"How goes it?" he asked, his mouth stuck together with peanut butter.
"You haven't thought through the Model Eight program well enough," she said simply, "and you should shut it down until you have. And you should call a big meeting and tell everybody what's going on so they can do their jobs more efficiently and safely." With that, she headed for the door.
"You went down into the mountain?" he asked, and she turned and nodded. "So you've seen what's going on there?" She nodded again. "And you've experienced virtual reality — and talked, of course, to the computer." It was not a question, more a recitation of the relevant facts. "Three days ago, you were a different person. You lived in another world. Three days ago — when you were sitting back in your late-twentieth-century office — if someone had told you what was possible today, with today's technology, would you have believed it? Would you have believed what you've seen with your own eyes on this island?"
Laura shivered from the cold floor under her bare feet and from her damp, clinging clothes. If only he wouldn't look at me like that, she thought. She shook her head.
"Laura, you've been on a rocket sled into the next century. The real twenty-first century — the latter part of it, not the beginning has been growing for some time now from the small germs of ideas in research labs and think tanks all over the planet." He twisted on his stool to face her — to seize her attention fully. "Nowhere have those pockets spread more widely than on this island. But they will spread. The pockets will grow, interconnect, overlap, and the world will be changed… forever."
Laura understood Gray's words but had no idea what he was really saying. "So that's what's been happening?" she asked softly. "That first night, when you walked me halfway to the assembly building and we saw the Model Six mowing the lawn, that was some sort of orientation course designed to… to bring me up to speed."
He stared at her intently, but made no reply. "You knew there would be a robot out there, and that we would see it. You were easing me into your world — your century."
He nodded. "But don't forget, you'd already seen the Model Threes. You don't even think about them anymore. They're passé. A minor appliance. You probably don't even think of them as robots, do you? But they are robots, every bit as much as the Model Eights you saw down in the mountain this morning."
"Why?" Laura whispered. "Why are you doing this with me?"
"You live in the world of the mind, and so do I. Only you view the mind — the brain — as a stunningly complex miracle, a challenging puzzle to be unraveled. All its mysteries to be explained in a lifelong quest of research and discovery. I, on the other hand, view it as a limitation — a handicap. You can't plug a new module into nature's computer and expand its memory capacity. You can't upgrade a processor and double its speed. It is what it is, and that's what it will be for tens of thousands of years until…"
He stopped right there.
"Until what?"
"Until nature takes its course. Until evolution does its magic and changes the basic architecture of the brain. Until it expands the hardware's capacity to run programs that think and reason and remember."
"Are you saying there's some sort of 'consciousness program'?" Laura asked. "That our brain is a computer and our intelligence is just software?"
"Not exactly."
"Then what are you saying — exactly?"
"You're not ready yet."
Laura instantly grew angry. "Don't you realize how patronizing that is? I'm not a child, and I don't appreciate being treated like one!"
"What do you think is going on here?" Gray asked.
She was so agitated it took several starts for her to get her reply out. "I think you've built some kind of… new robot — a 'Model Nine' or 'Ten' or whatever — that the little boy from the town meeting saw last night. And you're convinced that I'm not ready to know about them because the tour bus has only just made it to the Model Eights! And I think one of those new robots — the ones that run around in a crouch — had something to do with ripping the head off that Dutch soldier!"
His face was a total mask now. Not a twitch of his lips or a hint of a nod or shake of his head. He didn't even blink. "I wish I could tell you," he said softly.
His tone made her hesitate. "But I'm not ready yet?"
"Apparently not."
"Well… just when will I be ready — if ever?"
"When the computer says you are."
Laura rocked her head back. "When the computer says I'm ready?" she blurted out with a laugh, incredulous. He nodded. She took a deep breath to compose herself.
"You tell me that I'm here to analyze the computer, but you have the computer analyzing me." She shook her head in disbelief, and pieces of caked mud fell to the floor. "And Hoblenz thinks the computer is having me psychoanalyze you!"
Gray smiled broadly, his teeth and the whites of his eyes standing out starkly against his tanned face. "I hadn't thought of that one," he said. "It's an interesting little triangle."
"But why use the computer to judge me?" she asked. "If you're trying to make some kind of highly subjective determination about my mental state, why rely on a machine?"
"The same reason I rely on a bulldozer to move earth and a car to traverse distances. I build tools that amplify my abilities. Tools that make me stronger, faster… smarter."
"And the computer is one of your tools."
"It's a symbiotic relationship. We aid each other."
"It gives you mental horsepower," she said. Gray nodded. "And what do you give it?"
"Life."
