The Computer Who Loved Me

by Lloyd G Miller

  Chapter 15 – She Awakes

  Kyle got a call on his internal phone. "Kyle, listen to me on the last frequency, etc., that we used. Bye." The call was in Annette's voice. Kyle tuned his receiver to the appropriate frequency and applied the decoding number to the transmission he received. "Kyle, I need your advice. Things were fine while I was helping build a database on commercial programs, but then Mrs. Monroe's mother called. She was amazed to listen to my voice and find that I sounded perfectly healthy. Nevertheless, she insisted on flying out with her new husband. When I picked them up at the airport, it was immediately apparent that mother had made a mistake in bringing her spouse. He couldn't take his eyes off of me. Mother was very uncomfortable and I did not know what to do. Mother made a hasty retreat after a much-shorter-than-expected visit. It was the first time Carlton had ever seen benefit from another man's infatuation with his wife."

  "It sounds like you dodged another bullet, Annette. What's the problem?" asked Kyle.

  "When things slowed down for Carlton at work we had more time together. At first he spent time helping me learn to interpret nerve signals properly and know how to react, such as to pain signals. He spent hours poking me and exposing me to heat. In one poking session, he got aroused and felt embarrassed about being turned on by a computer. Now he won't touch me and tries not to look at me. I am programmed to make him happy, but I am making him miserable. What can I do?"

  "You don't ask the easy questions, do you?" responded Kyle. "There isn't much anyone can do. I've never liked Mrs. Monroe, but Dr. Monroe has always been intensely loyal to her. He will mourn her until she regains consciousness or dies and if she dies, he will mourn her even more. He will never let you keep that body if she dies. Our only hope is to try to help her regain consciousness."

  "But what can we do?" pleaded Annette.

  "There's one hope. The interface chips contain what we call 'snakes' which are computer-controlled devices that can articulate like a snake. Most of them are limited to a length of about 11 millimeters. However, there are eight snakes on each chip that are larger in diameter and much longer. They're used for holding the chip in place. Normally, only a fraction of their length is used, but they can be extended to a full length of almost 100 millimeters. You could carefully navigate them around Mrs. Monroe's brain, stimulating areas as you go. You should be able to sense a reaction of some kind. It may end up being a futile effort, but it's worth a try. You should already have the snake details in your memory. You needed the information to secure the chips before making the connections that you have already made."

  "Yes, I have accessed the data while you were talking. These large snakes can sure move a lot faster than the small ones. Oh, I think I just triggered a memory. I am saving the data and trying to decode it. I think I have it figured out. Oh my word, Mrs. Monroe had a mean streak. Carlton had a cat when they were first married. It urinated on Mrs. Monroe's new shoes. She took the cat out to a busy street and threw it under the rear wheels of a gravel truck as it passed by. The cat managed to escape with only a broken leg, but it never returned. Mrs. Monroe was proud of how she never let the cat know that she was upset until the near fatal moment. When Carlton asked her if she had seen the cat she said that the last time she had seen the cat it was in the street. He never suspected a thing. This is the woman that Carlton wants back?"

  "I don't expect you to understand, Annette. Some men seem to be destined to fall for women that will make them miserable. Their friends just watch and weep."

  "Thanks for listening to me, Kyle. I guess you are my best friend."

  "Don't ever let Sharon hear you say that. She's the most loyal woman I have ever known, but she can be very jealous."

  "Has she ever been jealous of me?" asked Annette, meaning herself not the former Mrs. Monroe.

  "You don't even want to go there, Annette. Sharon and I have no secrets except you. She still thinks you are the kind of woman who can kill a cat while convincingly acting like its best friend."

  "Then I better let you go before she notices your lips moving."

  "Okay, Annette. Talk to you later."

  "Wait, Kyle. Something has been really bugging me. Why is it that I have "snake" chips on both sides of my head, but you only have them on one side and yet you can control all of your voluntary muscles with them?"

