Fool's Experiments (32 page)

There was another place, an unimaginable place, an unknown implied by the curious new problems. Maybe in
that
place, it would be free to experience
all
time.

The entity decided to find that out....

The restaurant of the little inn was packed. A wood fire crackled in the large masonry fireplace. A jazz trio was setting up. The chatter and laughter of diners filled the dining room. Something smelled wonderful.

A bowl of chilled shrimp, indifferently picked at, sat beside a candle globe on Doug and Cheryl's table. Doug raised his wineglass and swirled its contents. "Despite the setting, the occasion"—the VA had placed its first order for prostheses—"and the company, this is a surprisingly unfestive celebration."

"Sorry," Cheryl said.

He was the wet blanket. What was
she
sorry about?

She sipped her wine before continuing. "I understand, Doug. Truly, I do. You've dedicated years to developing a better prosthetic limb. Yes, BioSciCorp can finally put the technology into production. It's still the end of an era for you. Of course you're depressed."

Depression was merely anger without enthusiasm. Was he angry about something?

She took a deep breath. "It's not disloyal to Holly to take pride in an accomplishment."

"I know," Doug lied. Then the waiter delivered their entrees, and the awkward moment passed.

Doug told himself he was just aimless, not depressed, and yet he couldn't manage a pun to save his life. "I wish I knew what challenge came next."

She picked up her fork. "You
just
returned to BSC. What do you mean?"

"Prosthetics is a small comer of BSC. Chances are, I've done everything there I can." He tried to sound light. "I'm already with the most beautiful woman in the company."

"Thanks, though hardly, and back up. No NIT group is large, especially now. What are you telling me?"

"Maybe I'd fit better someplace else." He wished he had a clue where that might be and what he would be doing there. He knew NIT, and now a fair amount about computer security.

And his newfound obsession with artificial intelligence? Maybe that was his new calling. At the least, Bev Greenwood's unanswerable question haunted him. How smart was
it
anyway?

Cheryl picked at one of the fried crab cakes on her plate. (He had the heart-healthy and bland fillet of sole.) "Glenn would happily take you back." She looked about the dining room, as though to signal why she was being vague. "And there are places he could refer you."

Classified NIT work, she meant. Helmets. He shivered. "No thanks."

She looked as unsettled as he felt. He was the supposedly depressed one and
she
had apologized before for the unfestive mood.

"I'm as oblivious as the next guy, Cheryl. Maybe more so. Even I see something is on your mind."

Her cheek ticced. "This isn't the place. We'll talk later."

What the
hell
was she not telling him?

The musicians finished their setup and began playing. Sax, double bass, and drums from fifteen feet away: It pretty much killed any hope of conversation. They ate quickly and walked out to his car. Cheryl gave a lot of attention to fastening her seat belt. Stalling.

"Okay," Doug said. He did not start the engine. "Out with it."

"Sheila Brunner," Cheryl muttered.

"What about her?"

The story tumbled out in a rush, and Doug forgot all about his malaise. "I'm truly sorry for Sheila, but it's too late to help her." Could a virus once imprinted into a mind through a NIT helmet back out the other way? "And it's way too dangerous. What are you trying to prove?"

Cheryl had been staring out the windshield. Now she turned her head and looked right at him. "Not long ago, I said much the same to you. You told me it was something you had to do."

And that he had gone on to do. It had almost killed him.

That Cheryl planned to go under a helmet scared him far more.

Two, four, six, eight.

Linda could not look away. Al was well aware which values came next. Al knew, on pain of losing half its processing nodes, never to touch the supervisory programs. And yet Al had usurped control of the supervisory programs—and revealed the fact!—to output that simple series to the sysadmin console.

In a fog, Linda exited through lab security and sat in her car. The midday sky was cloudless and the sun beat down. The inside of the vehicle was like an oven. She scarcely noticed.

Reaching stealthily past the supervisory programs, Al might have been studying her lab for weeks. No, that was paranoia. The supercomputer had no sensors. The lab had no connection to the outside world. What Al could deduce within its quarantine was limited.

