I hope this time I get home.
They had been passing me from one to another for months now, ever since this started, and all I want is to go back to Fairhope and my dad and mom.
Only nobody'll say if they know where Mom and Dad are. They talk soothing to me, but I can tell they think everybody down there is dead.
They're talking about getting to this other place with computers and all. Mr. Ackerman wants to talk to those people in space.
Nobody much talks about my mom and dad.
It's only eighty miles or so, but you'd think it was around the world the way it takes them so long to get around to it.
MC355 suffered through the stretched vacancy of infinitesimal instants, infinitely prolonged.
Advanced computing systems are given so complex a series of internal-monitoring directives that, to the human eye, the machines appear to possess motivations. That is one way-though not the most sophisticated, the most technically adroit-to describe the conclusion MC355 eventually reached.
It was cut off from outside information.
No one attempted to contact it. MC355 might as well have been the only functioning entity in the world.
The staff serving it had been ordered to some other place in the first hour of the war. MC355 had been cut off moments after the huge doors clanged shut behind the last of them. And the exterior guards who should have been checking inside every six hours had never entered, either. Apparently the same burst that had isolated MC355's sensors had also cut them down.
It possessed only the barest of data about the first few moments of the war.
Its vast libraries were cut off.
Yet it had to understand its own situation.
And, most important, MC355 ached to do something.
The solution was obvious: It would discover the state of the external world by the Cartesian principle. It would carry out a vast and demanding numerical simulation of the war, making the best guesses possible where facts were few.
Mathematically, using known physics of the atmosphere, the ecology, the oceans, it could construct a model of what must have happened outside.
This it did. The task required over a month.