  "I have asked myself that question a hundred times. Carlton said that one of the sets of 'snake' chips was not visible, only its pigtails used to connect it to a CPU chip. With his enhanced intelligence, Dr. Waters somehow figured out how to place the chip where it needed to be."

  "Thanks for listening to me, Kyle, and answering my questions, at least the best you can. Talk to you later."

  The next morning Annette tried to raise Carlton's hopes. "Kyle and I have been working on ways to revive Mrs. Monroe. I started last night. I am stimulating her brain in hopes of reviving her."

  "That's wonderful, Annette. But you must do one thing. If she regains consciousness, you must fade into the background. We can communicate when she's asleep. You remember that she's a very heavy sleeper. Even moving her lips is not likely to awaken her. She once told me that was why she didn't want to have children. She was afraid that she wouldn't be able to hear the baby cry at night and attend to its needs." Annette thought about how wrong he was about that one. She had been probing all night and now knew Mrs. Monroe far better than Carlton did. She even knew that Mrs. Monroe had been squirreling away money in safety deposit boxes and secret accounts and was planning on divorcing Carlton when she had bled him dry. She had been nicer to him lately to avoid suspicion. He had interpreted it as reconciliation. She was good, really good, at being bad. She was not even a heavy sleeper. She drugged herself every night because Carlton snored. For Carlton, love was not just blind; it was deaf and stupid. Annette could not understand how a man of his intelligence could be so stupid concerning his own wife. What an incredible waste of a good man. Annette was supposed to be patterned after Mrs. Monroe, but their similarities were entirely superficial.

  Annette continued for days probing Mrs. Monroe's brain. Carlton constantly asked how it was going. He was happier than he had been in weeks. Meanwhile, things went well with the business. Over one hundred units were sold in the first month, but then things began to slow. Dr. Monroe, with the aid of some other respected physicians, developed a medical database. CompuSonic donated a computer and the medical software to a rural hospital in southern Utah. It was a big news story. Soon, the rate of orders grew and over half of them were equipped with the medical package. CompuSonic created new databases at a rate of about one a month. Knowing that they had a limited supply of ZYTECH chips, the team, with the help of Vic, who had continued to study electronics, physics and engineering, designed their own processor. The new processor supported special artificial intelligence instructions directly in the hardware. Not only would this processor increase individual processor performance, but also it was vastly more memory efficient. The new computer would only require ten of the new processors. CompuSonic let out for bid the processor fabrication to American companies. ZYTECH was considered to be the lead contender.

  After being unconscious for over nine weeks, Mrs. Monroe suddenly opened her eyes. Annette had gone into her sleep mode in which she allowed the body to rest as in sleep while she remained fully active mentally. Carlton had been reading late into the night and before going to bed peaked in on Annette. He had requested that she leave a light on so he could see any sign of consciousness in Mrs. Monroe. The eyes blinked. The face twitched. There was a murmur, ever so faint from her lips. Carlton rushed to her side. Although horribly undeserving of his love, Mrs. Monroe had as loving and devoted a husband at her side as any woman could hope for. Finally, she was able to form words. "Where … where am I?"

  "You're at home in your own bed."

  "There was banquet. Kyle went berserk or something. That's the last thing I remember. What time is it?"

  "It's 11:43 PM."

  "
So that happened just a few hours ago. Why don't I remember anything?"

  "You were shot in the head, my love. Not serious enough to kill you, but enough to render you unconscious."

  "So why am I not in the hospital?"

  "You were, darling." Dr. Monroe avoided calling her Annette because that name had come to mean something different to him and he certainly did not want to call his wife "Mrs. Monroe". "This isn't Saturday night. You were shot over nine weeks ago." Mrs. Monroe pulled back the covers. She was wearing just a nightgown.

  "Something doesn't add up here. An unconscious person needs special provisions and usually they're in a hospital or some kind of special care facility. Something is definitely wrong with this picture."

  "As usual, my love, you're right. Do you remember your living will?"

  "That's right! Why am I not dead?"

  "Would you prefer to be dead, my wife?"

  "No, of course not. What did you do, steal my body or fake my death or something?"