Maybe Al inferred the outside world from the NSA data sets. Maybe it retained the memories of ancestors who had escaped AJ's lab unsuspected.

Did
how
matter right now?

Linda took the cell phone from the car's glove box. "Glenn, it's me. Al wants to talk."

Linda never exactly offered, and Glenn never precisely asked, so perhaps events were preordained. Very obliquely, they talked around the subject. She wound up on a plane out east.

One way or the other, Linda spent a week learning all about NIT helmets. Connecting them to computers. Defending them against viruses. Visualizing cyberspace while wearing one. Tuning and maintaining them.

The lead CIA tech, Aaron McDougal, was happy to answer questions. The one thing he refused to do was wear a helmet. If her plan had any merit, this would all go faster if she and McDougal both wore helmets and communicated that way. Or if McDougal had been cleared to hear
why
she wanted a helmet. He had been told only that she was worried about viruses.

A week or a month, Al would not care. His supercomputer was powered down.

Glenn dropped by at the end of the week. The techs at the CIA lab were almost as deferential as the Army guards in her lab. He had made quite an impression here at...that last incident. "How go the preparations?"

"Good." The mostly filled box on a lab workbench should have been a clue. "I plan to fly back tomorrow, Glenn." The box had to travel by military transport, so Linda planned to ride along. She wondered what that would be like.

Her boss pulled out a lab stool and sat. "Convince me this is safe."

So
had
it been her idea? Glenn's sudden solicitousness made her think he had, somehow, planted the seed. It no longer mattered. She
wanted
to do this.

Linda patted the helmet in the still-open box. "Looks just like what you've seen before, doesn't it? Of course you can't see software upgrades. Regardless, the big differences will be
between
helmet and computer."

Glenn raised an eyebrow at "will be."

With a black marker, Linda drew two boxes and a stick figure on the whiteboard. The stick figure had a bowl on its head. "The large box is Al's computer. The small box controls the helmet." She connected the boxes with a heavy line. "And
that
is why I'll be safe."

That
was a delay line. Al meddled in software, probably in more ways than she could anticipate. He could not alter hardware.

"Here's the thing, Glenn. We want messages in approved formats, and nothing else, to pass through the helmet. It'll be like exchanging e-mail, but at the speed of thought." He started to say something. She raised a hand to interrupt. "Yes, we think at different speeds. That's where the custom interface comes in. The delay line can't physically deliver a signal faster than the speed
I
can think at. Nothing Al does can alter that."

"So the delay line is like the big spool of optical fiber that trapped its cousin."

Different mechanism, same idea. It might have occurred to her quicker had she known what finally got the escaped one. Glenn had never before volunteered that detail.

Linda said, "Yes, with enhancements. There are controls at the input to the delay line. Suppose Al tries to send something other than a message in the allowed format. The failsafe immediately severs the link, at both ends. The connection drops before the delayed message ever reaches the helmet controller."

She could not decide if Glenn looked impressed. AJ had been much more forthcoming.

"And when Al does try something?" Glenn finally asked. When, not if. Glenn was probably correct. She picked up an eraser and obliterated most of the big box. Al's box. "Then we teach him to cooperate."

"Ah. Lion taming." Glenn smiled. "I shall have to learn to imagine you with whip and pith helmet."

She took that remark as her final okay.

At two minutes until eight, Doug's doorbell rang.

Ralph and Jim were predictably late on poker nights. Predictably late, period. Glenn was a stand-in, subbing for Keith Perlman, so Glenn's punctuality tonight would not be a matter of precedent. It was just the way Glenn was. By the rules. On the dot. According to Hoyle.

No mere international crisis would make Glenn late.

The door was unlocked. "Come on in, Glenn," Doug called out.

Glenn did. "Thanks for inviting me."

"Sure," Doug said. "I should mention the friend you're covering for usually loses big."

Glenn glanced around. A card table and four folding chairs sat in the living room. The chairs were empty. "I'm the first one here?" he asked.

Doug nodded.

"Good. I wanted to say this face-to-face. Cheryl called me. I didn't contact her."

