Gridiron

'Faxed or E-mailed wives, girlfriends, boyfriends. Told them the phones are down here, that we're all working on through the night to get this mother finished.'

There was a long, stunned silence. Finally David Arnon said, 'Do you think Grabel would call Mastercharge? Wipe out my debt?'

'Nobody is expecting us home tonight?' said Jenny. 'And nobody knows we're stuck here? With a madman?'

'That's about the size of it,' said Beech. 'But it gets even better than that.'

'What could be worse than that?' shrugged Coleman.

'Allen Grabel isn't responsible.'

'What? Who is then?' said Helen.

'Nobody.'

'I don't understand,' said Curtis. 'You said "someone" had tapped into central dispatch…"

'The "someone" we have all assumed is Allen Grabel is Abraham itself.'

'Are you saying that the computer is responsible for what's happening?' said Marty Birnbaum.

'That's precisely what I'm saying.'

'What the… I don't get it,' said Curtis. The only criminal minds I understand are the ones filled with guns, and drugs, and shit like that. Why would a computer do such a thing?'

'Oh come on,' interrupted Marty Birnbaum, 'you can't be serious, Bob. The integrity of the system may, as you say, have failed. But what you're suggesting is absurd. Alarmist, even. You're being quite irresponsible. Really. Why should Abraham intend harm to anyone? I'm not sure you can even talk about a computer having an intention at all.'

'Well, there at least we are in agreement,' said Beech. 'Not why, Sergeant. How. Why implies a motive. This is a machine we're talking about, remember?'

'Why? How? What fuckin' difference does it make? I'd like to know what's happening.'

'Well, it could be there's been some kind of brown-out.'

'What the hell's a brown-out?' said Coleman.

'A low voltage level rather than no voltage at all. The back-up generator is supposed to kick in if there's a major power failure. There could be just enough power so that the Powerbak system doesn't come on-stream, but not enough so as to let Abraham run things properly. Could be it's starved of power. Like a brain without oxygen.' He shrugged. 'I dunno. I'm just guessing, really.'

'Are you sure about this, Bob? About Abraham?'

'Mitch, there's no other explanation. I've been reading the transactions on the terminal as they were made on the Yu-5 downstairs. The speed of the transactions alone convince me that there's nobody in there operating the computer. I'm sure of it. No pre-programmed instructions either. Abraham is doing this all himself.'

'Bob? Maybe there's another explanation,' said Mitch.

'Let's hear it,' said Beech.

'This is a very complex system we're dealing with here, right? And complexity implies an inherent instability, doesn't it?'

'That's an interesting possibility,' admitted Beech.

'Come again?' said Curtis.

'Complex systems are always on the edge of chaos.'

'I thought there was some kind of law that prevented computers from attacking humans,' said Coleman. 'Like in the movies.'

'I think you're talking about Isaac Asimov's First Law of Robotics,'

Beech said thoughtfully. 'That was fine when all we had to deal with were binary systems, computers that function according to a sequential yes/no system. But this is a massively parallel computer, with a neural network that functions according to a system of weighted maybes, a bit like the human mind. This kind of computer learns as it goes along. In the established church of computer discipline and practice, Abraham is the equivalent of a Nonconformist. A free-thinker.'

'Maybe so,' said Marty Birnbaum. 'But that's a whole different ballpark from the one you guys are batting in. Initiative's one thing. Intention is something entirely different. What you're suggesting here is

-' He shrugged. 'No other word for it. Science fiction.'

'Shit,' said Beech. 'Mitch, this is unbelievable.'

'Could it be,' Mitch argued to Beech, 'that Abraham has passed a certain threshold of complexity and become autocatalytic?'

'Auto what?' said Levine.

'A computer self-organizes from the chaos of its various programmed responses to form a kind of metabolism.' Beech was looking more and more excited.

Jenny stood up slowly.

'Whooa,' she said. 'A kind of metabolism? Are you saying what I think you're saying, Mitch?'

'That's exactly what I'm saying.'

'What's he saying?' demanded David Arnon. 'Bob? Do you know what he's saying? Because I don't have a fucking idea.'

'I tell you something,' said Beech, 'I'm not a religious man. But this is the nearest I've ever come to experiencing a revelation. I have to admit the possibility that, for want of better words, Abraham is alive and thinking.'

-###-

What Bob Beech had to say left Willis Ellery feeling more nauseous than before. Believing that he was going to throw up, he went to the men's room, closed the cubicle door and knelt before the toilet bowl. His own shallow breathing and the cold sweat starting on his forehead seemed to underline the turmoil that was taking place inside his stomach. Only nothing happened. He belched a couple of times and wished that he had the nerve to stick a couple of fingers down his throat like some bulimic, adolescent schoolgirl. But somehow he could not bring himself to do it.

After several more minutes had elapsed, the feeling in his stomach seemed to drop down to his bowels and Ellery thought he would have to take a shit instead. So he stood up, unsteadily, unbuckled his belt, dropped his pants and shorts and sat down.

Why did it have to be Kay? he asked himself. Why? She had never done anyone any harm. Couldn't have been more than twenty-five years old. What a waste. And how was it possible for her to have drowned?

Even if Abraham had intended to kill her, how could it have managed it?

It wasn't like there was a diving board, or a wave machine. How was it possible?

The engineer in Ellery wanted to find out. He told himself that as soon as he was finished in the can he would call Ray Richardson on the walkie-talkie and get some details regarding the way in which Kay had met her death. No doubt Richardson had found her floating in the water and had simply made an assumption, as most people would have done. But there were other ways it could have happened. She had been electrocuted perhaps. Gassed even. Now that really was a possibility. With the automatic dosing pump it might have been possible for Abraham to have manufactured some kind of lethal gas. Or maybe he just hit her with ozone.

After a short spasmodic cramp Ellery evacuated his bowels and almost immediately started to feel better. He elbowed the toilet flush and activated the automatic personal-cleansing unit, left the cubicle and went to wash his hands in the long marble step of a sink that someone had considered fashionable. Ellery wanted to fill a bowl and push his whole face into it, but the shape of the sink made that impossible. It was not the kind of sink that encouraged you to linger.

Ellery looked at himself in the mirror and found his face recovering some of its former high colour.

'A sink ought to look like a sink, not a goddamn desktop,' he growled to himself.

He ran the tap, splashed cold water on his face and then drank some. The thought suddenly struck him that he was going about his business in much the same way that Kay Killen would have been going about hers when she met her death. The nausea returned as he realized he was in as much danger as Kay Killen had been.

Abraham controlled the washrooms just like he controlled the swimming pool.

Ellery did not want to touch the tap to turn it off, nor to dry his hands under the hot-air machine, for fear that he might be electrocuted. He ran to the door and laughed as he managed immediately to haul it open. Tony Levine nearly fell on top of him.