The ELI Event B007R5LTNS

remark, Dr. Duncan. No, I don’t mean he’ll lie. I mean he might bury the information deeper in his neural block, perhaps sever the connections to whatever’s going on until we’re unable to retrieve it at all, in order to conceal the malfunction.”
    “Hmmm, sounds like lying to me.”
    “You mean E-L-One’s behavior or mine?”
    She laughed. “Both.”
    “To- may -to, to- mah -to,” Wheeler sighed . Either way, it won’t help to deliberately bring it up to him.”
    “All right, I agree with you there. Then do you think we should tell Dr. Sanderson?”
    Wheeler snorted. “Hell, no. He’ll feel obliged to go by the book, and that means E-L-One gets shut down until the problem is isolated and fixed. We can’t afford that.”
    “But you don’t know what he’s doing. You don’t know what effects his actions might have.”
    “Then I’ll just have to find out. Look, the old boy’s going to be unhappy that there’s a problem at all, but he’ll be a lot less unhappy if I hand him the problem and the solution at the same time. Yes?”
    “Yes, I suppose so.”
    “You know so.”
    “You think it’s my fault, don’t you?” she asked abruptly.
    Wheeler forced himself to answer honestly. “At first I did, yes, but not now. I don’t believe your research would have caused this.”
    “Well, thanks for that, anyway. I’m sorry you can’t see the value of what I’m doing with Eli.”
    Wheeler shrugged. “Just because I can’t see it doesn’t make it wrong,” he admitted. “Just foolish.”
    “Jesus, Steve,” she said tiredly. “You think you’re the only one who… Oh, screw it. We’ve done this a hundred times. We’ll never see eye to eye on this, and we may as well both face it. But I think you’ll be surprised. I think you’ll find that Eli’s capacity for emotion will be a help rather than a hindrance. It might even help in solving this problem.”
    Wheeler saw an opportunity to ease back into the subject. “So, got any ideas at all? I’m open.”
    She seemed to relax a bit. “Nothing, really. He appears to be voluntarily dealing with external systems, like the bus line’s reservation computer. But then that other stuff looked like human conversation; I have no idea what that was about. And that chunk of text with the formulas in it—what was that? If we even knew what this stuff is, maybe we could figure out why he’s working on it.”
    Wheeler shook his head. “Could be anything; he’s interfaced to the outside world nine ways from Sunday. There’s no way to know what it is. It’s sure as hell not from anything we’re working on here.”
    “True. What do you have to go on?”
    “The only thing I’ve got is that memory dump, and I’ve looked at it until I’m blue in the face.”
    “Maybe another pair of eyes would help.”
    Wheeler looked at her suspiciously. “Really?”
    “If you mean would I really help, of course I would. If you’ll let me. But… Steve?”
    “What?”
    “You look like shit.”
    “Thank you very much. Nice of you to notice.”
    “No, really. How long have you been working on this?”
    “Um, I just found it this morning.”
    “What time this morning?”
    Wheeler hesitated. “About two.”
    “What? Two o’clock? You’ve been here all night! What the hell were you doing here at two o’clock in the morning?”
    “Oh, you know. Couldn’t sleep. Had a little problem bugging me, so I decided to come down here for a while. Thought I’d work while it was quiet, go home before noon. Then I discovered this, and… Well, you know how I am.”
    “Yeah, I know. Okay, tough guy, whatever you say. Listen, though, I really think you should get some sleep before you start on this again. You can’t concentrate when you’re this tired. Besides, I have a meeting with Dr. Sanderson and this Marx guy. I won’t be able to help you until that’s over, and there’s no telling when that’ll be. Let’s make a fresh start on it in the morning. What do you say?”
    Wheeler didn’t answer.
    “Or, you could come over to my place this evening. We could get out the rubber sheets and chocolate syrup and boink like baboons until we pass out.” Wheeler’s eyebrows involuntarily shot up. Kelly winked at him. “Gotcha!” she smiled.
    “Very funny,” Wheeler droned. “But I’m allergic to chocolate. Besides, I don’t think Moose would appreciate it.”
    “Bruce.”
    “Whatever.”
    “And that’s been over for months.”
    “Anyway, you hate