David weakly smiled, “Sure”
“Decaffeinated Constant Comment?”
David said, “Sounds perfect.”
Phyllis said with a weak smile, “I know five sugars.” Phyllis went into her bedroom and changed before the kettle whistled. Phyllis was wearing a bathrobe and had taken off her wig, makeup, and eyelashes.
After the tea steeped, they sat by the kitchen table.
They quietly sipped the tea. David still was frowning; he broke the silence, “What do you want me to do?” His voice cracked.
“I think being friends doesn’t work for us anymore.”
David’s frown increased, he looked down. “I’ll leave college. It was a mistake anyway.”
Phyllis took his face into her cupped hands and moved it up to look into her eyes, “I think we need to open up, at least to one another. I’ll show you mine, and you show me yours.” David looked confused.
“Never mind, I keep on forgetting that you never hung around the schoolyards. There are parts of you so unbelievably innocent. I still get shocked talking to you. I’ll start. My father was in the mob. At first, my mother pretended not to know, but she knew. Then, when I was twelve, I heard mom and dad fighting about it. The danger, the wrongness, how he could be killed any day by a rival family or arrested and go to jail – permanently. She would say that if anything happened to him, she and I would be left alone. Did he want his daughter to grow up like that? I wasn’t supposed to hear them, but I did. Then my mother would sleep on the couch, many a night. When I was fourteen they weren’t sleeping together at all. He started staying out late at nights. Then he didn’t come home a night or two a week. Then he stopped coming home entirely. When I was fifteen, I found out that he had a girlfriend on the side. … I hated him for breaking up the family. I despised my mother for driving him away. I got even with my parents. I got involved with boys, drinking, and drugs; I wouldn’t come home at all. My poor mother watched the entire family disintegrate around her. My mom told my dad about my boyfriends and drinking. He shouted and yelled. I finally shut him up by saying, ‘Are you going to snuff all my boyfriends – executioner style, for doing exactly what you’re doing?’ He was devastated. He raised his hand and started to slap my face and the way he was trembling, he was going to do it hard. I leaned my head forward to make it easier while staring into his eyes. He stopped. He just stood there with nothing to say. I left and stayed the night at a boyfriend’s place. I blamed and hated my parents for making my life miserable.
“One time he tried to explain that he wouldn’t /couldn’t leave our family. I wouldn’t hear of it. And then the accident. No, it wasn’t an accident. It was some stupid son of a rival capo. The kid had an IQ of 70, but he was trying to get his father to think he was a man. He found my father’s address and rigged the bomb for the car in the carport. The son-of-a-bitch never thought that my father hadn’t been home for the last year and a half.
“One day I had my mother, who I hated, and then she was gone. She pushed my father to leave the Mafia because of me. It was my fault. She never realized that I still loved her. I never told her.” Phyllis started to cry. “I never told her I loved her. She died thinking I hated her. She died thinking she was abandoned and hated by her husband and her daughter.”
Phyllis cried, then resumed, “It was strange, when I next saw my dad; I screamed at him and started to hit his chest ‘You did this.’ He stood there and said ‘Yes.’ That was it. He said in a quiet voice, ‘Yes’. He started crying, and crying and crying. I never saw him like that before. He never cried before. We cried together. He moved back into the house. He never mentioned his girlfriend. I don’t know if he ever saw her again. Then he told me that he asked mom to go to marital therapy together. The mob had its own psychotherapists. They were to have an appointment a week after she was murdered. Mob psychotherapists, I never thought about that. Well, we became closer than ever before. The son-of-a-bitch, who killed my mother, was eventually killed. I don’t even know the details, except it wasn’t by my dad’s capo. Like I said, that mother-killing asshole was too stupid to live, even with his father’s protection.
“My dad tried to speak to his capo about revenge. But the asshole, said that Murray was too good for his dead ex-wife. Murray needed to have a nice Italian wife. My mother was Irish. The capo said that my mother worked; a good wife doesn’t work. A wife needs to shut-up and cook dinners. Be a good, quiet, Italian wife. Like I said, the capo was a real asshole.
