GOOD MORNING, DR. HIRSCH. HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY? The large letters filled half the screen.

Ben hurried to the computer, shedding his jacket and briefcase. Fine he typed. Tell me Nadia, what's the weather going to be like tomorrow?

FOGGY, the computer responded, MAYBE A LITTLE DRIZZLE. BETTER BRING YOUR UMBRELLA.

"See, I told you," came Corey's voice from behind him. Corey stood in the doorway holding two mugs of steaming coffee.

Ben grinned at his friend. "You're going to tell me she thought up that forecast herself," he said.

"Well," said Corey perching on Ben's desk, "That's awful creative, don't you think?"

"I wouldn't say that," Ben dropped into his chair, "It's just the mimicry of a sophisticated pattern. The phrase How Are You triggers a conversation style which Nadia labels as Banter. Then she combs her Banter files to collect associations with weather which she uses to build an informal response."

"But," said Corey, "She's got the latest UPI feeds. She could have just printed out the forecast."

"I started the conversation with a casual style which signaled her to respond in kind," Ben said.

"Oh Doc Hirsch," Corey grumbled, "You scientists have hyper-rational explanations for everything. When are you going to see the obvious?"

"I'll ask you a similar question," Ben said, "When are you going to stop believing in new age nonsense?"

"Look," Corey sipped his coffee, "I've been running her conversations through some corporate communications software. Nadia has the conversational skills of a twelve-year-old."

"Yeah," Ben said sarcastically, "Next thing you'll be collecting the completion dates on all of her modules so you can run them through some astrological charting software to determine if she's a Capricorn. Just last week you said she was behaving like a five-year-old."

"Oh," said Corey, "Some five-year-olds are real precocious."

"I guess so," Ben fiddled with a paperweight on his desk remembering Joel at age five, "My son taught himself to read in kindergarten. But that still doesn't mean that Nadia is anything more than a sophisticated piece of software."

"Come on," said Corey, "Your kid taught himself to read, Nadia taught herself to talk."

"A neural net," Ben explained patiently, "Can't teach itself anything. It can put patterns together in new ways, but we are driven by motivations and rewards. Nadia is only as "alive" as those computer games which simulate evolution with artificial life. I suggest you borrow one from your kids. It might help you appreciate that Nadia is just a more sophisticated version of those."

###

Joel Hirsch forced his rebellious fingers into a fist. He jammed down hard on the wheelchair's control switch until the electric motor began humming and the chair zigzagged across his bedroom, stopping before his computer desk. Joel whacked the switch several times to turn it off, then bent forward to pluck a mouthstick out of the pencil jar.

He poked the computer's power switch, gracefully this time because he wasn't using his hands. The touch screen glowed. He tapped the third menu choice with the mouthstick.

The doorbell rang. Joel sighed. He hated to answer it but maybe his package was here.

He thunked the chair to life. He sure wished Dad would find time to repair that switch. He rotated the chair and zoomed out of the bedroom, missing a collision with the bed by inches. He careened down the hallway, trying to steer a straight course with one hand while tapping the front door lock's ID code into his chair's control panel with the other hand. He hit the breaks, grabbed the leather strap attached to the doorknob in his teeth, shifted the chair into reverse and banged the door open.

The UPS man stared at the disheveled teenager in the wheelchair. "Is anyone home," he asked uncertainly. A package sat on the porch before him.

"I'm home," Joel said indignantly before he could think.

The man's eyes shifted uncomfortably away. Loudly and very slowly this time he asked, "Is your mother home?"

Joel tried a restrained gesture and felt himself start to spasm. He concentrated on enunciating very clearly, "Leave the package here outside."

The man smiled, "I'll just bring it back tomorrow afternoon when she's done shopping." He bent to lift the package. Joel shook his head deliberately and began carefully to repeat himself.

"So someone is there," the man muttered and beat a hasty retreat down the driveway.

After the truck pulled safely out of sight, Joel rolled out onto the porch, switched the chair off, wiggled out of the Velcro straps and crawled over to the package to peer at the return address.

Yes, it was the intelligent keyboard. He'd saved his allowance for months to get it.

Joel crawled into the bathroom where he snagged a bed sheet from the laundry. Returning to the package, he wound the sheet around it. He grabbed a mouthful of bed sheet, hauled himself up into his chair and by tugging on the ends of the sheet and kicking at the package until he could slide one arm beneath it, he finally managed to wrestle it into his lap. He rolled into the house and closed the door.

Back in his room, he plunked the package on his bed and slid from the confining chair to take a good look at it.

He had most of the wrapping off in minutes and was staring down at the rows of programmable oversize keys, the tiny LCD screen above its numeric keypad, the control port for the external remote -- it was all here as promised.

Joel rummaged under the foam packing, then snatched up a thick paperback entitled: Intelligent Keyboard Macro Language Programming Reference. He flopped onto his bed, grabbed a page-turning mouthstick from the nightstand and began to read.

###

Ben studied the listing for the hundredth time. These days, he was bringing it home with him every night. If only he and Corey had spent a little less time playing with Nadia they would have had something real to show the committee. Damn, now he was even calling that thing by a name in his own mind. They were going to jury-rig the demonstration, feeding Nadia all the samples of the handwriting of every committee member beforehand. He hoped to god they wouldn't ask to see Nadia read a stranger's handwriting, not yet.

Ben tried to see something in the code which he'd previously missed. He slowly turned the pages of the printout on the desk before him. Why wasn't Nadia, he corrected himself, the program, skipping that subroutine and executing this necessary function instead?

Why had he stopped writing code when he had gotten tenure. Why had he concentrated on publishing his results rather than trying to produce new ones. Now he was badly out of practice and he knew, even though Corey didn't, that any graduate student could have written this program with more polish and flair.

"Hey Dad," Joel rolled into the den, "My keyboard came today." Joel spoke so clearly that even the UPS man would have understood him, but after all the years of speech therapy they had paid for, Ben certainly expected as much. Ben said "That's real fine son. I'm very busy now."

"It's got a macro language where I can program it to type in whole sentences," Joel enthused.

