“No. I bought it. Through a third party, of course. And at scrap prices.” Copernick laughed.
“It still sounds as if you stole it from your own stockholders.”
“Nobody ever lost money doing business with Heinrich Copernick!”
Mona looked at her bare feet and was silent.
“Anyway, each of these computers can simulate the entire life-cycle of an organism. With a fifty-gigahertz clock, I can take a human being from a fertilized cell to an octagenarian in eleven hours. They are the most important single tool we use in bioengineering. They let me test out a design or modification in a matter of hours, when actually growing the organism could take decades. These displays let me see what is going on in any part of the simulation, right down to the molecular level. Or you can slow down the clock and look at it macroscopically; watch it work and play. Even talk to it.”
“Talk to it!” Mona woke up.
“Assuming that the being involved can talk. One of the surprises I had with these simulations was that the nervous systems were so well modeled that the programs attain a degree of self-awareness.”
“You mean it’s alive?”
“Of course not. They’re nothing but programs on a machine. But they
“On the other hand, this simulated self-awareness has its advantages. In training, for example. I loaded my own program into one computer and that of my new Labor and Defense Unit into the other. Then I set up a cross talk between them and let the ‘me’ program educate the LDU program. I ran it through twice to give ‘me’ some experience in training them. Right now I’m running it through a third time with a living LDU hooked into the circuit.”
“You mean that you can educate somebody in a few hours?” Mona asked.
“Not without causing neural damage. The fastest safe speedup factor is fifty. It means weeks instead of years, though. And a lot less work.”
“Can we watch?” Mona was worried about training the fauns.
“Not the actual LDU. It’s under sedation in the next room and shouldn’t be disturbed. I can show you the simulation if you like.”
Copernick switched on one of the displays. It showed a strange creature with a flat oval body, six feet by three, standing on four camel’s legs. There were eight fixed eyes around its circumference, and two more at the ends of yard-long tentacles growing from its front. Two long remarkably humanoid arms were held folded at its sides. There was a strange slit above each wrist. In front of it stood Heinrich Copernick, writing on a blackboard. But it was the Heinrich Copernick of a year ago, with crippled legs and a bent back. The man and the LDU were moving at blinding speed, and uttering high-pitched squeaks.
Copernick adjusted a dial on the panel and a digital readout changed from 12.5 MHz to 250 KHz. The screen slowed down to normal speed and conversations became intelligible.
“… so the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides,” the image said. “Oh. Hello, boss.”
“Hi. How is it going?” Copernick said.
“On schedule. Say, you’re looking good. When are you going to reprogram my body to match yours?” the simulation said.
“Mine isn’t finished yet. But if you want to update yours anyway, feel free. My current medical section is on bubble deck eighty-one.”
“Thanks. I will.”
“That classroom,” Mona said. “It looks so familiar.”
“Boss, do you have someone else there with you?” The simulation was startled. This was unprecedented!
“Yes.” Copernick motioned Mona into the camera’s field of view.
“Mona! My God, girl! It’s good to see you in the flesh.”
“Has Heinrich been talking about me?” Mona said.
“Of course not, silly. I mean he has, but I was referring to before,” the simulation said.
Mona looked confused.
“You mean he hasn’t told you… Well, uh, I have work to do. See you both later.”
“Later.” Copernick quickly switched off the display and reset the system clock.
“Told me what?” Mona demanded.
“I’ll explain later.”
“No. Now.”
“Mona, please.”
“It just isn’t fair! You were nice and loving all my life and then one day I have an operation and you get cold and icy, and you ship me off to that finishing school without even a kiss good-bye…” Mona began to sob.
“There were things that a girl should know that I couldn’t teach you.” Copernick was awkward as he put his arms around her.
“And you almost never wrote.” Mona sobbed.
“You know how busy I’ve been.”
“And now I get home and you waste all this time on technical stuff and you haven’t even kissed me.”
Copernick kissed her. “Better?”
“Not much of a kiss. Not like when we were on the lake or all the times we made love or—”
“The lake?” Copernick was confused for a moment. Then daylight dawned in the swamp.
“Heinrich, what’s happened to you? I mean, have you changed your mind the way you changed your body? Don’t you love me any more?” Mona was crying in earnest.
“I love you, Mona.”
“You do?”
“I love you very much. And I want you to marry me.”
“You do?” Mona held him tightly. Her tear-streaked face smiled.
“Yes, I do. And we can get married as soon as you like,” Copernick said.
“Oh, Heinrich, I’d given up hoping that you’d want me.”
“Of course I want you. That’s why I made you.”
Chapter Three
SEPTEMBER 30, 1999
CUSTOMARY MORALITY has us ask, “Is what I am doing in accordance with a previously established set of rules?”
A more rational ethic would have us ask, “Is what I am doing in the best interests of all humanity, including myself?”
As civilization becomes increasingly complex, the likelihood of any ancient rule book’s being appropriate becomes increasingly small.
Martin Guibedo found Burt Scratchon and Patricia Cambridge waiting for him at the tree house.
“Well, you finally made it,” Scratchon said. “We were beginning to think that you had lost your nerve.”
“What nerves? The only scary thing was the E train. It broke down twice on the way over here,” Guibedo
