'I'm afraid there has been some misunderstanding. I'm not the one in need of your counseling, Dr. Aldridge.'
She shook her head and shrugged, then swiped away the wisp of hair that had fallen loose across her cheek. 'Who is it, then?' Gray had followed the movements of her hand as if studying her. He now stood there, staring at her intently. The smile faded.
'Mr. Gray?'
He turned away, and she waited as the last drop of humor drained from the man.
'Who is my patient, Mr. Gray?' she pressed, his behavior disconcerting.
Gray straightened, and as if with effort faced her full-on. 'It's the computer,' he said, his eyes tracing the line of her hair before darting away.
9
'Computer center, please,' Gray said as he settled into the seat beside Laura in the front of the driverless car.
'You can just, like, talk to it?' Laura asked, fumbling with her seatbelt.
'Just tell it where you want to go,' he answered as if it were the most mundane feature of his island world. The moment Laura's buckle clacked together, the car began its acceleration. 'Voice recognition and synthesis are consumer functions, and they require a surprisingly large amount of processing capacity. But the computer is able to parse sound waves accurately enough to recognize rudimentary commands if spoken clearly and in English.' The car picked up speed as it headed out of the courtyard and turned left at the gate.
Laura sat in what would have been the driver's seat of an American car. Her pulse quickened in time with the increasing speed of the vehicle, and she gasped and grabbed the empty dashboard as it sped into the black opening of the tunnel. She leaned toward Gray to peer around the gentle curve for the approaching head lamps with which — she imagined — they would at any moment collide.
'It's okay,' Gray said quietly. The gentle tone of his voice — the intimacy it suggested — drew her gaze to his. Their faces were close and Laura shrunk back into her seat. 'We've never, not even once had an accident with these cars. Never.'
Laura tried to relax, but she could barely avoid cringing again when they burst from the tunnel. Her heart thumped against her ribcage, and she was alert now to two things — the increasing speed of the car as they began their descent from the mountain and the physical proximity of Gray.
'We've… had some problems. With the computer.' Laura was too distracted by her fear of the unknown technology to which her life was now entrusted to concentrate fully on what he was saying. 'It's been experiencing unexplained errors for months now. The rate of failure has been growing… exponentially. The way things are going, in a week, maybe less…'
Laura was unable to pry her eyes off the streaking blur of the jungle's edge, which was illuminated in the narrow beams of the headlights, but she managed to ask, 'In a week, what?'
'The computer is the center of everything we do. Not just on this island, but worldwide. From that satellite coverage pattern I was describing to you earlier to a hundred and fifty million accounts, each of which can log pay- per-view requests, do on-line shopping or banking, answer polls, call plays for high school football teams, download software, play video games, send V-mail, or take advantage of any of the other interactive services we offer. And that's only a small fraction of what we have the computer doing.'
The car flew downhill at what had to be close to a hundred miles per hour, veering smoothly one way or the other at forks in the road that were widened and banked like a concrete bobsled course. Laura was on edge. She had no means of guessing which way the driverless vehicle would turn, and the result was a constant fear of impending demise.
'We use the computer, of course,' Gray continued, completely unconcerned, 'for our manufacturing. We've been able to build what you see here because the productivity of the fifteen hundred workers on this island is phenomenal. Productivity is a function of capital investment, and I've invested heavily in the island's infrastructure.'
Buildings of various sizes and shapes but no discernible purpose flew by in the darkness, but Laura kept her eyes peeled out of the windshield — straight ahead along the road down which they hurtled.
Her ears popped, and the backs of her hands hurt from her grip on the armrests. 'The gross product of this island is greater than that of a majority of the members of the United Nations. Mile-per-square-mile and man-for- man, this is the most productive place on the face of the planet. The most productive place in the history of the planet, for that matter.'
'What?' Laura asked distractedly, taking her eyes briefly off the road to glance at Gray as he sat there — supremely confident and relaxed in his seat.
'We produce products here every year whose value on the open market, if they were available for sale, would be in the hundreds of billions. Productivity per worker is a deceptive statistic, of course. With such a high degree of automation, it's losing its meaning. A lot of things are losing their meanings,' he mumbled.
Laura was beginning to calm down — slightly. They had yet to pass another vehicle. Maybe there were only one or two cars on these special roads. Maybe the driverless cars were only for Gray and his top henchmen. That comforting thought was ripped from her when in a blur and a brief buffeting of disturbed air first one, and then several cars identical to theirs rocketed by. Laura noticed that the previously sloppy driving of their vehicle had changed. It had slowed, and they hugged the right-hand side of the road as did the cars they passed headed in the opposite direction. It was all under control, Laura realized. Under the control of the computer. But hadn't Gray said the computer was malfunctioning? She thought.
Laura heaved a deep sigh — exhausted by the return of her anxiety.
Gray had fallen silent — his eyes, reflected in the dark window, looking off into the distance.
'I'm sorry, what did you say?' Laura asked.
'I said a lot of things are losing their meanings.'
She turned to him. From the tone of his voice, it appeared, all was not well in the Workers' Paradise. They continued down the mountain in silence.
When the car entered the outskirts of the Village, it slowed to more responsible speeds. 'Mr. Gray,' Laura said, rolling her [unclear] shoulders and flexing her stiff hands, 'you still haven't explained how I can help you with a computer. I'm afraid there might have been some misunderstanding. I'm a psychologist. If someone on your staff has misinformed you about my credentials, I think it would be appropriate for me to return my fee and—'
'The computer is suffering from depression,' Gray interrupted, turning from the window to meet her stare and hold it. 'At least, that's what it says. Chronic depression.'
After letting what he'd said sink in, Laura expelled a short huff that would have been a laugh but for her inability to muster a smile to go along with it. 'You've gotta be kidding.'
He not only didn't look as though he were kidding, he looked pained. His eyes — the same eyes as in the newspaper photo from his childhood — expressed sadness as conspicuously as any emotion could be conveyed without words.
Laura's head spun with the absurdity of the suggestion. Her eyes drifted off, reporting the sights of Village life to a mind that was lost deep in thought. Despite the absence of any traffic ahead, the car pulled to a full stop at an intersection. The streets of the Village were laid out in a grid like any normal town's. Their driverless car, however, and others like it that they passed seemed to navigate them with the same ease that they handled the banked and gently forking high-speed roads crisscrossing the island.
'What I have built here, Dr. Aldridge, is the first-ever sixth-generation computer. Do you know what that means?'
Laura shrugged, then shook her head. Her attention was drawn to a lone statue on her left, and then to the long boulevard which the statue dominated. The broad street with its grassy median descended gently through the center of the Village away from the mountain. The car turned right onto the boulevard, and Gray craned his neck to look out the clear Plexiglas windshield at the rear. Laura, however, was enthralled with the sights of the bustling Village ahead.