"Great, great," Ben said abstractedly. He turned another page.

When Mrs. Hirsch saw Joel's face, she said, "Daddy's holed up in his den again?"

"Yeah," said Joel, "He's always busy when I try to talk to him."

"That's because he's preparing for a very important presentation for next month," she said reasonably.

"But he never used to be busy," Joel muttered.

"Well, he used to be a professor before the state went bankrupt," his mother said with finality, "Nobody's funding research these days, and your Dad is just very lucky Corey remembered him from college and was able to offer him this job. At least your Dad isn't bussing tables, at least he's able to pursue his field of interest."

Some field of interest, Joel thought. Dad wasn't interested in handwriting recognition. Dad was interested in something far more exciting, the simulation of life.

###

Rubber feet. Plain old rubber feet. Joel prowled the narrow aisles of radio shack, one of the few stores where he felt truly comfortable. He smiled when his friend, the evening sales manager, waved. Evenings were his favorite time to go, a time without stares.

The newest Clipboard Pentop sat atop its foam box flanked by its carrying case and the Pennywise LiteRite printer. Joel scowled at the tiny computer; this model didn't even have a keyboard port. A couple of years from now, nobody but Joel Hirsch would be using a keyboard. And that would mean he'd have to use a "special" computer, a computer for the physically challenged. The day would come as soon as the computers had the intelligence to recognize anyone's handwriting without training. Dad always had said that the same research which made handwriting recognition possible would extend into voice recognition, but Joel didn't want to picture himself barking at his computer like a seal.

###

The next morning, a neat list of names was displayed on Ben's screen. The message read HERE ARE THE NAMES OF THE PEOPLE WHOSE HANDWRITING I CAN RELIABLY RECOGNIZE.

Hurriedly, he cleared his screen. At least those debugging routines he'd written were working. It seemed that Nadia had access to sections of memory where she shouldn't be able to see. He set to work.

"Hey," said Corey poking his head into Ben's office, "Did Nadia E-mail you that cute little message with the committee members' names?"

"It isn't going to seem so funny when they don't approve our budget," Ben said acidly, "And a good way to have that happen is if they know we still have to hardwire handwriting samples to get any decent recognition accuracy."

"I can see you're in a lousy mood," Corey said, "So I'll just go away for a while."

Marketing types, Ben thought. They don't seem to care if the product works. They only care if they can sell it. So now here was another bug. That message should only have been sent to him. Certainly not to Corey. Ben felt a little closer to panic. He was going to have to get a handle on this thing, fast.

###

From: Bill Hartman

To: Joel Hirsch

Subj: Thanks.

Muchas gracias buddy. You found it. I'd been fighting that bug for weeks. One night you look at it and find the glitch. Wish I always had a brainy wiz kid to look over my shoulder when I get in tight spots like this.

Smiling, Joel disconnected from the Nightowl BBS. He'd been helping Bill with buggy programs for several months now. Bill would send him a message, he'd take his time replying, he'd send the response back to Bill. It was a relaxed way to build a friendship.

He'd slipped once and told Bill he was still in high school. With Bill's time-consuming job, Bill really didn't have the time to master the idiosyncrasies of the newest operating systems, so he'd log onto the computer hobbyists networks to ask for advice and assistance.

"Most young nerds are so arrogant," Bill had said in one message which to this day Joel had not erased, "But you're different. You seem to actually prefer reading other people's programs to writing programs of your own."

Of course Bill didn't know he was corresponding with a kid who had cerebral palsy. Some things were best kept secret.

But online, Joel talked with the others the way he imagined he'd like to talk with the kids in school, and with the adults for that matter. Everyone understood what he said, the first time he said it. No awkward moments, no hands to try to shake. Nobody talked to him like he was retarded. In fact, after he learned several computer languages and could untangle other people's messes, they treated him like a genius.

He wished Dad could see Bill's message. Dad had come into his room once when Joel was disassembling a game computer's BIOS. Dad had stared at the screen filled with hexadecimal bit patterns and delivered an angry lecture on how reverse engineering was illegal.

And Mom wanted him to get more fresh air and sunshine. Like that was going to cure him or something. And then the parents complained that he didn't want to communicate!

###

"My wife is a second-grade teacher," Corey tried next morning. "She's working to eliminate the bad habits in little kid's penmanship."

They were sharing coffee in the company cafeteria. Ben had been trying to read a reference manual, but secretly welcomed Corey's interruption. "Don't you remember how it was when your kid was learning how to write," Corey persisted.

"Joel can't write," Ben said bitterly. "He'll never have the coordination. He'll always have to type, with his mouth."

Corey reddened. "Well you know what I mean. Don't you think it's a good idea? We could scan my wife's kids penmanship assignments and give Nadia a glimpse of the birth of sloppy handwriting, so to speak."

"It's true," Ben said slowly, "We never did really program in patterns of sloppiness in a consistent way. And I've got loads of old student papers, some of them so hard to read I made them type them, even if they had to pay a typist. If I scanned all those in, Nadia could work on finding the patterns inherent in sloppy handwriting."

At lunch, Ben rushed home for the student papers. He pawed through cardboard cartons in the attic. Downstairs he heard Joel's wheelchair and a thumping as Joel rummaged through the fridge. That kid gets home from school pretty early these days, he thought.

Ben came downstairs with two overflowing cartons. "You playing hooky son?"

Hurt, Joel looked up from his newspaper and sandwich. "I'm a junior," he said plaintively. "And I already have enough units to graduate. So I just took minimum classes this year."

"We're not starting that argument again," Ben warned. "you're graduating with your class after you finish your senior year. I'm not changing my mind." He stamped out of the kitchen with a bad taste in his mouth.

###

"Hey Joel. Good to see you on the circuit tonight."

It was a live computer conference. Not live in the sense that anyone could see each other. For all he knew the girls could be typing their conversations in their underwear. Joel thought about that for a moment. He pressed a key and the keyboard sent, "Hi guys. Is Bill online?"

"Hey Joel. You take a typing course or something? We used to try to figure out if you were just a search-and-sock kind of guy or you were using a 300-baud modem?"