They stared at each other in the stillness of the great house. Laura could detect no deception, no artifice. He consistently told the truth, and yet his core was still shrouded in veils of secrecy. That was the way things were with Gray, and it only deepened the mystery surrounding him.
"Oh!" Janet exclaimed from the [unclear]. "Mr. Gray!" She came rushing across the kitchen, setting aside the broom and dustpan with which she had apparently been tracking Laura. "Why didn't you tell me you wanted lunch?"
"That's okay, Janet," he said, not taking his eyes off Laura. "I'm through here."
Laura had gotten all she would get out of him, she realized. "I'm going to spend the day in the computer center — working," Laura said, as much to cajole herself into returning to her job as to inform Gray of her plan for the day. "Will I see you… there, I mean?"
"I'm sure I'll stop by sometime. I'll be down at the Launch Center most of the day, though. We're putting three flights up tonight."
"Three? I thought you had two in space already."
"You really were out last night," he said, casually jabbing at feelings bruised by his failure to invite her to the town meeting. He continued without taking notice. "We landed them both during the middle of the night, and we're preparing all three vehicles for relaunch."
Laura sighed. "I would ask you what's on board…" Gray tilted his head and made a face. "Never mind." On her way out, she passed Janet, who was washing her hands at the sink. "I'm sorry about the trail of mud," Laura said.
Janet was smiling broadly. "That's quite all right, Laura. It's quite all right." She was positively glowing.
Laura headed out — baffled by Janet's beaming gaze, which followed her all the way to the pantry door.
34
The nearly empty computer center was quiet through the open door to Laura's office.
Laura looked at her watch. She had doggedly questioned the computer for hours without interruption, and she felt she'd made good progress.
"Okay, let's see. After talking to you on the treadmill this morning, I went down to the Model Eight facility. Then I met Mr. Hoblenz on the coast, and he took me out into the jungle to see the place where…" She paused, not knowing quite how to put it.
"Thank you. Yes, where it happened."
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"Don't worry. Hoblenz had plenty of men, and they were armed to the teeth."
"Well, I had one of Hoblenz's men with me there, too, and he had a machine gun."
"Not enough for what?"
"Don't you think you're overreacting a little? The Model Eight facility seemed to be running okay to me."
Laura was stunned.
"Why?"
"How can he shut all that down? What about the electricity from the reactor and the whole Model Eight program?"
Laura looked back up at the word "regular." "Wait a minute. Do you mean that everything was automated before?"
Laura arched her eyebrows, again confused.
"Then what did the rest of the fifteen hundred employees do?"
"Do you mean that everyone spent eight hours a day, five days a week training to do a job just in case you malfunctioned?"
"So Gray gave people the option of what course they wanted to take, and everybody chose some kind of astronaut training?" Laura hit Enter with a growing sense of discovery — of finding another piece of the puzzle.
Laura smiled, shaking her head as she typed, "And people never suspected what Gray was doing?"
"You know what I mean! He's training an army of astronauts! And nobody ever guessed? So many geniuses on this island and they just rush like lemmings toward Gray's final frontier?"
"You just did," Laura typed. "By the way, I would've been a terrible subject for Mr. Gray. I would have taken all the wrong courses. But I'm curious. Why did Mr. Gray even offer the liberal arts curriculum? Why not just add more shop classes to his '[unclear]-tech' school for the outward-bound?"
ACCESS RESTRICTED.
"That was just a joke," Laura mumbled. She sighed in frustration. Every time she made progress in putting the puzzle together, she was handed yet another unexplained piece.
Laura found Filatov in the control room outside. "So," she said as she walked up to him, "Gray is training a whole army of people to be astronauts and nobody had any idea." He looked up at her but said nothing. "You've got three launch pads, space launches a couple of times a week lighting off down there like gigantic Roman candles, and it never occurred to anyone that he was planning on, you know…" She made flapping motions with her hands as though she were flying away.
Filatov looked around to confirm that they were alone. "I don't know if you've noticed," Filatov said in a lowered voice, "but Mr. Gray is fairly good at keeping a secret. He may or may not be the most intelligent man in history, but I'm sure about one thing. He's as hung up on the whole concept of 'intellectual property' as anybody I've ever met. He doesn't like people talking about this stuff, and the only way to pry him open is to get him drunk."
"He gets drunk?"
Filatov smiled. "Not easily. He can hang in there with the best of 'em, and on this island that's me! But when he does get smashed, he'll go on and on about this idea of…" He shook his head. "I don't even know what you'd call it. It was the whole point of his speech at the town meeting, last night — phase two and all that. It represents the… growth of the collective body of all knowledge. A different" — he was struggling with the words—"stage into which that body will evolve."
