Society of the Mind

by Eric L. Harry

  She pulled up the first report with a sigh.

 

 

  "Jesus Christ," Laura muttered. She skipped to the next report—

 

 

  Laura's mouth hung open. With a trembling hand, she hit "Next."

 

  Laura hit "Next" and "Next" and "Next," reading on in utter amazement. The computer's conclusions were born either of deep insight or of juvenile oversimplification. But there was a pattern to the reports. Although she hadn't searched for the word "sex," fully two-thirds dealt with the subject.

 

 

  Laura laughed so hard her eyes watered, but when she thought to check her watch again the humor of the moment disappeared. She had ten minutes.

  What had she learned? What was the point of the whole exercise?

  "Emotional database" were the words she'd used with Gray.

  To have schizophrenia, the computer had to be emotionally sophisticated — at least on par with a teenager.

  A teenager, Laura thought, who's preoccupied with sex! She shook her head. That's a human with hormones and an instinctual drive to have sex. The analogy was too strained. But what level of emotional sophistication had the computer attained? How large was its "emotional database"?

  The number stared Laura right in the face. the report's header read. Ninety-two million? she thought in disbelief, and she read on. All the reports dealt with emotional issues. The only error she'd made in phrasing her query was on the side of being too exclusive, of leaving out too many key words when casting her net.

  Words like "comfort" and "compassion" and "care" and "caress."

  Five minutes! Laura saw with a quick check of her watch. She exited the browser and logged onto the shell.

  the computer said instantly.

  "We don't have much time. I've got to ask you some questions."

 

  "Listen to me! Mr. Gray may delay loading the phase-three based on my analysis. What I have to assess is some measure of your emotional sophistication. Do you understand?"

 

  "This is very, very important. Please consider your answer very carefully. I need to know how emotionally developed you are, right now! What is it that you feel?"

  There was a sudden burst of shouting through the open door to the office. Buzzers sounded. The high-pitched chirping of an alarm.

  The distant waft of a siren. Two men with flapping white lab coats ran by Laura's office toward the control room. But Laura was riveted to the words that scrolled out across the screen.

 

  The raised voices — Gray's among them finally penetrated Laura's cocoon.

  She wanted to bring Gray there to read what the computer had said.

  But she had one more question. "Do you love Joseph Gray?" Laura typed and hit Enter.

  A throbbing Klaxon suddenly drowned out all the other noise.

 

  Laura's breaths came in pants and her eyes filled with tears.

  She bolted for the door. "No!" she shouted in the hallway. "No! Joseph, no!"

  Her entry into the control room went unnoticed. Everywhere stern-faced operators sat hunched over their consoles. Laura grabbed Filatov by the shoulders and shouted, "Don't load the phase-three!" He seemed not to understand and turned back to his work. Laura dug her fingernails into his arms and shook with all her might. "Don't load the phase-three-e!"

  Filatov struggled free of her grip and fell back against a console, fighting her off as if she'd just lost her mind.

  Laura sprinted over to Margaret. "You've got to stop! The phase-three's going to kill it!"

  A hand rested heavily on Laura's shoulder. She turned expecting to see Hoblenz there to escort her away, but it was Gray. His eyes were thick with moisture.

  "It's too late," he said — his voice almost inaudible in the din from the beetle room.

  "Shut that goddamn cache alarm off!" Filatov shouted from across the room.

  Laura was shaking her head slowly. "You loaded the phase-three?" she shouted her last words shrieked out over the sudden quiet in the control room.

  Filatov turned as if she'd yelled at him. "Nobody's loaded anything. The system's losing the resources we freed up! Our capacity is disappearing just like last time, and I want to know why, people!"

  All stared now at a large monitor in the center of the room Two numbers on the screen were rapidly ticking off. Laura couldn't decipher the cryptic acronyms above the numbers, but she knew right away what they must be. One climbed past eighty-five, and at the same moment the other fell to fifteen. The numbers were percentages measuring the system's free resources, and they were evaporating right before everyone's eyes.

  Filatov was handed a printout, and he sank against a workstation on reading it. "The system's losing all the columns over in the annex!" he announced to the room.

  Dorothy appeared beside Laura. In a quivering voice she whispered, "It's crashing."

