Society of the Mind

doesn't it?' Laura shrugged. 'Think about it,' Gray repeated. He was serious. Laura had no ready reply.

'If our objective is to keep pace with these things,' he said, waving his hand across the field at the robots, 'then why would we start giving up pieces of ourselves? What would be left when you carried it to its logical end? In order to gain an advantage in competing for a factory job you might replace your legs with bionic legs. But what's to prevent your competition from also strapping on bionic arms? Plus, you wouldn't want to be roaming around an industrial furnace with robotic arms and legs but a torso made of flesh. At some point biological reproduction would cease. The bionic hybrids would be sterile. And we might live two thousand years, but we wouldn't remember much. The human brain can't remember anything but memories of its memories for much over five years. So what's the last step in that process, Laura?' She shook her head and shrugged, looking up at him for the answer. But he refused to supply it, waiting instead for her to think.

'I don't know,' she said. 'Replace the brain with a more capable model?'

'Exactly!'

Laura smiled like a pupil on pleasing her teacher. She quickly caught herself, however, when she realized how insane the ideas were.

They were terrifying, and she had no idea why she was allowing herself to be taken in by them.

They walked on in silence past another row of Model Sevens — standing poised and ready for battle. 'It was just an idea,' she mumbled, wondering why her offhand suggestion about bionics would… Gray spun her around and grabbed her arms, studying her with blazing eyes. He focused on her as if she had just said the most important thing in the world. He pulled Laura toward him, his eyes remaining fixed on hers. Their faces close. His mouth descending toward her lips — pausing, hovering, almost touching. Laura drew in breath. Air no longer seemed important. An electric fire set her skin tingling, spreading from the unyielding pressure where their bodies met.

And then the moment was over. Gray pulled away, and the night air rushed in to fill the place where the warmth had been. Slowly he walked away.

It took Laura a moment to orient herself. 'Hey!' she called out. 'What the…' Her voice and anger rose. 'Did I just miss something here?' He didn't answer, and she ran after him. 'Hel-l-o-o-o?'

Gray stopped and looked at his watch. 'We'd better get back.'

'You… you can't just…!' Just what? 'You can't just take me on some mind-blowing tour of your twisted future and then leave me lying around in little pieces like… like one of your machines!'

Laura wanted to keep talking, but she didn't know what she would say next. She knew only the true cause of her upset. She yearned for the feel of him — for the crush of his body against hers.

Laura closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. 'Okay,' she continued, her voice level. 'Look, Joseph. We've gone from — what? — a million years ago when we were all just one big happy ape family, to strapping on bionic legs to compete in the workplace. But this is just undergraduate brainstorming crap, right?'

Gray smiled inexplicably. 'Did I ever tell you that you're really fun to talk to?'

'What?'

'But we ought to be getting back,' he said, turning for the computer center.

'I'm not through yet!' Laura said in exasperation. She tried to match his apparent detachment but found herself hating him for the very behavior she attempted to emulate. 'Do you know how mad it makes everybody here when you don't tell them anything unless they've already figured it out for themselves? And then you humiliate them by saying you already knew what they had just discovered! Oh, and sometimes you just don't answer! I mean… Jesus! Do you realize how rude that is? To not even acknowledge that you heard a question?'

'We really ought to be getting back, Laura.'

'There! You see? You're doing it again!'

'Laura,' he nodded toward the jungle, 'the Model Eights are back.'

Her eyes shot over to the searchlights, which shone on the jungle wall. There was movement just beyond the branches. 'You're watching the opening battle of a war,' he said. 'It's the beginning, but the end is a long, long way away.'

'What are you saying, Joseph?' she pleaded. 'Please just tell me what you're talking about! What's the purpose of all these robots and spaceships and factories and computers?'

There! she thought. At least she'd asked. She looked up at him, and he looked at her.

To her great surprise, Gray answered. 'There is a day coming, Laura, when intelligent machines will roam the earth. They won't bring an end to war, because war is as natural a phenomenon as life itself. Those machines will, however, raise the stakes. As time marches on, advancements will redefine virtually every facet of our lives except one — the competition among all living things for survival. Life is violent and aggressive in defense of its ecological niche, Laura, or God anoints another species as the fittest.'

Laura's eyes were drawn to the armies poised on the brink of battle. It was sheer madness — what Gray was saying, what was about to happen right before her eyes. 'So,' she recapped in a tone of barely concealed incredulity, 'you're afraid that one day humans will fight machines in a contest for survival.'

Gray's eyes rose. He looked not at the battlefield around them, Laura thought, but at some far distant vision. 'No,' he said. 'What I'm afraid of is that one day machines will fight machines to determine the fittest.'

They took up positions behind the sandbags at the computer center entrance. On the long, silent walk across the lawn, Laura had managed to regain a modicum of composure. Gray and Laura looked out onto the field of the coming battle, and Laura felt closer to him than before.

They even stood closer together — so clearly inside each other's personal space that Laura felt a continuing intimacy.

Gray lowered the binoculars from his eyes, and Laura quickly looked away. She felt like an emotional basket case. She had opened herself up for his kiss, and he had left her dangling and feeling exposed. It was just one more thing about Gray's own species that he didn't understand. You don't hold someone in an embrace like that and then… do nothing.

Laura needed time alone to think things through. But there he was — nonchalant, distracted, composed. It was from his coolness and distance she took her cue. What the hell have I been thinking? Laura chided herself. Look at him! She cleared her throat and said, in a businesslike tone, 'The computer said you could terminate the Other if you wanted, she said you could do anything you wanted with your God-level key. Is that true?'

'Yes. There are no security firewalls at God-level access.'

Despite having asked the question, Laura only half listened to the answer he gave. She was overloaded — burned out. Her mind was so saturated she felt that every new idea simply beaded up on the surface — unabsorbed.

She looked at the soldiers around her, wondering how it had come to this. Hoblenz's men had dug fighting holes in the lawn. They manned jeeps with weapons mounted on top. There had to be fifty soldiers in Gray's army, all ready for war. But when she looked at the lines of Model Sixes still arriving in a long procession from the assembly building, she wondered which was Gray's true army — the humans, or the robots. And which robots — the Sixes and Sevens on one side, or the Eights on the other?

Laura looked back up at him. 'So if you can kill the Other, why don't you?'

'The Other is every bit as much a creation of mine as Gina. Who am I to choose which of the two survives?' Gray faced her. 'If you accept the concept of artificial life, you should understand that I can't kill off the Other to save Gina just because I like Gina more.'

'The hell you can't! Gina's alive, the Other isn't.'

'But you're wrong!' Gray shot back. 'They're both alive! Gina is more human because I made her that way. I employed thousands of people to spend time with her. Oh, sure, they verified conclusions that she drew. But you could never review all the conclusions that are drawn in constructing a human mind. Ten thousand, ten million checkers couldn't have done the job. I selected people from all walks of life, from all cultures, for the sole purpose of giving the computer contact with its own kind — with humans. That's the sole reason for the shell, for God's sake. The computer doesn't need the shell. It has a hundred different computer languages to interact with programmers and other computers. The shell gives the computer human language, because without human language it could never be human.'

'I got movement in the trees!' one of the soldiers called out, but Gray ignored him and the clacking sounds of weapons being readied for firing. Hoblenz's men raised long sinister tubes, rifles, and machineguns onto the