Danny’s left hand held the half-finished plum with thumb and forefinger, and the other three fingers steadied the vinyl-wrapped steering wheel of his ‘79 Rabbit. As usual, it didn’t start immediately. With his right hand, Danny tried the ignition again after each patient pump-and-release of the accelerator.
At last it sputtered to life. Danny licked the plum juice that had run all the way down to his wrist, buckled up, and headed for I-101.
He felt good. As the Rabbit’s speedometer moseyed up toward 60, he wondered why his spirits were so high. Could be that he had something significant to do every day—something meaningful. Man, if Dad could see me now, he thought. What a cue for his Squandered-Gifts speech.
“Use the Brains God Gave You, Daniel,” Danny’s head recited as he drove the eternally pothole-free highway. “You’ve been blessed with the gifts to do something meaningful; look at your brothers. Don’t squander your gifts, Daniel. I’d like to see you make something of yourself.” The pause, the official throat-clearing, then: “I’ll mention one more time that Chuck Deegan is the dean at Chicago Business. He was my roommate in law school. The day you decide you’ve finished playing around with your computers, you let me know.”
Gotta give Dad a call one of these days.
Danny put on something fun and dancey on the AM radio—the Rabbit’s sole amenity—that he was still humming as he walked from the parking lot, through the Japanese garden, and into the Artelligence building. He had a feeling nothing would be able to crush his mood…if Gam got unpleasant, Danny vowed to just smile and work harder at the piece of the program he’d been assigned.
As he rounded the corner toward the R & D lab, he decided to poke his head into Michelle’s office, as he’d been making it a point to do more and more often. He’d been getting the feeling she looked forward to it.
“Hail there, Media Goddess!” he greeted her. “How are things in PR-Land?”
“Just dandy, Danny,” she said. She looked sunny and neat, her hair, as usual, care-fully tied back. “All systems go on my end; you guys gonna be ready for me?”
“Of course we will,” said Danny, grinning. “The Japanese may be baying at the door, the public may be screaming for their voice control…but we’re gonna finish this program on schedule for you and you alone. Never was a roomful of computer nerds so adoring.”
“That’s my boys!”
“Hey, cool terrarium.”
On a castered TV stand behind her desk was a small aquarium, a microcosmic forest. The hard plastic plate from a microwave frozen dinner served as a miniature lake.
“That’s Myrtle,” she said, lifting the mesh lid. “I thought she needed a change of scene, so I brought her in to work.”
Danny peered inside. “Myrtle?”
Her fingers burrowed through the leaves and wood chips. She grabbed something and carefully extracted it from the aquarium.
“Behold: Myrtle, mother of all dimestore turtles.”
She set the tiny turtle on her desk and watched it. No bigger than a half-dollar, the turtle blinked sleepily in the fluorescent light and took a single tentative step forward.
“Morning, Myrt,” said Danny grandly. To Michelle, he stage-whispered: “How do you know it’s a she?”
Michelle arched an eyebrow at him. “I don’t. But I give her the benefit of the doubt.”
Myrtle, evidently bored by the proceedings, half-receded into her shell. Michelle lifted her gently by the edges and put her back inside the terrarium.
“Technically, poor Myrtle is contraband,” she told Danny. “Pet stores in this country aren’t allowed to sell turtles anymore, did you know that? But I got Myrtle from the lady who used to have my apartment, and that was two years ago. Myrtle has already outlived her life expectancy in captivity by a year; I think she and I were meant to be together.”
“Of course you were,” he said. “Look at all you have in common. Myrtle is a leathery, toothless, egg-laying reptile; you’re a bright, with-it, very attractive media relations director at a major software firm…”
She folded her arms and gave him a flattery-will-get-you-nowhere look.
“Well, OK,” he conceded, caught in the act. “I guess you don’t have that much in common.”
He turned toward the door. “Well, I’d better get to work. Gam here yet?”
“No,” said Michelle. “He’s not coming in today. Oh, yeah—he says for you guys to leave his Mac alone. He’s got some kind of virus.”
The mood was shattered: he froze. A gush of adrenaline made his stomach muscles clench involuntarily. A computer virus—now? After all their weeks of work? Desperately, he mentally traced the connections in the R & D network; what if it spread to the other connected computers? Oh, God—he thought…depending on when Gam’s hard drive had become infected, there might not be a single healthy copy of the program! Even the backup copies would be corrupted…they were all made from the copy on Gam’s hard drive!
He looked hard at Michelle, a wave of panic washing over him.
“What?” was all he could get out.
“He’s got a nasty virus,” she repeated. “He’s not coming in today.”
“Oh God, oh God…How could this happen?!”
