He looked at her, his face grim, his eyes concerned. Then, looking up, he pointed to a tree. "Let's go sit over there."
As they approached the shade Wendy saw that a blanket and a picnic basket had been left there and she turned to John with a smile. "No wonder you were willing to walk out on breakfast. When did you bring this out?"
"I didn't," he answered, collapsing bonelessly onto the blanket. "But I have friends in the right places." He opened the basket and offered her something wrapped in a napkin. Wendy accepted it, going to her knees beside him. It turned out to be an extremely moist sort of savory pastry.
"It's good!" she said around a mouthful of oniony, cheesy, corn-muffin-y stuff.
"It's called sopa paraguaya, a traditional breakfast food. Marietta, the housekeeper, makes the best." He opened the thermos and poured them each a cup of coffee with the milk and sugar already added.
"This I'm not so crazy about," she said, making a face.
"Hey, it's got caffeine." John took a long swallow. "I didn't sleep much last night."
"Me either," Wendy said.
They were quiet for a while, filling the silence with eating and drinking. Marietta had packed fruit juice and Wendy eagerly drank that, leaving the too-sweet coffee to John.
"Tell me," she finally said.
He looked at her questioningly.
"Don't give me that look," she said, giving his shoulder a shove. "It's so on your mind I can practically see digital letters running across your forehead. But if you insist I'll make it easy for you. When are you leaving, and where are you going, and what are you going to do when you get there?"
He bit his lips and looked into his coffee as though trying to divine the future from it.
Wendy gave him another shove. "What's the point of holding out on me? Given where I am and what I already know."
"Good point," he admitted at last, sitting up. He shook his head. "Mom will kill me for this."
Wendy laughed. "I seriously doubt that. Me, maybe. But from her at least, you're safe."
John grinned and, putting his hand behind her head, pulled her toward him for a kiss, then let her go. "We're going to Antarctica."
"Cool," she said, then laughing, held up her hands. "No pun intended, honest."
He smiled, then frowned. "They've started up the Skynet project again at a secret base they've got down there. We're going to take it out."
"Blow it up, you mean," Wendy said.
Her face grew thoughtful and John kept silent, putting off what he saw as an inevitable argument. She would give him reasons why she should come and he would refuse. Then she'd be hurt and would in turn hurt him, by withdrawing, or even, perhaps, by saying something in anger. He lay down on his back and looked up at the tree and the blue sky just visible through its canopy of leaves.
"I think you might be making a mistake here," she said slowly, still obviously thinking hard. "You blow this thing up and they just rebuild it somewhere else."
John looked over at her, but said nothing. Wendy turned to him eagerly.
"What you need to do is get something into the programming that will also become a part of their stored data. Something that will prevent the thing from becoming sentient!"
John blinked. "Can that be done?" he asked, sitting up to face her.
"Yes. And it will probably be a lot easier than trying to make a machine sentient in the first place. And you know what?" She leaned close as though to kiss him.
"I've already done a lot of the work. So you do need me to come with you." Then she did kiss him.
John pulled his head back after a moment to give her a speculative look. "I'm not all that easily distracted myself, sweetheart. If you can write a program that will
do this, why can't we install it? Dieter and I are both computer literate."
Wendy gave an exaggerated sigh. "Well, I have most of the ideas down," she admitted. "But I was coming at the problem of AI from a different direction—
namely, creating self-awareness, not stifling it. So I'd have to rewrite the program." She shrugged. "And that will take a little time."
"We don't have years," he said, disappointed.
"It won't take years. I've already identified a number of factors that indicate sentience. Well," she admitted with a deprecatory shrug, "I've gotten a huge boost from Kurt Viemeister's articles. But those were just a springboard. I've gone much further. I can do this!" she insisted. "By the time we get there I could have it ready to go." Wendy tried to keep her expression neutral and to hide any trace of the mantra take me!, take me!, take me! that yammered in the back of her head.
John looked at her in astonishment. "What you're saying is we wouldn't have to blow it up."
"Not at all," she agreed, nodding enthusiastically. "It will be better if you don't because this way you'll corrupt all of their updated information. Just make it look like blowing it up was your goal, but you were prevented from following through and the program should pass unnoticed." She bit her lip. Don't say too much, she cautioned herself. Let him work it through.
John looked up from his reverie. "Let's go talk to Dieter."
" Should pass unnoticed?" Dieter said. He folded his arms before him on his desk.
"My dear Wendy, we can't afford should. We need to kill this monster."
"Which John tells me you've already done twice!" Wendy challenged from her chair in front of him. "So killing it isn't working. You need to prevent this thing from becoming a monster. Maybe something less obvious and less destructive is the answer. Let them have their Skynet!" She waved her hands in an expansive gesture. "Just don't let that Skynet reach its full potential. All they're looking for is a tool, not something that's going to try and take over the world. Let them have what they want while making sure you get what you want. They'll never even suspect anything's wrong—because from their point of view, nothing will be wrong!"
She stopped talking, looking at him as though willing him to give her a go-ahead. Von Rossbach pushed out his lower lip as he thought and John stood behind Wendy's chair, tapping his foot nervously.
"How likely are they to find this program you're proposing?" Dieter asked.
"Not very," Wendy assured him. "A program like the one that makes up Skynet is extremely complex; there are millions of lines of text involved. I could never have done it without that data that John gave us, from the thing's… head. What I'm intending isn't going to interrupt Skynet's function, so it won't cause problems for the designers. All I want to do is prevent unintended consequences, and I can do that by spreading my program out quite a bit so that it won't stand out as something alien." When von Rossbach still looked dubious she hastened to explain further. "They'll certainly check the program after your visit," she admitted. "I know I would. But they'll be looking for key words that will involve self-destruction. While our goal isn't to destroy but to get the computer to ignore
certain data. Something like that won't stand out. And unless someone is so anal that they insist on going over every single line of text, it will not be noticed."
"Where's your mother?" Dieter asked John, who shrugged. "Let's go find her."
Sarah was in John's room working on his computer. She glanced up with a distracted frown as they came in, then looked a question at them.
"Wendy has a new idea that we'd like to run by you," Dieter said.
Sarah turned to the girl and gave her all her attention. After Wendy had finished explaining she sat quietly rocking the desk chair as she thought. "It could work,"
she said at last. "Maybe destroying Skynet is impossible; it certainly feels that way. But sabotaging it…" Sarah chewed her lower lip, then nodded once, firmly.