“Dad didn’t say anything more to the capo. He knew that a bomb which could my mom could just as easily kill him or me. He went to the Feds. He made a deal. Protection for him and me, new faces, new names, and new identities. They would pay for my college and get dad started in a Witness Protection job. In turn, my dad would bring down the entire mafia family. The capo, somehow got off Scott-free, but dad was able to put four of the lieutenants in jail, for a very long time.
“I had some plastic surgery done. I never liked my nose or cheeks.
“I was always interested in computers and electronics, so I went to school in Carnegie Mellon. It was a great school, but too close to Phili. As I was going to class one day, I saw two older men who looked grossly out of place. They looked like mafia. They were looking for someone. I left immediately. I checked my car before I entered it. I didn’t even pack a bag. I stayed with my dad. I slept on the couch that night. I think he gave me his only blanket.
“The Feds got me into this school after more plastic surgery. I’ve been hiding here for the last four years. I even stopped checking my car out every time I entered it. I started again last week.”
“Okay, your turn.”
David had been holding her hands throughout her monologue. He made a half smile, “Well on Stardate 47410.3 Dr. Noonian Soon”
Phyllis freed her hand and gave David a stupid slap, across the back of his head, “Stop that, I’m serious.”
“My life is much less colorful than yours. My real name is David Klein. My father is a medical doctor and a researcher. During his post-doc he found a way to get a carbon nanotube to conduct weak electrical current from a single firing neuron. He then made a blanket of these nanotubes which he put on the brain of a lab rat. The matrix was composed of these nanotubes in various lengths, some gigantic in their nano-way. The tubes could be read using passive filaments. Well, at first he was content to look at the reading from the rats he used this matrix on. But one day, he noticed that there was a slight feedback from one of the filaments, so trivial an output that few would notice it, but the animal kept doing some behavior over and over. Dad hooked the rat up and soon there was two-way interaction between the computer and the rat.
“Dad doesn’t talk about mom at all. But she was a computer science, geek type, who hung around the labs as a research assistant. She was soon involved in writing code to allow the rat to do things. They went to larger animals. They got married, yadda-yadda-yadda, and in a year and a half my mother was pregnant with me. During this time, the research improved. They were able to integrate a new-borne chimpanzee with the computer. It was a success, an unparalleled success. The ape talked to him and mom.
“My dad had taken a psychology classes in human intelligence. He became convinced that intelligence was a set of linked operations. Memory is storage – like on a computer hard disk; knowledge is the linking of various locations, with a verification phase; creativity is a process of linking of random facts or characteristics with other unique locations then evaluating if the link is interesting or useful. You see, dad thought that if he could link a brain with a computer the next stage in human evolution would be reached. He convinced mom to do it with her unborn son, as they had done with a chimpanzee. Shortly after I was born, with the bones in my scalp un-fused, like all newborns, they inserted the nanotubes matrix on top of my brain, connected the computer and …
&nbs
p; “Nothing. I laid there. They felt that the puny baby needed time to interface with the computer, so they waited. This was illegal research, no institutional review board, no oversight, no data review committees, nothing. So, both mom and dad kept quiet about it. To any external viewer, I was catatonic. Mom got more and more depressed, finally when I was two and a half years old she wrote a note and ended it. After the funeral, dad left the university. He did part-time work, while an illegal alien woman took care of me during the day or evening. Dad tried to help me by having software added to do various things. He noticed that I made virtual pictures, line graphs actually. He interacted with me using them. Then he made them more complex. He said that I was able to increase the complexity. Then I made my own subroutines. Initially I did it with his help, then without. It wasn’t until I was almost four that I first ‘woke up’. I made up for the lost time. Dad programmed a picture of an apple with the sound of the word ‘apple,’ and he had the phonetic version of the word linked to my vocal apparatus, and then he hit first one, then the others, then put the apple in my mouth. A one-to-one-to-one computer linkage. He had an entire dictionary uploaded. I went from a zero word vocabulary to a 200,000 word vocabulary in two weeks. It was easy to include other languages as well, all other spoken and written languages. He did something like that for moving my hands, then feet. He developed a crude movement subroutine for moving. I was standing, then walking, then running, and jumping in a month.