Michelle was staring. “Danny, what’s your problem? Who cares? He touched some doorknob and didn’t wash his hands. Someone sneezed on him. How does any-one get a virus? It’s no big deal; he’ll be back in tomorrow.”
Danny exhaled audibly, drowning in relief. “Oh—oh—jeez. I get it. He’s got the flu or something?”
She nodded with a quizzical look.
His pulse was returning to normal. “Michelle, do you know what a computer virus is?”
She gave him a sharp look. “No, Danny. I’m a female. With no grasp of anything technical. I’ve only been in the software business for six years, and I also don’t read the newspaper.”
“Sorry,” Danny said, ashamed, but still relieved that Gam’s virus was a biolog-ical entity instead of an electronic one. “Look, I was just afraid you meant a computer virus. See, I may as well let you in on this: Gam takes his hard drive home every night. He hooks up to a lot of those dial-up modem services—that’s where most people pick up viruses, so I thought you meant…”
She nodded.
“You can imagine how hairy it’d be if some virus held us up for a few days,” he continued. “We’d probably miss our ship date, for one thing.”
For the first time, a tiny furrow of concern appeared on Michelle’s brow. He’d almost forgotten how important that shipping date was to her.
“Well, it’s bad enough that we’re losing a day of Gam-programming time to a human virus,” Michelle said, sitting on the front edge of her desk. “But I’m a little concerned about this modem thing. Does Arnie know that he’s exposing the project to that risk?”
Danny shook his head.
“Maybe we ought to tell him.”
Danny scratched his neck thoughtfully. “I don’t know. From what I’ve seen, Arnie’s not much of a match for anything Gam feels like doing.”
She rested her hand lightly on his wrist. “I think you ought to talk to him. There’s got to be some way to protect ourselves.”
She even smelled good.
Inspiration struck; Danny snapped his fingers. “Michelle, you’re brilliant!”
“What’d I say?”
His mind raced—it would be so simple. “You’re absolutely right. Of course we can protect ourselves—how could I be so silly?”
“What?” she asked.
And then another idea…now or never. He smiled mysteriously. “I can’t tell you now. But I’ll tell you what: have dinner with me tomorrow. I’ll let you in on my sordid past.” He started backing deliberately toward the door.
“I don’t know, Danny. I try to keep my professional and personal lives a little separate.”
He had one hand on the doorframe. “OK, I promise not to say anything personal. Seven o’clock?”
She hesitated only a moment longer. “Well, I guess it’s OK.” She hopped off the desk. “For the sake of the program.”
“Naturally,” he said. “For the sake of the program.” He threw her a half-smirk and sprinted into the hallway.
 
October 30, 1996
Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes.
With each footfall, Stroman chanted the word in his head like a mantra. Yes, here was the taxpayer’s money—in every car-peted office, in the glow of the computer screen on every desk, in every pair of swinging conference-room doors. Bob Stroman strode down the hallway, strug-gling not to let his dovey, Democratic past get the better of him.
And Hamilton Air Force Base wasn’t even the most frivolous expenditure of his country’s citizens’ money, either, Stroman knew as he checked door numbers for the office he sought. He wasn’t sure what the citizens’ action leagues would say if they knew what he was doing here today.
Nonetheless, Stroman had decided to treat the U.S. Government like any other Artelligence customer. Stroman would sell them the product; it wouldn’t be his responsibility to monitor what they did with it. If he started worrying about the ultimate reason for his presence in these hallways, he’d probably back right out of the deal out of sheer guilt; finding better and faster ways of killing people wasn’t quite his cup of tea.
There: room 1831-A. Past the open door was a cluttered reception area. The re-ceptionist, a young lieutenant, looked up.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Stroman,” he said. “Colonel Oskins is expecting you; go right on in.” He gestured to a second doorway.
Stroman walked in to Oskins’ office. Oskins, a corpulent, puffing man in his fifties, threw out his hand. “So: the man himself!” he boomed.
Stroman shook hands and sat down; Oskins struggled back into his desk chair. “Ah’m glad we could finally git together on this,” Oskins said. Stroman was always amazed at the man’s vestigial Alabaman accent—the guy was a walking movie-general stereotype.
“As Ah’ve been tellin’ you on the phone, Ah had to go through the usual red tape on gittin’ the funds for this project from the GAO. But now they’re saying they’ll sign whatever needs signin’ as soon as they can see a demo.”
Stroman smiled. “Right,” he said. “You told every-one about our little show on the eighth, didn’t you?” From all indications, the official public unveiling of Master Voice would be an incredible event.
“‘Course. That’s why Ah think you and Ah should assume it’s on, and maybe we can talk more about specifics.”