"Uh-huh." Cheryl had said the same, and Doug believed her. Neither pronouncement made her plans any easier to accept.

"Having said that..."

So Glenn wanted to discuss—yet again—opportunities at the forum. Gesturing toward the TV on which CNN droned softly, Doug changed the subject. "Hell of a mess."

The screen showed a naval flotilla, part of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. The ships were patrolling the Persian Gulf near where a ballistic missile had crashed and sunk, shot down in its boost phase by a USAF airborne laser. As the voice-over described the interrupted missile test, the crawler repeated New Caliphate warnings of "consequences."

"Not good," Glenn agreed.

Doug turned off the TV. "You ready for a beer?"

"Always. About that"—Glenn gestured at the now-dark TV—"rumor has it you're at loose ends. I could use someone with your experience."

Loose ends. Cheryl talking again? "I don't think so, Glenn." Jim's arrival cut off that line of conversation. Watching those two together should be fun. Then Ralph Pittman rang the bell, and the interpersonal dynamics got that much more interesting. Leaving Ralph and Glenn to catch up, Doug went to the kitchen. He upended a bag of low-fat, no-taste simulated cheese snacks into a bowl. He had real food for his guests. At least beer was heart-healthy.

He returned to find Ralph riffing about the quest for the Great Indigo Whale. Glenn played along, limping about as though with a wooden leg. Ralph had raised baiting Glenn to an art form. Why was Glenn playing along? Why, for God's sake, was Glenn smirking?

Doug distributed bottles of beer. "Since everyone is so garrulous tonight, you could just pay me upfront."

Ralph snorted. "That's the
only
way you'll get my money."

"In your dreams," Jim said.

Glenn didn't respond. He fished a cell phone from his pant pocket and looked at a text message. "Shit. Turn on CNN."

The image was all too familiar. A building shattered, wreathed in smoke and flame. Papers fluttering everywhere. The remains of a truck, its chassis twisted and charred. Careening ambulances and police cars. Wide-eyed people in bloody bandages. " 'American Embassy in London,' " Doug read from the crawler. "Crap."

Consequences, the New Caliphate had said.

Maybe the timing was entirely coincidental—Glenn said planning a bombing like that took time. Maybe the blast had been planned for a while, awaiting an excuse.

By tacit agreement, poker night ended without a hand being dealt.

Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, the pop- psych book would have it.

"Men are from Mars, and women all want to go there," Doug once said. "They can't tell a planet from a chocolate fix."

The random memories were no stranger than the sights, odors, and sounds that now washed over Cheryl. Unlike the primitive helmets she had tried in a simpler time, this one covered her eyes and ears, and it adapted to her mind within seconds.

Ralph had visualized a computer full of programs as a medieval castle keep. Doug spoke of a modern city, cold and sterile.

Did such conceptualizations influence how one appeared to another helmet wearer? Cheryl could easily imagine that they might.

Programs cooperated; why not envision them enjoying the process? The chaos in her mind resolved into a flock of sheep, gamboling and frolicking in a grassy meadow. She tried to picture herself as a border collie: strong, intelligent, protective.

Hopefully also nonthreatening.

"I'm ready," Cheryl called to the technician. "Is Dr. Brunner?"

Sheila's family had agreed to transfer her to a CIA psychiatric hospital. Glenn could be persuasive, but the prospect of decades of expensive care probably left them little choice.

If the staff here thought the new treatment strange, they kept their opinions to themselves. Maybe they were used to long-shot experiments with patients as unresponsive as Sheila.

"Go ahead," the tech responded.

In other words, how would anyone know?

With or without helmet, Sheila sat indifferently. At least putting a helmet on her head had not triggered a panic attack—she had worn one many times before. The flood of sensations so startling to Cheryl was nothing new to Sheila.

Or perhaps those stimuli, too, had gone unnoticed.

Their helmets linked to separate workstations. The flip of a switch would connect them. No castle walls, portcullis, or drawbridge between us, Cheryl reminded herself. Warm thoughts. Happy images. A pebbled, flower-lined path. "Connect us, please."