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.