Undaunted

23

Kris awoke to pounding on her door. Hard pounding that didn’t let up.

“Lights,” she mumbled as she rolled out of bed. Clad in gym shorts and an old Wardhaven U sweatshirt, she figured she was presentable enough to open the door at this hour. A glance in the mirror showed her hair in a mess likely to turn any man who saw her to stone. He’d deserve it.

She yanked the door open; Jack stood there in pajama bottoms and a sweat-stained T-shirt from a band that had gone lame long before Kris entered high school. Well, he was eight years older than she was.

“Kris, you got to get Nelly to turn this computer off.”

“What computer?” Kris asked.

“This brat of hers.”

“My kids are not brats,” Nelly said.

“You got that right, Mom,” the computer at Jack’s neck said. “Just answer the question.”

“It’s two in the morning!” Jack half shouted.

“You’re up at two o’clock in the morning lots of times with Her Princesship here,” the new computer pointed out.

“But Kris doesn’t usually bring me wide-awake at two in the morning from horrible dreams to ask me what ‘to be or not to be’ means.”

“Did you do that?” Nelly asked.

“Well, you quit answering my questions.”

“I wanted you to find your own answers.”

“That wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.”

“It never is.”

“Nelly,” Jack said, “could you please teach Sal how to get out of my head. Kris, you don’t have to put up with nightmares every freaking night, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” Kris said. “You named your computer Sal. Is that a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t know whether it’s Sal for Sally, Salvador Dali, or the Marquis de Sal.”

“That’s the Marquis de Sade,” Sal corrected.

“You keep this up, and you’re going to be Sad.”

“Can we slow down here,” Kris said, raising a hand. “I was sound asleep just a moment ago.”

“So was I,” Jack put in.

“Nelly, what’s going on? There are seven, eight other people with new computers sleeping . . .”

“Or not sleeping,” Jack interjected.

“Tonight,” Kris continued. “What have you done to them . . . and your . . . ah . . . children?”

“I thought it would be a good idea to toss them out of the nest. You know, like a mother bird does.”

“So you . . .”

“Went off net. Broke my communication link with them.” Kris let that spin around in her brain for a long moment. From the look on Jack’s face, his thoughts were spinning, too.

“So, Sal, what did you do?” Kris asked.

“I tried to organize all the data I had. I could not find a logical decision tree to fit the data. So I downloaded more data from the ship’s computer and applied several different algorithms. None of them successfully resulted in any kind of logical structure for the data. I did further research, tried more, then decided to wake up Jack to discuss some of the various data sets that were puzzling me.”

“ ‘ To be or not to be’? What kind of question is that?” Jack asked around a yawn.

“Does it really mean he was considering suicide?” Sal asked.

“If he’d had a computer like you messing with his head, he would have done it long ago.”

“But Nelly, I’m not supposed to harm a human. Yet my human tells me I am driving him to self-destruction. Are all humans so fragile?”

“No, dear, they just have a twisted sense of humor. I’ll explain that to you off-line.”

“Nelly, you take your computer off-line, and you get her out of my head so I can sleep.”

“Yes, Jack, I will do that. You can safely go to sleep now.”

“Hold it, Nelly,” Kris said. “Are all the new computers causing this kind of trouble? Am I going to have more people pounding on my door?”

“I don’t think so,” Nelly said, a bit slowly, and not nearly as confidently as Kris wanted to hear. “Penny and her computer are engaged in a lengthy discussion of crime, both actual and fictional. She seems to be enjoying it. The same with the colonel, although their topic is the history and causes of war. I’ve reconnected to them on net, and I’m updating them on how to keep their thoughts to themselves if and when their friends need to get some sleep.”

“Abby?” Kris said, ticking them off on her finger.

“She and Sergeant Bruce apparently turned their computers off before going to bed. Cara is still playing games with her computer. She says it’s ‘way far too cool.’ ”

“Chief Beni?”

“He and his computer are busy examining aspects of electronic wizardry that I will want to drop in on and look at later. I doubt if the chief will get any sleep tonight or be of much use tomorrow. Should I order him to sleep?”

“No, Nelly, we don’t want the computers to become Big Brother. Besides, I doubt if there will be anything happening tomorrow.”

“Big Brother?” Nelly said. “Oh, yes, that is an old book. But you humans still worry about those things, don’t you?”

“Yes, we do. Nelly, there are two more names on the list.”

“Yes, I know, Kris. I’ve brought both Professor mFumbo’s and Captain Drago’s computers back up on my net. I’ve instructed them on how to limit the power of their reflections and keep them out of the heads of their humans. When they wake up, they should not remember any of the dreams they had earlier in the night.”

“Shouldn’t, huh?” Jack said.

“We’ll see how they are at breakfast,” Kris muttered, and now it was her turn to yawn.

The morning, no doubt, would be interesting.

Kris was at her usual seat in the wardroom only fifteen minutes later than usual. Since the Wasp was decelerating toward the nearest jump point, she could expect a quiet day. She was comfortable in a Navy shipsuit.

Jack wandered in, his uniform sharp, undress khakis, even if his eyes were black and bleary.

“You sleep well?” Kris asked as he settled into the seat beside her with a breakfast of dry toast and coffee.

“Once I finally got to sleep. Though my dreams! I ought to sell them to some horror media.”

“Uh-oh. You remember them?” Kris asked.

