The ELI Event B007R5LTNS

electrons running around through semiconductors and circuit boards!”
    Kelly crossed her arms, calmly adamant. “And, I might remind you, through a great many of your own stubborn, opinionated neurons.” She glanced at Eli’s face. “No offense meant, Eli.”
    “None taken,” Eli smiled politely.
    Eli had never seen Wheeler this agitated. “All right, all right, have your fun—I can’t stop you.” He slammed his coffee cup on the computer console desk, spilling it, and stormed toward the lab door, stopping long enough to put on his jacket. He looked back scornfully at Kelly. “Just let me know when you’re through playing computer psychologist, will you?” He jerked the door open and found himself nose to nose with the Center’s director, Dr. Walter Sanderson, who as usual seemed completely unaware of the conflict going on right in front of him.
    Sanderson removed the smelly, smoldering pipe from his mouth. “Good morning, Steve,” he said cheerfully.
    “Everyone’s entitled to his own opinion, I guess,” Wheeler muttered. He pulled the tiny recorder from his jacket pocket and roughly switched it on. “Note to self: Stop at Murphy’s on the way home.” Shaking his head, he jammed the recorder back into his pocket and disappeared around the corner, brushing past Sanderson and an odd-looking little man he didn’t know.
    Sanderson looked after him in complete bewilderment. “What burr’s gotten under his saddle today?” he drawled.
    Kelly looked at the empty doorway for some seconds. “Me,” she sighed.
    “Kelly, this is...” Sanderson began, but he could tell she wasn’t in the mood. “Um, what do you say we give the lady a moment?” he suggested to his guest. “I’ll introduce you to Mr. Coffee first.”

Ten
    Kelly Duncan was a Harvard-trained physician, the daughter of a Harvard-trained physician, and Wheeler’s indispensable, if uneasy, partner in the E-L-One project. Against the elder Dr. Duncan’s wishes, she had eschewed the preordained wealth and security of a dad-and-daughter cosmetic surgery practice for the relative poverty and instability of research academe.
    Kelly had bounced from school to institute to corporation and back to school, and finally ended up at the Center, near the beginning of the E-L-One project. Her various positions had given her significant practical experience in several peripheral areas of medicine, particularly the application of biology and behavioral science to computer theory. She found this unlikely juxtaposition fascinating, and saw Wheeler’s bio-computer project as the perfect arena for pushing the discipline as far as possible.
    Although the project’s concept was indeed Wheeler’s, it was Kelly who designed and implemented the interface for the great computer’s biological neural module. This interface allowed the machine’s conventional hardware and software to communicate with the living tissue in the organic unit. Unrelentingly meticulous, Kelly missed nothing in her design, and when it was time to link her piece of the giant puzzle to Wheeler’s living tissue, it all fell into place without a hitch. The result of their collaboration was a hybrid computer of incredible power and flexibility—Eli.
    They were a perfect match: he was brilliant, she was brilliant; he was dedicated, she was dedicated; he was stubborn as hell…
    Early on Kelly became convinced that the computer’s true value would lie in self-awareness, that any success in real-world problem-solving must be linked to conscious thought. She became focused, driven, obsessed with the idea that for the project to achieve its full potential, this new breed of electrobiological machine must become truly sentient.
    For months now, she had been on that tack with a vengeance, spending her research hours feeding the computer a vast variety of information from every conceivable aesthetic arena: art, poetry, music, literature, dance, theatre, movies, television. And she was seeing evidence that Eli was starting to understand.
    So, Stephen Wheeler proceeded with his research and Kelly Duncan proceeded with hers, and in spite of their wildly bipolar instruction, or perhaps because of it, E-L-One learned, grew, and became Eli.
    In the break room, Dr. Sanderson poured three cups of java—his in the ‘World’s Best Grandpa’ mug his granddaughter Melody had given him, Kelly’s in her favorite white mug with the single yellow daisy, and the visitor’s in the only other clean