by John Saul
Amy Carlson.
His stomach heaved, and the half-digested breakfast he’d eaten only a couple of hours earlier spewed out onto the sand. He knew he should run and find Jeff—or anyone else—but somehow he couldn’t.
He couldn’t just go away and leave Amy lying on the beach.
Gingerly, he reached down, took hold of her one remaining arm and pulled her farther up the sand, out of reach of the crashing surf.
What had happened to her?
And then, as he stared fixedly at the ruined body of his friend, he remembered a movie he’d seen on television a while ago.
He knew what had happened to her.
Sharks.
She had been attacked by sharks.
A crowd had gathered on the beach, the usual curious throng that seems to form out of nowhere whenever a tragedy occurs. Some of them had walked out from the village, where the news of the discovery of a body washed up on the sand had spread like wildfire.
Above, on the road that ran along the edge of the bluff, cars were lined up, the first ones drawn by the car that had responded to Jeff Aldrich’s frantic signals after he’d spotted Josh sitting quietly on the beach next to Amy’s corpse. He hadn’t even yelled to Josh, but instead waved down the first car that came along. After the first car stopped, two more quickly followed. By the time Hildie Kramer had arrived, responding to a call from the police department, there had been barely enough room for her to edge off the road. After trying to jockey her Acura into a just-too-small space that had been left between a pickup truck full of surfboards and a motor home, she had abandoned the car, leaving its rear end sticking out a couple of feet into the lane of northbound traffic, and hurried across the pavement to the head of the stairs.
Already there were more than twenty-five people on the beach, half a dozen of them police officers and medics, the rest a milling throng of sightseers who were talking among themselves, passing on every bit of information they’d picked up from other conversations they’d overheard.
By the time Hildie had made it down the stairs to the beach and worked her way through to the knot of men clustered around Amy Carlson’s body, she’d already heard three or four versions of what had happened.
“She was kidnapped out of a mall in Santa Cruz,” someone said.
“That’s not what I heard,” someone else replied. “She’s one of the kids from town, and she got caught by a riptide.”
“I heard she was already dead before she even got into the water,” a third person ventured. “Someone said she’d been stabbed fifty-seven times. Can you imagine? How could anyone do something like that to a child? I don’t know what the world is coming to.”
Hildie ignored it all, even when someone called out her name, and asked if the child was one of the kids from the Academy. Instead of answering, she simply pressed in farther, until finally she was standing over the knot of policemen and medics who surrounded the badly maimed corpse. Hildie’s expression tightened as she gazed down on what was left of Amy, but even as her gorge rose at the mutilation of the little girl, she still felt a sense of relief.
It had worked, just as she had known it would.
Now, as she silently wondered if they’d found Steve Conners, too, she summoned up the proper tears of grief and sympathy for Amy Carlson. What the pounding of the sea might have failed to accomplish, something else had.
“Dear Lord,” she breathed, “What happened to her?”
One of the medics glanced up. “Sharks,” he said. “I don’t know what she was doing in the water at all, but she was sure in the wrong place at the wrong time. Once the first one hit her, she didn’t have a chance.”
What was left of Amy’s body was almost totally unrecognizable. Her right arm was completely gone, as was most of her left leg. Her stomach had been torn open, and there was nothing left but an empty cavity where her internal organs had once been.
Everywhere, flesh had been ripped away from bones, and the bones themselves seemed to be held together by no more than fragments of cartilage. Even her head had not been spared from the attack.
The back of her skull was completely gone, and the jagged edges of the empty cavity where her brain had been were broken and irregular.
Exactly as George Engersol had left them, Hildie told herself, obliterating the work he’d done with the saw with a small hammer and a pair of pliers.
“Her brain,” Hildie breathed. “What happened to it?”
The medic shook his head. “Something got it. Shark maybe, or even a sea otter. An otter could have scooped it out like an abalone out of its shell.”
Moaning, Hildie turned away, only to find Josh MacCallum standing beside her, listening to every word that had been said. “Josh? What are you doing here?”
“I was the one who found Amy.” Josh’s voice was barely audible as his eyes fixed once more on the remains of his friend. “I was with Jeff. We were looking for Steve.”
Before Hildie could respond, there was a crackling sound as one of the police radios came alive. Both Josh and Hildie turned to listen. One of the officers spoke into his unit, listened a moment, then promised to send two men right away. Putting the radio back into its holster on his belt, he glanced at Hildie, recognizing her immediately from the investigation of Adam Aldrich’s death. “One of my men just found a sweater,” he said. “Up on the promontory, you know? Where the viewpoint is?”
Hildie put on a puzzled expression. “A sweater?” she asked. “What—”
Before she could finish her question, the officer spoke again. “It has her name in it. It was on the ground, like someone had dropped it.”
Hildie’s frown deepened. “At the viewpoint?” she echoed. “Why would it be up there?”
The officer’s eyes clouded as he realized Hildie hadn’t yet heard what else had happened. “There’s a car in the water, Mrs. Kramer. We haven’t gotten to it yet, but we were able to spot the license number. It belongs to one of your teachers, Steve Conners.”