“Sure.” Stroman opened his briefcase. “As you know, the arc chip is sort of like a genius who can’t talk; it’s a brilliant piece of engineering, but it doesn’t do much without a software front end. It needs something to interpret our instruc-tions into a language it understands—and vice-versa.”
Oskins nodded.
“So, in essence, we have a couple of choices. We can give you what we’ve got right now—the chip and the software for the Macintosh, which we’re finishing up now. You might use that kind of system internally, admin-istratively, you know—the same way anyone in any office anywhere would use it.”
“That’s this Master’s Voice thang?”
“That’s right, Master Voice,” said Stroman, correcting him gently. “Now, of course, the real military possibilities of the arc chip don’t involve sitting around in an office cal-culating the cost of paperclips; I think you might be more inter-ested in having us adapt the software specifically for you, so you could incor-porate the voice-recognition technology into anything you wanted. Navigational controls, weapons systems…whatever.”
Stroman could tell from the gleam in Oskins’ eye that he’d found the colonel’s weak spot.
“Actually, Bob, Ah’ve been talkin’ to the boys in the INFIDEL of-fices here, and they been talkin’ to the brass at the Pentagon. They’re all con-vinced we should pursue it, full steam ahead.”
“The what office?”
“INFIDEL,” Oskins answered. He pronounced it Infa-dale. “It’s a new cruise missile class. For the last decade, this department been developing so-called ‘smart bombs.’ You know…once they’re shot off, they got enough sensors on board to home in on the heat of a jet exhaust, the metal bulk of a tank, and so on. In other words, you don’t actually have to aim the suckers when you launch ’em.”
“OK,” Stroman said.
“Well, the smart bombs got one big ol’ problem: they can’t tell the heat of an enemy plane from one of ours. Ah guess you could say that smart bombs aren’t quite smart enough.” He looked at Stroman, leaning back in his chair. Stroman took the cue and faked a smile.
“INFIDEL, though, is a little more ambitious. These little fel-lers have a much longer cruisin’ range, and much more sophisticated computer imaging on board. They got maps of the terrain stored right on board—or else they talk to our mainframes on the ground for that information—so they liter-ally look for some’m to hit. They go flyin’ around, takin’ their sweet time, compar-in’ the images from their cameras with the information in their topographical databases. When they spot somethin’—say, an enemy installation we know about—off they go. Kamikaze bombs, you know.
“The great thing about INFIDEL is the psychological edge we git. All of a sudden, enemy troops got no warnin’. They don’t pick up any scramblin’ of our jets, or movements of our tanks, to tip ‘em off that we’re attackin’. The smart missile can be out there lurkin’ all day, huntin’ them down.”
Stroman didn’t quite follow. “Well—how does speech-recognition enter all this?”
“All right, here’s what happens. The INFIDEL 8’s are workin’ right now. They’ve been shootin’ off dummy Eights in Nevada for six months. Trouble is, the Eights are expensive as all git-out. Every Eight costs us about two million bucks in circuitry and imaging gear. And what hap-pens if the things work? Two million bucks go up in a puffa smoke when they hit the tar-get. Kinda crazy—you waste taxpayer money when the damn things do work!”
Stroman pretended to be amused.
“And they still can’t tell a good plane from a bad one,” he added.
“So, OK, now we got INFIDEL 10’s on the drawin’ boards,” Oskins continued. “The Pentagon boys got a great idea: keep the databases and the processing gear on the ground. Keep the Tens in radio contact with the mainframes on the ground at thirty-six thousand bits per second, sendin’ instructions all the time, instead of kickin’ the missile out of the nest and wishin’ it goodnight. If we can get the Tens workin’, they’ll cost a fraction of the Eights, because the missile itself only carries weaponry. The expensive stuff—the computers—stay on the ground. The Tens’ll work better, too, ‘cause we can afford a helluva lot more number-crunchin’ power if the com-puters are in a truck somewhere. And, ‘course, the computers don’t get blown off the goddam map every time an INFIDEL hits its target.”
Stroman nodded, encouraging Oskins to elaborate.
“OK. So the boys have been thinkin’. First of all, they’re in love with the idea of making the INFIDEL command post mobile. They want to send a coupla semi’s out there into the desert, or the tundra, or wherever the battle happens to be, so communications with the actual missile remain good and strong. So that means transportable computer gear. And that means pow-erful but cheap. In the testing they been usin’ a pair of modified Mac Quadras to simulate the ground INFIDEL computers.”
Stroman snorted involuntarily. “You mean they’re running this trillion-dollar defense program off a coupla Macs!?” he said.
