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