“Dear Lord,” Hildie breathed. “You don’t suppose—”
“We’re not supposing anything yet, Mrs. Kramer. But we’ll be wanting to know everything you have about his background.”
Hildie shook her head. “He just started this term. He seemed to be so fond of the children.”
The officer’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe a little too fond, if you know what I mean.”
Hildie nodded. “I’d better go call Amy’s parents.” She sighed. “Josh, I think maybe you should come back to school with me.” But when she turned to where Josh had been standing only a moment ago, he was gone.
At a little after noon, Hildie Kramer once more took the elevator down to the laboratory hidden beneath the mansion’s basement. Stepping out into the bright glare of the white-tiled corridor, she ignored the scrub room and operating theater, which had been fashioned from the chamber that in another time had served as the dining room for Eustace Barrington’s son, and walked quickly to a door at the end. Behind this door had once been the younger Barrington’s lonely living room. Pressing her security code numbers into the keypad at its side, she let herself into the remodeled room that was now the lab housing the heart of George Engersol’s artificial intelligence project. In a room next door—once a sleeping alcove, but now completely separated from the lab by a glass wall—was the ominous-looking form of a Croyden computer. The twin black arcs that contained its vast range of microprocessors stood alone, forming a broken circle that was nearly six feet high. It was the only piece of equipment in the small room, crouched in lonely splendor in the center of its perfectly air-conditioned, dust-free environment. The most powerful computer in the world, the Croyden was as sensitive as it was fast, and when Alex Croyden, who had developed the computer, had designed its setting in this room, he’d seen to it that the smallest amount of contamination possible would be allowed to affect it. Other than Croyden himself, George Engersol, Hildie Kramer, and the head of one of the major entrepreneurial companies of Silicon Valley, no one knew the co
mputer was there. And no one but Alex Croyden himself was competent to fix it in the event that it failed.
The room had been designed to see to it that the Croyden did not fail. So far, it hadn’t. Controlled from a keyboard in the room in which Hildie now stood, its only connections to the outside world were through a series of thick cables under the floor, and a hermetically sealed door that Alex Croyden alone had the codes to open.
Where his supercomputer was concerned, Alex Croyden didn’t even trust George Engersol.
The room in which Hildie now stood comprised the rest of the artificial intelligence lab.
It, too, was filled with an array of computers, all of which were concerned with maintaining the contents of two glass tanks that stood in a special case at the end of the room.
Each of the tanks contained a living human brain.
Filled with a saline solution, the brains floated weightlessly in their environment.
From the stems of the brains, plastic tubing connected the main arteries and veins to machines that continually recirculated a blood supply, oxygenating it and cleaning it, eliminating wastes and adding nutrients. Every aspect of the blood supply was continuously monitored by the computers, its chemical balance kept in perfect stasis by the complex programs that determined the correct level of every element needed to feed the organs in the tanks.
Each system had several backups, and as Hildie stood just inside the door, watching the machines at work, she was once more astonished that it could work at all.
And yet it did. A pump worked silently, keeping the blood flowing, while a dialysis machine acted as artificial kidneys. Much of the equipment in the room had been designed by the Croyden computer in the adjoining room, which had processed volumes of data before determining precisely the equipment and programs that would be needed to keep a brain alive outside its natural environment.
Not only alive, but functioning.
For the plastic tubes were not the only things attached to the brains in the tanks.
Bundles of tiny wires, each of them attached to a separate nerve, also emerged from the brain stem, a flexible spinal column that connected the brains directly to the Croyden computer in the next room.
Probes were inserted into the brains as well, and their leads, too, ran through holes in the tanks to join the other cables that snaked away into the conduits beneath the floor.
Now, finally, it was all happening, all the plans that had been laid years ago were coming to fruition, for as Hildie scanned the monitors above the twin tanks, she could see by the graphic displays that the biological conditions of the two organs were precisely as they should be.
George Engersol glanced up from the keyboard, a frown forming as he saw the expression on Hildie Kramer’s face.
“Something’s happened, hasn’t it.” It was a statement, not a question.
Hildie nodded abruptly. “Josh MacCallum found Amy Carlson’s body this morning.”
“Josh?” Engersol echoed, his face paling. “What happened?”
“He was looking for Steve Conners. And Amy’s body washed up on the beach, in the cove where we have our picnics.”
Engersol’s expression hardened. “Why was Josh looking for Steve Conners on the beach? Isn’t he here?”
Briefly, Hildie told Engersol what had happened that morning. As she spoke, she saw Engersol’s face pale even more, and the muscles of his jaw clench with anger.
“I told you it was too risky,” he said when she was done. “We should have kept Amy’s body here and—”
“It’s all right,” Hildie broke in, her words sharp enough to silence Engersol. “They’re already assuming that Conners got his hands on Amy, probably intending to molest her, and something went wrong. They haven’t found his body yet, and judging from the condition of Amy’s, it won’t make much difference if they do.” She smiled thinly. “It seems that sharks got to her, and there isn’t much left. When I asked one of the policemen what happened to her brain, he suggested that a sea otter might have taken it. ‘Like an abalone out of its shell,’ is the way he put it, I believe. And they found Amy’s sweater at the viewpoint. What with the note I left on her computer, and Steve Conners’s accident, they’ll assume he either left the note himself or found her sometime during the night. I don’t think there’ll be much question about what happened.”
