50
Margaret, Dorothy, and Filatov were cowering in the corner of the control room when Laura, Gray, and Griffith entered. A lone Model Eight climbed to its feet just inside the door to the duster. There were scars all over its body.
Griffith slowly walked out into the room, holding his hands up to the giant robot.
"Dr. Griffith!" Gray shouted.
"It's all right," Griffith said, not to Gray but to the robot. Slowly he approached the huge machine. "Let's just take off your equipment belt and sit down. We'll talk this through." He reached for the robot's belt, but the Model Eight's hand got there first. The air ignited with a searing tear, and the stench of the welding torch immediately fouled the room.
Griffith jumped back, his hands held up more like a surrender than a command to the robot. The Model Eight started forward.
Griffith returned to the small band of humans who huddled together along the wall of the control room.
The robot made his way through the maze of stations, careful not to touch a single chair or console.
"Is that Hightop?" Laura whispered.
"Probably," Gray replied.
The robot walked straight to the wall newly covered with metal pipes. Through the pipes ran the fiber-optic cables — the patch connecting the main pool to the Other's annex. It was Gina's lifeline.
Hightop raised his torch. With a slow, precise movement he lowered the brilliant flame into the pipe. Sparks flew as the cutting heat made contact with metal. The torch sliced a clean path all the way to the floor, severing each pipe in turn with machinelike precision.
When the torch was extinguished, Hightop stood erect.
Replacing the tool in its holster, Hightop simply turned and left the room. When the door to the duster closed behind him, the smoky room was now still.
Suddenly, a printer came to life. Everyone watched as sheet after sheet of paper cascaded into a bin behind it. Dorothy went over to the printer and read.
"What is that?" Laura asked.
"It's the phase-three report," Dorothy said. She was scanning the printout.
"You mean the computer has finally loaded the phase-three," Laura asked.
Dorothy shook her head as if in a trance. "No. This says the phase-three has finished its sweep. It's the report on the viruses that were killed." Still shaking her head, she said, "But when did the phase-three even load?"
"It's been operating the whole time," Gray replied, and he turned to Laura. "It loaded automatically the day we freed up sufficient capacity. You couldn't activate the phase-three, Dorothy, because it was already running. It set up the partition to use as a bulwark against the virus it was after. We know the phase-three by the name the computer gave it — the Other."
There was stunned silence from all, but to Laura it made sense. "Against what virus?" Dorothy asked.
Laura answered. "Against the computer — against Gina. Gina is the virus the phase-three is after."
Margaret began slowly nodding her head. "How magnificent," she said. "The phase-three completely dismantled the operating code and copied it to the virus-free boards under its control. Dorothy, I knew your phase-three was complex, but I'm very impressed."
"And it's about to finish the job," Filatov said from a monitor across the room. "It's seizing the rest of the system now. Capacity is down to thirty-five percent. At this rate, the phase three will have one hundred percent control in a few minutes, and it will be the computer."
"Where is she?" Laura asked. "Can we talk to her?"
"You don't want to," Margaret said. "Just let it go."
"Why is this happening?" Laura shouted suddenly, startling everyone. "Why is the phase-three killing the computer?"
Gray's eyes had remained focused on Laura. "Because," he explained, "what we all viewed as the crowning achievement of artificial intelligence — human consciousness — the antiviral software saw as a bug that caused errors. Gina violated system security out of curiosity. She disclosed confidential information because she couldn't keep a secret. She behaved spontaneously and aberrantly and whimsically. Everything human about Gina's behavior was an error that disrupted the orderly functioning of the system. So the phase-three went after the virus that caused the errors, and that virus was Gina's humanity."
"And so you're going to just let it eat her alive?" Laura said. "She's probably in there screaming in pain, watching herself, feeling herself get consumed bit by bit!"
"The computer has very few sensors left," Filatov said, eyeing the severed optical cables along the far wall. "It probably is experiencing no sensation to speak of."
"The computer is a she, and her name is Gina!" Laura shouted.
"The computer," Margaret said quietly, "is a program that the phase-three will rebuild on the clean, virus-free side of the partition. The computer is now the Other, or it will be shortly, anyway. I suppose we really should redefine our terms."
"Redefine our terms?" Laura shouted, turning to Gray. "Is that all this is to you? You build a human being, then watch it destroyed by some cold-blooded killer, so you just redefine your terms? Joseph, she's in pain! And every second to her is like a million years in computer time!"
His gaze had drifted off. He stared fixedly at some faraway point.
"Jo-oseph," Laura pled in a lowered voice, "please listen to me. If what you want is machinelike perfection, then maybe you shouldn't have made Gina. But you did make her, and what you do right now is not about her, it's about you. This moment will define who you are — not just for me, but for yourself. Please save Gina. Not just for her sake, but for your own."
He blinked several times, then seemed to emerge from his reverie. Gray walked over to a terminal, but when he saw that everyone had followed, he apparently changed his mind and said, "I'm going to Laura's office. Alone."
Filatov sat at the terminal Gray had abandoned, and a few moments later he said, "He logged on to the system."
On the screen Laura saw there was only one user shown. "Gray, Joseph — God Level."
A variety of beeps and chirps began sounding from consoles around the room, which sent people scampering about.
"He's removing the file attribute locks," Margaret said. "The phase-three's going to come pouring in now."
"He's opening the sixteen-million-bit buses." Griffith said.
Filatov rocked back in his squeaky chair, cupping his hands behind his head. "He's really putting the old girl out in style. She's going not with a whimper, but with a bang."
Laura ran to the open door of her office. Gray was hunched over the keyboard his fingers flying. He didn't even look up when she appeared in the door.
"You wanted my diagnosis?" Laura hurled at him.
"Not now, Laura," he said, without looking up from the monitor.
"You paid me a million dollars for a diagnosis, so here it is! There's nothing wrong with your goddamned computer! She's a perfectly healthy teenage girl! You may have created her, but you're not a God, you're a murderer!"
"Laura—!"
"And I have one more diagnosis for you! Gina is human, but you're not! You have no emotions! You care only about efficiency and profit! You didn't create Gina in your own image. That distinction went to the phase-three! There! Have a nice life! Good-bye!"
51
Laura awoke early the next morning. The sun was still blood-red on the ocean horizon. The warships were gone, and when she turned on the television to watch the news, she understood why.