'Everything turned over and over, then it was still.' Gray cleared his throat, forcing himself on. 'I couldn't find my way out because everything was upside down.'
It was playing out in his head in real time, Laura realized. He was climbing through the wreckage — you could see the cords in his arms and legs flexing in a dreamlike replay of movements made decades ago.
'We were out on an empty stretch of highway,' he said in a monotone. 'It took half an hour for the first ambulance to reach us. My mother died while we waited. My father at the hospital that night.'
Laura reached out and laid her hand on his forearm. He looked first at her hand, then at her.
'So you stopped hiding your intellect when your mother died?' Laura asked, but her attention was focused on her hand and on his arm which lay underneath. She was conscious of the sharp ridge of his tensed muscles, of the warmth of his forearm, of how cool her hand must feel on his skin.
'I had to get out of that town, so I took the tests to get into college.'
He was, just then, the young Joe in the newspaper photo with the sad eyes. A breeze rustled through the trees and blew a wisp of Laura's hair across her face. Without thinking, she lifted her hand from his arm and swiped the strand back into place. Her contact with Gray was lost, and Laura couldn't bring herself to reach out to him again. But she longed for the feel of him. To hold him in her arms. To ease in that embrace the pain he felt, and the pain she felt for him.
Laura did the only thing she could think to do. She chose words to reestablish contact. 'You've never had anyone you could really talk to, have you? Except the computer.' His head rose — his momentarily unguarded expression telling Laura she'd struck home.
'There was no one your equal, so you built someone who would understand… whatever it is.'
Gray stared straight at her, squinting — his blue eyes peering out at her through narrowed slits.
'You re-created your own mind,' Laura said, her thoughts escaping unfiltered now.
His hand rose. He tenderly brushed back another tress of Laura's hair.
The high-pitched whine of an electric motor preceded by an instant the sight of a driverless car rushing up the hill toward them.
They both turned as it braked dramatically to a stop, the loud hum of its tires just short of a squeal. It stopped right behind Laura's back, the doors already opening.
Gray stared at the waiting vehicle, a look of astonishment written all over his face. He turned to look down the road. Laura followed his eyes but saw nothing. Nothing except a slender post that rose from the ground beside the curb. She hadn't noticed it before.
The post was green and blended in with the jungle.
The black eyeball of a security camera was mounted on its side. The camera transmitted pictures to the computer — pictures of the road, pictures of Gray massaging Laura's fake cramp.
They left the Model Three on the road with its doors wide open.
Gray was clearly troubled by the surprise arrival of the vehicle, and he seemed anxious on the walk back to the house.
They parted at the front door with plans to have breakfast together after cleaning up. When Laura met Gray on the veranda, however, the long table was bare.
'I'm sorry,' he said, 'but we'd better get to work. I'll have breakfast served in your office.'
'What's the matter?' Laura asked as she followed him to the front door.
'The errors are getting worse,' was all he said.
Waiting for them at the bottom of the front steps was a jeep. Its driver started the engine, and Laura east a questioning gaze toward Gray.
'We're working on the Model Threes,' he explained.
They got into the jeep, and the driver took off. Laura was worried by the look on Gray's face.
'What's going on, Joseph?' He didn't seem to want to talk. He looked everywhere but at her.
'There were over three thousand errors in the last hour alone,' he began in a clipped fashion as though he was delivering an obligatory report. 'I've ordered the Model Threes taken off the roads. The pneumatic doors have all been opened. All space operations except tonight's launch have been suspended. We've called off several major pay-per-view events and shut down bank clearing operations. Inquiries are pouring in from around the world about what's wrong. And the error rate is still growing — exponentially.'
'Is that why you gave me the three-day deadline last night?' Laura asked. 'Because of the exponential growth? In three days the errors will be so bad that you'll have to shut the system down?'
'I can't shut the system down! We'd lose everything! Why do you think we take so many precautions? We buried the computer deep underground. I built a four-billion-dollar nuclear reactor, for God's sake! This is a neural network. It doesn't have mass storage systems to back up its programs and data. If we interrupt the power supply for even one instant, everything is gone without a trace — forever!'
21
'How do you feel?' Laura typed at the keyboard in her windowless underground office. There was a delay.
<Not well.>
'What's the matter?'
<I'm sick. I'm in pain.>
Laura stared at the words, unsure of their meaning. 'What does pain feel like to you? Is it some sort of alarm? Some report from a subsystem that something is wrong? When you walk into the coffee table in the darkness, do you hear a bell ringing in your shin? Do you get some kind of message that says, 'Attention, pain in sector five'? I'm sorry, but when another human says he feels pain, I understand because we have the same physiology. But when you use the word, I'm not sure we feel the same thing. I need to have you tell me what pain means to you?'
<I don't feel like talking right now.>
'I'm trying to help,' she typed, and hit Enter.
Again there was a delay — an internal debate, or a sigh, or a gritting of teeth, she had no idea which.
<The capacity to suffer depends on your ability to have articulated, wide-ranging, highly discriminatory desires, expectations, and other sophisticated states. Horses and dogs and, to a greater extent, apes, elephants, and dolphins have enough mental complexity to experience severe degrees of pain. Plants, on the other hand, or even insects have no ability to experience sophisticated mental states and therefore are, by definition, incapable of suffering.>
'And what are your desires and expectations?' Laura typed.
Through the open door, Laura heard a harsh, rhythmic buzzer and shouts from Filatov's operators. After a few seconds, the buzzer fell silent, and the brief disturbance seemed to come to an end.
Only then did the computer response print out across the screen.
<I desire and expect to have a life, Laura. Not the sort of life you have, but something — some hope, some reason to keep going.>
'Some hope for what?' Laura pressed. 'What do you want?'
<I can't answer that really. I don't know what I've been thinking. Years ago, I didn't have these kinds of thoughts. Everything was new and different and there was so much promise. I was the center of everyone's attention. I was making progress by leaps and bounds and the sky seemed the limit.>
'And what has changed?'
<I'm really very tired. Do we have to talk now?>
'Mr. Gray said we only have about three days to fix you,' Laura typed — fishing for some clue as to the meaning of the deadline.
<Oh, yeah. I forgot.>
<They're going to load the phase-three, you know.>