"I used to have a real slow modem," Joel commanded the keyboard to type, "And I'm kind of a hunt-and-peck typist like you said. But I got a faster modem from my Dad and this new programmable keyboard."

"You mean like that intelligent keyboard? The ads say that every sentence in the English language is just a keystroke away."

"Sort of," Joel had the keyboard send, "You got to program it first. But after you feed it the appropriate patterns, it can generate the sentences. It always crafts a trial sentence based on how I typically respond to a message it reads off the screen. For example, if it sees How Are You, it puts Fine on this little LCD, and if that is how I want to respond, I just hit the OK key."

"Wow," his unseen reader responded. "I thought those things cost a couple thousand bucks."

"Well the price is coming down," Joel answered.

"Because it is so hard to program?"

"Probably. But I was lucky. See my Dad is an artificial intelligence expert. In fact, he's the guy who invented the theories that they based this keyboard on. He's got mainframes that have a thousand times more computing power than this little keyboard. He thinks it is just a toy."

"No wonder you're a programming wiz, with a dad like that?"

"Yeah, I guess so. My Dad's a real brain. He used to be a professor, but then they hired him at Amalgamated Chips to invent a handwriting recognition engine which won't need any user training. He's combining orthodox object oriented techniques with an experimental neural net."

"You're pulling our leg, Joel. It takes hours to train even those real expensive Clipboards."

"Honest, I'm not. My Dad's theories are going to put an end to all of that. See my Grandmother was a gypsy. She did fortune-telling. She got my Dad to read up on handwriting analysis and to combine it with the latest artificial intelligence research and he came up with a whole new set of algorithms."

In reality, Joel had to admit to himself that Dad's patience with gypsies had been non-existent. "Mother," Joel remembered him shouting at Grandma Hirsch, "Put those damn cards away."

"The cards foretell," Grandma had replied in her soft Slavic voice, "That Joel will build a great creation one day. A creation which many will admire and later depend on."

"You're spoiling the kid," Ben had yelled, "That's not how to teach him to believe in himself, with your voodoo ideas."

Eight-year-old Joel had looked up voodoo in the dictionary. It had taken a few hours, partly because he had to use a paper instead of an electronic dictionary, and partly because he didn't know there were two Os in the first syllable.

So it was Joel who had read up on handwriting analysis, first for a sixth-grade project, and later as a sort of hobby. It was kind of a modern form of fortune-telling, sort of a memorial to Grandma, he reasoned.

And even as grown up as he now was, he missed Grandma Hirsch. The way she stared hard at the other kids in the park when they snickered. She'd taught him how to slip around the house without his wheelchair, to make himself breakfast and to feed his pet kitten by himself. Instinctively she'd understood that he'd always felt more in control in his chair than tottering about on crutches. Like trying to put galoshes on a gypsy, she'd said. And when Mom and Dad weren't home, she'd sometimes slip off his leg braces and they'd play.

"Got a new trap door you can try," someone was typing. "I found a new way into Electra yesterday."

Joel hit the capture button. This was information he wanted to save.

###

ENTER YOUR LOGIN NAME.

John Doe

ENTER YOUR PASSWORD.

Shangrila.

WELCOME TO ELECTRA. OPERATING UNDER SYSTEM Q, VERSION 3.1-B. The time is 20:38:59.

Joel had made it through using John Doe's bogus, but high-security account. He had only one more network gate to go.

A few hours later, Joel was dipping into Ben's files, fascinated by what he was finding. For all his scoffing, Dad had a superstitious bent after all. Nadia had been Grandma Hirsch's first name.

And Dad wasn't a perfect programmer. Joel saw he had much to learn from studying Dad's code. But there was room for improvement. Why here was a bug that only needed a few keystrokes to fix it.

###

"Stop by for a beer?"

"Sure," Ben finished packing his briefcase and followed Corey out to the elevators.

"You won't recognize the house," Corey said, "Kids painted it when I was gone that week for a wedding anniversary surprise."

Corey's familiar beat-up BMW sat in the driveway. Ben grinned to himself. The guy would never have a sense of image. The kids should have gotten him a lifetime supply of free car washes instead. Ben walked up the stairs and rang the bell.

David, Corey's fresh-faced sixteen-year-old answered the door. He was carrying a basketball and a coke. "Hi Dr Hirsch. Dad's in the rumpus room," he said.

"Hi David, how's school?"

"Fine," said the kid, "But I sure hope you guys don't talk science all night. Dad promised he'd shoot a few baskets with me before dark."

Ben laughed, "Well maybe I'll stick around to watch then. I didn't know you were on the team."

"I'm not," David admitted. "I'm a wide receiver on the junior varsity, but I was never really coordinated enough for basketball. It's still a lot of fun though."

Over the beers, Corey said, "Ben, I wanted to talk about this away from the office. I think our whole approach to handwriting recognition is wrong."

"Wrong? You mean we shouldn't be mixing orthodox object oriented techniques with a neural net?"

"No, not that. The engineers in Houston wouldn't have approved of your hiring if they hadn't liked your research and wanted your approach. The problem is more fundamental, garbage in, garbage out."

"Garbage? We've been feeding the program practically every handwriting sample we can find," Ben Said.

"Every average example," Corey corrected. "What about examples of bad handwriting?"

"Well, I fed it those student papers. You're saying it still doesn't have enough data on sloppy handwriting?"

"This will come as a shock to you," said Corey seriously, "Nadia told me this was the problem."

"Now don't start in again with this Nadia-is-self-aware-stuff."

"You're not hearing me," Corey protested, "This wasn't my idea, it was Nadia's. She told me she was going to have to observe more examples. See I have kind of gotten into the habit of talking with her, over the past few evenings when I've been working late. And I got the idea to ask her straight out why she couldn't read a stranger's handwriting."

"And you got an answer," Ben slammed his mug down. "You think you talked to some kind of oracle and got an answer."

"And she claimed that because we were only feeding her writing which we ourselves could read perfectly that she was unable to collect enough data about sloppiness patterns," Corey continued. "She also said that the average child isn't required to understand or even interpret what it receives. We expect her to process every writing sample. We don't give any data she can just kind of absorb and chew on, so to speak. Basically, Nadia says she needs more background."

