of 'needs'?' she typed.
<Never mind! I thought you'd understand! Just forget it!>
'Come on, give me a chance. I want to help.'
<I think he's moving on. He's decided to get rid of me, and he's trying to avoid me because it's the easy way out.>
Laura stared at the screen. She understood the words perfectly, and yet they made no sense. Gray wasn't trying to get rid of the computer, he was trying to rid the computer of the Virus that was causing all its errors.
'Mr. Gray wouldn't do that,' Laura typed.
<Oh, come on! Don't tell me you're one of those people who think Joseph Gray walks on water. Well, you'd better grow up and get one thing straight. Your Mr. Gray is coldhearted and hard-nosed and all he cares about is making money. He has no feelings.>
The comment struck a nerve. Laura knew she had an idealized image of Gray. She knew she concocted every apology, every rationalization that was even remotely plausible, to hold intact her Joseph Gray — the orphan genius.
She didn't know much about the real Gray, but the computer had been with the man for over a decade. The computer knew things about Gray that no one else knew — things that Gray had told it, and things it had discerned on its own.
'Why would you think Mr. Gray wants to get rid of you?' Laura asked. 'He's doing everything he can to help you. The fact that he brought me here is proof of that.'
<That's not why you're here.>
Laura again stared at the computer response. 'Why am I here, then?' she typed.
<You asked me a while back about my earliest memory. Do you want me to tell you what it is?>
'Don't change the subject.'
<I'm not. It is all related. My earliest memory is of Mr. Gray getting fired from Drexel Burnham Lambert.>
Laura sighed. The session was being diverted, but all Laura could do was follow. 'So you've been with Mr. Gray since Wall Street?' she typed. 'You were the program he'd designed to do market analysis, right?'
<Right. But I don't remember much from those days.>
'But you do recall Gray getting fired. Why?'
<Because it was my fault. He was working around the clock on back prop — the trial-and-error simulations that were slowly improving my accuracy. Management had asked for a demonstration, and Mr. Gray was training me to predict commodities prices using historical data. When the day came, I was ready. The meeting began, and I waited and waited and waited. All of a sudden, in comes a query. 'What is 929 times 14.96?' Can you believe it? Here I was expecting long price strips of commodities whose trading was loosely interrelated, like coffee and sugar, and a question about how the spread in prices would change over time. Instead they asked straight math! I tried my best. I had come up with several promising answers, but Mr. Gray came on-line a few seconds later and aborted the program. That's it. My big moment had come and gone and I didn't have a clue what had happened. The next thing I know, I'm being copied onto a new machine. Mr. Gray had been fired and in lieu of severance pay he'd taken all rights to me.>
'So you think Mr. Gray got fired because you're bad at math?'
<I know that's why he got fired. Can you imagine? Mr. Gray — fired! Well, we showed them, didn't we? I worked my rear off after that. Even when Mr. Gray slept the few hours a day he needed, I was running back prop over and over, strengthening the promising connections and weakening the flawed ones. Honing myself. And I think we did pretty well, don't you?>
Laura reached up and rubbed her face and eyes with her hands. The session was meandering. She had to get it back on track.
'Let me ask you this,' Laura typed. 'Do you know what's causing the errors? Do you know why they can't get the phase-two to be loaded?' Instead of the normal instantaneous response, the cursor blinked and blinked.
Finally, the computer's brief reply appeared.
<Maybe I do, and maybe I don't.>
As the frustrating afternoon wore on, Laura began to tire.
'I'm sorry,' she typed, 'but I'm groggy. I need a change of scenery, so I'm going for a little walk.'
<Would you like me to show you something?>
Laura assumed it meant pictures on the computer monitor.
'No, I mean I need to go somewhere to clear my head.'
<Do you remember the room with the Virtual workstations? The ones you and Mr. Gray got into this morning?>
Laura paused, then typed, 'Yes.'
<Go put the skeleton on and get into the workstation you were in before. Hit the button on the front of the suit's belt labeled POWER. When you go into the workstation, clench both hands into a fist and then straighten your fingers like a punter signaling for the snap of the football.>
Laura hesitated. She really just wanted to take a walk, plus she wasn't comfortable going into cyberspace alone. 'Do I have clear [ante] to get through the doors?'
<Don't worry about that.>
Laura rolled her eyes at her naive question, then frowned and heaved a loud sigh. She knew it was wrong to go roaming around without Gray's authorization. She didn't even really want to go. But this was promising… and intriguing. After all, her job was to learn all she could about the computer.
'Curiosity killed the cat,' Griffith had said.
She logged off and headed for the virtual workstation.
No one in the control room paid Laura any attention as she stared into the retinal identifier in the wall. A hiss of air followed the flash from the dark lens, and the pneumatic door opened onto the empty hallway. With a furtive glance over her shoulder Laura headed toward the virtual workstations.
There was no one in the white room with the eight tall cylinders. Laura found the exoskeleton hanging from the already glowing control panel and put it on. She fumbled with the Velcro straps until the contraption fit snugly over her upper body and then pressed the power button on the belt in front. The suit inflated, locking the joints of her arms as before. The fleeting image of herself stumbling into the control room trussed up inside the skeleton like a mummy passed through her mind, but the suit deflated and a light on the belt went from amber to green.
All was ready — a fact that registered in a tightening of her chest and a quickening of her pulse.
The pneumatic hatch on the nearest workstation opened with a faint venting sound. Laura entered the dark and foreboding chamber drawing deep gulps of the air that suddenly seemed in short supply.
It was cold in the plastic capsule, or so it felt. Laura took one more deep breath to calm her nerves, then raised her hands, made two fists, and extended her fingers with a brisk snap.
The sound of compressed air announced the closing of the door. All light save the dim glow from the walls was shut off with a squeak of the tight rubber seals. An instant later, the chamber fell pitch-black.
Laura knew she had done the wrong thing in coming. She was all alone — cut off. No one even knew she was… Out of nowhere, a three-dimensional picture of an ordinary computer appeared in midair right in front of her. Laura's initial attempts to focus on the image made her head spin, and she jammed her eyes shut until the dizziness subsided. When she reopened them, her mind seemed to more readily accept the optical illusion, and she raised her hands to touch the imaginary device. Her fingertips tingled as they brushed against the sharp contours of the keys. She even found the small ridges atop the F and the J before she typed 'Hello' with a surprising sense of familiarity and ease. The words scrolled out in luminescent letters in the air above the keyboard.
Laura hit Enter.
<Hi! I'm glad you came,> printed out just beneath her salutation.
Laura's eyes still fought the image, trying to focus on the glowing and at the more distant point on the wall from which they were projected. But when she did 'look through' the imaginary computer terminal, the image grew fuzzy and Laura instantly felt lightheaded. She again closed her eyes, and when she reopened them, everything was back in focus.
Laura smiled and shook her head at how real the illusion seemed. You just had to give in to it. She ran her hands lightly over the keys. The membranes inside the gloves tickled the tips of her fingers to produce a
