04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (28 page)

"This—sense. These changes. They happen to everyone?"

"Very few, actually. Only the ones that work with the big computers on an intimate basis, if you know what I mean, and those of us who spend most of our time out here connected on and off to the grid by the god guns and other equipment. You and the lady better watch it if you come back out for any length of time, by the way. You either control it or it controls you."

You either control it, or it controls you.
...

He wasn't too sure if he could control it. The boring, empty trek left him little to do, and his mind kept going back to the power of the grid and the subtle mathematics it represented. Even on horseback he found himself drawing it from the very ground, and he saw that Connie, too, was drawing it. The difference between him and her was simply that she didn't consciously realize it. Gorton, however, was right about his own kind. He was
not
drawing it, except at certain times when he was obviously using it for directional confirmation.

Such power,
he thought.
To draw it and shape it by will alone.
But whose will? His? Or was, perhaps, the computer network experimenting with them, with
all
of them? Trying to build a direct human interface with all that power and no Guard. No, he decided, that wasn't it for the signal corpsmen controlled it, or at least their interaction with it. He had been overriding last night—or his subconscious had—not the computer. The computer, as usual, had simply delivered the programs requested. Somehow he had changed Connie, in subtle and basic ways, into what his lust wanted her to be. The physical change he could accept, and could reverse, if desired, in the lab. He knew how now. What was disturbing was that she was convinced that she had initiated the love-making. Nobody in Special Projects had intimated that a computer could do
that.
But, then again, nobody had ever said they'd told him the whole story either.

Connie herself was feeling a little confused and disoriented. She'd awakened still turned on, as she sometimes had in the past, but it hadn't gone away. Hours later she was
still
turned on and feeling very tense, and riding between two good-looking guys didn't help any. More than once she found herself caressing places on her body that she just didn't touch in public. Worse, for perhaps the first time in her life she felt her self-confidence eroding faster than that rain-soaked patch of ground they'd covered. Today, somehow, her occupation and life-style just didn't seem as personally important or even as interesting to her as it always had.

She'd worked hard, damned hard, her whole life. She had worked her way through university, worked sixteen-hour days at shitwork in the University of the Pacific computer complex getting hands-on experience for peanuts in pay while holding down a weekend job teaching swimming and surfing to would-be beach bums. Then had come the low-level job with Newcastle in Aukland, which was a minor subsidiary of Westrex, and she'd worked like a maniac to be one of those who qualified for this project, taking the night shift so she could get her necessary doctorate days. Then came Titan and learning the whole new Kagan system, faking much and staying up nights finding out what she really needed to know, then this.

She knew she was pretty, and she liked dressing and acting the half-naked Polynesian girl with the different-bed-each-night and let's-party personality, but it was a phony. The fact was, except for last night, she'd been laid by maybe six guys in her whole life and by nobody here. It wasn't for lack of offers, but her career, her need for independence, had gotten in the way. Now she was thirty-five, and, after this Anchor was formed up, she had maybe ten years of simulations and math and frustration until they maybe let her design a quadrant—a quadrant that would of necessity be compromised by the designs of three other top programmers, all of whom had differing visions. At fifty she could be a middle-aged head girl of some department someplace with a big office, lots of perks, and two ulcers.

She began to think that this wasn't waht she wanted at all. What she wanted to be, she realized, was that Hawaiian honey she'd always acted. No cares, no worries, just lots of fun with very little pressure.

She wondered what they would do if she quit after this Anchor was done. Just quit. They'd hardly bother to ship her back. Send her to one of Suzuki's shrinks, probably. Who knows? Maybe they'd figure she had to do it for her mental health. She sure had cause. A little while maybe in her fields and forests, just relaxing, before the farmers came in and mucked it up. Grow her hair long, maybe sing and dance for the crowds. It sounded
wonderful.

Her determination actually hardened by the time they reentered the bubble and sighted the big amp, still being checked out by the two techs who'd brought it there. Two girls, she remembered, somewhat disappointed, but then she reflected that it was probably all for the best. This business had to come before anything else.

Toby Haller looked over at Connie and gasped. Somehow, in a few hours of riding, her hair had gone from a very short pageboy style to a length that reached almost to her navel. She also looked like a teenager, with a hint of child in her face.

He got down, made the introductions, and immediately got up in the cab and called the computer center. He got Lo to ride guard and hooked himself immediately into the computer.

"Hello, Toby, what a surprise," said the computer pleasantly.

"Yeah, well, I've had too many surprises already today. Seventeen. Right now I need information. '

"If I can provide it, I will."

"Seventeen, something's happened to Connie. She's changed physically a great deal. I just had trouble convincing the crew here that she was who we said she was. Any change like that had to come from you, or at least one of the nine thousands maintaining the grid in this sector. I want to know how it happened, and why."

"I've traced down the operation, but I can't really explain it. I'm still researching the phenomenon, and after months of it I can't come up with a coherent reason why it happens. The best I can tell you is
what
happened."

"That'll have to do for now."

"Sometimes, when professional Overriders go into the void, I can hear them just like they're tied in. It's not much of a connection mentally, and I can't communicate with them, but I sense them, and every once in a while I get a string of instructions just like I get when Signals uses that portable interfacer unit, only without any specific program. It's all very localized and very general, and often not very logical, but I am compelled by my operating system instruction set to furnish the slight programs needed."

"But the change is both physical and mental, it seems. You'll see when you get her on line. I didn't think you could do the physical bit without a lot of prep, or the mental part at all."

