“You finish reading the file already?”
“Sort of.”
She was smiling like the little girl who had a secret that he didn’t know. He walked to the fire and stood with his back to it. “Sort of? What’s that smile mean?”
She gazed up at him from the couch but didn’t answer.
After a few seconds, John noticed the gold egg hanging on its chain, just above her breasts. “Hey, you took the bicycle helmet off. Was it through doing whatever it does?”
“Yes. It took about five minutes. Now it’s your turn.”
John couldn’t help taking a single involuntary step backward. “Whoa, I never said anything about trying it.”
“You have to. How can I tell if it really does what the file says unless there’s someone else to communicate with?”
The helmet rested on the cushion next to her. The other egg was already in its slot.
“How come I’m getting flashbacks to The Puppet Masters? You’re going to have to convince me that it hasn’t done anything to your mind before I try the thing on.”
“John, don’t be silly. It’s perfectly harmless. There’s one thing I found that it can do which already makes it the most valuable invention since the computer.”
He hadn’t thought her smile could get any wider, but then it did. “Okay, start talking.”
“Come on, put the helmet on. It’ll take more than five minutes to tell you, and once the communicator is keyed into your brain waves it’ll go much faster, and you’ll understand without doubting.”
She held out the helmet.
John looked at it, and then stared into her eyes. “It’s safe? It didn’t mess you up?”
“Perfectly safe. You have my word.”
He took the helmet from her. It was a lot heavier than a bicycle helmet. Adjusting the strap, he pulled it over his head and cinched the strap down.
“I feel foolish,” he said.
“You won’t regret it. Here, let me show you what I’ve found.”
Caitlin picked up her notebook computer, and he noticed that she’d attached the radio modem to it.
“You haven’t been making phone calls, have you?”
“No. You see the egg communicates with other units on one of the frequencies currently reserved for cell phone communications. By selecting the right band on the modem, you can link the communicator’s signal to a cell phone and therefore anything else that the phone can link to.”
“Okay, that’s interesting, but what good is it? Oh, I see, you can use the cell phone system to talk from one communicator to another, but wouldn’t you need an access chip.”
“The communicator is programmable. I used my computer to download the chip code on my phone and then transmitted it to the egg.”
“Wait, until you had this egg...” he stopped and shook his head.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“You’re going to have to come up with a better name for this thing. The ‘egg’ just doesn’t sound good, and communicator is too awkward. You need something snazzy like ‘cell phone.’”
“You’re right, how about what the inventor called it, cyber phone?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It seems like everything has cyber tacked onto it these days. Since it works like telepathy, I’d say tele-phone, but that’s been done.”
Caitlin chuckled. “Cute. See, you don’t have to be serious all the time.”
“Who says I wasn't serious? I know, we’ll call it an egg phone.”
Caitlin’s faced twisted into a pained expression. “Sounds too much like a Chinese dish.”
“I like Chinese.”
“So do I, but let’s be serious, or at least not stoogeish.”
“Hey! Don’t knock the Stooges.”
“Look, when you come up with a better name, let me know. Now stop interrupting,” Caitlin said.
“All right already.” He held his hands in front of him as if fending her off.
“I was telling you that I linked the egg, ah cyber phone, to my computer.”
“Yeah, you were going to explain how you loaded the chip code to the cyber phone so you could access the computer.”
“You’re interrupting again.”
“Sorry.”
“I loaded the chip code by telling the cyber phone to record it.”
“Huh?”
“Once it’s linked to your brain waves you can modify its programming for things like that by just telling it, well thinking at it anyway,” Caitlin said.
“So you just thought at it. Yeah, that makes sense.” John struggled to keep his face calm, even though he wanted to laugh out loud. The whole thing was bordering the absurd.
“That’s right. Then came the really neat part. Here,” she turned the computer so he could see the screen, “watch the monitor.”
The communications screen was open. Without Caitlin touching the computer, the active screen shrunk into the background and Scott’s file opened up. It flashed to the contents, and then begin to page down at about a page a second.
“Whoa, how’d you do that?”
“I told you, the cyber phone can link into anything that can receive its signal. I’m telling the computer what to do over the cyber phone.”
“Direct access. Fan-fucking-tastic. I’m impressed, but why are you paging down so fast, you can’t read anything like that.”
“What makes you think so?”
The flash of passing pages doubled in speed.
John stared at the screen for a second, then he met Caitlin’s gaze. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
She laughed and shook her head gleefully. “Not at all. It is fantastic, John. I can access anything on my computer one hundred, maybe two hundred, times faster than I can read it.”
“How can that be? I mean ... hell, I don’t know what I mean, but I just don’t see how it’s possible,” he said.
“I don’t either. I read the entire file. With the proper tools and a good