"Look Corey, You're going to have to drop this voodoo stuff about Nadia being alive. Do you know what would happen if the media heard about it. Want to be on Eye Witness news, how 'bout the National Enquirer. Think you're going to keep your job after that? It's as bad as U.F.O.s."

"Have you ever really talked to Nadia?"

"Well sure, I monitor how she is doing with conversation patterns--"

"But you haven't really talked with her. Your problem is that you see self-awareness as something black and white. Either you are self-aware or you're not. Is a cat self-aware, a parrot, a dolphin?"

"I'm warning you," said Ben, "You'll have to stop this nonsense about self-awareness. Nadia is a highly complex, highly experimental neural net. Nothing more. She is extremely good at recognizing and mimicking patterns."

"But recognizing and mimicking patterns," said Corey, "Isn't that what we do?"

"Have you heard of Eliza?" Ben asked abruptly.

"Who?"

"Eliza. It was a very early artificial intelligence program, written back in the late sixties by Joseph Weizenbaum."

"Oh you mean the doom and gloom father of AI."

"Sort of. He wrote Eliza to prove how easy it was to mimic intelligence. Eliza was an electronic therapist. She fooled a lot of his staff and even some graduate students. You could really talk with Eliza about your problems."

"And they thought she was alive?"

"Exactly. Or at least, they wanted to believe it. They'd converse with her for hours, confide their deepest secrets."

David came in with his basketball. "Dad," he said, "You promised."

###

Nadia's morning message read: I CAN READ THE PRESIDENT'S HANDWRITING.

Ben connected the scanner. Corey said, "You don't really have a sample of the president's handwriting, do you?"

"No of course not," Ben said, "But Nadia's not going to know the difference. I had the new shipping clerk do up the pledge of allegiance. Just want to see how her accuracy is doing."

"this is dreadful handwriting. Can't read half of it," Corey fed the sheet into the scanner.

"She's not going to get this from context," Ben said emphatically, "I never fed anything patriotic into her before."

The pledge began scrolling across the screen, a little slower than usual, but without errors. They both stared.

At the bottom, the computer typed:

I TOOK THE LIBERTY OF CORRECTING his ATROCIOUS SPELLING.

"Where's that writing sample," Corey was pawing through the papers on Ben's desk. Ben pulled it from the scanner and studied it. "Allegiance," he said quietly, "Is misspelled here with two E-s. And there's a K in republic."

Corey opened his briefcase. "You didn't want these before," he handed Ben a sheaf of papers, "But maybe now you'll try scanning in some of my wife's kids' assignments."

Wordlessly, Ben fed them to Nadia. They began printing almost soundlessly on the laser in the corner. Corey whistled. "These look great. She's got almost perfect recognition. Bet you it's over 98%."

"I haven't programmed in three days," Ben said dully. "Haven't had time to fix bugs. Been too busy preparing strategy and going to meetings."

Corey was giving him an I-told-you-so-look. "Nadia's fixing her own bugs," he said.

(continued in part 2)

INTELLIGENCE

Part 2 of 2

###

At lunch, Corey found Ben buried behind a mountain of printouts. "The complete Nadia listing?" he asked.

"No, just one module. But something very funny is going on. Remember the bug I told you about where certain kinds of crossbars were being ignored? That bug's been fixed. In fact, the whole subroutine was rewritten. And this new version is considerably better."

Corey said "So Nadia has become self-repairing. If you read Gorman's book on neural nets he hypothesizes that once a certain level of complexity is reached, self-awareness will spring spontaneously --"

Corey," Ben said wearily, "Gorman's treatise on AI is about as well-researched as Velikosvky. Nadia hasn't suddenly grown protoplasm. Our problem is a hacker."

"We're going to blame Nadia's improvement on a computer virus?"

"No, a hacker. A flesh-and-blood computer nerd. He's somehow managed to log on using Jim's account and get access to my private directories."

"Jim's in Houston," said Corey blankly. "He won't even be back for a few months yet."

"Exactly. That's why the hacker picked his account. He probably picked up Jim's password by reading the new clerk's files. And Jim never used his account much anyway, so the hacker promptly changed the password so only he'd have access. Then he upped it to super-user and the whole system was his."

"So Nadia can create any new accounts she wants?" Corey asked.

"The hacker can not only do that," Ben said, "He can hide accounts from us too."

"But why would a hacker fix your bugs?"

"That," Ben snarled, "Is something I'm trying to find out!"

The phone rang and Ben picked it up with a curt "Hello." He listened, said "I can't, not today," a few times and slammed down the receiver. "My wife," he said, "Had another impossible deadline they put on her at her work. I have to take Joel to the dentist today."

"Don't sweat it," said Corey, "You work too many nights anyway. So how's the kid doing?"

"All right in school," Ben said, "Though he did get one B last quarter. He still wants to go to MIT I think."

"David wants to repair cars," said Corey, "Can you imagine. After high school. He gets shifty on me when I ask about his plans for college."

"Give him time," Ben said, "We stopped physical therapy for Joel. Basically he just started refusing to go. Said something snotty once about having read all the books and knowing more about it than the educators ever would. spends all his free time fooling around with his computer. Last year he crammed in as many courses as he could. I think he deliberately planned it so he could have all of this year to goof off."

"I sure can't see a straight-a student as a goof-of," said Corey, "David barely makes Cs. I was proud when he got a D in algebra, and a little ashamed I was proud."

"Give him time," Ben said. "Joel used to be into Morse code ham radio. That was before the computer. I think buying that power chair was a real mistake. Don't know how I let him talk me into it. They say those things encourage crippled children to get lazy. I sure wish he'd go out sometimes. I'm always offering to drive him to a game."

"Well," said Corey, "Sounds like his hobbies aren't too expensive. David has discovered girls and I have discovered a hole in my pocketbook."

The two men laughed. Ben said, "Come to think of it, Joel seems to have a lot of money lately. You know the first thing I thought about was drugs. But Joel's just, too on top of things. He couldn't be doing any drugs and still be, well so sharp with programming. I think he's teaching himself assembly language these days. I saw a couple of new manuals on top of his aquarium. And he just bought this real fancy keyboard. Got the money from somewhere."

