Cruz felt gratified. The people working for Cyberdyne had always been good, some of the best available. Since Casse had restructured the company, Cyberdye was becoming even more efficient. At this rate, they would be ready to begin construction within six months.
He still wondered if they had enough to work with. The Connors’ raid in 2001 had brought work on Skynet to a halt. They had lost their best R & D person when Rosanna Monk had defected to their side. Layton had salvaged quite a lot, but then Reed and Jones finished up what the Connors had started. It still seemed inconceivable to him that they had won.
Won for the time being…we’re coming back…There will yet be a Skynet, and then…then…
Cruz choked, coughed, and his vision blurred; since leaving prison, this happened more and more. He longed for the day Skynet existed, for the human race to finally reach oblivion at the hand of its natural superior and replacement. It was all evolution in progress. When 80
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humanity acquired the ability to reshape its environment—radically, effectively—natural selection lost its hegemony over them. If evolution were to continue, it had to be by the will of these same humans who kept it at bay with their technology and crude understanding of nature.
Ironic, then, that they stood at the cusp of the next phase, brought about by their own efforts, all unknowing and certainly unwilling.
It had to be, though. Skynet would be, was, had to be the natural successor to the current dominant species. It was inevitable and it was good. Cruz saw that, had seen it since that day Charles Layton had introduced the nanoware into his brain to program him. That day had been like a conversion, a revelation, and Oscar Cruz ceased being a mere bureaucratic upper management functionary. He became an instrument in the Great Work. It had been wonderful, liberating, a truly profound experience. He knew it was right, it was good, it was necessary.
So why, he wondered, did he begin to weep every time he thought of the extinction of the human race?
81
EIGHT
Deirdre watched the two men, each as different from the other as two people could be who worked together. Stan Cramer, the older of the pair, sat on the edge of the love seat, jotting notes into his pda with quick, nervous bursts of movement. He always looked like he had slept in his clothes, no matter how well tailored or expensive, and his thinning gray hair refused to stay combed, the gel he used to tame it producing a plastic sheen. Since Ian Destry’s death, Cramer seemed distracted, but he still did his job well enough that Deirdre’s stepfather, Dennis McMillin, kept him on as chief of security.
Paul Patterson roamed the apartment while Cramer and she spoke, a slow progress that seemed no more than idle curiosity. Deirdre knew better. Patterson stood five-feet-seven, broad across the shoulders, deep-chested. He always dressed impeccably, always looked neat and professional, and though his manner appeared light and unobtrusive Deirdre recognized the intensity he brought to his job as Cramer’s lieutenant. Of the two, Deirdre expected Patterson to be the one to last—he would doubtless take Cramer’s place, perhaps sooner than later.
Deirdre watched him while Cramer asked questions. When Patterson stopped at the kitchen table and began studying the papers Bobby had left there by the computer, she felt 82
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oddly gratified at his bewildered frown. It lasted only a few seconds before the impassive mask resumed.
“Where’s Bobby?” Cramer asked.
“Class. He has applied physics this year, it’s pretty intense.
He won’t be back till this afternoon.”
“You don’t want him to know we’re here.”
“No. Matter of fact, I expect this is nothing, but…”
Cramer shrugged. “License plate, make…You couldn’t tell how many were in the car?”
“Not without actually going down to the parking lot.”
“Why do you think this is anything to worry about?”
“It might not be, but I recognize surveillance when I see it. At least, most of the time. It felt like that.”
“We can run the plates, see what comes up.” Cramer sighed, shaking his head. “Any idea why anyone would post surveillance on you or Bobby?”
Deirdre wondered if she should tell Cramer about the interview Bobby insisted on going to. The car, if surveillance indeed, was probably connected to that. Cyberdyne had a reputation for paranoia. Probably not unjustified, given their history.
“He’s been working in some pretty obscure theoretical areas,” she said.
Cramer nodded. Years of corporate security gave him insight into industrial espionage. The lengths companies sometimes went to get a jump on competition made ancient Cold War spy stories seem innocuous. Cramer understood her implication without the need to comprehend the material to which she referred. “Obscure theoretical areas”
covered a world of pre-patent research that could mean millions to the right corporations—either by funding it, stealing it, or killing it. She did not know how old the tradition was of watching the universities for talent and potential profitable work—doubtless as old as universities themselves—but the intrusiveness of corporate interest had turned severe in the last few decades.
“Any guesses,” Patterson asked suddenly, “as to who might be watching him?”
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Patterson had said nothing after a cordial hello when they arrived. Deirdre met his gaze evenly.
“Could be anyone,” Deirdre lied, thinking of Cyberdyne.
“Or nothing at all.”
Skepticism flashed over his face. He doesn’t believe me, thinks I know, she thought. A guess, or is he that percept-ive?
Cramer finished his notes and closed up his pda. He stood.
“We’ll check it out for you. I can tell you it isn’t us.”
“I wouldn’t have expected it to be.”
