“We’ll get out.” I spring off the chairback and land on my feet. “What about telling the FBI?”
She gives me a searching look, and while it lasts Miles does not exist. After some mental process I cannot divine, she says, “They have the same facts we do. As long as you start checking the blind-draft women, I see no point in calling attention to ourselves tonight.”
A sigh of relief escapes Miles’s lips.
“But if one turns up missing,” Drewe adds, “we go straight to the FBI.”
Miles nods, then quickly gathers his papers into his briefcase. I kiss Drewe on the cheek and lead him down the hall to my office-the domain of secrets, and of the EROS computer.
CHAPTER 26
Sitting in a half-lotus position on a stool before the EROS computer, his hands flying across the keyboard, Miles says, “I’d forgotten how quick Drewe is.”
“You really think there’s another blind-draft woman missing?” I ask, staring over his shoulder. The cover is off the computer, and its electronic guts look very different than they did thirty minutes ago.
“We’ll know soon,” he says.
Typical Miles. He’s already e-mailed his techs and instructed them to begin a discreet check on the safety of all female blind-draft account holders; thus, predictions are pointless.
He stares at the monitor, his hands suspended over the keys. “I can’t believe you never installed this card, man. I sent it to you two months ago.”
He’s referring to a large rectangular circuit board designed for voice synthesis and recognition. The voice- rec/synth card is the most densely packed PC card I’ve ever seen.
“I don’t use the voice much,” I tell him.
“That’s because the one you have sucks. The new one has unbelievable inflection control. It really sounds human.”
“Let’s hear it.”
He drops his hands to his sides. “Put the cover on, Bwana. You just entered the twenty-first century.”
With a hard shove, I press the metal cover back onto the chassis. “You got a demo for it?”
Miles shakes his head. “Call up a file. An EROS file. These cards only work properly with the EROS format.”
I lean over his shoulder, click the mouse, and retrieve the top file in my electronic filing cabinet. The text of a typical exchange between myself and Eleanor Rigby fills the screen. Miles hits ALT-V-a key combination called a macro that simultaneously carries out several functions-and a rectangular window appears in the lower left corner of the screen.
MALE FEMALE
VOICE ONE: Hz
VOICE TWO: Hz
Using the mouse, Miles clicks on the first HARPER› prompt, drags the mouse over to VOICE ONE, and clicks again. Then he selects a frequency under the male range. He does the same with ELEANOR RIGBY› but selects a frequency in the female range. Beneath the frequency range display is a group of controls much like those on a tape recorder. Miles uses the mouse to select PLAY.
“Unbelievable,” I say over the hypnotic canticle. “All the subscribers will get this?”
“Not for a while.” Miles chuckles with the affection of a proud father. “This part of the package isn’t that complicated or expensive. It’s the other half that puts it out of reach.”
“What? Video?”
“No, quality voice recognition. It’s much more complex than real-time video. Which you should know, since you’ve had video by satellite uplink for six months.”
“Which I hardly use either.”
“Krislov thanks you. It’s too fucking expensive.”
He stands up from the stool and hands me a black plastic headset exactly like those worn by telephone operators and receptionists. “I guess this will count as the first field test. The earphones don’t work. I picked up the wrong set when I split the office. The mike works fine, though.”
“Just talk into it?”
“Hang on.” He clicks RECORD/CHAT with the mouse, and the Harper-Eleanor Rigby file vanishes.
“Okay. The real test is whether the program will recognize your voice. If it won’t, this thing is useless to you until we train it with your voice.”
“How do you train it?”
“By reading many long and boring passages into it, Grasshopper. I’ve modified the program to be as tolerant as I can make it. Out of six techs at EROS, it accepts four as me.”
I sit before the computer and, rather tentatively, say, “Hello?”
On the screen appears:
MILES› Hello.
“I’ll be damned!”
“Hello is easy,” says Miles. “It displayed the ‘Miles’ prompt because I logged on as me. I’ll set it to read whatever screen name you’re using at the time. Try a sentence.”
“Okay.” As clearly as I can, I recite, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”
On the screen we see:
MILES› Okay. Now is the time four all good men to come two the aid of there country.
“Shit,” says Miles, his voice weary. “Actually that’s not bad, considering you never trained with it. If you’ll consciously avoid your Southern accent, you’ll probably get better results.”
“
Now that he’s neutralized the stress he felt at being around a computer that was not quite state-of-the-art, Miles walks away from the EROS table and examines various objects around the room with distracted interest. My guitars, the Civil War sword, the sculpture of my father’s coat.
“You glossed right over Lenz’s plan to lure Brahma by pretending to be a woman,” he says, leaning across the twin bed and rubbing the side pocket of the coat. “I let it slide because you sounded like you didn’t want to go into detail about EROS in front of Drewe.”
“Good instinct.”
“I can’t believe this is made of wood,” he says, running his fingertips over the sculpture. “I thought Drewe was into EROS.”
“She was until about three months ago. Now she can’t stand it. She hasn’t stepped into this room in six weeks.”
He sits down on the bed and peers at me with open curiosity. “Why the change? She find out about Eleanor Rigby?”
“No. She’s ready to have kids, Miles. But that’s only part of it. I’d rather not go into it right now.”