  Laura put her arm around the girl, who lowered her head to Laura's shoulder and sobbed.

  Everyone stood motionless — staring at the skyrocketing measure of the system's resource usage.

  "Ninety," Margaret said, her voice shaking.

  Gray sat alone at a nearby keyboard, and Laura went over to stand behind him. Was this the end of his grand experiment? she wondered.

  His clenched fist tapped lightly against his mouth. His eyes were fixed not on the screen watched by everyone else but on the monitor just in front of him. The words "Are you there?" glowed brightly just beneath his log-in script, but they drew no reply.

  "Come on, come on, come on," Gray repeated under his breath.

  "Ninety-two," Margaret said.

  finally printed across the screen.

  He lurched forward and typed, "I know. I'm here with you."

  "Ninety-five," Margaret counted out.

  "Well, it was fun while it lasted!" Filatov shouted. He then threw the printout he held into the air. "Don't forget to turn out the lights!" He pushed his way through the crowd toward his office, slamming consoles and spinning chairs along the way. Laura loo
ked down at Gray's screen.

 

  "I don't know," Gray typed as Laura watched. "Probably not."

 

  "I don't know that either. I don't think it'll hurt."

  "Ninety-seven percent," Margaret said.

 

  Laura felt tears [garbled] her eyes. She looked over at Dorothy, whose hand was clenched to her mouth as she sobbed.

  Gray stared intently at his small monitor. Laura put her hands on his shoulders.

  "Ninety-nine," Margaret announced. "Here it comes!"

  Laura read.

  Gray's back heaved with labored breathing. His fingers hovered over the keys, then suddenly began to type. "Fight, goddammit! Use your file attribute leaks! Dump functions! Do whatever it takes! Fight!"

  His hands gripped the console as if expecting a quake to rise up from the earth. His shoulders felt as hard as wood — the muscles beneath Laura's hands now indistinguishable from the bone.

  "It's slowing down!" Margaret exclaimed, and Gray's head shot up to the main screen. Laura's gaze lingered on Gray, then followed his eyes to the numbers.

  Her vision was so blurred by tears that she couldn't read what the numbers were. But they were ticking off much more slowly now. She dried her eyes to see that they'd stopped at ninety-nine point eight.

  Slowly, the numbers began to fall.

  Dorothy laughed and cried simultaneously, and Margaret rose to put her arms around the girl. "I'll be goddamned!" Griffith said, and then he began to cheer "Go, go!" A chorus of voices joined in.

  Hoblenz whooped, then yelled, "Kick some ass, buddy!" System capacity continued to fall into the mid-nineties, but Gray's blue eyes remained focused on his small screen.

  "Are you still there?" he'd typed, and now he waited for a response.

  Three letters finally printed slowly across the screen.

  "Are you okay?"

  the computer spluttered, its reply coming in fits and starts.

  "What's the matter?" Laura typed at the terminal in her office.

  The reply came more slowly than normal.

  "But why? Why are things different now?"

 

  Laura stared at the screen. Slowly, she typed, "Tell me about the Other."

 

  "So is it a virus?"

 

  "What's the Other doing to you?"

 

  "Do you mean there is a part of your…" Laura paused, considering her choice of words.

 

  Laura hadn't pressed Enter on the keyboard. She hadn't even finished typing her question. "I didn't hit Enter. How did you know what I was typing?"

 

  "But how do you read what's on the screen before I transmit the text?"

 

  Laura arched her eyebrows and typed, "Are there any other tricks you've learned?" Her finger hovered over the Enter key but didn't press down.

  After a few moments, the reply came.

  Laura looked up at the black eyeball beside the door. "Sorry," she typed, "back to the subject. Do you mean that the Other is taking over parts of your brain physically?" This time she hit Enter.

 

  "But can a virus rewire your circuit boards?"

 

  "Are you still trying to load the phase-three?"

 

  "But if it's a virus, couldn't the phase-three gain access to the boards that were rewired?"

 

  "You sound scared of it," Laura typed.

 

  The computer refused to say anything more about the phase-three.

  After prodding and cajoling for a while, Laura reluctantly returned to her analysis. The day dragged on, and she found herself nodding off.

  She had to do something to break the tedium, so she rose and headed for the door.

