danger that it poses to every human on earth.'
A quiet descended on the table, many seated there with heads bowed.
'Now,' Gray concluded, 'do you accept those terms?'
Laura frowned. She couldn't understand why Gray had made such a big deal out of her remark. She tried not to let her hurt feelings show as she said, 'All right.'
Gray's servants arrived just then with breakfast. The interruption seemed to evoke a sense of welcomed relief from all the others and bring the odd episode to a close. But the service struck Laura as strangely ill-timed — coming, as it did, during Gray's stern lecture.
Laura looked at the open French doors and caught Janet's eye. Gray's majordomo flashed Laura a smile, then slipped quietly back into the house to continue giving directions to her staff.
'Okay then,' Gray said, 'let's move on. Any results reported from the phase-two?' he asked as if nothing had happened. As if nothing important had been said. But something important had been said, Laura knew. She just didn't understand what it meant.
Filatov and Holliday were looking at each other in the silence, but neither ventured a word in reply. Everyone waited on the two of them.
'Well?' Gray prodded — somewhat more testily than before, Laura thought.
Filatov reluctantly spoke up. 'We haven't been able to load the phase-two. We still don't have the resources.'
'I thought we'd already started the off-loading,' Gray said. 'We were up to six and a half percent free last time you and I spoke.'
Filatov shrugged. 'As soon as we hit eight and defragged we started to lose it.'
'What do you mean 'lose it'?'
'I mean lose free resources. The system's throughput surged before we could load the phase-two, and the free space in the annex just… evaporated.'
The look on Gray's face betrayed nothing. It was his delay in responding that made Laura suspicious. He broke his intense gaze at Filatov and redirected it toward Dorothy. She arched her brow as if to ask him why he was looking at her. When that didn't seem to suffice Dorothy shrugged in an exaggerated gesture.
Gray's eyes fell absentmindedly to his plate. After a moment, he realized what he was looking at and stabbed a sausage link with his fork. He froze like that with fork to plate for an odd and unexplained interlude, then it was over. He plopped the sausage into his mouth and asked casually while chewing, 'Do you know what filled that capacity up?' He was staring again at his plate, but Laura could tell that he was waiting for the response.
'We can't tell,' Filatov replied, continuing in a tone of concern. 'And, Mr. Gray, we haven't been able to resume processing the wire-clearing operations.'
Filatov and many of the others, Laura sensed, considered the news to be near catastrophic. Laura assumed that meant expensive — piece of their revenue pie growing smaller — but Gray just nodded and ate. All of a sudden he was more interested in his food.
'Maybe the computer reprioritized its programming,' Margaret jumped in. 'Maybe when we freed up that extra capacity, some subsystem reprogrammed the code. It could have decided to maximize speed or electrical power conservation or some other variable instead of capacity utilization.'
Filatov loosed a derogatory snort at Margaret's theory.
'Did anyone, ask the computer what had happened?' Laura asked.
'It says it doesn't know what's going on,' Filatov answered, then shook his head, panning the faces around the table in disbelief. 'We went from eight percent free back down to two percent in the course of a few seconds, and the computer says it doesn't know what idled it up!' He sank back into his chair and wrung his hands nervously. 'It's sick, Mr. Gray. Something's wrong.'
The resignation evident in Filatov's comment seemed to reflect the mood of the group.
'What's the latest error report?' Gray asked. His unconcerned tone stood in stark contrast to the darker disposition of the others.
Dorothy picked up her palmtop but then hesitated. She set it back on the table unopened. 'They've gone, like,' — she made the sound of an explosion and spread her clenched hands apart—'through the roof.' She turned to Griffith. 'There's the assembly building,' she said, her voice barely audible against the faint background clatter of silverware on china.
'It's not as serious as you make it sound!' Dr. Griffith interjected vehemently.
'It crossed the line!' Dorothy blurted out, turning to make her case to Gray. 'The computer set up a special security zone.' Heads rose in sudden alarm.
Only Gray seemed undisturbed. 'Let's pull it up on the monitor!' he said in a raised voice.
Janet disappeared into the house from her post just inside the French doors, and a few moments later two waiters wheeled a large, flat-screen monitor onto the veranda.
The large high-def screen lit up with vivid color test bars. Griffith waved to one of the waiters for the remote control. He tilted his glasses forward to read the labels and then began pressing a button repeatedly.
Successive scenes from around Gray's domain flashed onto the monitor with each push of Griffith's finger. No one paid attention to the parade of images except Laura, who sat frozen in amazement with her fork suspended in midair.
Goggled lab technicians mixing beakers of brown fluid. Huge metal spheres in the jungle venting steam. Beams of blue light focused from all angles on a stainless steel ball. Robot construction crews pouring concrete under the hot morning sun. Large structures lit by bright lights in a deep indoor pool. A curbed white roadbed streaked by just inches beneath the camera. A spinning satellite ready for launch from a payload bay.
Each view was identified by a number in the lower right-hand corner, and when Griffith held the button down the numbers quickly rose into the four digits. The images flickered by at a speed that rendered it impossible to register them singly. They left in Laura, however, a strong subliminal impression.
Gray was changing everything. Nothing the world had known would ever be the same again.
'Here it is,' Griffith said after going backward through the numbers to the one he'd passed. It was number 9,012. Nine thousand black eyeballs through which the computer peered out on the world. The others craned their necks to look at the screen with interest.
On the monitor was a picture of the main floor of the assembly building. In the background, the huge conveyer belt rolled by as relentlessly as the tide. Turned away from the main line was an ordinary industrial robot. Its hydraulic arm was raised. The single gripper at the end quivered in an uncontrollable but apparently harmless fashion.
The robot was surrounded by a series of cones, and yellow tape was stretched from one cone to the next. It reminded Laura of a crime scene.
'You see.' Griffith said. 'It's just having trouble with the second derivative of velocity.'
Heads nodded slowly.
'The what?' Laura asked, making a face at the ridiculously obscure vocabulary.
Griffith pointed at the screen, 'We can't control the rate of change of the gripper speed.' Laura arched her eyebrows at him. 'It's jerky,' Griffith tried.
'Thank you,' Laura said.
'What happened.' Gray asked quietly.
Griffith turned to him. 'We had a trainee hurt. Just a little bump on the arm. He came tearing into the offices yelling about that pick-and-place there. He said it was behaving erratically, waving its arm back and forth, acting 'drunk.' He said it reached right out over the line and knocked him down.'
Laura watched the twitching robotic arm — its palsied gripper afflicted with little more than a nervous tic. Its robot neighbors worked uninterrupted, but not the errant arm amid the cordon of cones of the 'special security zone.' Its trial was being conducted over breakfast and it was patiently awaiting its punishment.
'Has it exhibited any aberrant behavior other than jerking since we took it off-line?' Gray asked.