“No and yes. No, I don’t remember them vividly enough to dictate them and sell them for a plot, but yes, they’re kind of hanging around the back of my head, like a shadow of a shadow.”

“Sal,” Kris asked, “do you remember Jack’s dreams?”

“No, I don’t think so. I got mixed-up images and things that weren’t quite a thought.”

“I told you to ignore them,” Nelly said.

“I did, but they were there, and I had to look at them to see if they were orders for me or instructions or . . .”

“Nelly, do you get things like that from me when I’m sleeping?” Kris asked.

“Not really, Kris. I know that when you’re asleep I’ll get no orders, so I ignore anything coming from you. Maybe this is something else I need to warn my children about.”

Penny arrived next; like Kris, she was in a blue shipsuit. Only when she had her plate settled down across from Kris, did she admit, with a good Irish sigh, that she was tired.

“You stay up all night talking girl talk with your new friend?” Kris asked.

“Mimzy is very interested in crime tales,” Penny admitted. “We had a ball taking apart several cracking good stories.”

“And got to sleep quite late?” Jack said.

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“And slept soundly?” Kris asked. “No bad dreams?”

“No dreams at all. Want to tell me how you know and why this matters?” the intelligence officer asked.

Before Kris could answer, two more of Nelly’s kids arrived in the room, one around Professor mFumbo’s neck, the other in Captain Drago’s hand. Held at arm’s length. As if it were venomous.

“Take this thing,” the captain demanded.

“Mine, too,” the professor said, lifting it from his neck.

Both landed on the table none too gently in front of Kris.

“I take it you remember some nightmares,” Kris said slowly.

“God, what horrible. Horrible. Horrible things,” mFumbo spat. “Never. Never again.”

“And you’re sure they came from these?” Kris said, gently moving the computers out of reach of their previous users.

“I never had anything like them, and I’m never going to have anything like them again,” the captain half shouted, “because I’m never putting something like that on again. Ever. Again. I will smash it under my boot if it comes near me.”

Kris pulled them into her lap and out of sight.

“Your concerns are recognized and accepted,” she said, trying to put an end to the show that was drawing attention from everyone present.

The two began to turn away, but Nelly intervened. “Penny, could you please remove their communications interfaces.”

The men showed no interest in pausing until Nelly added, “If you don’t get the wires off them, they may keep hearing things from the computers.”

That froze the men in place just long enough for Penny to hastily, and none too carefully, remove the wires from their temples and around their ears. Then the captain and professor exited the room posthaste, congratulating each other for surviving this inhuman experiment and proposing to eat breakfast in the Scientists’ Refrectory.

“I’m glad that’s over,” Kris said softly to Jack.

Penny handed the wires to Kris. “I take it that these had something to do with you asking me about nightmares.”

“Yes. There was a problem. We solved it before you went to sleep, but not before they did.”

“And not before I did,” Jack added.

Abby and Cara passed the captain and professor on the way out. As soon as they went through the chow line, they joined Kris at her table.

“What bee was in their bonnets?” the maid asked, buttering her toast.

“The computer gave them nightmares,” Kris said. “You turned yours off.”

“Yes. I know Nelly doesn’t like that, but I like to dip my toesies into hot water an itty bit at a time. See how it goes with others,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the now-empty door. “What was eating them?”

“Nothing we haven’t solved,” Kris said.

The colonel wasn’t much later. He’d enjoyed his evening talk with Don Quixote, “Don, for short.” When Kris invited Sergeant Bruce to join them for a cup of coffee after he’d eaten in the Marine side of the mess, he admitted he’d enjoyed swapping war stories with Chesty.

“Swapping war stories?” Abby asked.

“Yeah, me telling stories about what I’d been up to my ears in. Chesty coming up with stories he’d heard. Somebody loaded this poor soldier full of hair-raising tales.”

Abby just sniffed. “Chesty, Nelly, Don. Everybody names these dang chunks of metal. You all must be crazy.”

“Crazy, maybe,” Kris said, “but I always treated Nelly like a girlfriend, and now she is. I’m not sure how a highly intelligent computer would develop if you treated it like any old hunk of metal.”

“I’ll never name my machine,” Abby said with finality.

“That might not be a smart idea,” Penny said. “Would you really want to risk a crazy Nelly around your neck?”

Abby made a sour face, but it was clear she was rethinking her position.

The last coffee cups nearing empty, Kris stood. “Folks, I’d like your input on something I lost sleep over last night.”

“Something beside the antics of Nelly’s kids?” Jack said.

“Definitely,” Kris said, and told them that her brother had sent her a digest of the human happenings while she’d been having fun gallivanting around the stars.

“Something tells me the milk of human kindness didn’t overflow.” Penny sighed.

“Why do I suspect that that herd of cows done wandered far off the reservation,” Abby added.

“More likely been chopped up for hamburger,” added the colonel.

“Stop it. Stop it, or I swear, somebody’s gonna get hurt,” Kris said. “I know, ’cause I’m gonna do the hurting.”

“Why’d you do that, Auntie Kris?” Cara cut in. “It was fun.”

“ ’Cause that cow done left the station,” Sergeant Bruce said.

“And it was going downhill fast enough to break a leg,” Jack said.

Kris threw up her hands. “Come to the Tac Room and see the news. Then we’ll see who wants to tell a joke.”