“Dad kept on moving to different states. Initially we moved to avoid the Division of Youth and Family Services, then avoiding anyone. I went to public school for an entire day. A school psychologist gave me an intelligence exam, which I aced. I scared her shitless. We moved that night. I’ve been home schooled and working from home since then. I eventually had a few selfish inventions. Things I needed, that were better than anything else out there. I’m the lead scientist, developer, production supervisor, true CFO and president of CompuHead Inc. I’m sure you’ve heard of them. I also have a nifty search engine. I’m also starting to get into energy production. Except for that school psychologist at 6, I talked to my first female when I arrived on campus. The only other thing is that dad thought I should interact with people more, to learn ‘Wisdom’. In that area I suck, so he sent me to college. What a stupid failure that turned out to be. He was right, I do suck at people.”
Phyllis wiped her eyes. “What about love?”
David turned red, started to turn away, but stopped and faced Phyllis, “Just you and Andrea.”
“Uh huh, and she only kissed you, you hardly ever kissed her?”
David turned beet red, “Yes.”
“I’m tired of having sex with you. Get undressed; I want to make love with you.”
David turned to get a condom, but Phyllis stopped him. “I don’t think we need that anymore.”
“But.”
“I’m on the pill, silly.”
They went to her bed.
David started to get onto his back; Phyllis preferred to be on top. However, today she lay down next to him on her side, facing him, slowly caressed his face, tracing his ears, his nose, and his chin. Then she slowly moved her hands down his sides lightly. All the while, she was looking deeply into his eyes.
As they made love, it was slow and deep. She had both arms around his chest and was looking straight up into his eyes. As he was thrusting faster and appeared ready to come, Phyllis said, “David Smith-Klein, I love you. If I’m going to hide or face the world daring death, I want you as my best friend.”
David rolled over and quickly got hard again. Phyllis smiled and looked at it, “I always wanted to ask, is that another computer enhancement too?”
David smiled, “It’s controlled by up here,” he pointed to his head then to his computer “which means down here”.
Phyllis laughed, “They never mentioned that in neither Robocop I nor II.”
Phyllis came while David kissed her breasts and took deep slow thrusts. Before she came he said, “Phyllis/Ellen/Debra Marks/Neuman/Martini, I love you. If I’m going to hide or face the world daring death, I want you as my best friend.”
YEAR 17.61 DON’T WORRY, DAD’S BARK IS WORSE THAN HIS BITE
They woke at 10 AM. Phyllis on realizing the time woke David up. “David, I just realized that you probably need to walk Hilda. It’s late.”
David smiled and kissed her, “No, she’s already gone. She didn’t feel like going out today so she used the bathroom.”
“Won’t Charlie notice?”
“Of course not. She flushed.”
“What, you mean, she’s not being mentally commanded by you?”
“No silly, she isn’t my servant, but a companion. She sees her purpose in life to be a watchdog. Somehow you can’t beat genetics.”
“Then she must be clawing the walls now, not knowing where you are.”
“Oh she knows where I am, and what I’m doing, at all times.”
“You mean she’s linked to you?”
“Yes, as long as I’m near any computer’s WiFi port, or cell phone satellite receiver.”
“Is she as smart as you?”
“Well no. Ahhh, she’s completely smart for a dog. If I were ever playing paint ball in the woods with her, I’d be dead 11 billion times to one. In terms of guarding, there’s no breaching her defenses. But she only wants to speak modern languages, and her mechanical aptitude is on par with a 10 year old.”
“You said she speaks modern languages, you mean she actually understands English?”
“Of course, perfectly. And French, Chinese, Hungarian, Swahili, and others, but I have to warn you, she does have an accent.”
“Now you’re putting me on.”
