in pleasure as she found a letter from her sister. Tearing open the blue envelope, she plopped into one of the “ice-cream parlor” chairs to read it.

  Hap latched on to the new issue of his favorite magazine, Popular Technology, which had a great-looking cover story on ten ways to soup up an electric dune buggy. Right up my alley! he thought, momentarily forgetting that Dr. Hwa’s ban on the gang using any island vehicles was still in force.

  Hap’s father began leafing through the newspapers. Since the electronic shield created to secure the research being done on Anza-bora made it virtually impossible for unauthorized electronic transmissions to leave—or reach—the island, the weekly arrival of the news had become something of a ritual moment in Henry Swenson’s life.

  The brief tranquility of the scene was shattered when both Hap’s parents cried out in disgust at the same time.

  “Look at this!” said Mrs. Swenson angrily. She was holding up a sheet of paper marked with several large blotches. “Just look at it!”

  “What is it?” asked Hap.

  “A copy of my last letter to your aunt Sarah. She sent it back to show me how they censored it.” She threw the page onto the table as if it offended her to touch it.

  “Why did they do that?” asked Hap.

  “Security,” said his father, “The government doesn’t much care what comes onto the island. But everything leaving it gets read by some jamoke in Washington before it goes on to its final destination.”

  “Why?” asked Hap again.

  “To make sure it doesn’t give away too much information. If they think something might give a clue to what’s going on here—out it goes! Sometimes they get a little overzealous.”

  “Well, I say it’s nonsense!” snapped Mrs. Swenson. “You’d think I
was a spy or something.”

  “I wish it was nonsense,” said Henry Swenson. “But considering what’s going on out there, I think it might be justified.” When his wife started to object, he thrust the newspaper he had been reading in her direction. “Take a look at this. We’ll be lucky if the fools don’t blow us to kingdom come before the year is over!”

  Hap rose to read over his mother’s shoulder. It was hard to tell who his father was talking about when he said “fools” in that tone of voice, since he thought all members of the “Nuclear Club” were less than sane.

  Hap felt his stomach knot up as he scanned the headline: SOUTH AMERICAN CONSORTIUM BREAKS OFF TALKS WITH UNIFIED KOREA—NEGOTIATORS EXPRESS CONCERN OVER ESCALATING HOSTILITY.

  He sank slowly back into his seat. Moments like this sometimes made him think artificial intelligence might not be such a bad idea, after all. No matter how powerful a computer got, it probably couldn’t do much worse than mankind was doing on its own. And it might do a whole lot better.

  The darkening world situation seemed to dominate every conversation on the island for the next several days. An unpleasant tension settled over the scientists and their families as they wondered how close the two sides in the current conflict had come to taking a step from which there might be no return.

  “If they actually do start a war, it could drag in dozens of other countries as well,” said Dr. Phillips glumly one night at dinner.

  From the look on his face he immediately regretted the words. It was not his desire to frighten his children.

  But Roger and Rachel didn’t need their father to tell them that even if the other nations of the world stayed out of things, the kind of nuclear battle the two countries involved might start could end up destroying the world’s ecology for everyone, warmongers and peacemakers alike.

  Rachel found herself lying awake at night wondering if the supply plane would ever come again—or if the outside world would blow itself to smithereens, leaving them stranded on Anza-bora with no word of what had happened.

  She would have been doubly horrified to know that the root of the tension between the two powers was a series of signals originating right on Anza-bora—signals that were being received and processed by the robot she had helped launch!

  “I am not going to let all this gloom and doom ruin Christmas!” Rachel announced suddenly one Saturday afternoon. She was sitting on Wendy Wendell’s bed, watching the tiny blonde adjust the circuits in one of her automated dolls. Actually, Rachel was sitting less on the bed than on the heap of assorted stuff that covered it. The remarkable condition of the Wonderchild’s room was one of the reasons Rachel didn’t visit Wendy more often.

  Wendy was well aware of this fact. It didn’t offend her, since she could hardly stand the place herself.

  Rachel’s outburst caused the Wonderchild to look up from her work. “What are you talking about?” she asked, tucking a wire into place with a piece of solder so tiny it was almost invisible.

  “Oh… everything!” said Rachel with a helpless gesture. “Everybody’s so uptight around here, I’m afraid it’s going to ruin the holidays.”

  “My parents aren’t too big on holidays,” said Wendy. “We’ve never done much about them.”

  “You’re kidding!” cried Rachel, appalled at the idea of life without a great winter celebration.

  Wendy shrugged. “My father says if you live right, every day is a holiday. It’s a nice idea, I guess, though personally I don’t think Dad actually pulls it off.”

  “I was thinking it might be fun to have a Christmas party at headquarters,” said Rachel. “You know, some munchies, a few games, exchange gifts…”

  Wendy set the doll on the floor. “Plastic people have more fun!” it said. It began to wander around the bedroom, picking itself up every time it stumbled over some debris.

  “Well, it ain’t perfect, but it’s an improvement,” said the Wonderchild.

  “Wendy!”

  “Oh, yeah. A party. Sounds like work to me. But look on the bright side. If our weekly ration of newspapers is any indication, you might not have to worry about it. I think the world’s governments are planning a special fireworks display to celebrate the holidays this year.”

