by Alan Brudner
"I can't even think in those terms. It isn't funny. Your life's worth more than any test."
"Of course, Dad. I just meant it hypothetically." His voice got lower, cracked. "Look, Mom died trying to save me. I'd never let her down by making her death a waste." He kissed me on the unscratched cheek. "Why don't you get some sleep? I have to go to the office early tomorrow. Stop thinking morbid thoughts. And remember, people like to shoot arrows at the king."
I clasped my son's hands tightly.
"You think he was ever involved in really bad stuff like his partner's murder, Sky?"
"You mean that old rumorazzi nonsense about Justin Webb?" Sky frowned and shook his head. "Don't believe every piece of tabloid crap you read, Dad. Avery's the easiest scapegoat around. He was miles away when it happened."
"Maybe. But is it true he got agitated when he found out you were hacking around in an effort to prove that?"
"Scarlett again, Dad. You have what I call Scarlett Fever."
"Is it?" I pointed at the fading red gash on his temple. "Looks nasty."
He nodded. "It's not because I tried to find the killer. It's how. I was hacking. Avery doesn't want one of his key employees to do something dumb like getting caught breaking and entering into somebody else's database. That's what hacking really is. Or cracking. Bad for the corporate image."
"So is throwing a box of diskettes."
"An accident, Dad. He just meant to push them off a shelf."
"Maybe. But I thought you computer guys do that hacking and cracking stuff all the time."
"Not the top people, Dad. Too risky. According to Avery, anyway. And I have to agree, with the big Congressional investigation looming, it wouldn't be a good time to get caught breaking into somebody's database."
I took a deep breath. I hoped my genius son was right, but my comfort level was about as high as my ankles.
"Did you find anything?" I asked. "When you hacked?"
"Not really." He didn't hesitate, and his voice sounded more even. "I didn't get too far. All I got was a name. Henry Driver. The police could never pin it on him. I found some old records that identified him as someone they spoke to. But they never made his name public."
"Henry Driver?"
"A drifter or something."
I looked deeply into my son's eyes. They studied me the way Eliza's used to.
"I just want your promise, Sky. That you won't do anything stupid."
"You have it."
"Scout's honor?"
"I always thought that was silly, Dad. I never was a scout."
I remained silent, motionless. When Sky was a child, a minute or so of quiet stillness was all it took to get him to ease up and give in. Not so now. He simply stood up and walked out of the room. Then I heard his bedroom door close and latch.
I wished I had a bottle of Dewar's, partly because I wanted to get smashed and partly to feel the emotional release of smashing it against a wall. Instead, I stared out the window at the large crescent that glowed white in the distance, a second moon in a sky that was black but starting to redden with the dawn. I wondered when the crescent would start tightening its grip like a claw around the weakened throat of my fragile existence. Or around my son's.
And I wondered just what I would do to stop it.
Chapter 18
"Welcome to the Cybronics campus," said the tour guide, standing in a disk-drive shaped doorway that led into Building Three, the third from the left in a horseshoe-shaped cluster of putty-colored buildings surrounding a sculpture garden. Having seen it all on 60 Minutes and in postcards, it seemed surreal when blown up to its actual dimensions. The tour guide was pony-tailed, mustached, puka-shelled, tie-dyed, bell-bottomed, looks that reminded me of David Crosby or Neil Young, I forget which. Except that he was cleaner than I imagined the rockers were, his skin sported a surfer's radiance, his features were sharp and symmetrical. Maybe a young Sonny Bono. His movements were a bit slow, his pronunciations deliberate, as if his voice had been fed through a synthesizer that transformed it into a southern drawl without the accent. Something about his expression seemed mechanical as well.
He handed me a white credit-card sized plastic card with Lightman, Clifford, and a series of numbers embossed across it.
"It's good only. For today," he said, his speech oddly broken. "You'll need it. To access. Certain areas. You can use it. At any Public Info. Terminal. You see." I glanced around and saw one a few feet away. It looked like an ATM.
