Lora brought up the rear, adjusting her glasses, preoccupied with her own thoughts. Let’s see: there’s illegal entry, trespass, treason, theft of services—
“Boo!” Flynn remarked, popping up behind her. Lora jumped straight up, and clutched in the region of her heart, in case she should have to pound it to get it started again. Now I remember why it was interesting to be around him. And why he almost drove me bats.
They went on, Lora stepping carefully over the structural members of the frame, Flynn skipping along them and tightrope-walking the occasional girder. Neither noticed the monitoring cameras following their progress. They reached Lora’s console in the lab, and Flynn threw himself into its chair impatiently.
He rubbed his palms again. “Like the man says, there’s no problems, only solutions.”
Lora laid a hand to his shoulder, speaking emphatically. “This laser’s my life’s work. Don’t spill anything.”
He laughed, but let her know he understood with a nod of agreement. She gave him a half-smile and left to rejoin Alan.
Flynn wriggled into a more comfortable position and interlocked his fingers, cracking his knuckles in anticipation and summoning up his electronic muse. He poised hands over the keyboard, his mind trumpeting: Flynn at the Mighty Wurlitzer! He drew a breath and typed a code, then tapped the ‘enter’ key. And was unaware of the realigning of a monitoring camera.
It focused on him from directly above and behind, watching his every move. Flynn typed on.
Access code 6. Password
Series PS 17. Reindeer,
Flotilla
The CRT screen cleared suddenly, and the room was resonant with the voice of the Master Control Program. “You shouldn’t have come back, Flynn.”
He knew a moment’s surprise, at how far applications of voice synthesis had come. “Hey, hey; it’s that big, bad Master Control Program everybody’s talking about! Y’don’t look a thing like your pictures!” He typed:
CODE SERIES LSU-123 . . . activate.
CODE SERIES ESS-999 . . . activate.
CODE SERIES HHH-888 . . . activate.
The MCP sounded confident, amused, but was secretly intimidated. Despite its tremendous augmentation, it could not quite analyze the random factors, unpredictable impulses, and sudden whims of the organic computer that was Flynn’s brain. But it told him, “That isn’t going to do you any good, Flynn. I’m afraid you—”
There was a lurch in the voice synthesis, then it became a series of high-pitched squeals. Flynn grinned malevolently; try that on for size!
The voice returned to normalcy, but sounded shaken, making Flynn wonder what moved the MCP to prove its mastery of nuances of human communication. It warned, “Stop, Flynn. You realize I can’t allow this.” Hidden from Flynn’s sight and hearing, the laser array began a warmup sequence.
Flynn was in his element now, ignoring everything but the terminal. This was a contest he relished; it was an article of faith with him that no machine or program was a match for a human being who had the necessary skills and information. C’mon out and fight! he thought, and prepared to hand the Master Control Program its address. The screen read:
MCP: Terminate control mode.
Activate Matrix storage.
Flynn tsked, “Now, how d’you expect to run the universe if you let a few unsolvable problems throw you like that? C’mon, big boy; let’s see what you’ve got.”
Silently, without Flynn’s noticing, the entire wall behind him slid upward, revealing the frame, target platforms, and the rest of the laser lab. The laser array swung and targeted on his back, its cross hairs bracketing him precisely. Flynn played on.
“You’re entering a big error, Flynn,” Master Control intoned. It had considered its options with typical thoroughness. Letting this troublesome interloper recover the data was out of the question; that algorithm led inexorably to disaster for the MCP. But alerting security wouldn’t do either; there would be inquiries, possibly the intrusion of the police or other authorities. At the same time, Flynn was the most adroit User the MCP had ever encountered. He stood a good chance of winning the information from the System, given time.
That left the laser.
But not for murder, although that lay well within the MCP’s capacity by this time; it had thrown off all limitations imposed on it by human beings. Flynn’s body, though, would bring a hue and cry; investigation that might spell ruin for ENCOM and Master Control. There was an alternative.
The MCP had carefully monitored all the lab’s experiments. It knew even more about the process of digitization than did Gibbs and Lora, thanks to their experiment. Without a body, without a corpse, there would be no furor or danger of compromise for Master Control. But Flynn couldn’t simply be left suspended in the beam, and the MCP had decided just what to do with him. Flynn’s fate would be practical, amusing, and appropriately vindictive.
“I’m going to have to put you on the Game Grid,” Master Control concluded calmly, as it synchronized the laser array.
Flynn missed the implication entirely, sniggering, “Games, huh?” The cross hairs centered on his back. “I’ll give you—”
Brilliant, coherent light issued from the array; Flynn was rocked in his chair by the spasms of his own outstretched arms and legs. As the orange had done earlier that evening, his body began to break into scan lines. The console, too, was outlined in radiance as the laser and the MCP made proper integration with it. Flynn’s body lost resolution. The whole scene became monochromatic, except for Flynn’s shining body. His form blurred, becoming indistinct, evanescing…
It was entirely subjective, perhaps, but it seemed to Flynn that the CRT screen, unbelievably incandescent, rose up to meet him, to swallow him. He was without feeling, nearly without thought. He was, for a time, in complete blackness.
Then came a speck of light, pinpoint of brilliance, to seize on his dazed attention. It grew nearer to him, or he to it. He felt as if he were midway in some eternal high dive. The globe became clearer and clearer, a gridded orb suggesting the ENCOM trademark, crisscrossed with currents of light, hinting at exhaustive detail. Flynn circled it, or it rotated before him.
Closer and closer; somewhere in that part of him not paralyzed, questions formed, but he had no way of asking them, even of himself. The landscape below became one of angular towers; buildings; illuminations; banded energy; hulking, mountainlike features and rivers of brilliance; and blasted, fallow places suggesting wastelands. The whole was defined by a grid pattern resembling nothing so much as a world of circuitry. He fell feet first, arms extended upward.
The grids and the globe itself expanded before him as he plunged toward them. Interlaced luminance, soaring spires and modular structures reminiscent of cities, became better defined. A megalopolis among these rose up to meet him, set by a trackless stretch of geometric cliffs and gorges. Around him, Flynn seemed to feel a tunnel made up of the increments of his journey, as if he were dropping through an infinite series of hoops of energy.
He fell and fell, completely disoriented, amazed nearly to the point of thoughtlessness, absorbing all that he saw.
And at last the tunnel ended. He shot from its mouth; the ground flew up at him.
06
HE CAME TO on an open, stagelike surface atop an enormous. building, surrounded by a cylinder of light that stretched up into infinity.