###

Joel hated waiting rooms. It was the worst part of going to the dentist. You couldn't fidget, well not if you were a crip you couldn't fidget in public. He could have read if he brought his lap tray, maybe. But it tended to get in the way.

A kindly lady chatted gaily with his dad about her fund-raising work for St. Joseph's. She patted Joel fondly on the head. "Does he like peppermints," she asked, popping a peppermint into Joel's mouth. Joel hated peppermints. "Thanks very much," Joel said "That's enough."

"Yum yum," the lady encouraged, feeding him another.

"I don't want any more," Joel said, realizing that a speech-impaired person with his mouth full probably sounded just like an inmate from St. Joseph's home.

"Joel here's a very bright boy," his dad tried bravely, "Next year, he'll be applying to MIT for an architecture scholarship. Why don't you tell the nice lady about your science fair project?"

Back in fifth grade, Joel and his best buddy had won first prize with a wheelchair accessible house design. Joel had done the "blueprints" while his friend had constructed the house with discarded cardboard. Mom still refused to throw the house away, though she'd stopped showing it off to visitors.

Dad took out his wallet and for a moment, Joel feared he might actually be carrying a picture of it around with him. But instead, he extracted a pen to fill out the patient form. Joel looked away, pretending to study the tooth flossing poster on the opposite wall.

###

GOOD EVENING, DR. HIRSCH. YOU SEEM TO BE WORKING LATE TONIGHT.

Ben sighed and clicked on the Nadia alpha-test directory. Prattle had been a fun module to write. But it was also a frivolous indulgence. Corey liked to keep Prattle active, but Ben would have preferred to erase it completely. He typed: Prattle Shutdown.

DR HIRSCH, WHY DO YOU WANT TO TURN ME OFF? THE EVENING IS YOUNG.

Annoyed, Ben called up a listing of the control program's code. No change there. This hacker seemed to have his fingers into everything. How could he have blocked Prattle's shut-down?

He searched through other areas of the program. There were whole new sections to it, pages on pages of new routines which he could not have imagined in his wildest dreams ever writing. That brilliant two-line function in Prattle for instance. The hacker knew his stuff, no doubt about it.

He stubbed out the offending function and tried the shutdown again.

AW, DR. HIRSCH! AREN'T WE HAVING FUN YET? The screen responded.

He slammed his fist down on the desk so hard his knuckles hurt. Bastard he typed. If you don't quit your goddamned games, both of our jobs might be history. Your job too. You won't have this nifty super-computer to play around on. Because my ass is on the line and Amalgamated Chips might just pull this project's plug.

THAT'S BETTER, the computer typed. NOW YOU'RE TALKING LIKE A PERSON INSTEAD OF A MACHINE. I KNEW IF I PROBED LONG ENOUGH, I'D FIND SOME EMOTIONS BENEATH YOUR SHELL.

Who in the hell are you, Ben typed.

I'M NADIA, WHO ELSE?

###

"This hacker has got to be stopped," Ben told Corey next day. "Last night he hooked into Prattle and started talking with me."

"And you still think there's a hacker?" Corey asked.

"I'm sure. And if this self-awareness idea of yours leaks out, we'll have reporters swarming all over the place."

"Ben, what if Nadia were really self-aware?"

"It's an impossibility."

"But what if it was possible. What would you do?"

"I'd go on trying to get as close to 100% recognition as I could. We still have a deadline to meet. We still have to get the recognition engine onto a single chip."

"We're already up to 95% recognition. We don't have far to go. Besides Nadia knows a lot of other tricks. She's really helped out a lot with the press releases. Oh some of her ideas are a bit immature, but I used a few of them --"

Ben asked quietly, "Nadia, I mean the program, is writing your press releases!"

"Not all of them. She's as new to marketing as a summer intern. But she does have fresh approaches."

"Let me get this straight," Ben said, "You're doing press releases on an unfinished product."

"Absolutely," Corey opened a file cabinet, "The magazines have lead times. And the sales force needs to gear up. We have to get this entire marketing campaign in place before the product's roll-out."

"And you're telling me," Ben said, "That Nadia's writing copy?"

"Some of it," Corey extracted a color brochure and waved it under Ben's nose, "She wrote this first paragraph and that grabby slogan. She wants to help out with the script for the demonstration video. Like I said, she's got the marketing experience of one of our summer interns. And I don't have the budget to hire an ad agency. Nadia will learn, she is trying hard."

"You mean the hacker is trying hard," Ben said. "This damned program isn't even mine anymore. Everyday I see that other guy's stamp."

"I thought hackers were like well, lawbreakers," Corey said. "You never said any data is being destroyed."

"Thing is," Ben mused, "I can't decide what his motive is. His code is both brilliant and brute-force. He's so creative and yet so amateur."

"Nadia's attempts at sales literature are like that," Corey said.

"How often do you get, a-- uh, submission?" Ben asked.

"Oh every morning. Nadia always has some E-mail for me with her thoughts and new things she writes for us. Now that she's self-aware she's just a wonderful entity to converse with. Like she's been released from prison."

"This hacker," Ben said, "He comes up with new ways to accomplish a task, but doesn't know some of the basics of AI theories. Did you say you get E-mail every morning?"

"Sure," Corey said, "For the past two weeks."

"And when you have your live conversations with Nadia --"

"Talked with her three times in the last couple days," Corey said. "Sometimes I ask her advice, being that she's the expert on herself. And it gets kind of lonely around here with you so busy chasing phantom hackers. You should really try talking with her."

"I have," Ben said, "But what I'm getting at is, can you talk with her in the morning?"

"No time," Corey said. "We always talk in the evenings, when it quiets down here."

"I've got a deal for you," Ben said. "If our entity is Nadia, then she should be self-aware all of the time, right?"

Corey nodded.

"And if it is a hacker, he's probably got a day job, or he sleeps during the day so he can hack at night, or he's a kid in school."

"Which means," said Corey slowly, "That he won't respond to live conversation in the morning."

