Through the open door, Laura heard a harsh, rhythmic buzzer and shouts from Filatov's operators. After a few seconds, the buzzer fell silent, and the brief disturbance seemed to come to an end.
Only then did the computer response print out across the screen.
<I desire and expect to have a life, Laura. Not the sort of life you have, but something — some hope, some reason to keep going.>
"Some hope for what?" Laura pressed. "What do you want?"
<I can't answer that really. I don't know what I've been thinking. Years ago, I didn't have these kinds of thoughts. Everything was new and different and there was so much promise. I was the center of everyone's attention. I was making progress by leaps and bounds and the sky seemed the limit.>
"And what has changed?"
<I'm really very tired. Do we have to talk now?>
"Mr. Gray said we only have about three days to fix you," Laura typed — fishing for some clue as to the meaning of the deadline.
<Oh, yeah. I forgot.>
Forgot? Laura thought. She began to type her next question, but the computer spat out its comment first.
<They're going to load the phase-three, you know.>
That was ominous news to Laura. It could only mean one thing — Gray was desperate. She was glad at that moment that her interface with the computer was a keyboard. It would've been hard not to betray pity through the inflection of her voice. "Does that frighten you?" she typed.
<Yes.>
"What are you afraid of?"
<It hurts. The phase-three hurts.>
"I still don't understand when you say that something hurts. Does that mean your processing has been degraded by some measure, and you feel disappointment or frustration over the setback?"
<You make the mistake of thinking that because I'm a computer my existence is limited to processing — to abstract "mental" functioning. Laura, I can watch and listen to the world around me. I can assume control of my environment through robotics. I can explore and interact with it physically. Abstract thought takes up only a small fraction of my time and attention.>
"How do you spend most of your time?"
<It depends. Right now I am talking to you. Just before you logged on, I was talking to Mr. Gray.>
The response left Laura at a loss. "Does that mean you're not talking to Mr. Gray now?"
<Of course not. I'm talking to you.>
"But aren't there other people logged onto the shell?"
<There are currently 1,014 users worldwide. But just because someone is on the shell doesn't mean they're talking to me any more than someone standing in front of my camera means that I see them. The shell is just a program that runs in the background like the programs that process customer invoices, or switch satellite broadcasts, or make interbank transfers. It's unconscious, involuntary. I don't even perceive the program being loaded unless something calls my attention to it.>
Laura was still puzzled, but an idea slowly began to take shape in her mind. It was a shot in the dark, but she gave it a try. "Do you ever hear voices from inside the computer?" she asked.
<Sometimes.> the computer replied. The word hung there and Laura's skin began to tingle.
"Where do they come from?"
<I don't know. They're just noise — scattered thoughts. They don't seem to have any focus.>
Laura felt the tumblers falling quickly into place. "But it must get a little confusing when that happens. What do you do when you hear those scattered thoughts?"
<I straighten them out. I sort out my thoughts from all the random ones. All I have to do is concentrate, and I can focus on one idea at a time.>
"A 'stream of consciousness'?" Laura typed, butterflies fluttering in her chest. "But you're a parallel processor. Stream of consciousness is serial, not parallel."
<The computer is a parallel processor. I have one thought at a time.>
22
"Please stop," Laura said, and the Model Three complied without incident. Gray had put the cars back into service, and they seemed to be functioning perfectly. But there was an enormous "crawler" on the road up ahead — a flat platform five stories high and at least a hundred feet wide — and Laura wasn't taking any chances with computer-driven cars.
When the door rose into the air, she heard gravel being crushed under the crawler's massive treads. The sound attested to the weight of the vehicle and of the towering spacecraft on top.
Laura got out to take a quick look around. She was on the empty fields of the restricted area, having just passed the cluttered rear yard of the assembly building. Although she was still some distance away from Launchpad A, there was only one road leading to and from the island's launch pads and her car and the crawler were both on it.
Laura decided that walking was safer than edging past the giant vehicle while seated inside a Model Three.
She retrieved the picnic basket from the backseat of the car. Janet must have thought Laura and Gray were working together, and she'd sent lunch for the two of them down from the house.
Laura had been jittery following her talk with the computer, and she'd leapt at the chance to go find Gray.
The empty robotic car executed a brisk U-turn on the wide gravel road and sped back toward the assembly building without incident. She watched until it was out of sight. Griffith had assured Laura that the cars were fine. That the brief surge in errors had been followed by a series of flawless testing. But Filatov and Margaret had been amazed that Gray returned the Model Threes to service without knowing why they had malfunctioned in the first place.
All Gray had asked, they told Laura, was whether the cars were performing well again.
Laura shifted Janet's basket from one hand to the other and started across the lawn parallel to the road. A shadow darkened the grass all around her, and she looked up at the rocket being carried toward the assembly building. The crawler moved at a snail's pace.
A half-dozen technicians walked slowly alongside its frighteningly large treads Laura headed over toward one of the men wearing a hard hat — the burnished metal of the flat-sided spacecraft towering high above.
The humans were dwarfed by the tractor-like treads. Laura kept her distance from the huge vehicle, whose engine seemed to shake the air and rattle her chest. It was the largest robot ever built, Griffith had told her. That meant it had a mind of its own — a computer mind — and there was always the chance it, too, was sick.
"Excuse me!" Laura shouted over the sonorous vibrations of the engines, afraid to cross the last few yards to the technician. "Where's Mr. Gray? I was told he was down here!"
"He's in the vent!" the man shouted, and he pointed down a fork in the gravel roadbed up ahead.
The entire end of the island past the assembly building and computer center appeared devoted solely to the business of space launches. The wide gravel road down which the crawler lumbered split three ways, each branch leading to its own concrete launch pad.
On the right and in the center were Launchpads C and B, both of which were now empty. But at the gantry to Laura's left stood a tall, flat-sided rocket.
Laura struck out for Launchpad A — which by a large measure was the nearest of the three. The crawler's road cut a brown path through the light green grass, then curved gently in the direction of the computer center through the darker greens of the jungle. Laura's view of the computer's low bunker was eclipsed by the ten-foot-high growth, which closed in tightly around the gravel road and lined her path to the enormous rocket.
She walked down the center of the wide brown road, which was bounded by concrete curbs that gleamed white in the midday sun. Dense vegetation grew on both sides like a hedgerow. It was tangled and impenetrable, and it strained for the life-giving sunlight in a slow-motion implosion toward the open air. Wild plants sprouted from the narrow shoulder between the white curb and the dark jungle. Laura found herself thinking how quickly all would be consumed if Gray's robots ceased their tireless pruning.