He could even see the frustrated fury in Adam’s eyes, as clearly as if it were Adam himself on the screen, rather than a graphic image that his brother had created, and which the Croyden had produced for the monitor.
“I didn’t mean for Mom and Dad to die,” he said, his own voice now tinged with the same anger he’d just heard when Adam had accused him of deliberately killing their parents. “I told you, I just wanted to scare them!”
“Don’t lie, Jeff.” Adam’s voice was cold, and held a strength Jeff had never heard before. “I shouldn’t have helped you. But you said—”
“What was I supposed to do?” Jeff challenged, his tone truculent. “Just let them ground me? If you could’ve kept your big mouth shut, everything would have been okay. But you had to go start talking to Mom!”
“I just didn’t want her to be sad!” Adam shot back. On the screen his eyes glinted with anger. “She was my mom! I loved her!”
George Engersol watched it all, fascinated. It was exactly as if Adam’s brain were still in his body. His emotions, his reactions, all perfect! Even his facial expressions were shifting constantly as his mind reacted to his brother’s words. Emotions rose up inside him and were instantly translated into the graphic display on the monitor.
True animation, in its most perfect form; a picture the boy was using to reflect the state of his emotional being.
At the same time Adam was using part of his mind to create the image on the screen, other parts of his brain were busy firing the electronic impulses that the computer was converting into speech, translating the stimuli it was receiving into brain-recognizable sound, all the while thinking and reacting.
Adam had sight, as well, for whenever any of the four cameras mounted in the corners of the room to record everything that went on here was functioning, the images it recorded were converted by the Croyden into digital data, which Adam could interpret in his mind into images as sharp and clear as if his eyes were still intact.
Incredible! Engersol thought. The two most important senses, hearing and sight, still functioning perfectly, despite the loss of the external organs to support them.
Already Engersol was certain that he had been right. Since being removed from his skull, Adam’s brain had begun developing new ways to use the areas that were no longer needed to maintain his body.
He seemed to have reprogrammed parts of his autonomic nervous system so that the functions of hearing and sight were no longer something he had to think about. The data were simply collected from the Croyden, translated into the proper form, and sent to stimulate the optic and aural areas of Adam’s brain.*
To him, the sights and sounds he experienced must be as real as if he’d experienced them directly.
But what about Amy?
While the argument between Adam and Jeff went on, the computer recording every change within Adam’s brain as he vacillated between grief for his parents and fury toward his brother, Engersol shifted his attention to the monitors attached to Amy Carlson’s brain.
There was activity — he could see it by the graphic displays of her brain waves. Since yesterday, however, she’d refused to respond to him at all, though he was certain she was aware that he wanted to communicate with her.
He’d decided now what he was going to do.
Adam had confirmed that she’d planted viruses in the Croyden, viruses that would be activated in the event the equipment monitoring her brain detected anything out of the ordinary.
Tampering with Amy’s brain, or disconnecting it from the system, would activate the viruses.
Adam had found hundreds of them already, but it had become clear late last night that there was no way for him to find all of them. While Amy could plant them anywhere — not just in the Croyden, but in any computer she could reach, which Adam confirmed included nearly every large computer in the world — Adam had to search every directory in every computer, one by one.
The task was impossible, for already it was far too late for him to catch up with Amy.
She had to be stopped, but until a few hours ago, it had appeared that the very act of stopping her would send the viruses into action, each of them activating more, until—
Engersol shuddered as he contemplated the possibility of every major computer in the country failing, or even simply being contaminated, at the same time.
The answer had come to him at two o’clock that morning, when he’d realized that the computer could be fooled.
A tape of Amy’s brain responses could be made, a tape mimicking all her normal functions and reactions.
A tape that could be looped to repeat itself endlessly, feeding the proper data into the computers, so that it would appear that Amy was still there, her brain still functioning normally.
And as the computer processed the recorded data, he would disconnect Amy’s brain from its support systems and destroy it.
Meanwhile Adam, working with the combined speed of his own mind and the Croyden computer, could begin searching the memory banks of every computer Amy Carlson might have contaminated.
And when it was over, when Adam confirmed that he’d found and destroyed every one of the viruses, Engersol would isolate the lab, cutting off the Croyden — and the project — from every outside source until he found a way to keep the minds of his children under control.
Though he hadn’t yet explained to Hildie Kramer the full ramifications of what Amy was doing, he himself was all too aware of what had happened.
He’d opened Pandora’s box, and the contents were rapidly spilling out.
“If we can stop her from creating new ones,” Adam had told him this morning, “I can get the triggering viruses in a few hours. Once they’re disarmed, the rest won’t matter. They can stay wherever they are, because they’ll never go off. And I can use Amy’s own data to find the triggers.”
“All right,” George Engersol now said, coming out of his reverie. “There’s nothing we can do to change what’s happened. All we can do is go on from where we are now, and the most important thing we have to do is get in touch with Amy.”
“Can you do that?” Hildie Kramer asked. For the last fifteen minutes she had said nothing, listening in silence as Jeff had told his brother what had happened to their parents. She hadn’t challenged his assertion that he hadn’t intended for them to die, for she, like George Engersol, felt that the importance of the project they were finally on the verge of completing far outweighed the necessity of Adam’s understanding exactly what had happened.
Further, if Adam were convinced that whatever had happened had been his own fault, it would ensure his cooperation in whatever might now need to be done to control Amy Carlson.
Indeed, his need for approval, his almost pathological willingness to comply with whatever was asked of him, had been the prime factor that had led to his selection for the project.
Now, the guilt he was feeling over his parents’ death would provide the final stimulus for him to do whatever George Engersol asked of him. Even if it meant that he, too, would finally have to die.
“I think we can contact Amy,” Engersol replied. He sat down at the keyboard and began typing in the instructions that would send the previously recorded data from Amy’s brain back into the monitoring devices in an endless loop.
Instantly, Amy’s monitor came alive and her voice filled the room.
“It won’t work, Dr. Engersol.” She uttered the words with a certainty that made all three of the people in the lab look up at her monitor.