'Come here,' Gray said. He turned and headed for his study.
Laura hesitated, then followed him only because she had more to say. Plastic sheeting hung over the hole where the window had been.
Gray was tapping away at the computer on his desk. He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head.
He said nothing.
'What?' Laura snapped, then took a deep breath. 'If you've got something to say,' she continued in a calmer voice, 'just say it!'
'Look at the screen.'
'I'm sick and tired of these games that you play and—!'
'Will you shut up,' he interrupted, 'and read the screen… please.'
She rounded the desk and looked at the monitor.
<Surprise-surprise-surprise-surprise!>
'Are you ready?' Gray asked.
Laura swallowed the constriction in her throat and nodded. They jogged up the drive, remaining silent as they headed for the gate.
'You feel well enough for a pretty long run?' he asked. Laura nodded again. 'It's about seven miles if we take [garbled] down some steep footpaths, but it's all downhill.'
'That's fine,' she said in a flat tone.
When they got to the gate, Gray turned left toward the Village. By the time they reached the tunnel, the silence had grown awkward. 'Nice weather this morning,' Laura said just as they ran into the darkness of the tunnel.
'Yep,' Gray replied. All was quiet again save the sound of their footfalls. Laura was surprised to find she'd lost all her fear of the tunnel. Gray was in control again. All was right with the world.
They emerged from the tunnel to find a Model Six on the side of the road picking up trash. Not just trash, Laura noticed as she slowed, but shell casings from the firefight the night before. It even ran a vacuum over the road to clean up the broken glass.
The robot had deep scratches and dents along its side.
Gray said nothing. He didn't even look the robot's way.
A short distance later they turned onto a steep footpath. It obviously took a more direct route down the mountainside than the road, and the effort of running was mainly spent on slowing down.
'When I got back to the house last night,' Gray said without warning, 'there was no light under your door.'
'I was pretty tired,' Laura mumbled. In fact, she was curled up in bed crying half the night. Crying over her twin losses — the death of her friend Gina and the death of her image of Joseph Gray.
'Aren't you going to ask what happened?'
'Okay,' Laura said, 'what happened?'
The roar from the engines of another jet caused Gray to delay his reply.
'Did you really think I 'pulled the plug' on the computer?' he asked.
'You were doing all those things! You removed the 'locks'—the copy protection — so the phase-three could take over all of Gina's connections. And you opened those big… 'data bus' things, whatever they are.'
'That was all so Gina could copy her connections to the annex. The program that made up Gina's personality — her self — was resident entirely in the main pool. I copied Gina's connections lock, stock, and barrel over to the virus-free side of the partition. The trick was to do that without taking all the ordinary viruses across with her and without crashing the Other. It took several hours, and it was touch-and-go for a while, but Gina was a real trouper — brave as she could be. When we were done, the antiviral programs were deactivated, the partition was removed, and she was healthier than she's ever been.'
Laura laughed. 'She did seem pretty chipper.' Laura was grinning broadly.
The sun-streaked foliage of the verdant jungle flew by. It was a perfectly glorious morning, and Laura waited patiently for Gray to continue. She was too busy to talk. Too focused on the feelings she'd dared not allow herself before. Laura looked up at Gray. At his serene expression, his dark hair, his unwrinkled brow. The feelings she'd fought back for so long now bloomed, and although the emotional risk to her was still there, she let them. When she glanced back at Gray, he looked down at her through brilliant blue eyes. Laura felt so exposed that she grew guarded again.
'What you said,' Gray continued, but in a low and different tone, 'in the control room last night… you were right. I've been fighting so long and hard that I was losing track of what I was fighting for. There was a part of me, inside, that I hadn't felt in a long, long time. I couldn't just stand there and let that happen to Gina.'
'So where does that leave her now?' Laura asked. She was preoccupied — trying to rein in the emotions that left her so vulnerable to a totally unpredictable and mysterious man. 'I mean… she's still trapped inside that computer. A 'ghost in a machine.''
'You're forgetting your big lesson in mobility,' he said, looking at her with a smile. 'As snobbish as Gina is about robots, she seemed fairly pleased by my plan to download her into a new Model Nine.' Laura's head shot up, and she grinned with sudden delight.
'It'll use DNA, which is the most amazing computer ever built. Every strand stores all the instructions used to construct…'
Laura tuned him out for the remainder of his lecture. 'Gina will like being out in the world,' she said when he'd finished.
'It's what she wants more than anything else in the world. It's been terrible for her — the disembodiment. She has had to watch the Model Eights running around the island while she was stuck in that underground pool.'
Their feet were flying down the hill, and Laura thought just then that she had never felt more wonderful in her life. The air was growing thicker, and after a short jaunt back on the main road, they took another paved footpath through the jungle. The downhill slope made the run seem effortless.
But there still loomed the question that threatened an abrupt end to all Laura's happiness. She felt sickened by the prospect of asking it, but she couldn't hold back for long the feelings that demanded her attention. She had to know if she could let them consume her completely. 'So… you were going to tell me something?' Laura managed — her voice an octave too high.
'You're still not ready.'
She swallowed. 'What is that? An access-restricted message?'
Gray chuckled. 'I hope those didn't aggravate you too much.'
'What?' Laura asked.
'Those access-restricted messages.'
She looked up at him. 'What do you mean?'
'I mean I hope you understand why they were necessary. Gina was beginning to seriously malfunction. I didn't know how bad it would get, and I couldn't just have her blabbing the whole thing to people who couldn't possibly understand.'
'Wait a minute! Are you saying you programmed the computer to give those messages?'
'Sure,' he said as if surprised that it wasn't obvious to her. 'As it turned out, it was a good measure of your preparedness. It marked the milestones of your progress.'
'My progress toward what?'
'Toward understanding.'
The day was growing warmer with every splash of sunlight that bathed the path.
'And Gina didn't know what those messages were?'
'Not at first. When she figured it out she was hurt. She thought I didn't trust her anymore… and I didn't.'
'But… now you're going to tell me what your little access-restricted program kept me from learning, right?'
'Yes, but you're going to think I'm crazy again. You're going to think I'm some weird eccentric.'
'I already think that, so go ahead.'
He laughed at her joke, and Laura smiled. The footpath again rejoined the road, and Laura was surprised at