"Great idea," I said, slipping the card into my shirt pocket.
"Of course," said the tour guide, smiling, straight pearly teeth reflecting a glimmer of the halogen glow from the ceiling. "You'll be with a group. Of four. Mr. Lightman. They're in. The waiting area. Please. Wait while I get them. And we'll all. Get going."
I looked around as he walked over to a glassed-in room. The plant was huge, and much of it was a wide open central space. Workers in white astronaut-style suits moved slowly about in several rooms that had walls of glass like the waiting room. Offices full of glowing computer monitors lined the perimeter.
"Dust," the tour guide said, suddenly behind me. I jumped.
"Sorry," he continued. "The suits and. The glass. Protect against dust. A hair, a little bit. Of. Skin. A drop. Of mucus. Anything as small as a. Micron. Can ruin. A perfectly good piece. Of software. Or hardware. Even a great one. Like. Me."
"You mean you're—" two of the guests blurted out simultaneously.
"A computer?" the tour guide asked. "A robot? If not here, where? If not now. When?"
"You're amazing!" one of the women said. She wore a crimson sweatshirt with a big "H" on the front and looked a bit beyond college age; maybe a grad student.
"If Manhattan were. A micron," the tour guide continued, seeming unfazed, "it would fit. On the head. Of a pin. We also have. Air filters. That can nail germs. That small." He smiled and the woman nodded back.
Our little group followed the tour guide past some workrooms, his arms and knees noticeably stiffer than ours as he shuffled along. We watched employees manipulate tiny items with robotized hands and fingers, which they controlled with computer mice and remote controls while staring at a magnifying monitor.
"The assembly area," the guide said. "These technicians are. The assembly line. Workers of today. As unskilled. As it gets. In this. Industry."
"How much do they make?" a man in a blue business suit with white sneakers asked.
"Fifty dollars," the guide said. "An hour."
"That's not too unskilled," the graduate student said.
"You should apply," said the guide. "We often need. More help. As we expand."
"I always see Cybronics on t.v., in the magazines," the other woman said in a shy mousy voice. "But I'm not sure exactly what this company is."
"At Cybronics, we make life worth living," droned the tour guide.
"Well, what does that mean, in terms of products?" asked the businessman in sneakers. "For instance, with IBM, we think of hardware. Intel makes chips. Microsoft makes operating systems and software. Just what does Cybronics specialize in?"
"The cutting. Edge," said the guide. "Improving upon. What's already out there. Hardware. Software. Chips. Browsers. The shell—that's the interface. Whatever it takes. To bring. A particular. Concept to life."
The other guests looked as puzzled as I felt.
The tour guide elaborated.
"We don't just start. With the idea. That we'll make hardware. Or software. Or microprocessors," he said. "That's how other. Manufacturers. Operate. At Cybronics, we think. Of a concept. Then we do whatever. It takes. To bring it. Into existence. In the cheapest. Most efficient. Most reliable manner. Isn't that right, Avery?"
"It is," chuckled the adolescent voice of Avery Kord. I didn't see him, or any speakers or cameras, either. His voice continued.
"I've been listening, and please allow me to answer you. We conceptualize first, then create. Think of people as cavemen who are tired of eating raw flesh
. We dream of cooked meat. Then we invent fire and the barbecue and the utensils to go with it. But if someone's already carved out that specialty, we consider ways to make it hotter or safer or easier to use. Some of our main areas include arts and entertainment, consumer electronics, databases, education, networks, news—not to mention professional software of all kinds, the net, television, travel. We're up there in all areas."
"But where are you yourself, Mr. Kord?" the grad student asked. "I mean physically, right now."
"I'm all around you," came the disembodied reply. "You're in my little playground, where I see all and hear all. But now I need to run to a meeting. So keep paying close attention to my electronic friend. Nice meeting you all!"
My brow furrowed as I looked at the tour guide. The Sonny Bono look-a-like shrugged and stared blankly. Just past him, I noticed a Public Info terminal. I scrambled up to it and inserted my card.
