She stared at the screen.
Once more the word processing program had crashed. She was facing a blank screen.
She started to type in the command to reboot the program once more, but this time the keyboard refused to respond.
She hit the control, alt, and delete keys simultaneously, and waited for the entire computer to reboot itself.
Nothing happened.
Sighing, she reached for the red switch on the computer itself, and was about to shut off the main power, wait a few seconds, then start over again by turning the machine back on when the screen suddenly came to life:
MOM
Jeanette stared at the word for a moment. What was going on? Was it really the word she’d heard from her kids all her life, or was it just some kind of garbage the computer had kicked up?
She tried rebooting the computer once more, and this time it worked. The screen went blank, then a series of commands rolled up the screen as the operating system installed itself. But as she was about to enter the command for the word processing system yet again, the screen once more came to life. This time, there was no mistaking what it said:
MOM. ITS ME. IT’S ADAM.
Jeanette stared at the words.
A joke.
Someone’s horrible idea of a joke.
She stared numbly at the message for a moment, and suddenly realized she was trembling. What was she supposed to do?
Did someone expect her to answer?
Her mind raced as she tried to figure out where the message could have come from.
A timed message, slipped into the computer by practically anyone, set to pop up at a certain time of day.
Someone somewhere else, coming into the computer by modem.
There were all kinds of explanations for the message, two or three ways it could have gotten there. But why? And who?
Who would do such a thing? Who would be so cruel as to pretend to be Adam?
Surely no one could think this was funny!
Her hands still trembling, she reached out and shut off the computer. The words on the screen faded away.
Should she turn it back on, and try to finish what she’d been doing?
She hesitated, but then remembered how the machine had already crashed twice.
Don’t touch it, she told herself. Just leave it until tomorrow.
Ignoring everything else that still needed to be done in her office, she picked up her purse, switched off the lights, and left, locking the door behind her. A few minutes later she was in her car, driving home. But the words on the computer still haunted her.
She remembered something that had happened months ago, last spring. She’d been working in her office, typing up a report, and the word processing program had suddenly crashed.
She’d been about to reboot it, when suddenly some words had appeared on her screen:
HI, MOM. IT’S ME. ITS ADAM!
That time, it really had been. He’d hacked into her computer from his room, just as a joke.
At the time, she’d thought it was funny.
But now Adam was dead, and it had happened again.
And whoever had done it had used exactìy the same words Adam had used months ago.
17
Josh watched Amy run away from the swimming pool and disappear into the women’s shower room, wishing he could run after her. As the experiment had gone on, his eyes had remained glued to Amy, instead of focusing on the computer monitor, for as soon as he’d seen the dangling knotted rope and the diving board, he’d understood exactly what she was going through.
How could Dr. Engersol have done it to her? Didn’t he know how frightened she was of heights?
And then Josh understood. It was exactly the point of the experiment — to see how Amy would react when she had to choose between two things that terrified her.
But it was mean. Even meaner than what had been done to the cat this morning. In fact, when Amy had left the classroom, Josh hadn’t really understood what she was so mad about. After all, the cat hadn’t been in any pain. Dr. Engersol had told them so, hadn’t he?
But Dr. Engersol had told Amy she wouldn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to, either. And then he’d not only scared her to death, but humiliated her in front of all her friends, too.
Maybe he could catch up with her outside the gym, when she came out of the locker room. He moved away from the group gathered around the computer monitor, but Dr. Engersol, as if understanding what he was going to do, stopped him.
“Let Hildie take care of Amy, Josh,” he said. “She’ll be all right — she just needs a few minutes to calm down.”
“But she’s crying—”Josh objected.
“Yes, she is,” Engersol agreed, his voice carrying no more emotion than if he’d been commenting on one of the graphs displayed on the monitor. “It was a perfectly predictable response to the experiment. I’d be surprised if she wasn’t. In fact, if you’ll take a look at this, you can see exactly when the crying response began.”
Josh hesitated, torn by his urge to go after his friend and tell her everything was going to be all right, that nobody was going to call her chicken, and his equally strong desire to join the rest of his class around the monitor and see exactly what Amy had gone through. Only when Hildie Kramer started toward the locker room did he make up his mind. Amy liked Hildie, and the housemother would know what to say to her better than he would. His mind still half on Amy, he slipped in next to Jeff Aldrich and gazed raptly at the screen while Dr. Engersol explained what the graphs meant.
“You can see it all right here,” the Academy’s director told them. “Here her respirations became irregular, and these peaks represent constrictions of her throat. And here’s her heartbeat, increasing and growing slightly irregular, too, when she first understood the choice she had to make.” His fingers tapped rapidly at the keyboard, and the display on the monitor changed. “I want you to pay close attention to this. These are her brain waves, and though they don’t look much different from those of the cat this morning, I think we’ll find a lot of differences when we analyze them. The cat, you see, was responding much more to instinctive behavior and conditioned response, while Amy was trying to make an intellectual decision.”
Engersol’s analysis of what had happened inside Amy’s brain went on, and the graphic displays on the monitor kept changing. Soon Josh was caught up along with the rest of his classmates in the digitized display of the myriad processes that Amy’s body, as well as her mind, had gone through during the few short minutes the experiment had lasted.
“For the rest of the week,” Engersol finished half an hour later, “we’ll continue working with this data, and by Friday we should have a pretty good understanding of just exactly what parts of Amy’s brain came into play during the experiment, and what processes they went through.”
“But what about Amy?” Josh asked when Engersol was finally finished. “What about how she feels?”
Engersol’s eyes fixed on Josh, and there was an emptiness in them that sent a chill down the boy’s spine. “I’m sure she’s just fine,” he said. “After all, we didn’t hurt her, did we?”
As the rest of the class started out of the pool area, still buzzing amongst themselves about the results of the experiment, Josh stayed where he was, staring at the display on the computer monitor.
It was nothing but a series of zigzag lines crossing and recrossing each other, showing what had happened inside Amy’s brain.
But it didn’t show anything about what had happened to Amy herself, Josh thought. Hadn’t anyone else seen the look on her face? Hadn’t they seen how scared she was, not only of the rope and the diving board, but of looking like a chicken in front of her friends?