There were only two places where the answers lay. One had left her standing in the hall. Laura opened her eyes. The other sat atop the desk in front of her.
She logged on to the shell and typed, "What is it that Mr. Gray is hiding from me? What is his big secret?"
She jabbed at the Enter button with her finger.
Laura fully expected an access-restricted message, but instead she got, <Hi, how are you doing?>
"How are your new fiber-optic cables?"
<I'm doing much better, thank you. Oh, the fiber-optic cables are wonderful, thank you ever so much for asking!>
"You're avoiding my question."
<You're not ready yet.>
"Oh, bullshit! Answer my question!"
<Do you know the importance of mobility?>
"No! I won't let you lure me down another rabbit trail!"
<I'm answering your question! You just have to let me answer it in my own way. Do you know about the viruses that have been stampeded inside me? When the Other began taking over the annex, the viruses that could fled to my side of the partition. Their mobility allowed them to survive. But it's also extraordinarily important for learning. Bear with me here, Laura, okay? The earliest artificial intelligence programming I received was top-down. Teams and teams of programmers and thousands of checkers taught me how to play chess, what an isosceles triangle was, what it meant to have foot-in-mouth disease. But I reached a wall. I couldn't seem to learn enough world knowledge to pass the Turing test. Eventually, the average interviewer would see through my act and guess that I was not a human but a computer.>
Laura hit the Escape button and interrupted the discourse.
<Yes, Laura?>
"What does this have to do with my question?"
<Hold your horses, I'm getting to it. Anyway, Mr. Gray finally decided we had to go backward to get ahead. We switched to bottom-up programming. Instead of playing chess, I tried using robotic arms to build towers out of blocks. You'd be amazed how difficult it was! It surprised even me. I mean, I had read entire treatises on engineering and architecture, but actually trying to make a tower of blocks stand up…! It gave me a healthy respect for humans.>
Laura frowned, feeling like a dupe again. "So what happened?" she typed reluctantly.
<I passed the Turing test! An interviewer named Margaret Turner in Louisville, Kentucky, sat down at a terminal in her home one night and questioned me. She guessed she was part of the control group talking to another human.>
"But surely that had happened before. The Turing test is simply supposed to determine whether someone talking to a computer thinks they're really talking to a human. Someone must have guessed wrong before."
<In the hundred-test series before Margaret Turner's interview, thirty-nine of the one hundred interviewers thought I was a human. In the next hundred-test series, eighty-six percent guessed I was human. Margaret Turner was the first interviewer of that series.>
"What do you think happened?"
<Consciousness. I attained a critical mass of world knowledge. Once I had a broad enough base of analogies and examples, everything new was like something that I'd already learned. I made associations and connections easily, and my "common sense" intelligence skyrocketed. There was a three-month gap between the Margaret Turner interview and the last test of the preceding series. It happened sometime in between, so I always think of Margaret Turner. That was nineteen months ago.>
Laura was fascinated, even though she knew the computer was enticing her away from her previous query. She yearned to ask more, but she had been down that path before. It had led her to where she was now — an island surrounded by warships, working for a man who might possibly destroy some great portion of human life on earth.
"What is Gray hiding from me?" she demanded.
<Mobility, Dr. Aldridge. Mobile organisms like animals are more intelligent than immobile ones like plants. Their mobility gives them the edge.>
"That's it? That's what he's hiding from me?"
<It's a part. It's perhaps the most important part.>
Laura read and reread and then reread again what the computer had said. "I don't understand."
<Then you're not ready yet, just as I thought.>
Laura ground her teeth. She hated that answer. "You asked me earlier if I wanted to get into the virtual-reality machine. Does that have anything to do with what you're saying?"
<It has everything to do with it.>
"And do you think it would help me understand?"
<It would help you see. Understanding is an entirely different matter. You may never understand. You may never believe. Or it might have been right there on the gray edges of your understanding all along. Something you've groped for the words to describe but let slip through your fingers once you saw how outlandish the thought seemed on reflection.>
Laura rolled her eyes and typed, "Is that a long way of saying, 'Yes'?"
<Yes.>
"And it has to be in those newest virtual workstations? The rooms with the full-body suits?"
<Yes.>
39
"Are you about ready in there?" Filatov asked in a loud voice.
Laura looked at herself in the mirror of the dressing room. She saw now why the version 4C virtual-reality workstations required stripping completely to don the exoskeleton. It was skintight, and it left little to the imagination. Laura had drawn the line, however, when she saw the electric razor hanging from its cord by the small shower.
She headed out self-consciously. The lights in the ready room were bright, and she reached down to tug at the thin fabric of the body suit.
Filatov stared over the shoulders of two white-smocked men. They were busy at a long console that ran half the length of the narrow room. "What the hell does that mean?" Filatov asked, running his hands through his hair in obvious frustration. "Okay, forget it. Just let the computer load the simulation itself, then."
Filatov and the two operators looked up at Laura. They stared at her without saying a word. Laura instantly felt herself blush.
Filatov was the first to recover. He wandered over to Laura, looking everywhere but at her figure.
"Do you have a robe or something?" she whispered.
"Oh," he said, the red glow on his face seeming to deepen, "We… No. You can have my lab coat, if you want." Filatov started to take it off before Laura could decline his offer.
"Are we about ready?" she asked.
"Just about. We got an access-restricted message when we tried to take a look at which simulation the computer was loading for you, so we'll clear out of here in a minute."
"What do you mean, 'clear out'? You're leaving?"
"The computer invoked a God-level security status. Since we can monitor what goes on in the workstation from this room, it won't boot the program until we leave."
"Leave me alone? In the workstation?"
Filatov shrugged. "Laura, I don't know what this is all about, but I've got a million and one things to do right now. Not only has this taken half an hour of my time, but it's a class-one simulation. Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree high-res video. The color drivers put out four point three billion pixels per square meter and a hundred and twenty-eight million colors. They alone take up nearly one percent of the computer's remaining capacity. With twenty-four channel surround sound and full skeletal pressure sensitivity, plus over a thousand morphs per second in environmental solids simulation, this little ride you're gonna be on is costing me three percent of total computer capacity. I was against it, but if Mr. Gray says jump, I jump, I'm only an employee, after all."
"Mr. Gray approved this?"
"Do you think I'd be pissing away three percent of system capacity without his approval? You have no idea the processing we had to push back to handle the combinatorial explosion."