Cramer headed for the door. Patterson joined his boss, then paused. He gestured in the direction of the kitchen.
“What is that he’s working on?”
“I doubt you’d understand.”
“Maybe not the details, but I do have some numbers. I recognized some wave functions and Fibonacci lattices.”
Deirdre stared at him. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
He smiled. “It’s okay. I’m a security specialist. No reason I should understand anything outside of a detective novel.”
Deirdre felt a whirl of conflicting emotions. She had condescended to him and he had just returned it. For an instant, she felt angry, then embarrassed, then baffled. She almost began explaining Bobby’s work, then stopped herself, feeling, finally, manipulated.
“I can see how you’re good at your job, Mr. Patterson,”
she said.
His eyes danced, pleased. “I’ll see to it we do this thoroughly, Ms. McMillin.”
He exited the apartment, leaving Deirdre off balance. The door snicked shut. She was unused to nonspecialists knowing anything about math or physics. Patterson surprised her—and he knew it. She wondered how much he really understood, or if he had simply picked up some jar-gon—
No. She had the feeling he did understand, at least more than most people.
“The day is full of surprises,” she muttered.
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She went back to the kitchen. Bobby’s papers lay in three neat piles. He had scribbled notes in the margins of the main equations. One of them read: based on projections of zero point states monopoles result from refolding of dimensional expressions/ rotation through possible dimension-states related to formation of bubbles in initial expansion.
Deirdre stared at it, struggling briefly to make sense of it. Zero point states remained hypothetical, but recent work on Visser wormholes suggested the condition might be found in conjunction with singularities. Which meant, for all practical purposes, that they would never be “found”
outside strictly mathema
tical models. She could see how a refolding of the dimensions into the original unexpanded state would produce a condition in which zero point states would pertain, but what did monopoles…
Oh, I see.
It would be a way to achieve symmetry in the electromagnetic equations. But—
The phone rang. Annoyed, she went into the living room.
“It’s me,” she said into the handset, “speak.”
“Ms. McMillin, this is George Shepherd.”
Her new thesis advisor. She glanced at the time, but it was still three hours from her scheduled meeting with him.
“Yes, Mr. Shepherd?”
“I hate to do this, but something’s come up for this afternoon, do you think you could come now?”
Deirdre closed her eyes. The man had a tendency to be forgetful. In her few dealings with him since he took over from Ann Reichard last month he had managed to miss two meetings and misplace one of her papers.
“I don’t see why not, Mr. Shepherd,” she said. “I can be there in about half an hour.”
“That would be excellent, Ms. McMillin. I’ll see you then.”
She hung up the phone. Damn, what a nuisance. She went to the window. The mystery car had not shown up this morning. Deirdre did not really want to leave, but she realized that it was more paranoia than reasonable caution.
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She left Bobby a note. He would be back by lunchtime.
Then she gathered up her backpack, grabbed her keys, and headed out the door. She considered again having Cramer install an alarm. The apartment complex forbade private alarm systems, and nothing had happened since Bobby and she had moved in to make her want one. Till now.
Hell with regulations, she thought as she unlocked her bicycle. Slipping the backpack over both shoulders, she swung a leg over the sleek urban racer and pushed away from the rack. The meeting should only take an hour. She estimated that she would be back by twelve-thirty. She flowed into the easy rhythm of peddling and sped out of the complex, on her way to the main campus.
At eleven A.M., most of the office staff began migrating out for lunch. Deirdre signed in. Within ten minutes she was alone in the warren of offices. She knocked on Dr. Shepherd’s office and waited. No note, no one left to ask where he was or how long he would be gone. Deirdre knocked again, tried the knob—locked—and found a chair. She stretched her long legs out, settled down to wait.
Minutes compiled into an hour, feeding her irritation till it gradually became anger. When the first office staff reappeared, an hour and a half after leaving, Deirdre asked when Shepherd had left.
“Haven’t seen him today,” one of them—her nametag said CLARICE—told her. “He doesn’t usually see students in the morning.”
“I know, but he called me to say he was busy this afternoon, and—”
The door opened, admitting Dr. Shepherd. He carried a briefcase and held a stack of papers in the other hand. He frowned upon seeing Deirdre. “Ms. McMillin? I didn’t think our conference was till this afternoon.”
“You asked me to come in early.”
He blinked. “I did?” He shook his head. “Well, you’re here now. Shall we?”
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Deirdre kept her frustration in check and followed him to his office.
The meeting progressed easily enough, Shepherd making several observations about the direction of her work, a few of them useful. Deirdre took notes, though she already knew which ones she could use and which would be deleted as soon as she got back to the apartment.
Finished, she packed up. At the door, she said, “Dr.
Shepherd, you called me this morning to ask me to come in early. You said you had something come up this afternoon.”
He stared at her. “I’m certain I didn’t call you, Ms.
McMillin. And I have nothing to do this afternoon except meet with students. Actually, I’m glad you came in early.
I have some time to go over a few things before my next appointment.”
“But—it was you. You called me.”