The tension in George Engersol eased slightly. “Have you told her parents?”
“They’re on their way up,” Hildie replied, nodding. “I imagine they’ll be here sometime this afternoon. I don’t think it will be pleasant, but we can deal with it. I suspect we’ll lose a few more students, though. Two deaths in two weeks is going to be hard for some of them to take.”
Engersol smiled. “I suspect you’ll manage. If we lose a few, it won’t matter, so long as we keep the ones I need.”
“I wish I could guarantee it,” Hildie replied. “But I can’t.” She shifted her attention to the tank on the left. “Everything is still stable?” she asked anxiously, remembering what had happened last year, when Timmy Evans’s brain had been transferred into one of the tanks, only to die suddenly when it was on the very verge of awakening. Though Engersol had insisted that the problem had lain with Timmy’s brain itself, Hildie herself was all but positive that what had truly happened was some kind of error in programming. Hildie was convinced the data that had been fed to Timmy Evans’s mind had been at fault, somehow killing his brain instead of bringing it back to consciousness.
Exactly what had happened to Timmy, though, neither she nor Engersol would ever know. But Adam, unlike Timmy, was surviving. “No signs of deterioration?” she pressed.
“Adam isn’t turning into another Timmy Evans,” Engersol replied icily, letting her know that he understood exactly what she was asking. “In fact, he’s doing even better than I could have hoped for. Look.”
He tapped at the keyboard, and an image of a brain came up on the monitor that sat on Engersol’s desk. “That’s the way Adam’s brain looked twenty-four hours ago. But look what’s happening.” He pressed some more keys, and a second image appeared on the monitor, superimposed over the first. “Right there,” Engersol said, tapping on the screen with the tip of a ballpoint pen. “See it?”
Hildie studied the screen for a moment, then shook her head. “What am I looking for?”
“Just a second. Let me enlarge it.” Using a mouse, Engersol drew a small box around part of the image, then clicked a couple of commands from the bar at the top of the screen. “There. See?”
Hildie’s eyes widened as she finally saw what Engersol was talking about.
The brain in the left-hand tank—Adam Aldrich’s brain—was growing.
“I didn’t think that was possible,” Hildie told him.
“Nor did I,” Engersol agreed. “And I’m not sure yet exactly why it’s happening. But it’s the frontal lobe that’s growing, the part of the brain that is responsible for thought. It’s not just staying alive, Hildie. It’s actually growing. We’ve done it. We’ve succeeded in wiring a human brain into a computer. One that’s still living, and still functioning.”
Hildie’s eyes were suddenly caught by activity on the monitor above the tank on the right. As she watched, lines that had been quiescent only a moment ago began to waver, then form peaks and valleys. Then two other lines also came to life, one of them suddenly shooting up to the top of the screen before leveling off, another spiking quickly, easing off, then spiking again.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s happening?”
“It’s Amy,” George Engersol replied. “She’s waking up.”
21
Blackness.
As the last of the narcotic was washed out of her brain, Amy Carlson’s mind rose slowly into consciousness, but it was a consciousness such as she had never experienced before.
She found herself in an unfathomable silence and darkness that made her scream out in terror.
But nothing happened.
Sh
e felt nothing in her throat, heard no sound in her ears.
Yet in her mind the scream echoed still, surrounding her, fading away, then rising again.
Or was she screaming again?
She didn’t know, for everything she knew, everything that gave meaning to her existence, had vanished.
The entire world had disappeared, and she felt as if she was suspended in some kind of vacuum, left alone in a darkness and silence so impenetrable that it was suffocating her.
She tried to breathe, tried to fill her lungs with air.
Again, nothing happened. She felt no fresh air rush into her lungs, felt no relief from the terror that gripped her.
Panic closed in on her. She couldn’t breathe. She was going to die.
She tried to cry out again, tried to scream for help, but once more nothing happened.
Words formed in her mind, but she couldn’t feel her tongue move to shape the sounds, feel her mouth open to emit the words.
Once again she tried to breathe, and once again felt nothing as her body refused to respond to the orders her mind sent forth.
Paralyzed.
She was paralyzed!
But how had it happened?
Her mind reeled as she tried to follow a logical line of thought through the panic that was pouring at her from every direction, rolling in on her from the darkness, pressing her down.
Dying!
That’s what was happening to her!
She was alone, and she was dying, and nobody knew about it and nobody could help her.
She tried to open her eyes, sure now that whatever was happening to her could only be a nightmare and that when she opened her eyes and let in the light, the horrible darkness around her would lift and she would once again be a part of the world.
She blinked.
Except that yet again nothing happened. She blinked again, trying to feel the faint sensation of her eyelids reacting to the command from her mind.
Nothing!
It felt as if her eyes no longer existed!
Now she tried to move her body, tried to roll over, to shake herself loose from the unseen, unfelt bonds that held her in their grip.