"What makes you think that?" Laura replied.
"You didn't answer my question."
Laura was floored. She'd ordered the movie on Gray's pay-per-view system — but only twice. The computer said it hadn't watched the movie nearly as many times as she had. How could it know that she'd made rental of that videodisc a regular Saturday-evening ritual for months at a time?
It dawned on her just then.
"You broke into the computer records at my video store, didn't you?" she typed.
There was no response.
"And that means you must have broken into my bank records, too!!!!! And maybe the university network at Harvard?"
Still there was no response. How long has this thing been stalking me? Laura suddenly wondered, a chill passing up her spine.
The break-ins at the video store and bank would have been long before Gray's offer to her. What reason could the computer have had to follow her?
the computer finally said.
"There is no record. I'm not a cop."
Laura hesitated. It would've been an entirely proper request from a human patient, but the ethics of a therapist-computer relationship were somewhat less certain.
"Okay. I promise."
"So you spied on me? You violated my privacy?"
"And you think breaking into someone's personal records is the way to find a friend?!!"
Laura felt her anger drain from her. It was replaced by a rising tide of sympathy. She wanted to reach out and… what? Touch its hand? Pat its head? Put her arms around it? All Laura had was words.
"I'm sorry," Laura typed. "I'm your friend. What can I do?"
Needs? Laura thought. A confusing jumble of interpretations rushed in. "What kind of 'needs'?" she typed.
"Come on, give me a chance. I want to help."
Laura stared at the screen. She understood the words perfectly, and yet they made no sense. Gray wasn't trying to get rid of the computer, he was trying to rid the computer of the Virus that was causing all its errors.
"Mr. Gray wouldn't do that," Laura typed.
The comment struck a nerve. Laura knew she had an idealized image of Gray. She knew she concocted every apology, every rationalization that was even remotely plausible, to hold intact her Joseph Gray — the orphan genius.
She didn't know much about the real Gray, but the computer had been with the man for over a decade. The computer knew things about Gray that no one else knew — things that Gray had told it, and things it had discerned on its own.
"Why would you think Mr. Gray wants to get rid of you?" Laura asked. "He's doing everything he can to help you. The fact that he brought me here is proof of that."
Laura again stared at the computer response. "Why am I here, then?" she typed.
"Don't change the subject."
Laura sighed. The session was being diverted, but all Laura could do was follow. "So you've been with Mr. Gray since Wall Street?" she typed. "You were the program he'd designed to do market analysis, right?"
"But you do recall Gray getting fired. Why?"
"So you think Mr. Gray got fired because you're bad at math?"
Laura reached up and rubbed her face and eyes with her hands. The session was meandering. She had to get it back on track.
"Let me ask you this," Laura typed. "Do you know what's causing the errors? Do you know why they can't get the phase-two to be loaded?" Instead of the normal instantaneous response, the cursor blinked and blinked.
Finally, the computer's brief reply appeared.
As the frustrating afternoon wore on, Laura began to tire.
"I'm sorry," she typed, "but I'm groggy. I need a change of scenery, so I'm going for a little walk."
Laura assumed it meant pictures on the computer monitor.
"No, I mean I need to go somewhere to clear my head."
Laura paused, then typed, "Yes."
Laura hesitated. She really just wanted to take a walk, plus she wasn't comfortable going into cyberspace alone. "Do I have clear [ante] to get through the doors?"
Laura rolled her eyes at her naïve question, then frowned and heaved a loud sigh. She knew it was wrong to go
roaming around without Gray's authorization. She didn't even really want to go. But this was promising… and intriguing. After all, her job was to learn all she could about the computer.
"Curiosity killed the cat," Griffith had said.
She logged off and headed for the virtual workstation.
No one in the control room paid Laura any attention as she stared into the retinal identifier in the wall. A hiss of air followed the flash from the dark lens, and the pneumatic door opened onto the empty hallway. With a furtive glance over her shoulder Laura headed toward the virtual workstations.
There was no one in the white room with the eight tall cylinders. Laura found the exoskeleton hanging from the already glowing control panel and put it on. She fumbled with the Velcro straps until the contraption fit snugly over her upper body and then pressed the power button on the belt in front. The suit inflated, locking the joints of her arms as before. The fleeting image of herself stumbling into the control room trussed up inside the skeleton like a mummy passed through her mind, but the suit deflated and a light on the belt went from amber to green.
All was ready — a fact that registered in a tightening of her chest and a quickening of her pulse.
The pneumatic hatch on the nearest workstation opened with a faint venting sound. Laura entered the dark and foreboding chamber drawing deep gulps of the air that suddenly seemed in short supply.
It was cold in the plastic capsule, or so it felt. Laura took one more deep breath to calm her nerves, then raised her hands, made two fists, and extended her fingers with a brisk snap.
The sound of compressed air announced the closing of the door. All light save the dim glow from the walls was shut off with a squeak of the tight rubber seals. An instant later, the chamber fell pitch-black.
Laura knew she had done the wrong thing in coming. She was all alone — cut off. No one even knew she was… Out of nowhere, a three-dimensional picture of an ordinary computer appeared in midair right in front of her. Laura's initial attempts to focus on the image made her head spin, and she jammed her eyes shut until the dizziness subsided. When she reopened them, her mind seemed to more readily accept the optical illusion, and she raised her hands to touch the imaginary device. Her fingertips tingled as they brushed against the sharp contours of the keys. She even found the small ridges atop the F and the J before she typed "Hello" with a surprising sense of familiarity and ease. The words scrolled out in luminescent letters in the air above the keyboard.