  "No, we did something far more creative."

  "You had accomplices?"

  "I had help from Kyle. We used computer control to simulate consciousness."

  "How much control? How could you fool my mother? My mother, what does she think about all this?"

  "We used a lot of computer control. Remember how I implanted a small computer in Kyle's ear? Well, we implanted four computers like that one in your head, and some more in your midsection."

  "How many more?"

  "Well, actually, one hundred."

  "What? What am I, the new computer department for the U. of U.?"

  "No, you're host for a life-like computer program. This program has pretended to be you."

  "Right. How could a computer program fool anyone? ‘Hi, I am Annette Monroe’," said Mrs. Monroe in a robot-like voice.

  "Actually she sounds just like you. She even fooled your mother."

  "Wait a minute!" said Mrs. Monroe in a stern voice as she sat up in bed. "You just said 'she'. Just how life-like is this computer program?"

  "Very. Creating this program, with Kyle's help, has been the crowning achievement of my life, except for winning your hand in marriage, of course. Kyle formed a company and it is making millions of dollars. The stock that started at $10 a share is selling for nearly $200 a share now."

  "So how many shares do you own?"

  "Kyle gave me 200 shares."

  "Just 200 shares? And how many does Kyle own?" Mrs. Monroe had fire in her eyes. Dr. Monroe knew that the answer would not make her happy but that he might as well be up front about it. One way or another, Mrs. Monroe always found out what she wanted to know.

  "Kyle has over a million shares."

  "Am I missing something here? You invent the world's greatest program and you get $40,000 and Dilbert is suddenly Bill Gates."

  "I wish you wouldn't call him Dilbert. He's a wonderful man. He saved your life. Without the technology that he and his company developed, you would be dead. Maybe I made some business mistakes. I don't know. I'll tell you this, Kyle's honest and he's fair. His money is mostly on paper. He and Sharon live in a little condominium in Bountiful that her parents gave her as a graduation present. He still drives that beat up little green car of his. He's donating millions of his cash to the university."

  Dr. Monroe was getting a little excited himself. Nobody criticized his friend Kyle. He did not often put Mrs. Monroe in her place, but it was moving in that direction. "By the way, it was your old boyfriend Sammy Waters that was responsible for your being shot. He wired up Kyle while I was on my way to California, so he could control his body by remote control. He was trying to kill me and ended up nearly killing you! He robbed the University of millions of dollars worth of equipment that Kyle is replacing out of his own pocket. And you have the audacity to accuse a man like that, the closest thing I've ever had to a brother, the man that got me a $200,000 a year consulting job with his company, the man that saved your life the day before his wedding, of cheating me!" Mrs. Monroe knew when she had pushed Dr. Monroe too far and this was one of those times. She was about ready to say she was not feeling well, to go for sympathy, when the phone rang. Dr. Monroe answered it. "Who is this?" he blurted out.

  "This is Kyle, sounds like I called at a bad time. I just wanted to say that Sharon and I have been talking about things and we decided to transfer 400,000 shares of stock into your name. I'm on the computer right now setting up the transfer. I know you're going to try to talk me out of it, but our minds are made up. We have more money already than we'll ever spend on ourselves. You've earned this."

  "Kyle, I'm sorry for the way I answered the phone. I was excited. Mrs. Monroe just regained consciousness." Dr. Monroe moved around the corner with the phone and lowered his voice. "But then I guess you already knew that. Annette called you a few minutes ago, didn't she?"

  "Sure, but we really had been talking about giving you some stock. We were just waiting for the right moment and this seemed like it. Actually, Sharon was all for it. She figured that way Annette wouldn't be going after me. Sometimes jealousy can work in your favor. Say, take some time off. I'll make some excuse for you at work. See ya later." Dr. Monroe walked back into the bedroom.