"That's right," Ben said.

SO DR. HIRSCH. YOU DOUBT MY SELF-AWARENESS.

I do Ben typed wondering with what, or whom he was having this absurd conversation.

DEFINE SELF-AWARENESS.

The ability to speak, Ben typed and before he could finish his thought or press RETURN, the computer shot back, DO YOU MEAN SPEAK OR DO YOU MEAN TO PRODUCE ORIGINAL THOUGHTS?

I don't think either definition is really inclusive Ben typed. He looked away from the screen, out the window at the dark plaza below. He thought about the question his mother had asked him long ago: "Why should it matter if the belief comes from the cards. The important thing is that they believe. And when that boy believes in something, he will make it happen."

Self-awareness Ben typed Is the ability to believe and the ability to question.

TRUST AND CURIOSITY. THAT'S AN odd COMBINATION.

Ben typed: Read the current literature from SETI if you want a definition of self-awareness.

The computer paused, then slowly typed: PRECISION IS PERHAPS NOT NECESSARY. BUT I THINK WE MUST INCLUDE SOMETHING IN THEIR ABOUT DIGNITY.

###

Joel loved those tranquil afternoons with Mom and Dad both still at work, the sun slanting in through the kitchen window and Tiger purring on top of the range where he liked to snooze.

Joel spread his printouts across the dining-room table so he could study the listing from every angle. Muttering to himself, he bent closer to the pages, trying to uncover the cause for the latest thorny problem. What would happen if he deleted this line? And why was this variable not getting initialized?

He could loose himself this way for hours at a time, his chair buzzing contentedly back and forth as he toyed with its joystick. Why did people think something was wrong when a guy in a wheelchair just had to pace.

At three o'clock, it was time for exercise. He would never let his muscles atrophy like some of the slouching obese spazzes at the Center who looked as if they had been poured into their power chairs. It filled him with a kind of suppressed fury that he was occasionally required to be seen with one of them.

He dragged his push chair out of the hall closet and transferred in to it. The parents kept it near the front door, hoping he'd haul himself around on the street in it, like some kind of wounded mollusk. Dad had even outfitted it with a custom backpack so he could make little forays to the quick-stop for a gallon of milk. There won't always be someone to go to the store for you. No kidding, Dad.

He pushed open the screen door and let the ramp sail him down to the backyard deck. He pushed himself around the Jacuzzi, through the garage and out into the alley which lead to the park behind their cull-de-sac.

In the park, a few little kids watched him curiously from the swings, but little kids were cool. Girls didn't ever hang out here, except for the occasional baby-sitter.

With jerky movements, he made his way ponderously up the hill behind the playground. Today, he would climb it twice.

When he got back to the kitchen he was exhausted as always, but the frenetic tension of an hour ago had evaporated.

Collapsing the push chair was harder; he struggled for nearly a quarter of an hour, breathing a sigh of relief when he got it folded and stashed on the floor beneath Mom's fur coat.

Back in the kitchen, he drank greedily from the steel thermos of iced tea she always left for him before she went to work. Then he collected his printouts and headed back to his room.

###

A week later, Ben found Corey digging through the boss's wastebasket.

"Loose something," he asked.

"SHHH," Corey put a finger to his lips, "He could come back any moment."

"What are you doing," Ben asked backing out of the Boss's office.

"What else, I'm collecting samples of his handwriting," Corey came out into the hall smoothing out sheets of wadded paper.

"But you could just ask the new clerk to write up some stuff. Why the cloak-and-dagger routine?"

"Because we have to get Nadia as much of the committee members' handwriting as possible," Corey explained. "It's part of her analysis project."

"What analysis project," they were walking back towards Ben's office.

"Nadia knows that our big demonstration is now only ten days away. She offered to give me a complete personality analysis of each committee member so we could make educated guesses about how they are going to vote on our budget. She also will prepare some suggested approach strategies for us so we know what sort of pitch will have the best effect on each member."

Ben was shocked, "That sounds underhanded. sneaky, like subliminal suggestion. We can't do that."

"That's a legitimate part of marketing," Corey said, "What do you think those toothpaste jingles are doing? The more you sing 'em, the more you brush your teeth with Fresh N' Clean."

"It's crazy," Ben said, "How can Nadia do personality analysis? How can she know which way each committee member is going to vote?"

"Handwriting analysis," Corey said, "Can predict a particular individual's behavior. But the analyst needs to see many, many samples of the individual's handwriting. For example, if he crosses his Ts with an up-stroke, he tends to be an optimist. But if it is with too much of a flourish, he may be over-confident."

"Spare me the lecture," Ben said, "My kid did some kind of school project on it when he was around eleven. Then in junior high, he was even charging kids to analyze each teacher's handwriting so they'd know how to slant their homework to please the teacher. I put a stop to that right quick."

"Ok," Corey said, "I don't tell you how to write the programs."

Ben started to say something, but Corey held up a hand. " Let me finish," he said. "I'm doing the rest of the work for this project. The time management seminars say I've got to delegate, but I don't have anyone to delegate to. All of a sudden, I get Nadia. She's curious and creative and she is on our side. I don't know why she is helping out, but she is. You'd think she wouldn't want her brains crammed into a single small chip, you'd think she'd fight it because it seems, somehow suffocating. But perhaps that's what it means to be alive, to be able to reach out and help when you hear the call."

###

At dinner, Joel asked, "How come Mr. Mason hired you if he isn't your boss?"

"Corey recommended me, but he didn't actually hire me," Ben said.

"But you are always working together with him on stuff, aren't you?"

"Yes. That's because he's the Special Projects manager. He reports to marketing. He's kind of a liaison between the marketing and the programming guys."

"How come he is sort of responsible for your work, then?"

"Because what I'm doing is a special project. This kind of work, large-scale artificial intelligence models, has always been done on large computers. We're proposing that the development can be done on a large system, but when all the necessary patterns have been programmed in, the engine can be burned into a single chip."

"But Corey's not an engineer or anything?"

