"Or maybe we'll all be killed by an asteroid that some rogue genius rams into our planet."
"Maybe," Gray said. "We're creating the engines of our own destruction, and we've been at work on that technology ever since we entered phase two."
She frowned and rubbed her face with cool hands. "Okay, so what's your plan — your phase two?"
"Actually, it's not a plan, it's a stage. It was Gina who named them phase one, two, and three out of a sense of irony over the parallels between the predicament in which both we and she find ourselves. Phase one is the growth of knowledge that began ten thousand years ago. That growth exploded in the last century when knowledge became threatened with extinction along with its human hosts in massive wars of vast destructiveness."
"And phase two?"
"Phase two is the reaction of the human population that nature set in motion. We humans are now in turn threatened by the growth of the parasite. Our overpopulation 'problem' is a mass, subconscious reaction to that threat. Man has spread across this planet like bacteria run rampant, and now we're going to propagate outward. By colonizing into every nook and cranny of the galaxy, we might preserve spores from which our species will reproduce after the great destructions to come. That means aggressive, violent expansion. Unbridled reproduction. An empire spanning the stars. Or it means extinction. Those are the choices, Laura. A diaspora of life — an expansion outward of the human seed — or death."
Laura felt nauseated. It was madness… it just had to be. And it was the most dangerous form of madness, cloaked as it was in the guise of genius. "And what is phase three, then?"
"It's the end. It's the ultimate program for the extinction of mankind. Phase three is the antiviral program coming and seeking to destroy the virus of humanity and [garbled] and crime, and pollution, and our wasteful misuse of resources [garbled] try to eliminate all the things that we humans think and change that bring harm onto ourselves and therefore also onto the store of knowledge. Phase three is when the successor hosts to the virus finally decide in some hopefully distant future to eliminate the risk posed by Homo sapiens. That is the clock I'm racing."
Laura remembered Gina's warning about the phase three. When it enters your universe, only then will you know how I feel, she had said.
Laura took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The boulevard below was aswirl with activity. Everyone laughed and giddily took pictures of the robots, even the Model Sixes. They were trainees — the first of Gray's new army of astronauts. Seed bearers headed out into space to reproduce.
"They don't know any of this," she said, looking up at Gray, who had propped a foot on the base of the statue.
"They don't need to know. Nor do Filatov, or Hoblenz, or Bickham, or Holliday, or Griffith."
"Only me," Laura said, raising her hand to shield her eyes from the bright sun.
"Yes, only you need to know."
It was too much, too fast, too incredible. Her mind jumped from one idea to another, her eyes darting from object to object in a fit of distress.
Her gaze fell on the shadow of the statue — the only monument in the Village. They sat at its base. Gray had run straight there.
It was the place where he had told her everything.
She looked up at the marble figure. It was a girl, or a woman, wearing pants and a short-sleeve shirt. She held a globe aloft in both hands.
The orb had diagonal contours running in swaths across its oblong form. The sun shone brightly behind it. Laura rose and stepped into the shadow to scrutinize the statue for the first time up close and in daylight.
The sun's light formed a halo behind the orb. Laura's heart skipped a beat and she gasped. "Oh, my God!"
The marble figure was of a woman wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt.
Laura stared at the face, the figure. She stared at her own cheekbones and chin and nose, at her own eyes and face and figure.
Laura's skin suddenly crawled and tingled. It was a statue of Laura, holding a human head — Gray's logo — toward the heavens. And it had been there all along!
"I never knew," Gray said as he joined her, "that such a person existed. I always thought the computer simply designed her idea of the perfect woman. It never occurred to me that she had modeled that statue, and her image of herself, on someone real."
"How did she… When…?"
"It was right after you delivered your paper at the Houston symposium. We broadcast it on some obscure channel that the computer was watching. She became infatuated with you and got me to commission this statue. When it arrived, I thought nothing of it. Then, a few months later, Hightop told me the statue had become a focal point of sorts for the Model Eights. The juveniles who snuck out of their facility at night would come here. It became a rite of passage for them to make it all the way into the Village to touch it. Somewhere, embedded deep in the billions of simulations Gina ran for them, her infatuation with you was implanted."
Laura swallowed before trying to speak. "But you… you didn't know anything about…"
"About Gina's matchmaking?" Laura's heart thumped so hard she could feel it. It was on the table, out in the open. "No. I've thought about what you said last night. About Gina being like the daughter of a widower father. It makes sense. I don't think Gina even knew what she was doing. She's been trying to show me how unhappy she is being trapped inside a machine through acts of juvenile delinquency. But those acts raised the specter of the antiviral routines, and Gina was growing more frightened by the day at how far out of hand her behavior had gotten. Finally, she decided to bring you here. Consciously, she thought of you as a would-be girlfriend. Subconsciously, however, she brought you here for me."
Laura breathed only with difficulty. There was a great weight on her chest.
"She put you up in my house," Gray said, then chuckled. "She had an ally in Janet, who's been telling me for days how much life you've brought into my home."
"When did you know all this?" Laura asked.
"One evening," Gray said with deep feeling, "you showed up in my dining room and turned my life upside down, and inside out. I don't know when it all came together in my mind. I loved you from the instant I laid eyes on you. I've [garbled] you [garbled] almost told you — a hundred times since [garbled] I've spent every moment we were apart thinking of ways to meet, and contriving ways I could speed that meeting up and when we were together, I was happy in a way I'd forgotten was possible." He was standing close, and Laura's face rose to his.
"Does it bother you," he asked softly. "that Gina arranged this?"
She felt his breath warm against her upturned lips.
"No," she said, making almost no sound.
The black lenses of the cameras recorded it all, and an ecstatic Gina beamed the scene instantly to all Gray's creations. The robots stopped what they were doing and focused on the strange picture that appeared in their minds out of nowhere. The sight of the two humans kissing meant nothing to them at first. But then there arose an idea in one of the quietest and smartest of the young Model Eights.
They're not like us, it thought. They're different.
Ever so slowly that idea took root and began to spread and to build and to change. It is from that seed that the great destructions of phase three were to grow.