An ATM-like display quickly lit up and words appeared in white on blue:
How may I help you, Mr. Lightman? Touch one bar, please:
1. Provide more information about Cybronics.
2. Provide more information about Cybronics personnel.
3. Explain how a particular item works.
4. Location of the nearest convenience stop.
I touched bar number 2, and a new menu appeared:
1. How many employees does Cybronics have?
2. How diverse are we?
3. How educated is our work force?
4. What are our names?
5. How to apply for a position.
Not seeing anything specific about Kord, I pushed a fire-red icon labeled Exit. The screen went blank.
"I'm sure you'd. All like. Some lunch," the tour guide said as I rejoined the group.
"Actually, I'd like to visit my son," I said. "Schuyler Lightman."
The tour guide seemed to think for a moment, then said, "He's in. Special R&D. Up on Six."
I turned to walk to the elevators, but the guide quickly grabbed my arm with a vise-like grip.
"You can't go. Unescorted. But he has. Something planned. For you. After lunch." My arm was red when he let it go.
I don't remember either the food or the conversation, but both reminded me of cardboard. The mechanized Sonny Bono, of course, didn't eat. He was lucky.
After lunch, a rest stop and a few more glass-walled rooms, he left me in the custody of a lab-coated guard built like a bouncer. We walked into the elevator and turned toward the door. The guard pressed Six and stared straight ahead. We got out and walked past a row of offices lined with computer terminals. Then past a man who was gesturing in front of a full-length mirror and a wall of monitors, most of which were tracking the other guests on my tour and the downstairs surroundings. The man wore a white suit that stuck to his skin like scuba gear, with wires coming out of electrodes that were affixed to it at numerous places—the wrists, upper arms, shoulders, thighs, calves; similar, smaller wires were attached to large vinyl gloves on his hands and boots on his feet. The wires all led into a bank of computers attached to controls he was also working, along with several joysticks and buttons. A camera also seemed to be focused on his face; his expressions were duplicated in real time on a sma ll monitor screen—on an animated version of the tour guide's face. The man spoke into a microphone headset, and when I heard his familiar nasal voice and the odd. Way. He. Broke up. His sentences, it left me with no doubt that his bodily and facial movements and speech were being replicated by the tour guide downstairs. Sonny Bono wasn't a walking, talking, independently thinking robot at all, but a remote-controlled mannequin, a life-size marionette with a wired-up puppeteer.
The guard dropped me off at the Holography Laboratory. We didn't speak a word to one another in the two long minutes we were together. He pushed a green button outside the door and it slid open. I walked in and the door slid closed behind me.
The Holography Lab looked like many of the glassed-in rooms I had seen downstairs, full of monitors and terminals, but it also had some antique furnishings and a beautiful old Persian rug in its center.
"Pretty cool, huh, Dad?" Schuyler said, getting up from behind a terminal.
"The rug?"
"No. The company tour."
"It is, Sky. Especially when Avery Kord just drops in unexpectedly. By voice, I mean."
"He does that to employees, too. You never know when or where he'll turn up. Voice, or image, or in the flesh. But you get used to it."
"Sounds like Big Brother."
"It's okay, Dad. Trust me. Avery's great."
Especially when he's listening, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut and smiled instead.
"You like the tour guide, Dad?"
"He didn't eat much in the cafeteria."
Sky laughed. "I designed some of his circuits. Someday he'll be a fully automated computer, but for now we just have fun faking it. I've worn the control suit myself."
"Just like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz."
He walked back over to the terminal and sat on a stool in front of it. He banged out keystrokes faster than Elton John playing Pinball Wizard on the electric piano. Then he stood up again and walked over next to me on the rug.
"You came all the way out to Portland to celebrate Mom.ava, Dad."
"Right."
"So I thought Mom should be part of the celebration. Like I told you, the Mom.ava program's like a website. I can access it and bring her here."