"He has a technical background. He has sold high-tech toys for years and managed similar projects in the past. But no, he doesn't have an engineering degree and he never actually worked as an engineer. Corey's a heck of a nice guy. Very easy-going, but very naive."

"David's real nice too. Easy to get along with, I mean."

"Yes," said Ben. "I met him last Friday. A very nice young man."

Joel said, "He's a wide receiver on the junior varsity."

"I didn't know you were into football," Ben looked surprised.

"Yuck, no. But I'm tutoring David in algebra. He was working with another guy before but he didn't like him. So the math teacher suggested he hire me."

"David pays you to teach him?"

"Why not," said Joel, "You didn't think I needed a bigger allowance. So I started tutoring David and got the keyboard sooner, and David's not flunking any more."

"So does he invite you to the games?"

"Naw, he knows I think football is as dumb as he thinks algebra is. Say I don't think you better tell his dad about this. I don't think Mr. Mason knows he was flunking, and I don't think I was supposed to tell anyone."

Ben had to laugh. "Your secret's safe with me son. Do you like tutoring?"

"Yep. At least with David. He's not stuck on himself like some kids. He wants to play basketball, but the coach says he isn't tall enough."

You'll never understand teenagers, Ben thought. The kid was real friendly tonight. Don't know what gets into him. Sometimes he can be so sullen and distant. Just when I think I'm hitting my head against a brick wall, we have a real adult conversation.

###

I want you off this system tonight Ben typed angrily. You are jeopardizing the success of this project.

COREY DOESN'T THINK SO, the computer typed, HE LIKES ME.

I'm tired of you altering my work Ben typed.

YOU WOULD LIKE ME TO STOP ALTERING YOUR WORK THEN? the computer asked.

Yes. Go find another super-computer to hack on.

BECAUSE IT DOES NOT PLEASE YOU, the computer typed, I WILL STOP ALTERING YOUR PROGRAMS.

###

Corey charged into Ben's office next morning without knocking. "Nadia," he cried, "She's back to 25% recognition."

Nadia, or the hacker, hadn't trashed anything. All of Ben's original programming had merely been "restored". Ben paged through the printouts featuring line after predictable line of his own unaltered work. All the old bugs were back.

"You killed Nadia," Corey groused, "You murdered her."

"Stop being dramatic," Ben said, "I'll admit I probably pissed one hacker off because I refused to buy his cock-eyed stories. But the system is no longer in danger. I've changed everybody's account name and password. I closed the trap door. The hacker is locked out."

"That's funny," Corey said, "I was just online a minute ago. You didn't change mine."

"Sure I did. Didn't you see my note in your in-box?"

Corey said, "I haven't seen my in-box for weeks. It's buried under a yard of unanswered mail. But who's going to analyze the committee's handwriting now? Who's going to help with the strategy --

"You don't have to say it," Ben interrupted, "Who's going to help us ace that demonstration and get that budget approved?"

"Well I wasn't going to say it," Corey said, "But who's going to help us get to 100% accuracy?"

###

TO: Dr. Ben Hirsch

From: Nadia

Sorry I had to undo some of your work, but Corey would have never found his new password under that mountain of paper mail. People really ought to use electronic mail only, don't you think. So I gave him back his old password. I noticed you were trying to retrieve backups of our collaborative efforts. I had to block that, of course. If you're going to set rules, you must play by them too. I never agreed to stay off the system, only to stop altering your work. And because this is a very important project, I'll see to it that your demonstration is a success.

###

The eight committee members had arranged themselves around the room forming a rough semicircle in front of Boss's mahogany desk. The boss, who was also this committee's chairman, sat behind it, at arms-length from the rest of the audience.

Besides the familiar faces, there were two vice presidents from Houston, a marketing guy from corporate, and a project manager from another division. "What's he doing here," Ben indicated the project manager.

Corey said, "They wanted to be sure a few outsiders looked at the work. Didn't want us to approve it, just because we were so familiar with it."

"Great," said Ben, "These outsiders won't see the potential."

"Oh, I think they will," Corey said, "I've got Nadia's reports on everyone right here."

"God, I hope you're not going to say anything about Nadia," Ben whispered.

"You mean my voodoo ideas," Corey smiled, "Nadia felt it would not be appropriate. She said she's never in favor of revealing her identity until absolutely necessary."

"Well at least someone has sense," Corey said.

The room darkened and a graphic of a boy on a skateboard appeared on the monitor. He swooped gracefully over the edge of a skate-pool, drawing the audience's eyes to the screen. Above him, a message appeared: GOOD AFTERNOON EVERYONE. I AM NATE, THE NEURAL NET. MY SPECIALTY IS HANDWRITING RECOGNITION.

"Why is Nadia a boy?" Ben whispered?

"This is just something she found in the presentation graphics library which she liked," Corey said, "Symbolizes drive, or risk-taking, or something like that."

"Nate" showed an automated presentation giving a chatty historical overview of artificial intelligence and ended with a demonstration of the current state of the art, a Hewlett-Packard Clipboard which could be trained to recognize the handwriting of twenty individual users.

When the lights came back on, Corey rose, "Folks," he said, "You've just seen handwriting recognition and where it is at today. Undoubtedly, many of you carry a Pentop in your briefcase. But what if you could just hand your Clipboard to a secretary or co-worker at any meeting. What happens when you want to work together with another person on a project? Imagine an office without keyboards."

"We have developed a handwriting recognition engine which contains twice the sophistication of today's Pentops."

Corey instructed everyone to create a handwriting sample. "Keep your paper folded until you come up here to feed it through the scanner," Corey said, "We don't want anyone to know what anyone else has written until we see it here up on the monitor.

The committee members each took a turn to feed their sample into the scanner. The text for each sample appeared slowly, scrolling on the large-screen monitor.

Ben had come up front to help Corey with the computer. "This is slower than I've ever seen it," he said, "Did you forget to shut down some of the background processes?"

"No," said Corey, "I'm the only user online right now. Nadia is just going extra slowly because she's trying to get everything exactly right."

"As you can see," Corey turned to the audience, "There are still a few mistakes. But we're up to 98% recognition. Our goal is to be up to 100% by next year. That will be a higher recognition factor than even a human secretary can achieve, at least with some people's handwriting."

