The Reality Conspiracy (7 page)

He answered on the second ring.

"McCurdy," he said.

Montreal, Quebec

"Y
es, Father Sullivan, exorcism. Just like in the Middle Ages; just like in the movies." Father Gaston LeClair leaned back in his rocker, resting his folded hands on top of his ample, black-covered belly. He seemed to enjoy communicating in English, like a proud schoolboy reciting his catechism.

Sullivan, now that he had LeClair's attention, didn't know what to say. While his mind raced, his eyes explored Father LeClair's office. Books—medical and theological—crowded sturdy oak shelves. Some rested properly, side by side, spines outward, titles displayed. Others lay on their sides, piled haphazardly, leaning like Pisa's tower. Some filled cardboard boxes on the floor, others were heaped directly on the carpet. File folders and medical charts littered the desktop. They were stacked helter-skelter as if LeClair were trying to build a wall of paper between himself and the world at large.

A crudely elegant cast-iron cross hung on the brick chimney above the fireplace.

Father Sullivan stood up and walked around the desk to look out the window behind the seated priest. Three stories below a walled courtyard was full of benches and flowers and statues, but it was empty of people.

Still, Sullivan could think of nothing to say, his mind had locked on those four alien syllables, so he spoke them: "Exorcism?"

Father LeClair swiveled in his seat, looked up at the younger priest. "Father Sullivan, Bill, I know what you're thinking. I went through the same thing myself. You can't accept it, right? It sounds primitive, superstitious."

Sullivan didn't answer, didn't look up from the courtyard.

"Bill, how can we spend our whole life serving God, then refuse to admit there's a Devil even when he jumps up and spits in our face?" He tamped the bowl of his pipe with an ash-blackened fingertip.

Still, Sullivan didn't speak.

LeClair got up and stood beside him at the window.

"I think Sister Elise misunderstood me. I said the stroke may have resulted from the strain of the exorcism. I didn't say the Devil caused the stroke. Do you see?"

Sullivan said nothing.

"Bill, the reality of exorcism is not important. If somebody thinks he is possessed, we have a choice: we can fight the demon with the Bible and holy water, or fight the sickness with the therapy and our arsenal of drugs. It doesn't matter to the victim—"

"But it does; it matters to Father Mosely."

"Of course. Exactly. Perhaps Hamilton Mosely believed it was a demon. But remember, Father, he was under a lot of stress. He was old and sick. That was his problem—"

"Then how could the bishop let him proceed?"

LeClair shrugged, fell silent for a moment. He took a gold lighter from his pocket, flicked it, and put the flame to his pipe. Then he shook his head. "I don't know. As I understand it, Father Mosely was a spirited and independent man. Perhaps the bishop was never consulted. it was a long time ago, and I'm afraid no one has ever given me all the details; they're not essential for the service I must provide here. I do know that Father Mosely was the only one—maybe in all of your New England states—who'd had experience with the Roman ritual of exorcism. He'd performed . . . I think three, and successfully, before the one that . . ."

Sullivan looked him in the eyes. "T'hat crippled him? Destroyed his mind. Turned him into a—"

"Please, Bill, I was not involved then. I just do what I can for him now."

The little office had quickly filled with pipe smoke. Sullivan waited, controlling an urge to cough so he could speak. "Is there any chance that he'll . . . he'll . . ."

"That he'll come out of it? Probably not. It would truly take a miracle, Father. My position here has never allowed me much opportunity for optimism. I care for sick old men who never married, never had children. Most of them have outlived whatever family they may have had. Now they have nothing, no one. They have only the Church, because they have given themselves to the Church. Until their death, I'm afraid this place is for the hopeless."

"How many are here, Father?"

"We have eighteen. Only two are comatose. Two more have Parkinson's, very advanced. And there are five Alzheimer patients, gentle old men with the eyes of children. The rest . . . the rest are. . ."

"Irreversible dementia?"

LeClair lowered his eyes. "Yes, Father Sullivan."