“Never. When she was a puppy, she found out that her breed is a German Sheppard so she speaks with a German accent. She can turn it off if she wanted to, I suppose, but it’s her way of being unique. She even convinced Hansel, the family’s other enhanced dog to have a German accent too. Although Hansel’s accent is more Prussian. Oh, I asked her to join us, I hope you don’t mind. She bears a present. She’ll be here in a few minutes, so can you open the downstairs door? I keep putting off making her a dormitory skeleton key.”
“You have a skeleton key? Why aren’t I surprised?”
They quickly got dressed and went downstairs. Hilda was already waiting and holding a small envelope in her mouth. The three went upstairs. David looked expectantly at Phyllis, “Open it.”
Inside the envelope was a necklace and an odd assemblage of plastic. The latter was part flesh colored and part clear. The necklace was golden, oval, with a series of gem-like studs in a tasteful design, each the size of a nickel. The studs went all the way around the necklace. The studs were obviously made of the same type of material as David’s necklace.
“Thank you, it’s a beautiful necklace.”
David smiled, “Its gold so it can make better contact with your skin, and the beads are diamonds.”
“Yeah, riiight a dozen ¾ inch smooth, round diamonds. A nice present. Found it in the Cracker-jack box did ya?”
David smiled. Phyllis looked at the plastic nest of wires.
“What is it?”
“It’s a special phone-like thing. Put the necklace on.”
Phyllis put the necklace on and looked carefully at second piece, the splay of plastic ‘wires’. The earpiece of the phone was made of a flesh colored piece of plastic, about 1½” long with a curved shape. It had the thickness of three pieces of thin spaghetti. The top tapered to a clear plastic tube. The clear plastic tube split into a straight rigid tube and a soft piece to fit into the ear. The ear canal part ended in a ring almost at the end. The ring looked like a miniature bicycle wheel with spokes anchoring the central tube. The central tube ended ¼” into a rounded nub.
“What do I do with it?”
“Put it ar
ound your ear and the nub inside your ear.”
Phyllis put the flesh colored part behind her right ear. It fit perfectly around it. The straight clear tube pointed forward and ended in the middle of her temple. It was practically invisible against her hair. The ring fit snugly inside her ear with the nub close to her eardrum. She got up and walked into the bathroom. In the mirror she could barely notice the phone unit. Phyllis returned to the kitchenette.
David: Can you hear me?
David’s mouth did not move. Phyllis said, “Yes, clearly. It tickles.”
David: You’ll get used to its presence in your ear in a little bit. Try to talk sub-vocally.
Whispering Phyllis said, “Like this?”
David: Now try it without your voice.
Phyllis forced herself to mouth the words.
Phyllis: Like this?
David: Almost perfect. You don’t need to try so hard. Now we can always talk without anyone else hearing us.
Phyllis: How can you hear me?
David: The necklace is monitoring your throat muscles, but more surprises about that later. Now turn on your laptop.
She complied. After it booted, a strange window appeared. It was a picture of the computer. As Phyllis moved her head, the image moved. Phyllis exclaimed, “you mean it sees through the tube?”
“Yup and hears too. But that’s not all.” The picture suddenly shifted to behind her. As Phyllis shifted her head, the image also shifted.
“The tube and the necklace?”
David nodded, “Yup – eyes in the back of your head.”
The picture shifted to a black and white image from a lower prospective. Phyllis looked down at Hilda, “Hilda?”
“Ja Fraülein Phyllis. I bin at you looking.”
Phyllis addressed the dog, “Does she, I mean, do you have more than one camera too?”
“Ja five.” The prospective suddenly changed to a view of the ceiling, and various other angles.
David interrupted, “I also have a few, we placed more around our dormitories, and we took the liberty of placing a couple in your car.
The picture shifted to a wide-angle view of the front of the car, then the back of the car. It was obvious that a camera was near the rear seat headrest. The scene shifted to under the car facing forward and back.
The Infinite when it was Two Digits Old Page 9