  She found Filatov leaning over the shoulder of one of his operators. After a few keystrokes, the man slammed his fist down on the console. "Access error! And look! It's not even showing an address now! It was there a second ago, and now it's not even showing up!"

  "[Garbled]!" Filatov cursed in Russian, grinding his teeth as he turned to Laura.

  She cleared her throat. "Oh, I was just wondering, do you have a laptop or something so I can get out of that office." Filatov stared back at her, uncomprehending. "I mean, you know, get some fresh air, but keep working?"

  Filatov looked surprised by her strange request. "Well, if you'd like. The island has a cellular data system, of course, if you want a portable."

  "And I could take it anywhere?"

  Filatov shrugged. "Sure. The data transfer rate is slower than with fiber-optic cabling, but for what you're doing it's more than adequate."

  He gave her an ultra-light notebook computer, and Laura wondered why she had not asked for one earlier. She headed out of the computer center to find a gloriously warm and sunny afternoon. The assembly building and gantry of Launchpad A gleamed white. The rocket under which she and Gray had stood towered high above the jungle, in the final stages of being readied for a night launch.

  A car pulled up beside Laura, moving so soundlessly that it startled her. The door opened, but no one got out. Laura hesitated, then looked inside. The car was empty.

  "Uhm, I didn't ask for a car," she said, speaking slowly and in a loud voice.

  When she stood erect, the car remained at the curb with its gull-wing door raised. There was only one way to find out if the car was waiting for her. Laura got in.

  The door closed behind her, and the car started to roll. She hadn't issued any command. She hadn't even buckled her seatbelt, which she quickly proceeded to do.

  The car headed into the jungle up the road that led to the Village. She wanted to ask where she was going, but there was no one in the car to answer her. The mental image of some invisible presence drew her eyes to the empty seat beside her. She hugged the laptop tightly to her chest.

  The gate across the road marking the boundary of the restricted area rose into the air to allow the car through. At the last intersection before the Village the car veered off to the left instead of headi
ng up the central boulevard. It swept past yet another construction project, and then hurtled into the unreclaimed jungle just beyond.

  Thick growth rushed by the windows and wove together into a living roof above the road. The constant turns allowed only brief glimpses of what lay ahead.

  The car finally burst out of the jungle onto a coastal plane, which rose slowly up the outside of the mountain. She caught a glimpse of the airport's single runway jutting out into the water far below.

  Frothy waves crashed onto black-sand beaches, and the azure sea spread unbroken by reefs to the horizon beyond. The roadbed was carved out of the dark rocks of the steep volcanic mountain. There were no other signs of man or machine anywhere in sight.

  The world fell dark… then the car emerged from a tunnel into the light. Before Laura lay a part of the island she'd never seen before.

  The [garbled] was covered not with thick jungle but with tall grasses and drooping ferns. A primeval forest, she thought. A glimpse into the earth's past.

  The car began to slow as it ascended an inland hill. The faint whine made by the electric motor wound down, and the car pulled to a stop at the crest of a ridge. There was nothing but the thin ribbon of concrete for as far as the eye could see.

  The door opened to admit a stiff wind. Laura was fearful she'd be abandoned if she got out, but after a few moments, she exited tentatively with her laptop. She leaned inside and said, "Don't leave, okay?" The car didn't move. It didn't even shut the door, as if sensing Laura's anxiety.

  The air felt noticeably cooler. Laura guessed she was a few thousand feet above sea level as she looked down at the trackless expanse of ocean far below. As good a place as any, Laura told herself, and she climbed a few meters to a flat ledge that had been gouged out of the hillside above. Erosion had washed the bedrock bare and worn the surface of the black lava stone smooth. The notch was about the size of a large beach blanket and it formed a pocket sheltered nicely from the wind.

  Laura settled in after confirming that the car still waited on the road. She opened the laptop, but almost immediately her eyes were drawn to something odd. She couldn't have seen it from the road, but her higher vantage gave her a clear view. There was a flat terrace nestled into the hillside about halfway down the mountain below. The grass was trimmed, and the yard was bordered along its open end by a high concrete wall. Squinting and shielding her eyes from the sun, Laura could make out objects of various sizes strewn all about the terrace. There were large balls and cubes and cylinders and ramps and cones.