  “Fireworks?”

  “Yeah. They’re going to get together and blow up the planet.”

  The conversation seemed to go sour after that and finally Rachel left.

  Roger was feeding information into Sherlock when Rachel came into the headquarters.

  “Glad to see you, twin,” he said cheerfully. “I was getting a little tired of doing this on my own. In fact, I’m about ready to take a break. Are you up for a three-way game of Aliens and Artichokes?”

  “Just you, me, and the computer?”

  “Can you think of better companions?” asked Roger with a grin.

  Rachel smiled back and prepared to flex her brain.

  They had been playing for nearly an hour when Roger said, “Sometimes I wonder if these games might not do as much to bring the computer to self-awareness as any of the things we’re actually expecting to work on it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “I was thinking about that book we fed into it yesterday, the one about right-brain versus left-brain thinking. Almost everything a computer is asked to do is left-brain stuff—very statistical, very analytical. But some of these games really demand right-brain skills: intuition, logical jumps, that kind of thing.” Rachel felt a little shiver in her spine. She looked at her twin for a long moment, then finally said, “Now that you mention it, I’ve had the feeling that the machine has been getting better at those things lately.”

  Roger nodded. “Me, too. That was what got me thinking about it. I wonder if true consciousness requires a development of both kinds of skills.”

  Rachel gestured toward the sign posted above the terminal. “Well, it probably does take a kind of intuitive jump to even think of saying Cogito, ergo sum.”

  The phrase, Latin for “I think, therefore I am,” was something they had picked up from Trip Davis’s mother. In fact, it had been one of their first clues to what Project Alpha was really all about. Now they used it as their motto: a quick way of referring to the kind of understanding both they and their parents were trying to create in ADAM.

  “Well, I think it’s time for a break,” said a pleasant voice behind them.

  “Hap!” cried Rachel. “We didn’t hear you come in.”

  “I’ve been out enjoying the night. I came to see if anyone wanted to join me.”

  Rachel felt the tiniest hint of a blush tinge her cheek.

  Roger looked from his sister to Hap, then back again. “Go ahead, Rach,” he said. “I’ve got some more programming I want to do.”

  Rachel flashed her twin a grateful smile, then headed for the door.

  “Romance,” said Roger when the room was empty again. “Phooey!”

  He returned his attention to the computer. After another hour or so he grew weary of the work and decided to switch jobs. Crossing the room, he lifted the cushion from a dilapidated armchair to reveal a black glove, and a stack of file folders.

  He examined the glove first, as he had so many times before. Smooth leather, a little worn; the size seemed about right for someone shorter than five feet seven. The only other mark on the glove was a slight bulge at the base of the second finger.

  He was tempted to slip his own hand inside, in the bizarre hope that the glove might somehow communicate with him.

  Roger snorted at himself for being so ridiculous. Anyway, his hand was too large for the glove. And he didn’t want to stretch it out. He was convinced that somehow it held the answer.

  He sighed and allowed himself a momentary twinge of loneliness as he put down the glove and removed the folders from their hiding place. He would have been happier if his twin had stayed here to work with him, rather than opting for a walk in the moonlight with Hap.

  “Oh, Roger,” called a voice to
his left. “Can we go home now? I’m getting tired.”

  Roger glanced at the bronze head sitting on a stack of papers at the end of the table. Sometimes he wished he had never started programming Paracelsus with specific messages to tease and annoy his sister. Rachel had turned the game around, and it was getting to be a pain in the neck.

  “Roger, answer me!” demanded the automaton.

  “No, we’re not going home! I’ve got too much work to do.”

  He picked up the first folder on the stack. It was the top-secret personnel file for Dr. Bai’ Ling. Roger recognized that the odds on Dr. Ling being Black Glove were pretty slim. On the other hand, her folder was more fun to read than most of the others. And she did match their two clues…

  “You are not taking very good care of me,” said Paracelsus. “I need my beauty rest, you know. I’ve a good mind to turn you over to the SPCA.”

  “Will you shut up?” cried Roger. “And what’s the SPCA got to do with it? Wait! Wait! Forget I said that!”

  It was too late. He had triggered the response mechanism.

  “The SPCA,” said Paracelsus severely, “is the Society for the Prevention—”

  “—of Cruelty to Automatons,” finished Roger, speaking in unison with the machine and cursing himself for falling into Rachel’s trap.

  The simple solution, of course, would have been to shut off this automaton’s power source. But he always felt guilty when he did that—almost as if he was committing a murder.

  Roger shuddered as he imagined the blast of contempt he would collect from his father if he ever admitted to that feeling!

  He returned to the stack of files, which they had pulled from the main computer with a highly sophisticated password program written by the Wonderchild. He thought again how glad he was they had managed to print them out before Rachel’s unfortunate slip of the tongue a few months back had revealed the program’s existence. Her disclosure had prompted Dr. Remov to write new security measures into the mainframe, making it impossible for them to continue using Wendy’s program.

  Roger had faith that, given time, the Wonderchild could crack the new security shields. But time was part of the problem right now. So he was just as glad they had these printouts—despite the fact that if anyone ever found out about them it would probably cause a crackdown that would make their recent session with Dr. Hwa look like a pep rally.