A hacker, perhaps. Someone seated before a monitor exerting his will electronically. It all might be a grandiose prank on the part of some MIT graduate student with access to a computer more intelligent than himself.
This mind might not expect Harold Smith to attack him outside the realm of cyberspace.
On the other hand, he might be expecting it. Perhaps all that had come before was engineered to force Harold Smith out of the cold cocoon of his Folcroft office and into a position of peril.
Therein lay the risk.
Smith thought hard as he cleaned his glasses of even the tiniest dust speck. As his eyes aged, any such mote on the lens was enough to give him a blinding headache. Eyes that looked for the tiniest connections couldn't see past a speck of lint.
Replacing the glasses on his patrician nose, Smith turned and brought up a blank screen. His fingers caressed the touch-sensitive keyboard until a crisp amber sentence appeared on the buried desktop screen: I KNOW YOU EXIST.
Smith pressed the transmit button, although he had every reason to believe that whatever he wrote onscreen was simultaneously reproduced elsewhere.
He waited for a reply. None was forthcoming. Smith frowned. He knew he was not wrong. Perhaps he had chosen to contact the unknown at a time when he was sleeping or attending other matters.
The intercom buzzed and Smith keyed it.
"Dr. Smith, your wife is on line two. And I have your mail."
"Bring it in," said Smith, automatically reaching for the button that would darken the monitor. He felt its coolness and stopped. Reaching for his ROLM phone, Smith left the screen illuminated. The keyboard had gone dark once his hands had withdrawn from the capacitor field.
"Harold, are you coming home tonight?" came Mrs. Smith's voice.
"I'm not certain, dear."
The office door opened and Mrs. Mikulka came in, her eyes brightening at the sight of Smith's new desk.
"Very nice," she mouthed, laying a short stack of mail on the shiny glass and walking out again.
"Harold, I have last night's meat loaf in the refrigerator. If I keep it another night, it might not be very good."
"Then you have it, dear. I will eat in the cafeteria."
"Harold, you forgot to call to say you weren't coming home last night," Mrs. Smith said in a sad, resigned voice. "It's not like you to be so thoughtless. Is everything all right?"
"I am in the middle of an IRS audit," Smith explained, and it bothered him terribly to distort the truth to his faithful Maude. "But I will try to be more considerate in the future."
"Very well, Harold."
Smith hung up. It had worked; his secretary had practically loomed over the monitor and not seen it. The screen was canted toward him slightly, making it virtually invisible unless one faced it squarely. Once he arranged his desk nameplate, pen holders and other items strategically about the desk, the blips of reflected light from the overhead fluorescents would combine to conceal the entire arrangement from prying eyes.
His eyes went to the screen, and Smith was disappointed to see no sign of a reply. Then he noticed that his original message had been changed. It now read, YOU KNOW I EXIST.
WHO ARE YOU? Smith typed out.
This time the reply appeared under Smith's question:
Smith blinked. What was this?
It winked out.
REPEAT REPLY, Smith typed.
Back came the same string of seemingly nonsense symbols.
Smith stared at this for some moments. It looked for all the world like a comic-strip representation of a four- letter word. He saved the screen and called up a corner window where he could work. Typing out the string of symbols, he asked the computer to analyze them.
The answer came back at once.
:-) IS AN EMOTICON USED IN COMPUTER BULLETIN-BOARD COMMUNICATIONS TO SIGNIFY A SMILE. ALSO KNOWN AS A SMILEY.
"A smiley?" Smith muttered, puzzled. It struck him a moment later. Tilted upward, the symbols constituted a crude smiley face. He was being taunted by his own computer.
Lips thinning, Harold Smith considered an appropriately salty reply. Instead, he typed, YOU WIN.
YOU LOSE, appeared in place of Smith's admission of defeat.
Smith logged off the system and pressed the black button that powered down the desktop monitor.
"Mrs. Mikulka," he said into the intercom, "I will be out the rest of the day.''
"What about Mr. Ballard?" "Ballard can wait," said Smith, reaching for his briefcase. The IRS was the least of his worries.
Chapter 17
Chip Craft was beginning to think that the past five years of his life were ail a mirage.
He had come to XL SysCorp fresh out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology class of 1980 with a degree in computer engineering.
The computer field was booming then. Not like now. Back then the sky seemed, not the limit, but a simple stepping stone to cosmic heights. Back then it was not XL SysCorp but Excelsior Systems. And Chip Craft never got to see the inside of the CEO's office, much less occupy it in style.
In those days he had been an installer. Not just any installer. Excelsior had been deep into supercomputers: the Umbra 44, the Dray 1000 and the first supercomputer with artificial-intelligence programming—the ES Quantum 3000. And it had been Chip's responsibility to install ES machines into various Pentagon, CIA and NSA offices. He had top secret DOB clearance. And he was at the top of his profession.
Chip never dreamed of the CEO's chair in those days. It was exciting enough jetting between the old building in Piscataway, New Jersey, and wherever the U.S. government needed him, just like 007. Except he carried a tool valise not a Beretta.
It began to change when a government agency whose name Chip never learned had won the bid on the ES Quantum 3000 prototype. And after a short trial period, returned it as unsatisfactory.
It was unheard-of. No one ever returned a supercomputer. Not one that was voice activated and responded in a fetching female voice that was programmed into the software because studies had determined that the female voice was more attention holding and also because it made a great selling point— even to the Intelligence community.
But the ES Quantum 3000 had come back, and it was Chip's job to find out what was wrong with it.
The first strangeness struck him the minute he powered up the spindle-shaped supercomputer. Its voice had inexplicably become masculine. It was impossible. The voice had been created from a recording of an actress specifically hired for her tonal pleasantness and mixed so that her voice synthesized any word, phrase or sentence the software was called upon to reproduce.
Five years after the fact, Chip Craft remembered the first words the strangely transformed ES Quantum 3000 had spoken to him.
"Hello, friend."