Laura hit Enter.
Laura's eyes still fought the image, trying to focus on the glowing and at the more distant point on the wall from which they were projected. But when she did "look through" the imaginary computer terminal, the image grew fuzzy and Laura instantly felt lightheaded. She again closed her eyes, and when she reopened them, everything was back in focus.
Laura smiled and shook her head at how real the illusion seemed. You just had to give in to it. She ran her hands lightly over the keys. The membranes inside the gloves tickled the tips of her fingers to produce a marvelously complete experience.
"You're going to get me in trouble, you know," Laura tapped out, hearing faint plastic clacks as each key was pressed.
"Take it easy on me. No running with the bulls or bungee jumping or anything, okay?"
Laura turned slowly to see the corrugated steel walls of a large factory dominating the parking lot behind her. At the center of the building was a brightly lit entrance. "Gray Consumer Products Division" read the large letters of a sign above the door. The words were arched over Gray's logo — the profile of a human head drawn in crosshatched diagonal lines. "Erlangen, Germany," the smaller letters beneath read.
Laura turned back to the keyboard. "I'm in a parking lot in Germany?"
The door was a fair distance away, and this nighttime excursion wasn't nearly as stimulating as her walk around the island with Gray had been. Plus, there were easily a hundred fairly solid-looking cars between Laura and the door.
"No, not really," Laura typed.
"A little."
The picture changed so abruptly that Laura flinched, her arms groping the air to her sides for balance. The snapping of static electricity from the walls gave way to a flood of noise.
Laura was standing now on the upper level of a busy shopping mall. The ghostly images of people flashed by as they rushed up and down the walkway. She turned to see Gray's televisions mounted in displays all along the walls of the crowded store to her back.
The keyboard remained fixed in its place before her. "Where am I now?" she typed.
Laura laughed and shook her head. It was amazing; Here she was, standing in a busy mall! "Unbelievable," she mumbled, grinning.
She waited for a small break in the pedestrian traffic and then headed across the walkway. She was invisible to the passersby, however, and they didn't break stride to allow her to pass. Several times people walked straight through her — momentary blurs as the translucent haze of a woman's hair or a man's jacket flashed before Laura's eyes. She made it to the railing at the far side of the aisle and clung to the cool, rounded metal.
The high ceilings and the trees and fountains of the central atrium below combined with the hum of noise from everywhere at once to give Laura the physical sensation of being in a large, open space.
Just below her vantage the marble floors and upscale shops glittered in striking resolution. She turned once again to the keyboard.
"How many places have you modeled like this mall and the factory in Germany and the island?"
Laura found the idea of computer cops unsettling. And it wasn't only the unblinking eye of the computer that troubled her. It was also the prospect of unauthorized "virtunauts" hacking their way in and roaming unfettered through malls and homes and bedrooms. Of being ogled and groped by hordes of invisible net surfers who would populate the dark alleys of cyberspace.
Laura shook off the quiver and returned her attention to the here and now. To the mall in which she was, for the time being, all alone in her alternate universe. Laura confirmed that everyone was indeed of the translucent variety.
A girl suddenly caught Laura's eye. She was about fifty feet away, but her white T-shirt and blue jeans appeared bright and solid. She stood out among the ghostly figures. The girl had clearly been looking in Laura's direction, but she quickly slipped into the entryway of a store. Laura kept her eyes on the storefront, but the girl didn't reappear.
She must have been mistaken, she thought. There was nobody in the mall but the ghosts. Laura was alone in the virtual world.
&nbs
p; Shoppers hustled by in a never-ending current of activity. The model seemed complete to Laura right down to the last detail. Everywhere there was the commotion of life and activity.
Laura turned back to the imaginary keyboard. "What do you use models like this for?" she typed.
There was a pause.
"I mean why go to all the trouble of creating a model of a shopping mall? It must take a lot of processing time."
Laura was distracted by the crowds. Most of the shoppers were women. Girls who traveled in giggling packs. Well-dressed businesswomen whose valuable time was spent speeding from store to store. Foreign tourists taking leisurely strolls down the air-conditioned American boulevard.
"Why don't you just call him?" a passing girl asked.
"Oh, like, I'm sure!" her nervously giggling friend replied.
"Is he in?" the confident voice of an adult came from behind Laura.
She turned to see an attractive woman in a business suit holding a cellular phone to her ear with one hand and an open Filofax sagging limply in the other. The strap of a Neiman-Marcus bag was looped over her arm, and she stood on a small balcony jutting out over the ground floor. "Mr. Owen?" she said suddenly and in a cheery tone. "This is Rebecca James. How are you?"
A man hovered not far from the woman, leaning casually against the rail and staring at the businesswoman quite openly.
The woman was aware of the man's gaze and stood half turned away from him. "Yes," she said in an upbeat, can-do manner. "We'll have the papers to you first thing in the morning, you've got my word." She was nodding her head and said "absolutely" twice before hanging up with a gracious good-bye. Without closing the phone she quickly redialed.
Her voice changed completely. "Don't give me that shit, goddammit! If you miss Fed Ex you get your butt out to the airport and do counter-to-counter!"
She hung up and dropped the small phone into her purse. The man still eyed her. She steered a wide path around her unwanted admirer and departed in a power walk.
Laura looked back down at the floating computer monitor.
Society of the Mind Page 21