Hoblenz put his fork down and wiped his lips with a napkin. "Well, all right." He hesitated. "This afternoon we had a penetration of a secure zone."
Laura was instantly on guard. "What secure zone?"
Hoblenz looked at Gray, who nodded.
"It was a VR workstation, we're pretty sure," Hoblenz said. "The log showed that a bunch of VR drivers got loaded."
"It was me," Laura said immediately.
Gray looked up — not at her, but at Hoblenz.
Hoblenz threw his napkin down on the table, returning Gray's stare. "That don't prove a goddamn thing, sir!"
Gray turned to Laura. "How did you get in?" he asked, looking now directly into her eyes.
"The computer told me to go there, and I did."
"Where did you go when you were in cyberspace?" Gray asked. He chose each word with care.
Laura glanced back and forth between the two men. "I… I went to your facility in Germany, and then to a shopping mall."
"Tyson's Corner outside Washington?" Gray asked, and Laura nodded.
Hoblenz looked over at his boss. He wore a confused look on his face.
He's never been there, Laura realized. But Gray has.
"Anywhere… else?" Gray probed. Laura held his gaze for a moment, then nodded again — just once. Gray stared back at her through eyes that narrowed to mere slits, then abruptly said, "Mr. Hoblenz, would you leave us, please."
Hoblenz arched his eyebrows in shock. "Sir?"
"I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave us alone. I apologize about dinner. I'll give you a rain check."
Hoblenz hesitated, then heaved a noisy sigh and rose. He was furious, Laura could see.
"And Mr. Hoblenz, call off your surveillance of Dr. Aldridge."
Hoblenz muttered something laced with profanity, then he stomped from the room with his jaw firmly set.
Laura kept her eyes on her plate. The waiters served the main course — rack of lamb with mint jelly. Laura drained her glass of wine, and Gray promptly refilled it.
"Look," Laura said abruptly. "I'm sorry if I saw something I wasn't supposed to. I knew I shouldn't have gone in there, but… I'm supposed to get inside the computer's head, so what better way than in one of those workstations?" she tried, using the computer's fairly weak justification.
Gray poked at his lamb, slumped over the plate wearing a look of resignation. "You talked to the computer, didn't you?" he asked.
Laura chewed slowly, trying to decide whether to get the computer in trouble. "The voice-recognition speech-synthesis program was loaded while you were in the workstation," he said, eliminating any need for her to answer. "What'd you think about it?"
Laura broke into a grin. "It was amazing," she said, and Gray smiled. "Why don't you have it talk all the time?"
"I will, someday. Right now the program is a resource hog."
They ate for a while in silence. When Gray resumed, he'd changed the topic. "Have you talked to the computer about its depression?"
"I… I hadn't gotten that far yet," Laura replied, feeling slightly defensive. "I thought what I'd do first is determine whether the computer was sufficiently 'human' to exhibit psychiatric pathologies."
Gray nodded. He seemed to have lost interest in his meal. "So… where else did you go? In cyberspace, I mean?"
Gray poked at his food with his fork, waiting for her answer.
"It looked like… somewhere in space. Like on a planet or a moon, only the ground was jet-black."
Gray replaced the utensil on his plate, the lamb resting on it uneaten.
He spoke slowly when he asked, "Did you touch anything?"
Laura tilted her head in confusion, then replied, "No, I didn't touch anything."
"Are you absolutely certain?" he persisted.
Laura nodded, then nodded again more vigorously. "When I reached out in front of me," she explained, raising her arm in the air, "my hand looked like this… claw." She pinched her fingers together like a lobster. "It scared me so much, I got out right away. I didn't touch a thing, I swear."
Gray nodded slowly.
"What was that place?"
Gray looked up, but he stared straight past her and out the window. He spoke slowly, his voice lowered. "For the first time in my life I don't know what to do. I don't know whether to tell you everything, or send you away from this island forever. I don't know whether to shut the computer down and start over, or whether what's happening is the most exciting thing since the dawn of man. I… I just don't know what to do."
She waited, but he said nothing further.
"Mr. Gray, when you told me about how you could, you know, operate robots remotely…"
He looked up at her. "Teleoperation," he supplied.
"Yeah. Well… was that place where I went some kind of simulation? What it would be like to teleoperate a robot on another planet or something?"
"I don't know," he replied in a faraway voice.
"You don't know the place I'm talking about?" Laura asked. "The place with the pitch-black surface and some sort of… landing craft?"
"Oh, I know the place very well," Gray replied in his tired monotone, looking up at her but clearly lost deep in thought. That was all he would say.
Gray remained quiet on the walk to the car parked in front of his house. He'd suggested they go for a drive, and Laura didn't press him about their destination.
When the car doors closed, Laura said, "Hoblenz doesn't know about that place, does he?" Gray shook his head.
"Assembly building," he directed in a clear voice, and the car took off. "Everything is on a need-to-know basis. With the computer assuming control over more and more of our operations, the list of things even the department heads need to know is growing shorter."
"You act like that's a good thing," Laura said, shaking her head.
They passed through the gates and turned left on the curbed road. "Keeping people in the dark. Why are you so secretive? I mean, surely you trust Margaret and Georgi and Griffith and the others."
He opened his mouth to speak, but the words seemed to stick in his throat. Finally he said, "It's a burden to know certain things. To have to carry them with you all the time. Having to live with their weight on your shoulders."
Laura caught a glimpse of Gray shaking his head before they plunged into the black mouth of the tunnel. She felt emboldened by the cloak of darkness. "The computer knows your big secret."
When they burst out into the dim light of the evening, Laura saw that Gray was looking at her. "Of course it does," he said. "The computer knows almost everything. This island is highly automated and the computer is at the center of all we do." His gaze drifted out of the window. "It's we humans that are becoming increasingly used to the day-to-day operations."
"And you really think I can help the computer, Mr. Gray?" Laura asked, then anxiously awaited his response.
He turned to her. "Please, call me Joseph," was all he said. The assembly building was off-limits to humans. Those who did go inside, Gray explained, made quick runs in from the half a dozen trailers that had been set up just outside.
He led Laura through the duster into the massive building. They didn't venture out onto the main floor, but instead took a side door into a hallway. It led past empty offices to a door labeled "Nursery." Laura followed Gray in.
Along the far wall were arrayed a series of tall stools with low backs. They faced a wide plate-glass window overlooking a large room from on high. Gray ushered Laura past rows of computer terminals toward the window.
In front of each stool was a dashboard filled with monitors and controls. Contraptions that looked like empty gloves rose from the deactivated workstations, and devices like the grip of a gun hung suspended from the ceiling by booms.