Sky took my hand and led me off the rug, to a corner near the sliding door. He dimmed the lights slightly and took a remote control off of a rack on the wall. He hit a button and the rug rolled up, seemingly by itself, to reveal that it had been covering a small metal pod. An identical pod descended from the ceiling until it hung like a lighting fixture directly above its twin.
Sky pressed another button on the remote and a swirling kaleidoscope of laser lights shot from the top pod to the bottom one.
"What's the password, Dad?"
"The password?"
"To the Mom.ava program. The auditory receptors are waiting. I've got her programmed to respond only to your voice."
Newly metamorphosed butterflies flitted around in my stomach and goosebumps rose up on my skin.
"Shutterbug," I thought I said, but obviously in too mild a voice.
"What, Dad?"
"Shutterbug!" I repeated, louder, my emotions reliving what they had felt that night when I pulled out the diamond ring in the Mexican restaurant and asked Eliza to marry me.
She had hesitated back then, and I glared at her wide-eyed.
"What're you staring at?" she had said then, with a sly smile, before breaking into laughter because she knew what the answer would be.
"What're you staring at?" the hologram said now, and it was Eliza, life-size, three-dimensional, in the same old white cardigan and jeans she wore back then. And the ever-present pearls. She started laughing.
"Both of you, what? Do I look fat or something?"
I looked at Sky. He smiled back.
"How you feeling, Mom?" he asked the 3-D image of his mother, his tone as matter-of-fact as if she were merely getting over a cold.
"I feel pretty well, Sky," she replied, nodding. "Now are we here to celebrate, or what?"
"You got it, Mom." Schuyler walked over to a faded old globe and flipped open the top half. Out of the southern hemisphere came a bottle of wine, a can of Coke, three glasses and a corkscrew.
"Cliff, you do the honors," Eliza said. "Watching you open a bottle of wine will remind me of NYU."
I complied and poured three glasses. Sky winked as I bypassed the wine to fill his glass with Coke. I handed it to him, picked up my own glass and left Eliza's on the floor. The image of a glass identical to ours appeared in her hand, half-full, as if she had just taken it from me.
"To us," I said, and raised my glass.
"All of us," said Sky, raising his.
"The Lightmans," said Eliza. She polished off her wine before m
ine reached my lips.
"Nice bouquet," she said.
"You never drank that quickly, Lize," I said. "We didn't even clink."
"You're right," she said. "I guess I was excited." After a short pause, the image of her glass refilled halfway.
"One more toast," said Sky. "Of course, Mom, we can't really clink with you."
"To Avery Kord, who made this all possible," Eliza said. I wondered if she meant it or had said it because she thought Kord might be eavesdropping.
Sky reached over to clink with me. I didn't budge. Sky must have slipped, and he knocked over the third glass I had poured. The glass toppled and the wine splashed out over the black pod.
"Shit!" Eliza said, loudly, an electronic fizz in her voice, and suddenly her image looked charred before it began to smoke and then black out.
"Shit is right!" Sky said, his voice trembling as he fumbled with the remote control before hitting a few buttons. "I just shorted out the hologram projector!"
"How big a problem is it, Sky?"
"They'll fix it. It'll take a day or two. But now I'll have to explain it. Mom.ava's my own program. Not approved by Cybronics. You're not supposed to run unapproved software in the building."
"So you'll have to tell Avery Kord?"
He stared at the floor. "There are sensors in various strategic places to detect problems. So they'll know something happened up here. But Avery's pretty forgiving, Dad."
"What about Mom.ava?"
"I hope she's okay. But we didn't exit properly. We'll just have to try to boot her up somewhere else and keep our fingers crossed. In the meantime, I'd better make sure I didn't royally fuck the place up."
"Be careful, Sky," I said. He nodded and waved as the door slid open and another stonefaced guard appeared to escort me back to the elevator.
Chapter 19
I had just gotten settled in Sky's apartment when he called to tell me he'd be home in the middle of the night, if at all. He had to run more tests to be certain the accident in the Holography Lab didn't release any potential bugs into Cybronics' central computer systems. He told me to make myself comfortable, so I tried.