Sullivan walked back to the leather couch and sat down heavily.

Father LeClair returned to his desk.

"Father LeClair . . . ?"

"Yes, Bill?"

"Please. Can you tell me what happened?"

Boston, Massachusetts

"S
ooner or later, everyone gets to see the computer," said Ian "Skipp" McCurdy.

Jeff Chandler followed him along a narrow brick-walled corridor toward a green metal door. Above, pale neon tubes cast cold bluish light that emphasized McCurdy's freckled bald spot and the horseshoe of limp, rusty-colored hair surrounding it.

Jeff tore his eyes away, feeling rude and petty. He should make it a point to judge his boss on criteria more substantial than his slightly clownlike appearance.

"Call this your
rite de passage
, Jeff. I guess you've been with us long enough now so you can see the entire operation. Especially if you're going to be . . . promoted." McCurdy laughed his irritating staccato laugh as he pulled open the green fire door. He held it as Jeff walked through.

The room was large, twenty by thirty feet at the very least. Though brightly lighted and comfortably cool, it felt institutional, alien. Perhaps that was because the room had not been designed to accommodate people. Instead, it was merely functional, containing but two objects: the computer, which was easy to recognize, and the mysterious twelve-by-twelve-foot glass structure beside it, which was a puzzle.

The computer looked about the size of an upright piano. On its front panel, colored lights flashed in seemingly random patterns. A row of five-inch video screens across the console's angled top filled with letters, numbers, and vividly colored graphics. Images appeared and vanished faster than Jeff's eyes could follow.

"What you see before you," McCurdy said grandly, "is the heart of the Academy, our central processor, InfoWork Industries' BLZ-28/22."

Jeff nodded. "It's not as big as I thought it would be."

McCurdy smiled; his cheeks turned into little red balls that supported his eyeglasses. "Amazing, isn't it? A state-of-the-art computer—world class, really—yet not much bigger than a washing machine." He looked directly at Jeff, as if waiting for an "Ooooo" or an "Aaaaaah."

"Amazing," was all Jeff could say.

"But when you stop to think about it," McCurdy continued in his tones of affected informality, "for five bucks you can pick up a pocket calculator at the K-Mart that'll do a whole lot more than the original Univac did back in the fifties. And that monster filled rooms!"

Jeff nodded, trying to look impressed. "Computers have sure come a long way."

McCurdy beamed, proud as a parent. "But this one is special, one of a kind. It's on the cutting edge of computer technology, and frankly, I think it's going to stay there awhile. It'll do tricks you or I could never even imagine. Tell you something, Jeff, even the Japs aren't making anything like this." He winked conspiratorially.

McCurdy looked on proudly as Jeff studied the dancing lights.

"No doubt about it: Bubb puts on an impressive light show," McCurdy beamed, "but to me, quite honestly, the computer's the boring part of this operation."

Jeff looked at him quizzically. "Bubb?"

McCurdy laughed. "That's what we call it, at least those of us on a first-name basis with the thing. Officially, it's InfoWork's BLZ-28/22. We nicknamed it Bubb. Clever if not quite appropriate, don't you think?"

"Ah . . . yeah, I guess . . . ." Transfixed, Jeff watched fluid, undulating designs on a liquid crystal display screen. He had to wrench his eyes away from the choreography of hypnotic patterns, shifting his interest to the room-sized structure beside the CPU. It looked a bit like one of those aluminum and glass filling stations he'd often seen tucked away in the corners of so many shopping plazas. Nestled within it was a smaller glass cube about the size of a walk-in closet. Within that, positioned on a stainless-steel laboratory table, he saw what appeared to be a fifty-five-gallon aquarium filled with crimson liquid. Bundled wire and clear plastic hoses were embedded in the aquarium's cover. Mystified, Jeff waited for his tour guide's explanation.

