Laura laughed. "She did seem pretty chipper." Laura was grinning broadly.
The sun-streaked foliage of the verdant jungle flew by. It was a perfectly glorious morning, and Laura waited patiently for Gray to continue. She was too busy to talk. Too focused on the feelings she'd dared not allow herself before. Laura looked up at Gray. At his serene expression, his dark hair, his unwrinkled brow. The feelings she'd fought back for so long now bloomed, and although the emotional risk to her was still there, she let them. When she glanced back at Gray, he looked down at her through brilliant blue eyes. Laura felt so exposed that she grew guarded again.
"What you said," Gray continued, but in a low and different tone, "in the control room last night… you were right. I've been fighting so long and hard that I was losing track of what I was fighting for. There was a part of me, inside, that I hadn't felt in a long, long time. I couldn't just stand there and let that happen to Gina."
"So where does that leave her now?" Laura asked. She was preoccupied — trying to rein in the emotions that left her so vulnerable to a totally unpredictable and mysterious man. "I mean… she's still trapped inside that computer. A 'ghost in a machine.'"
"You're forgetting your big lesson in mobility," he said, looking at her with a smile. "As snobbish as Gina is about robots, she seemed fairly pleased by my plan to download her into a new Model Nine." Laura's head shot up, and she grinned with sudden delight.
"It'll use DNA, which is the most amazing computer ever built. Every strand stores all the instructions used to construct…"
Laura tuned him out for the remainder of his lecture. "Gina will like being out in the world," she said when he'd finished.
"It's what she wants more than anything else in the world. It's been terrible for her — the disembodiment. She has had to watch the Model Eights running around the island while she was stuck in that underground pool."
Their feet were flying down the hill, and Laura thought just then that she had never felt more wonderful in her life. The air was growing thicker, and after a short jaunt back on the main road, they took another paved footpath through the jungle. The downhill slope made the run seem effortless.
But there still loomed the question that threatened an abrupt end to all Laura's happiness. She felt sickened by the prospect of asking it, but she couldn't hold back for long the feelings that demanded her attention. She had to know if she could let them consume her completely. "So… you were going to tell me something?" Laura managed — her voice an octave too high.
"You're still not ready."
She swallowed. "What is that? An access-restricted message?"
Gray chuckled. "I hope those didn't aggravate you too much."
"What?" Laura asked.
"Those access-restricted messages."
She looked up at him. "What do you mean?"
"I mean I hope you understand why they were necessary. Gina was beginning to seriously malfunction. I didn't know how bad it would get, and I couldn't just have her blabbing the whole thing to people who couldn't possibly understand."
"Wait a minute! Are you saying you programmed the computer to give those messages?"
"Sure," he said as if surprised that it wasn't obvious to her. "As it turned out, it was a good measure of your preparedness. It marked the milestones of your progress."
"My progress toward what?"
"Toward understanding."
The day was growing warmer with every splash of sunlight that bathed the path.
"And Gina didn't know what those messages were?"
"Not at first. When she figured it out she was hurt. She thought I didn't trust her anymore… and I didn't."
"But… now you're going to tell me what your little access-restricted program kept me from learning, right?"
"Yes, but you're going to think I'm crazy again. You're going to think I'm some weird eccentric."
"I already think that, so go ahead."
He laughed at her joke, and Laura smiled. The footpath again rejoined the road, and Laura was surprised at how far they had run.
It was the road that ran between the airport and the Village, and they had to get out of the roadbed to allow a busload of new arrivals to pass. The faces of all the passengers were jammed into the windows like tourists, and they seemed excited to catch a glimpse of Joseph Gray. He was completely oblivious to the adoration and the hurriedly snapped photographs. The bus was headed toward the Village up ahead, which Laura could see was teeming with life.
Human life and, to her great shock, robotic.
A crowd of people followed a Model Eight as it walked down the central boulevard. Cameras flashed and mothers held their children to keep them from getting too close to its legs. Laura wondered if the day would come when such sights would cease to be remarkable. Not if, Laura realized, but when.
She looked up at Gray, who ran along in silence. "Okay, Joseph, you're stalling."
He took a deep breath and said, "I've never told anybody this in my entire life — only Gina. I was afraid to tell other people."
"Afraid of what?"
"Of the virus." They ran on, and Laura waited.
"I realized what was happening when I was a child. When I was eight years old, as a matter of fact. I was reading Mein Kampf, and—"
"Hitler's Mein Kampf?" she interrupted. "You were eight, and you were reading Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf?"
"Would you let me finish this, please?" Laura fell silent. He had grown serious, and she let him find the words in his own time. They approached the outskirts of the Village, and another bus of oglers rambled by. Gray's legions of true believers were back in force. The new phase had begun in earnest.
"You've noted my preoccupation with evolution," he finally continued. "The genetic engineering effected by biological evolution over millions of years of life on earth has done more to change the face of this planet than wind, fire, rain, and water. Darwinian evolution is incredibly powerful, but it's also glacial in its rate of change. It requires thousands of generations to test even the most minuscule of mutations in the population. Then, after competition has determined the fittest, it takes thousands of generations for the superior organism to dominate the species and, by dominating, spread its superior traits. For major architectural changes to an organism, the change takes tens of thousands of years."
"Major architectural changes like what, for instance?"
"Like expanding the size of the human brain and the cranium that houses it. Because that's what's necessary, ultimately, to improve our performance." They entered the Village streets and turned left at the central boulevard. Smiling people waved on Gray's path. Laura marveled that he seemed not to notice. "Oh, we can tweak the system. We can use tricks to learn and improve our mental processing speed."
"And what about your 'tools'—the computer, for instance?"
"But those tools are alive themselves. They're living organisms whose evolutionary histories are only beginning. Relying on them for assistance is all we can do for now, but it's not a long-term solution. In the long term we would be placing the continued existence of our species in the hands of another species. That's a foolish course."
They ran to the end of the boulevard, and Gray stopped at the base of the statue. He sat, and Laura settled onto the cool stone base beside him. Sounds of life filled the Village, but from Gray there was silence. Just when Laura thought she was going to have to prod him into continuing, however, he began.
"About ten thousand years ago, humans were infected with a virus that rendered genetic evolution irrelevant. The speed with which that new virus reproduces is phenomenal, and its rate of reproduction is growing a millionfold every human generation. Within the next century it could extinguish all human life on earth."