He shook his head. “Someone played a prank on you, Ms. McMillin. I didn’t call you.”
Deirdre did not think Shepherd capable of teasing her, not with a straight face. Besides, it really did not fit his character. “My mistake.”
She almost sprinted down to her bicycle.
Her leg burned almost to the point of exhaustion by the time she pulled up at the apartment. She ran up the stairs, then hesitated. The door was closed. She realized that she knew nothing about break-ins, not to tell whether the door had been jimmied since her evidently unnecessary trip to the campus. It looked just as she had left it.
She tried the knob. Locked.
As quietly as she could, she entered the apartment. Then it occurred to her to check the parking lot for the strange car. She peered out the window. Nothing.
Deirdre walked silently from room to room, struggling to control her breathing. Her muscles ached for oxygen, demanded her lungs overwork to purge the toxins, but she took slow, even breaths.
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Nothing looked in the least different.
No, not quite. The papers on the kitchen table…someone had shuffled and tamped them together evenly, so the piles were neat and precise. At least, they seemed much tidier than when she had been studying them. She tried to remember if she had done that, absently. She did not think so, but it was impossible to be sure. She had a habit of doing that with her own work when she was finished with it: make the edges sharp and solid, neat like a book. But she tended to leave Bobby’s work alone.
She hissed, whirling round to glare at the apartment walls. Someone was in here…Someone got me to leave and came in here…
To go through Bobby’s papers? Her hands shot out to the keyboard, but she stopped short, fingers inches from the keys. She did not pry into Bobby’s work. He never went through hers, and she waited for him to show her his.
She looked at the clock. After two now. Bobby was late.
It happened. He would get deeply into something with his advisor and completely forget the time. If the man were not a thief, it would have been an ideal intellectual situation for Bobby.
She made herself calm down. It took a few minutes.
If he’s not back by six, then I panic.
Professor Cojensis frowned through every meeting. Bobby had learned to ignore it, realizing that it was a sign of concentration. But sometimes it seemed to indicate frustration. Like now. Cojensis stared at the screen of the laptop, the lines in his wide forehead deep, eyes narrowed. After several minutes of silence, he touched his stylus to the screen, drawing a line under a set of equations. The line appeared on Bobby’s screen.
“I don’t see why you chose this path,” Cojensis said. “I would have thought…Look, these should be standard—”
“I tried—”
“You can’t just ignore—”
A terse minute of back and forth followed, Bobby 88
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defending his work against Cojensis’ criticisms. It all came down to approach, to intuition. Bobby hated that, never expecting the solutions to appear when he followed a hunch down a rabbit hole. Often the hunch failed, the rabbit hole led to a dead end. Sometimes, though, he found himself in a new area where the solutions seemed to offer themselves up to him like prizes in a game.
Cojensis often went on about Hindu calculus, where the solutions certainly appeared, but when one tried to prove the method it fell apart. Goal-specific, he called it, and tailored for one thing, making it useless for all the other tasks to which proper calculus applied. Bobby told himself that Cojensis took pains with him because, when he did come up with a novel approach, he could defend it and show how it proved out.
“All right,” Cojensis finally said. “Not bad.” He shut down his laptop, leaned back in his chair, and rubbed his eyes.
When he looked at Bobby ag
ain, the frown softened. “So did you go over the letter from Cyberdyne?”
For a moment, Bobby was surprised that Cojensis knew, but then he remembered that the invitation had come via Cojensis’ office. “Yes,” he said.
“And?” Cojensis picked his glasses from the desk and began cleaning them.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Anything in particular holding you back?”
“What if…what if they want me to come to work right away?”
Cojensis’ mouth twitched, nearly a smile. “Backhanded back patting, Porter?”
“It’s not that. I want to finish my degree first.”
“You will. Believe me, a corporation like Cyberdyne doesn’t want undegreed math prodigies. Looks bad to their board of directors.” He narrowed his eyes at Bobby as he slipped his glasses on. “Would you consider taking a position under those conditions?”
“Depends, I guess. I’d prefer postponing it till—”
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“Sensible. Do you know what you’re going to present to them?”
“Assuming I go?”
Cojensis nodded.
“I guess I should let them ask for what they want. Unless you have some advice.”
“Assuming you go, I think you should let them choose the subject.”
“How did they find out about me?”
Cojensis waved a hand. “Oh, corporate headhunters have ways of sniffing out the talent. The dean sent me a request to list my ten best students. I supposed then it was for a talent scout of some kind.”
“Did anybody else get an invitation?”
“That’s confidential, Robert.”
“Any idea who I’d be talking to?”
“I used to know a few people at Cyberdyne, but that was years ago, before all that nonsense in Colorado Springs.”
“Excuse me?”
“Hmm? Oh, I suppose that was before your time. Never mind, it’s not important. There was a shakeup. A lot of people I knew working there left. I don’t know anyone now…except maybe Oscar Cruz, I think he’s still there.”
“The letter was signed by a Mr. Casse. Do you know him?”
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