yourself, which is sort of the accepted method — then as far as the computer's concerned, it didn't happen. It's outside the computer model. If you live on this island, you learn to figure out where the gaps are. It's no big deal, really.'
'And you go to all that trouble just for security? Is Gray that much of a control freak?'
'Oh, no, no, no! It's not just security. The robots use that same world model, for example, to avoid running into things. Those Model Three cars whip down the roads so fast because they can see what's up ahead of them. They know if there's a Model Six crossing the road around the next bend. And a Six would know when to cross because they tap into that same world model and look both ways. That's the beauty of building and maintaining a complete world model. There are so many different uses for it.'
Laura couldn't help feeling ill at ease now that she knew they were being watched — constantly. Every movement recorded. She felt a stifling presence, an unblinking eye staring her way.
The unblinking eye of a disturbed presence, she remembered.
'So, Dr. Griffith, what do you think is wrong with the computer?'
Griffith shrugged yet again. 'We think maybe it's another virus. The computer is massively interconnected not only internally, but all over the world through the Web. We've had to put up with hackers, corporate espionage, and a whole lot of infections. One of 'em almost took the system down last year, as a matter of fact.'
'You mean an infection with an ordinary computer virus almost crashed that entire computer?' Laura asked.
Griffith shook his head. 'It was worse than an infection, it was a plague — the Hong Kong 1085. One of our field offices gave Georgi's operators a wrong telephone number, and the computer dialed up a bulletin board in Hong Kong instead of an onboard digital processor we'd leased. The computer wrote a program — a 'gopher'—and zapped it onto the bulletin board. The gopher reproduced itself about a million times and tore through the database in a couple of seconds. It sifted through everything — games, homemade porno stories, classified ads — and reported back using a zippered data stream before self-destructing. That's how the virus slipped through. When the report came back compressed, it went right through the firewall erected by the phase one to screen for viruses. Over the next couple of days, the computer got real sick. We almost had to shut it down to kill the damn bug.'
Laura had heard, of course, of computer viruses. They were now quite common news items. But she'd never heard of a plague.
'So what does it mean for the computer to get sick?' she asked.
'Just like for you or me, I suppose. My bet is that's one of the things you're here to find out.' Griffith cinched his belt up and jutted his jaw out. 'But you never kno-ow with the big cheese.' He drew the last words out in what sounded like an impersonation, but it was too poorly rendered to be recognizable.
Laura took a wild guess that Griffith had attempted to be witty, and she smiled up at him politely. 'Is that what everybody calls him? 'The big cheese'?'
'That bunch?' Griffith said in a disparaging tone, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder at the computer center. 'They're too uptight, man. They need to take it do-o- a [unclear].'
Laura's smile was genuine this time. Griffith smiled back at her, exuding total confidence in who he was. Now, when she looked at Griffith, she didn't see the bushy curls sticking out from the sides but not the top of his head. The crooked teeth and thick glasses and sideburns grown to enormous proportions were gone. Whoever he was — in his head — was different from what appeared on the surface.
They walked along through the quiet night, but her mind remained focused on the plague. 'Dr. Griffith…?' she began.
'Phil,' he interjected.
'Phil,' she repeated, 'and please call me Laura.'
'Me Phil,' Griffith said in a Caveman voice, touching his chest, 'you Laura.' He laughed and shook his head at the hilarity of his antics.
Laura's smile quickly grew stale, and she cleared her throat 'So, Phil, why did the computer even look through that bulletin board in Hong Kong? Surely it realized it had the wrong number Why didn't it just hang up?'
'Curiosity killed the cat. You see, with the exception of the little 'seed' program Mr. Gray installed to get the thing going, the computer's almost entirely self-taught. And there's only one way to motivate self-study, and that's to program it to be curious, which Margaret did with a vengeance.'
'You sure seem to minimize Mr. Gray's part in the effort,' Laura said — fishing.
'Oh! If I did that, please excuse me. Never does a career much good to talk down the boss. It's just that Mr. Gray's real genius is in robotics. The artificial intelligence side of it isn't really his bag.'
Gray, Laura thought, a genius at robotics? She'd been convinced it was Gray's work on neural networks, and not in mechanical engineering, that had achieved the breakthroughs evident on his island.
'Man,' Griffith continued, 'I remember how the computer used to talk your ears off, so to speak. But only on the shell. Most of my time is spent at lower-level languages, but I would occasionally get stumped and want to ask some questions. On the shell, you see, you can type things in plain English like, 'If the hydraulic drive connects to a linkage with four degrees of freedom but only three boundary constraints, can the control system generate a goal to prevent the mechanism from being underconstrained—'
Laura's eyes rose to him, a wry smile on her face. 'Plain English?' she asked.
Griffith just cocked his head — perplexed by her question. 'Or Japanese, or German, or French, or whatever you speak,' he said, misunderstanding. 'Anyway, halfway into your session, the computer would start asking 'Is that all you wanted to know?' or something like that. If you said, 'Yes,' then it'd say, 'Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?'' Griffith laughed. 'You could see it coming a mile away. And it would wear your fingers to the bone typing out your answers. Back then, you understand, it was socially immature. If you typed something like, 'Boy, look at the time. It's midnight already,' it would say, 'I show nothing on your calendar for midnight.''
Laura laughed and asked, 'So why didn't you just log off?'
'Well…' Griffith began, but then seemed to struggle to find the right words. 'You know, that wouldn't have been very… nice, would it?'
13
'Just don't look up,' Griffith said helpfully as Laura clung to the cool metal railing. They headed down the steps leading to the assembly building entrance, which — like its counterpart at the computer center — was sunk slightly below ground level. Laura had looked up at the sixteen-story wall that ran almost half a mile in either direction.
It was as if seeing the unexpected plane rising perpendicular to the earth caused her brain to question which was the true horizon. She'd almost instantly grown dizzy and faintly nauseated. 'That happens more often than you'd think,' Griffith said. 'Let's get inside. It'll be better in there.'
She edged her way down the steps, grasping the rail hand over hand and keeping her head bowed. Passing through a thick vault door, they entered yet another of the infernal 'dusters.' This time, however, she knew to hold on to her skirt. Again her hair lashed wildly at her face, but again the gale dissipated quickly.
'Maybe I should just shave my head,' Laura said as she raked the hair off her face.
Griffith seemed totally unbothered by the experience. 'Oh, look,' he said, pointing to a small black marble [missing] mounted on the wall beside the door. 'That's a wide-angle retinal chip. You'll see them all over the place.' He mugged for the camera, sticking his thumbs in his ears and his tongue from his mouth.
The inner door glided open, and the sound of activity echoed through the enclosed space ahead. She followed Griffith into a small, well-lit room — touching the antistatic pad, and receiving the expected snap on her fingertips. Laura looked but didn't find a vanity or brush beside this door. What she found was another black eyeball staring out at the room.
'Here,' Griffith said, holding goggles with large, clear lenses and ear protectors that looked like ancient stereo headphones.
Laura put the goggles on — the soft plastic wrapping around her eyes and fitting tightly against her face. The ear protectors dampened the sound from outside the room to a mere hum. Griffith then handed her a white hard hat, which fit snugly over her gear and mercifully covered the tortured mess of her hair.