"I didn't used to be able to do it, but the more experiments performed by researchers in this area, the more generalized programs and knowledge I have to do things. In these specific instances, though, I furnish only what I perceive is requested. Last night you wanted her, and in the face of no overriding or contradictory instructions from her, I provided her the way you instructed me. She must have wanted you. Otherwise she could have stopped it by issuing any countermand."

Well, that explained that, and relieved some of his guilt. "But that doesn't explain her today."

"She is as she directed. I did nothing creative. I only provided what was requested."

"But she doesn't even believe it's possible," he began, and then thought about it. The solution to at least the
what
of it struck him almost immediately. He had inadvertently connected her up the previous night and that connection remained on. Seventeen had been unable to distinguish between conscious directives and subconscious fantasizing, for which the void's drabness and stifling atmosphere were perfect incubators. Just as it had been unable to distinguish between his lustful fantasizing and a command set and subset.

"Seventeen—just how many people can send and receive instructions in that manner?"

"Nine hundred and forty-seven people," the computer answered literally. "The number will grow, however, and there are degrees of it. Only one hundred and fifty-four have any strong signal on their own."

"Correlate. What do those have in common with one another that the rest do not?"

"They all have used the remote subsidiary computer link extensively, as you are doing now. That one we determined long ago. The more you use it, the clearer the connection becomes."

He thought a moment. "Could it be used in Anchor?"

"No. Direct connection to the grid is necessary, and some mental attunement."

"Who is aware of this phenomenon?"

"Classified, but you can probably guess. It is frustrating that the various projects on it are all sealed off from one another, so none have the benefits of the other's research. I, however, have all the knowledge of all of them."

"I can guess. Signals and Special Projects for sure. Probably main systems—no, they wouldn't work with these big amps. Who else would?"

"The remote subsidiary computer link is used by Signals. Security, and Transportation and Energy," the computer responded. "No one else has the need."

And that, of course, told him everything. The one surprise was Transportation and Energy. Watanabe. He felt foolish. It was from a Watanabe assistant that he'd first learned of what these computers could really do, and that was only the 7240 series.

"Analysis. What would it take to get the old Connie back?"

"Simple. All she had to do is sit where you are, ask for it, and I will include it in the master program. I can include as easily as exclude."

It
sounded
simple, but it wasn't. Connie now understood fully that she had changed, and she was ready to accept the why of it, but she did not want to change it. Her new look and new outlook came directly out of her suppressed libido.

"Why are you so
worried
?"
she asked him. "This is the
best
thing that's happened to me in years. I feel—reborn. Great. I won't let you down though. We'll make this sucker as big as all outdoors all at once."

"And after that?"

"Well, we've got the south half to do, I guess."

"And after that?"

"After that I'm quitting. It'll be done and I won't be essential. I need some time to just enjoy myself, that's all."

He tried all the old arguments, but he failed. She wasn't him, she told him, and she didn't see things that way. She'd had her fill of "dedication" and "joy in work" and all that other stuff. She'd carried more than her load, and this was the payoff. Faye and Ali, the two technicians, also started in on her, and she got digusted by it. Finally, she asked Toby, "So what would I do to change back? Go back and sleep another night out there in the nothing? Or maybe go out and call, 'Seventeen! Oh, Seventeen! I want to be thirty-five, repressed, and a workaholic again!' "

"No, you just tell Seventeen when we run the big program. He'll do the rest, right up there when it runs."

"And if I don't?"

"Then maybe I'll do it for you."

"You wouldn't dare!"

"Try me," he responded, and she stalked off.

She was nicer and far more friendly, if still noncommittal, the next morning when he prepared to leave. They'd used the big amp to give his horse a good feed, and he packed water and some candy and very little else for his ride. He got on the horse, thinking of the ordeal ahead, but he looked down at her one last time. "You think about what I said. It's for your own good."

"I
have
been thinking about it," she told him, and he took that as something of an assent. He picked up a portable communicator and triangulation device so he'd stay on course and started off over the hard-packed dirt. They watched him go.

For Connie, she'd never felt so emotional or so committed. Before he was out of sight, she climbed up into the cab and got herself connected to Seventeen. Ron was on guard now, and he neither knew about nor cared about Haller's conversations, or hers either. She signed on and went about a lot of routine stuff until Ron was preoccupied with setting up some of the other big amps.

"Seventeen, warn me if Ron starts paying attention to this conversation. I want you to tell me everything about this— change—that you told Toby."

Seventeen, friendly as always, did just that.

"Can he put me in his own master program from his amp?"

"He could."

"Analysis of Haller's probable action in this matter."

"Indications strong that he will direct the restoration. He feels guilty because he thinks he caused it all."

"Simple. Create a basic program now that will act to cancel his directive when implemented."

She thought a moment. That would do for now, but then they'd be going back through the new land to the core. He'd surely turn her over to Suzuki and she'd get the treatment in spades.

"Seventeen—what can I do to make this permanent? So that not even you or the shrinks could take it away. Is that possible?"

"I feel obligated to warn you that such a step would be permanent and irrevocable, even by you. This borders on the irrational and may trip my Guard flag
¹
:"

"Is it possible?"

"Yes. However, I will have to have the specifics of your request before I can make a judgment."

"I want to look, and feel, this way from now on. I want to be the most sexy, desirable girl around. I want to lose all the inhibitions that won't do harm to others. I want to be mature, desirable, but get back the innocence and wonder of childhood. I'd be happy to be like that until I died. Can you understand that?"

"Would it disturb you to know that I felt compelled to send this to the Special Projects office? That Dr. Suzuki herself is monitoring this at this very moment?"

She felt a sudden crash. "Yes. It would disturb me a great deal."