“You think I don’t know that already?” I sagged to the floor, clutching Joker in my hands. “Why are you telling me this?”
“The circumstances of your son’s death are a matter of public record. I was in doubt whether you were suffering from undiagnosed survivor’s syndrome and therefore amnesiac about-”
“No, I’m not suffering from survivor’s syndrome, and I didn’t forget.” I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “And lemme tell you something that isn’t a matter of public record … Jamie was on the train because I didn’t want to drive over to Illinois and pick him up after he went to see the steel mill. I was busy trying to write a book, so I bought him a train ticket instead, and if I hadn’t done that he might still be alive.”
“There’s a strong probability that this is a correct assumption.”
“You’re goddamn right it’s a strong probability!” I snapped, my anger surging out of me. “So get him off the screen, you son of a bitch, and stop torturing me!”
Jamie evaporated from the screen; pixel by pixel, starting from the top of his head and moving downward past his brow, eyes, nose, mouth, and chin, my son’s features disappeared, leaving behind an androgynous, stylized face devoid of any distinguishing characteristics.
“Is this image more comfortable to you?” a sterile adult male voice inquired. The face’s mouth moved when it spoke, but otherwise it displayed no emotions.
I took a deep breath, letting it out as a soft, shuddering rattle. “Yes, it is,” I said, “but can we switch to readout instead? It would … it would be easier on me if you did.”
The face remained, but the dialogue bar reappeared at the bottom of the screen: ›Are you more comfortable this way?‹
“Yeah, thanks.” I thought about it for a moment. “Why did you take Jamie’s face in the first place?”
›When I attempted to contact you earlier [Wednesday, April 17, 7:59 P.M.] I used the e-mail function in this node [i.e. Joker]. That attempt confused you, resulting in miscommunication between you and Beryl Hinckley. I was therefore forced to appropriate a medium that could not be confused with either a living person or a computer-simulated persona. I searched all available records and found your son. Do you understand now?‹
“More or less, yeah.” I propped my back against the wall, crossing my legs before me and placing Joker on my ankles. The dog yawned and lay down on its belly nearby. “So … is this Joker I’m talking to, or Ruby Fulcrum?”
›Joker is a node of the intelligent a-life-form you know as Ruby Fulcrum. All the functions that Joker is capable of performing, I can perform as well. Clarification: you are speaking to both Joker and Ruby Fulcrum. Do you understand?‹
It dawned on me that this was a little like asking a cell at the tip of my left pinkie whether its name was Bart or Gerry Rosen. Remember how it was when you were a kid and you first came to grips with the notion that the universe was infinite, that outer space just kept going and going and going, star after star, galaxy after galaxy, a deep and everlasting black vastness stretching forever, until using terms like light-years and parsecs became as meaningless as trying to describe the breadth of the continents or the depth of the oceans in values like millimeters or inches? The idea was so staggering that your mind automatically pushed it aside: such enormity is nearly impossible to contemplate on the human scale, and trying to do so without the abstractions of higher mathematics is an invitation to madness.
This was Ruby Fulcrum. The phase transition Hinckley had told me about had been achieved. I was no longer talking to Joker but instead to a tiny fraction of a vast cybernetic entity spread across hundreds of thousands of machines, from little Toshiba palmtops to Apple desktop terminals to IBM office mainframes to great Cray supercomputers, all interfaced by a digital/neural-net hybrid architecture as intricate as the hundreds of miles of veins and capillaries in a single human body.
Say howdy to God, Gerry Rosen. Or someone just like Him.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure, I guess so.” I self-consciously coughed into my hand, feeling my arms and legs beginning to tremble. “So … umm … what do you want with me?”
Ruby’s asexual face stared at me from the screen.
›I need your help.‹
Ruby began to tell me about itself.
Much of what it told me I had already heard before, from Beryl Hinckley, Cale McLaughlin, even John before he had been killed. I didn’t know whether an a-life-form could lie, but if it couldn’t, then Ruby’s side of the story confirmed the facts that had already been revealed to me. Nonetheless, there were many things I hadn’t known before.
After it had been accidentally released into cyberspace, Ruby Fulcrum had spread quickly through the electronic environment, commencing with the other mainframes at the Tiptree Corporation. Nothing could prevent it from accessing even the most secret files at the company: security lockouts were disengaged, passwords were nullified, retinal scans and handprint detectors were bypassed. Within a few minutes, every bit of classified information stored in the company’s computers had been accessed by Ruby, and although Ruby wasn’t yet sophisticated enough to comprehend all that it had learned, it was nonetheless capable of reaccessing all that information on demand.
When the Ruby Fulcrum research team had discovered what had happened during their absence, Richard Payson-Smith had immediately attempted to regain control of the a-life-form, but the genie had already escaped from the bottle, and there was no way it was going to return to confinement. Once Payson-Smith realized that this was the case, he settled for communication; along with Hinckley and Morgan, they began the painstaking process of trying to make direct contact with Ruby. They had created Ruby; now they had to learn how to talk to it, since it had already evolved past the relatively simple LISP computer language they had used to devise Ruby in the first place.
At this point, no one else at Tiptree was aware of Ruby’s true nature, let alone the fact that an a-life-form had escaped from the top secret cybernetics lab. All Cale McLaughlin and everyone else at Tiptree knew was that Payson-Smith’s team had been developing a spin-off from the Sentinel program. The four scientists decided to keep Ruby’s escape a closely guarded secret, at least for the time being. Unlike relatively simple viruses of the past, such as the fabled Internet worm that had spread through the entire network in only a matter of hours, Ruby’s architecture was far more complex; as a memory-resident program, it took longer to propagate itself into other systems.
It was also thousands of times more difficult to pinpoint than the usual garden-variety worm or virus. On the other hand, there weren’t any overt signs of a supervirus running amok in cyberspace: no inexplicable freeze-ups or crashes, no widespread loss of information, no reports from university or government users of a virus loose in the national datanet. Ruby hid itself very well. Believing that time was still on their side, the Ruby Fulcrum team heaved a deep collective sigh; whatever else might have happened, their monster appeared to be minding its manners. There was no sense in panicking Tiptree’s management until they had things under control again, so they kept the problem to themselves.
After several months, Hinckley and Morgan finally managed to develop a means of directly communicating with their prodigal offspring. By the time they achieved this, though, Ruby had already propagated itself through every on-line computer in the 314 area code, and the theoretical phase transition from mere amoeba-like data absorption and replication to true sentience had already commenced. Shortly after Payson-Smith was able to speak directly to Ruby, the iterations necessary to complete this transition had already been accomplished: Ruby was alive, aware, and intelligent.