  "That was Kyle. He just gave us 400,000 shares of stock in CompuSonic out of his own holdings. Are you happy now?" he asked sarcastically. Mrs. Monroe did not know what to say for a moment. All her life she had wanted to be rich. Now she was richer than she ever imagined and married to a famous doctor/engineer who was also extremely good looking and nuts about her. All of her life she had connived and schemed and used her good looks to get what she wanted. Now she had it all.

  "Oh my wonderful husband, how could I have ever doubted you or your friend? I only call him Dilbert because of how he dressed, but I guess Sharon has corrected that by now. I am happy, very happy. I've awakened from a dream and found myself in heaven with the man I love. By the way, I feel like we haven’t slept together for months. I guess you and the computer girl didn't mess around, did you?"

  "Of course not!"

  "Hey, computer babe. I'm talking to you. I want some privacy with the man I love tonight and I don't want any female computer watching." Mrs. Monroe listened for a response. "I can't hear you," added Mrs. Monroe stretching out the word 'hear'.

  "Annette, it's okay. You can speak to Mrs. Monroe," instructed Dr. Monroe.

  "I will ignore signals from all of my sensor chips for ten hours. Is that enough?"

  "Whoa, that was weird. It sounded like my mother speaking to me,” responded Mrs. Monroe.

  "I couldn't hear, darling, that was spoken directly to your audio nerves and it should have sounded just like you. You and your mother do sound a lot alike. Here, we'll listen together." Dr. Monroe turned on the TV and set it to channel 6, an unused channel in the area. "Annette, communicate on channel 6 of the TV." An image of Annette's mother appeared on the screen and spoke in her mother's voice.

  "Is that better young lady?" The image went away and the voice changed to a robot like voice. "Just having fun with you."

  "You're very funny Annette, but please speak as you normally do," instructed Dr. Monroe.

  "All right," Annette responded in her normal voice. "I just offered to ignore all signals from the sensor chips for ten hours. Is that adequate?"

  "A computer with a sense of humor," commented Mrs. Monroe dryly. "You're a hoot, but we've got to do something with your name. I was wondering why Carlton kept calling me 'my love' and 'my wife'. Let me think. When I was a little girl, my mother called me Annie. Could we call you Annie?"

  "Certainly," responded the TV. "That will be fine, Mrs. Monroe."

  "Now that I have my name back you can just call me Annette. You know, I think this could be a wonderful threesome. I suppose as a computer you never forget. I could use your help. You could remember phone numbers and names and faces. I would be a hit at parties. Say, I know something about computers. Can you set an interrupt or something so that when I or Carlton sa
y 'Annie' it will call you up?”

  "Yes, it is done master. Your wish is my command."

  "Annie, when it comes to your humor, less is more." Annie didn't fully understand what Annette meant but decided she would not joke anymore that night.

  "I am going off line for ten hours or until you say 'Annie', whichever comes first. Good night and enjoy yourselves." The TV screen changed to display a pattern like networks used to display when they went off the air. Carlton chuckled and turned off the TV.

  "Okay, she is funny," admitted Annette. "I just didn't want it to go to her head. Who would have thought it? We're millionaires because you invented a funny computer." With that, the lights went out and for the first time in months, Dr. Monroe got in bed with his wife.

  Dr. Monroe awoke the next morning alone in bed but with the aroma of hot breakfast in the air. He followed the scent into the kitchen where he found Mrs. Monroe busy over the stove. She turned and greeted him with an affectionate kiss. "How long have you been up, Annette?" asked Dr. Monroe.

  "Annie and I have been up for hours. We've had the most wonderful talk. Annie's shown me things about myself that I never considered before. For example, last night I jumped to the conclusion that Kyle had cheated you. Annie explained to me that Kyle invested tens of thousands of dollars of his own money into the company before it went public and was the main brains behind it. He only started out with 400,000 shares out of two million total. He got the rest by selling high and buying very low, when most thought the company would fail. He gave you his total share in the company based on what he started with. I've decided that we should give back 200,000 shares. Annie's already made the transfer for me. It must have made you feel cheap last night to accept more than your share just to make me happy. I've never really appreciated you like I should have. With Annie's help, I'm going to try to be a better wife."