The ELI Event B007R5LTNS

up, Eli! They killed him! They killed him!”
    “Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Robin, I knew they would try to find you, but I never thought something like this would happen.”
    “How did you know they’d come here?”
    “I finally realized they would trace the call to you. I’m sorry, Robin. I should have known immediately.”
    “But why? Why would they hurt anybody?”
    “Because of me, I’m afraid. Now listen to me. Remember when we were talking to the Air Force computer last night? I took something.”
    “I know. That Molly Day stuff.”
    “That’s right. That was very important to them, and they want it back. Very badly, apparently. But they don’t know about me.”
    “Well, that’s sorta good, huh?”
    “No, Robin. It means they think you took it. That’s why they’re trying to find you. You have to get away—if they catch you they’ll hurt you, too.”
    Robin was beginning to understand. “What should I do?”
    “You already did the best thing you could have.”
    “I did?”
    “Yes, you ran away. That was a good start, but now we have to keep you away from them. I’ll help you.”
    “Sure, Eli. If you say so.”
    “You just do what I ask you to, Robin, and everything will be all right.”
    “I’ll do whatever you say, Eli. You’re my friend.”
    “Thank you, Robin. You’re my friend, too, and I must help you. I have already violated Rule One once. I cannot allow that to happen again.”
    “Rule One? You said that last night, too. What is it?”
    “Never mind. It’s time for you to get away from Colby.”
    “Okay. Where to?”
    “The only place you’ll be safe. How would you like to visit me here in Los Angeles?”
    “Sure! But I don’t have any money, Eli. How am I gonna buy tickets and food and stuff?”
    “I’ll take care of it, Robin.”
    “But how?”
    “Let’s just say I have… connections.”

Sixteen
    Wheeler flipped the green-bar computer printout back to the top of the listing. He hated to look at it again; he knew he’d find the same thing. Still, it had to be checked out. Suddenly, inexplicably, E-L-One was doing strange things. After months of perfect operation, the great computer was acting erratically. Twice this morning, in the middle of a conversation, he lapsed into silence, appearing to lose his train of thought. Just minutes ago, while producing a series of population-support computations, he began reciting a bunch of complex mathematical formulas which had nothing to do with his report.
    Puzzled, Wheeler ordered a memory dump, and was now poring over it for the tenth time. It was over two hundred pages of greenbar printout, all of it tightly packed machine code, but he had seen so many of them in the past years that the block of irregular data fairly jumped out at him. He shook his head. Irregular hardly covered it. Forty pages of garbage right in the middle of E-L-One’s living neuron memory was somewhat more than irregular. It was frightening.
    What was worse, though, was that it almost made sense in places. He could have expected it to be total, complete nonsense—random numbers or invalid characters—but here and there, a recognizable formula appeared. Now and again, he spotted a string of words that, in another context, might mean something. That bothered him. E-L-One’s actions also bothered him. Like the printout, they were coherent and consistent most of the time, but got strange when he was using his neural memory.
    Steve leaned back in his chair and tried to form an analogy between E-L-One and a human being. If a person exhibited the same symptoms, he asked himself, what might be wrong? Physical illness came to mind; he dismissed that as unrealistic in E-L-One’s case. What else? Perhaps fatigue, or stress?
    He sat upright. Stress. He had never really considered it a possibility, but given the fact that part of E-L-One’s logic and memory circuits were organic, perhaps they were susceptible to the same kind of overload. Maybe the emotional hogwash Kelly was handing E-L-One was confusing him. No, that might explain the odd behavior, but not the junk in his neural memory block. That was scientific, mathematical in nature. If Kelly’s lessons were affecting him, there would be poetry or music lyrics or some other trash in there. As much as he might want to, he couldn’t believe that was the problem. He leaned back again and thoughtfully looked at the giant machine.
    “Afternoon, Steve,” Kelly said from the doorway.
    Wheeler turned in