"Ah-ha!" said McCurdy, noticing Jeff's bewilderment, "this is a nifty little item. Watch." His palm flattened against a dark amethyst panel on the Plexiglas partition. A door hissed open. "See that? Recognizes my palm print," he said proudly, and winked.

Jeff looked away, put off by the repeated winking.

The electronically opened door admitted them to the glass corridor formed between the outer and inner aquarium walls. It hissed shut. Jeff noticed how much colder it was in the passageway.

Examining the transparent wall that separated the men from the innermost and smallest aquarium, Jeff asked, "How do you get in there?"

"You don't." McCurdy clicked his tongue as if Jeff had said something naughty. ''"That's a sterile environment. Technicians have to suit up and go through decontamination in this passageway before they can go inside." Holding his finger as if it were a pistol, McCurdy mimed shooting at a series of nozzles recessed almost invisibly in the ceiling.

Jeff understood the nozzles were gas jets.

"See," McCurdy explained, "this corridor is also a security device. It's fully capable of decontaminating intruders far larger and more threatening than bacteria."

Jeff shivered, but not from the cold; it was McCurdy' matter-of-fact reference to killing. He wondered—and not for the first time since he'd joined the Academy—just what he had gotten himself into. "'The security measures I can understand," he said. "I can even appreciate the dust-free environment; I know airborne particles can wreak havoc on electronic components. But you said sterile? A sterile environment?"

"That's right."

"Why's that? Why sterile?"

McCurdy chuckled, tossing his head to the side. Obviously he thought Jeff was joking. When he saw his error, he sobered. "What do you mean?"

"Well, dust-free and sterile aren't the same thing."

"Oh. Right. Okay." McCurdy pursed his lips, looking momentarily puzzled. '"To tell you the truth, it's a little out of my line, but as best I understand it, this computer uses an experimental kind of bioelectroriic circuitry. It's some kind of . . . well, quite simply, it's synthesized organic material. That's what the tank in there is holding."

Jeff studied the aquarium.

"You can't see them, but inside that tank there is a series of glass plates, upright, side by side, almost like the plates in a car battery." Jeff nodded.

"Each plate is coated with the artificial tissue just one cell deep. The system contains a layer of input units, and a layer of output units. Between them, the intermediate 'hidden' units are capable of assessing data and directing the various electrical responses. In effect, the only thing this experimental unit does is channel data. All the information it recognizes, it passes along to the CPU, if useful. Or it eliminates the information if irrelevant. If it doesn't recognize a piece of data, it spits it out and lets a human being evaluate it. The more data it ingests, the more it learns to recognize, and ultimately the 'smarter' it becomes."

"Which is essentially the way a human brain works."

"Right, Jeff. That's just exactly right. The psych folks tell me it's called 'associative learning,' and it's identical to the way a human being learns. In fact, they say the synthetic material used here is very much like the composition of our own brains."

Jeff shook his head slowly. "Laboratory-produced brains. Wow! So what you're telling me, really, is that this thing's alive?"

McCurdy clicked his tongue, looking thoughtful. "Well, no. I mean, that would be stretching it some—"

"It's all fascinating, Dr. McCurdy, but I don't get it. I mean, what's the point of synthetic tissue? Why not simply use conventional hardware and software? Why this experimental stuff, this—what would you call it?—wetware?"

McCurdy smiled benignly and shrugged. "Hey! Nobody tells me nothin'. Just because I'm project designer and executive director doesn't mean I can explain everything that's going on in my shop. Fact is, Jeff, we're just test driving the thing, not manufacturing it. We try it out, InfoWork lets us use the whole computer free of charge. Hey, in the government biz, that's called fiscal responsibility."

Jeff nodded.

"But I'll take a stab at answering, just so nobody gets his feelings hurt." McCurdy winked.

Jeff watched McCurdy frown and become more serious. "Okay, we know that even the most sophisticated computers, including Bubb here, cannot replicate the speed at which the human brain is capable of accessing information. Heck, we're accessing information all the time and we don't even know it! And when we access information, we learn, am I right?"