Copyright © 1986, by David Brin and Gregory Benford. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

VIRGINIA (continued)

Everything in Virginia's private work capsule was neat, crisp, efficient. The screens and opalescent holo displays that surrounded her web-couch all operated perfectly. Far from home and everything she had known -- even hurtling out of the solar system at thirty kilometers per second -- this was the center of her universe. She made certain everything was in good working order.
     Officially, her role was to provide special support to Computations Section. But she had actually inveigled her way aboard this mission in hopes of getting some of her own research done. In the kind of scientific environment that was developing on Earth, the sorts of things she was interested in were frowned on.
     Bio-organic computers... machines that might really think... These were areas that had been diagnosed as improbable, even dangerous, by increasingly conservative twenty-first-century science. Even in her native Hawaii, her superiors had grown more and more uncomfortable with the attention her work was drawing from the outside world.
     But I know bio-organics can eventually outperform silicon and gallium! And machines can do better than moron mechanical water drawing and wood hewing. Stochastic processors can be made to think.
     Over to the right, tucked under a desktop, was the squat box containing her own, special simulation unit; the Kelmar organo computer had used up nearly all of her small personal-effects allowance, but it was worth it.
     Panel lights rippled as the hatch hissed shut behind her and she slipped onto the web-couch. Virginia belted herself in and spoke softly.
     "Hello, JonVon."
     The main holo screen glittered.

     She smiled. No doubt in the eighty years ahead much progress would be made. It had to happen -- even in a growing tide of scientific conservatism.
     But right now her charge was the best there was -- unconventional, using technology all but banned back home, but supreme in her own estimation.
     She had named the unit after John Von Neumann, inventor of the theory of games. The program/mainframe could mimic a human's response patterns well enough to pass a third-stage Turing test... fooling an unsuspecting person in a five-minute casual vid-phone conversation into thinking the face and voice on the other end of the line were those of a real person, not a computer.
     JonVon could even tell a dirty joke, leering just enough and chuckling at the right time.
     Unprecedented, yes. But stunts like that weren't true "machine intelligence" -- not the way Virginia felt should be possible.
     The molecular hardware in that five-liter box should be good enough to model the complex standing wave in a human brain. She was sure of it. They didn't agree back home, of course, and so it had never really been given a chance.
     For the next few weeks she would have little time to engage in her private experiments. She had to use all her equipment, including JonVon, to supplement the ship's mainframe. Nearly all her energy was devoted to preparing those mathematical models Captain Cruz's spacers kept demanding.
     Later, though, during her years on watch, there would be time. Time for work and undiluted thought.
     Back in the twentieth century, they knew how to have daring dreams, she thought. They did not believe in limits. It was one reason she liked old-time flat-screen movies... and enjoyed simulating old-time film stars and long-ago poets.
     Those people nearly wrecked the world with their greed, but they did believe in ambition. They wouldn't have rested until they had machines that could think.
     She glanced at the timepiece etched indelibly under her left thumbnail. "How about twenty minutes of diversion, Johnny?" Virginia lifted a cable from the console and bared a whitish bump at the back other head. When the connection clicked home, the symbols on the screen were accompanied by a rich voice inside her head.

     She answered quickly with an impulsive thread of verse:

Ka Honua
     -- Earth, my home,
 
E hoomanao no au ia oe
     -- I shall remember you.
 
I wonder what he likes
     to do,
And if he can spare me
     the time of day?

     The line to her acoustic nerve hummed.

     She blushed. "Oh hush, silly. Come on now. Let's take a look at your conversation subroutines."

Continue reading sample 6, 7, 8 and 9, or purchase Heart of the Comet.