“Easy with the figures, there, son; the INFIDEL program’s budget is well un-der a billion,” Oskins said earnestly. “Anyway, with the custom software we got, these Macs really cook. And the GAO loves ’em, ‘cause Macs are something they c’n understand.” Stroman mumbled apologetically and sat back to listen.
“So we were thinkin’ about this voice-recognition stuff. The idea is this: we want the man on the ground system to feel like he’s right on that sucker. We want him to actually see whether that missile is chasin’ an enemy plane or a friendly one, double-check its decisions about where it is, maybe help it scan for enemy installations, and so forth. The point is for a human eye to work together with the INFIDEL’s video.
“So we got this crazy idea: outfit him with this voice thing. We want him tellin’ that bomb what to do. You know, ‘Right thirty degrees,’ ‘Circle that valley again,’ that kind of thing. He’ll be sittin’ back in that truck with a martini, starin’ at the video from the onboard cameras, while the bomb is three hundred miles away, tellin’ it where to go and how it’s doin’.”
Stroman considered for a moment. “Well, it’s completely do-able,” he said. “I mean, it doesn’t sound that tricky for Master Voice, even unmodified. If you wrote the right interpretive code for the kinds of in-structions your men will be speaking, you could use the product as is.”
“That’s exactly what we were hopin’ you’d say, Bob.” The colonel extracted a pair of minuscule half-moon glasses from the desk drawer, and perched them almost daintily on his nose. “Now, our worries here are about the timeline. We need to see somethin’ on this fairly ASAP.”
“Of course,” Stroman said. “We’ve been meaning to draw up a proposal. We’ve just been so busy getting our first consumer-level product out the door, this Master Voice package, that I just haven’t had any time. But listen, the minute that product ships—”
Oskins interrupted. “Bob, look, Ah’ll be straight with you. Ah don’t know that Ah can wait until the spring, or whenever you’re done with your home-market device. You probably know that you’re not the only speech-recognition devel-oper in the world; we’re also lookin’ into a couple of other promisin’ packages. Now, Ah like what Ah’ve seen of your system, so Ah’m happy to keep in touch with you on this. But time is of the essence.” He clucked his tongue a couple of times.
Stroman jerked involuntarily; other systems!? What other systems? What other developers? Oskins couldn’t possibly be talking about one of the old pattern-matching voice systems. Did he know about some other true speech-recognition system Stroman didn’t?
“Colonel, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that… I didn’t know there were other candi-dates for this contract.”
“We have to consider all the options, Bob. ‘Course, these projects will repre-sent a healthy chunka change for some company, and we just want to make sure we’re doin’ the right thang.”
“If I may ask…how many other candidates there are?” Stroman’s mind raced. There weren’t any other true speech-recognition systems anywhere near completion! There were some experiments at M.I.T., but they wouldn’t be courting the Pentagon…
“Aw, look, Bob, you know Ah can’t go inta that. Let’s just say that there’s at least one major player sayin’ they’re ready to talk to us. You git me the write-up soon as you can, and you got nothin’ to worry about. All right sir?”
For another twenty minutes, they discussed the specifics of the arrangement that might be struck. Oskins talked money, manpower, and fiscal budget years; Stroman did what he could to help with information about develop-ment time. But all he could think of was the other bidder. Suddenly Stroman’s place in technological history wasn’t so secure as he’d imagined.
At precisely nine a.m., Oskins rose.
“All right, Bob, Ah think we done some good work here. Ah think the next step is for me to bring the boys in to see your big demonstration on the eighth.” He walked from behind the desk.
Stroman bent forward to close his briefcase—and froze. There, in square center of the blotter, was Oskins’ file folder, still open on the desk. What he saw there shocked him.
He looked away, stunned.
“We talk next week then, Bob?” came the big friendly voice from behind him.
Stroman straightened, turned. “Yeah…yeah, thanks,” he said in a breathy voice, and coughed twice to cover for his paralysis. He squeezed past the burly colonel in the doorway, giving him a quick, firm nod by way of farewell.
He plowed out of the building, clenching his sunglasses nearly to the breaking point, his nerve shattered. He should have expected this; somehow he should have seen it coming…he scanned the parking lot for his car, his confusion turning to rage.
In that one sec-ond, Stroman had seen a sheet of letterhead paper clipped to each leaf of the open folder. Even upside-down, he recognized his own Artelligence logo at the top of one page. It was his original proposal.
The logo on the other page said:
 
So this was Huntington’s game. This was his ten-year-old punishment for Stroman’s defection—to beat Artelligence to market, steal their thunder, shoot down Stroman’s brilliant dream.
He wouldn’t let it happen. His jaw tightened: he’d get Master Voice finished on time, or die trying.