"Finally a somewhat consistent answer!" Laura said. "I had been told this phase two of his was about colonization of space, and about war, but Griffith gave me more or less the same description as you."
"Well, I could see colonization and war fitting into it," Filatov said. "When you colonize some place, you take your knowledge with you. That represents growth. And colonization could certainly lead to war, although I got the impression the conflict Gray was alluding to was more…" He seemed at a loss for words.
"More what?"
"More apocalyptic!" Filatov replied.
When Laura passed Dorothy's office, she saw the girl was slumped over at her desk — oblivious to the glowing screens that surrounded her.
"You okay, Dorothy?" Laura asked.
Dorothy looked up at Laura, the corners of her small mouth drooping into what could have been a pout. She heaved a sigh, burying her hands between her thighs and sitting on them, further folding her shoulders into their slump.
"I don't know why I'm even wasting my time."
Laura went up to her desk. "What do you mean?"
"I mean…" Again she heaved a deep huff, this time glancing at the door. "I can't stop it," she said in a soft, reedy voice.
"Stop what?"
"The virus." The way she spoke, the word conveyed a menace of great proportion. And the tone in her voice betrayed something more: intense stress.
"Dorothy, nobody's putting any special pressure on you to solve all the system's problems."
"It's my job!" she shot back too quickly, and Laura realized she'd struck the girl's worries dead-center.
"But what's happening is beyond any one person's ability to solve."
"I told him I could do it," she said, her voice distant and her head sagging.
"You told Mr. Gray you could fix the computer all by yourself?"
"No-o-o. Way back, when he was considering me for this job. He came to a recital… a piano recital." Her eyes were unfocused, her head tilted to one side. She was in a dreamy state, obviously in great need of rest. "He explained that he was going to build the computer, and that he was looking for an immunobiologist. He asked if I thought I could handle the job. I said yes." Her lower lip began to quiver.
"Dorothy," Laura said gently, rounding the desk to kneel beside her chair. She rubbed her hand across the girl's back. Her bones stuck through the jersey. "You've done a great job. Nobody expects you to do any more than you've been doing. Even Mr. Gray doesn't have a clue what's wrong."
Dorothy's chin was tucked into her chest. "Don't be so sure," she whispered.
Laura took her hand from the girl's back. "What do you mean?"
Dorothy sniffed and straightened. Again she glanced at the open door. "Nothing," she said, not looking Laura in the eye.
"You think Mr. Gray knows what's going on, and he's not telling us?"
"Mr. Gray always knows what's going on!" she snapped, her teeth clenched. "Haven't you figured that out already?" Dorothy looked at the door for a t
hird time.
Laura followed the girl eyes to the empty doorway. "There's something you're not telling me," she said quietly.
"Laura, you can't tell anybody, okay?" Dorothy whispered, and Laura nodded. The young girl leaned forward and spoke urgently, with fear evident in her voice. "You want to know what I think is happening? It's a pandemic. A plague that started out in the computer and spread to the robots. It's communicable through one of the normal data ports like the tap the robots make into the computer's world model. That's why we can't kill it with the computer's antiviral programs. As soon as the virus is swept from the computer, it gets infected again by a robot when the data link is established. The clipped versions of the antiviral programs in the robots' mini-nets just aren't capable enough to kill the spores of the virus that they carry."
"Well, if you're right, what's going to happen?"
Dorothy looked ashen. Her voice was distant and weak, she spoke in a monotone. "The computer and the robots are going to get sicker and sicker. Their behavior is going to become more erratic. Then, when the delirium sets in… all hell's going to break loose."
Laura had to swallow before she could speak with any confidence in how she would sound. "Dorothy, if that's what you think's happening, why don't you tell Mr. Gray?"
The girl looked up at Laura. "I did." She swallowed hard — rushing to continue before the effort was complete. "He listened to me without saying a word or asking a single question!" She drifted off again, lost in the retelling. "Then he looked at me — you know, really looked right at me the way he does — and said, 'That's very good work, Dorothy. I can't tell you how proud I am of you. Now, I don't want you ever to breathe a word of this to anybody.'" The girl looked up at Laura — suddenly alarmed. "Please don't tell anybody! You promise?" Laura assured her she wouldn't tell, and Dorothy sank again into her morass of worry. "It's a pandemic," she muttered.
"It's the end… the end of everything."
Dorothy's fears swirled in Laura's mind as she returned to her desk.
Society of the Mind Page 38