gotten very far. Simply reading about all the other children who had fallen victim to the same pressures to which Adam had finally succumbed had almost torn her heart out. More than once she’d had to stop reading altogether, for even through the dry prose with which the graduate student had constructed his paper, the human suffering kept breaking to the surface.
It was as if each of the children discussed in the thesis was reaching out to her, calling for help, pleading with her to do something for him.
But there was nothing she could do, for, like Adam, they were already dead.
The youngest had been only five years old when, in front of his mother and older sister, he’d walked in front of a bus.
There had been no question that he knew the bus was coming. He’d even pointed it out to his mother.
Together, they’d stood watching it roll along the road, moving at a steady thirty-five miles an hour.
At the last second the little boy had jerked his hand out of his mother’s and darted into the street, throwing himself under the tires.
Jeanette could barely bring herself to finish reading the paragraphs, feeling the pain the mother of that child must have felt, her tears blurring the words until she finally had to put the thesis back in her purse.
But tonight she would finish it, no matter how difficult it was for her. Until she did, she knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else, for no matter what she tried to do, the thesis seemed to beckon to her, demanding her attention.
At last she gave up even trying to work, and began the process of closing her office for the day. Giving her computer a command to print out the document she had been working on — the final edited copy of an article the head of the department was submitting to one of the psychological journals — she set to work putting the files on her desk back into the cabinet, replacing each of them in its proper folder. In the background the quiet buzz of the printer provided an oddly soothing noise, interrupted every thirty seconds or so by a brief silence as it rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the platen.
Almost unconsciously, she found herself counting the pages as they printed.
Halfway through the seventh one, the printer suddenly stopped.
Jeanette paused, glancing at the machine.
The page was resting motionlessly, a line partway down waiting to be completed.
None of the warning lights on the printer was glowing, so she shifted her attention to the computer screen.
The program had crashed.
Swearing softly under her breath, Jeanette rebooted the program, brought up the file she was looking for, and set it to begin printing again with the top of the seventh page. When she was ready, she turned back to the printer, pressed the form feed button to kick a new sheet of paper into the platen, and returned to the computer.
She stared at the screen.
Once more the word processing program had crashed. She was facing a blank screen.
She started to type in the command to reboot the program once more, but this time the keyboard refused to respond.
She hit the control, alt, and delete keys simultaneously, and waited for the entire computer to reboot itself.
Nothing happened.
Sighing, she reached for the red switch on the computer itself, and was about to shut off the main power, wait a few seconds, then start over again by turning the machine back on when the screen suddenly came to life:
MOM
Jeanette stared at the word for a moment. What was going on? Was it really the word she’d heard from her kids all her life, or was it just some kind of garbage the computer had kicked up?
She tried rebooting the computer once more, and this time it worked. The screen went blank, then a series of commands rolled up the screen as the operating system installed itself. But as she was about to enter the command for the word processing system yet again, the screen once more came to life. This time, there was no mistaking what it said:
MOM. ITS ME. IT’S ADAM.
Jeanette stared at the words.
A joke.
Someone’s horrible idea of a joke.
She stared numbly at the message for a moment, and suddenly realized she was trembling. What was she supposed to do?
Did someone expect her to answer?
Her mind raced as she tried to figure out where the message could have come from.
A timed message, slipped into the computer by practically anyone, set to pop up at a certain time of day.
Someone somewhere else, coming into the computer by modem.
There were all kinds of explanations for the message, two or three ways it could have gotten there. But why? And who?
Who would do such a thing? Who would be so cruel as to pretend to be Adam?
Surely no one could think this was funny!
Her hands still trembling, she reached out and shut off the computer. The words on the screen faded away.
Should she turn it back on, and try to finish what she’d been doing?
She hesitated, but then remembered how the machine had already crashed twice.
Don’t touch it, she told herself. Just leave it until tomorrow.
Ignoring everything else that still needed to be done in her office, she picked up her purse, switched off the lights, and left, locking the door behind her. A few minutes later she was in her car, driving home. But the words on the computer still haunted her.
She remembered something that had happened months ago, last spring. She’d been working in her office, typing up a report, and the word processing program had suddenly crashed.
She’d been about to reboot it, when suddenly some words had appeared on her screen:
HI, MOM. IT’S ME. ITS ADAM!
That time, it really had been. He’d hacked into her computer from his room, just as a joke.
At the time, she’d thought it was funny.
But now Adam was dead, and it had happened again.
And whoever had done it had used exactiy the same words Adam had used months ago.
17
Josh watched Amy run away from the swimming pool and disappear into the women’s shower room, wishing he could run after her. As the experiment had gone on, his eyes had remained glued to Amy, instead of focusing on the computer monitor, for as soon as he’d seen the dangling knotted rope and the diving board, he’d understood exactly what she was going through.
How could Dr. Engersol have done it to her? Didn’t he know how frightened she was of heights?
And then Josh understood. It was exactly the point of the experiment — to see how Amy would react when she had to choose between two things that terrified her.
But it was mean. Even meaner than what had been done to the cat this morning. In fact, when Amy had left the classroom, Josh hadn’t really understood what she was so mad about. After all, the cat hadn’t been in any pain. Dr. Engersol had told them so, hadn’t he?