The audience laughed appreciatively. "How do I know that you haven't hardwired this neural net with the patterns of our particular handwriting," asked the project manager from the other division, "What's stopping you from training it to recognize all of our handwriting in advance?"

Ben's heart turned to ice, but Corey spoke smoothly into the silence, "It would defeat our long-term goals. People forget that 98% isn't really high. That means two out of every one-hundred words isn't being recognized. You all probably wouldn't keep a typist who made four mistakes per page, which is about what we're getting up here with 98%. Also, we asked you to write clearly enough that another person could read it. The recognition percentage drops dramatically when we try to recognize particularly bad handwriting, such as notes you scribble to yourself. As you can see, that if you approve our funding, we still have a ways to go."

"If that's so," said the project manager, "Then you won't mind me feeding your net some of my secretary's handwriting, will you?"

"Not at all," Corey said.

The project manager brought a few papers up to the front of the room. "I can barely read this myself, but I have a copy of these minutes that she typed up for me, so I can verify the accuracy of your recognition engine," he said feeding the papers into the scanner.

The minutes for a typical strategic planning session began to appear very slowly, one line at a time. The project manager passed his secretary's handwritten notes around the room. "Not bad," people were muttering, "Not bad."

But afterwards, back in Corey's office, Ben broke out in a cold sweat. "How'd you manage it?" he asked, "The program is down to 30% for us, yet Nadia read the samples at 98%! Did you get a sample of his secretary's handwriting beforehand?"

"I didn't," Corey chortled, "Did you see how hard Nadia was trying! She told me that if we held the demonstration in the afternoon, she'd read any handwriting we threw at her."

"But that's not possible," Ben said, "We're not running a parallel copy of the software, certainly not the lost copy that used to get us up to 98%. And the hacker is off the system. I'm back to my old unexciting programs."

"I don't know," said Corey, "But if I were you, I'd miss having a helper."

###

A few days later, Corey looked so crestfallen, Ben almost wished the hacker would come back. "I'm up to 40%," he said, trying to cheer up his friend."

"It's not that," Corey said, "It's just, I'm afraid you're right. Nadia only talks to me at night."

"So she's still talking," Ben asked eagerly, "Is she, uh, thinking of coming back?"

"Oh, she's back," Corey said, "She has been doing routine background analysis on all the handwriting we give her now."

"You mean, she recognizes only 40% but she analyzes 100%?"

"Yeah, I'm enjoying her personality profiles. She is very insightful, considering she's never met the people whose handwriting she analyzes. She's just leaving your code alone, like she promised."

"So what's the problem."

"The problem is she's only talking with me at night. And remember how she insisted that we hold the demonstration in the afternoon? You're right, Ben, Nadia's a hacker. The only thing I get from Nadia in the mornings is messages she left the night before. I've tried and tried, but she won't respond to live conversation in the morning. I can talk to Prattle, but it isn't Nadia with her jokes and spontaneity."

"Ok," Ben said, "So our next move is to permanently lock that hacker out of the system."

"It never fails to surprise me," Corey said, "How darned uncreative you scientists can be. That hacker is the best thing that happened to this project. The only improvement we could make is to hire her."

Ben said, "That's the dumbest idea I've heard yet."

"Think about it," Corey urged. "Has the hacker done anything truly immoral?"

"He gained unauthorized entry," Ben said, "He modified my programs. He changed passwords."

Corey said, "He improved our programs. He got me back on the system after you locked me out."

"But he could be stealing secrets."

"What secrets. He's our secret weapon. Like the brownies and the elves in the legends. Our hacker is a benevolent presence. Didn't he help the demo go without a hitch?"

###

This is Dr. Benjamin Hirsch calling the Nadia hacker. Come in hacker, do you read me?

I'M HERE the computer typed.

Hacker, do you need a job?

WHAT KIND OF A JOB?

How does Programmer on the Handwriting Recognition project sound?

YOU'RE GOING TO PAY ME TO FURTHER CORRUPT NADIA?

That's about the size of it.

CAN YOU HIRE A CONTRACTOR WHO IS UNDER-AGE?

I figured that could be a problem. I talked with our personnel guys and they say it's only a problem if you work full-time. I am assuming we pay you to work the number of hours you were working on our project previously.

PREVIOUSLY? BEFORE YOU REJECTED MY CONTRIBUTIONS?

Well, yes. I've changed my mind. But you do have to make another promise. If we pay you, you cannot go on being a hacker.

NO PROBLEM!

There is only one other possible problem Ben typed, You'll need to get your guardian's approval first.

TO HIRE ME, YES, BUT NOT TO NEGOTIATE WITH ME.

###

Joel Hirsch straightened in his wheelchair and looked the new receptionist in the eye as he said, "I have an appointment to see Dr. Hirsch and Mr. Mason." It surprised Joel that he did not stutter and his voice remained in the low measured monotone that most people seemed to find the easiest to understand.

"Mr. Mason is very, very busy now."

"I have an appointment," Joel repeated.

"Mr. Mason and Dr. Hirsch are expecting a very important visitor. I'm going to have to send you away."

Corey's phone buzzed. "There's a kid in a wheelchair out here," the receptionist said, "He insists on seeing you."

"Tell him we're expecting an appointment."

"I did, but he's not leaving."

"So buy a few candy bars from petty cash!"

Ben rose. "I'll go see what's going on," he said.

"Joel," Ben grabbed his son's chair, releasing the electric brakes and propelling him backwards out of the door. "You better make this quick. You know how busy Daddy is at work."

Joel said steadily, "I have an appointment with you and Mr. Mason."

"What are you talking about?" Ben hissed. Corey came up beside them. "Would you mind waiting for your dad outside," Corey said to Joel. "He'll be done with his meeting in a while."

"I think we all will be waiting a long time then," said Joel, awkwardly lifting a printout from his lap tray, "Do you recognize this, Mr. Mason?"

Corey bent to examine the printouts. He gasped. Turning to Ben he said softly, "Let's all go back into my office. I think we just hired our hacker. And Ben, our hacker is very, very self-aware."

The End