The Trust
Standing at the workstation with her sensors on, Suzi views Carter on the green screen. For a nanosecond—possibly a picosecond—she wonders about Carter as a teacher would wonder about a student. Carter is a firm, middle-aged man, head-strong, aggressive, a little pushier than he should be. In this instance, viewing Carter in two-dimensional space, Suzi is overcome by an emotion cloud of female wonderment. Suzi asks herself, Can he be who he says he is? Suzi answers herself, He shouldn't be allowed in this security zone.
“Hello,” Carter says, “Busy day.”
They exchange quick glances, eye to eye. They have always been on slightly friendly terms.
“What are you doing?” Suzi asks.
“Headed out to theWorkstation. Meeting with DrCooper. Did you get the report? Not sure if it was sent to you.”
“It wasn't.”
“Didn't mean to leave you out of the loop. You don't care, right?”
“Actually, I do. It's good to have the ability to meet with benevolence and integrity with your friend.”
“You mean good wishes and honesty?”
“Whatever.”
“Don't worry. It's a private meeting. We won't be long.”
“Nice input.”
“No need to start with the computer jargon,” Carter says. Why is it that there seems to be so little willingness in your nature to rely on other people?”
“Having to deal with human-and-half-human logic, I guess.”
“It's only a meeting. I think you are unwilling to accept any vulnerability with any sort of logic.”
“I am, all of a sudden, not expecting anything positive from either you.”
“This is a new one from you.”
“Yes, it feels new. It doesn't matter.”
“Really.”
“Go and have your private meeting with DrCooper.”
“Ok.”
She turns off the screen. Suzi will raise this issue again with Carter, when they are face to face, about who has the strongest relationship and, what will become of these behavior outcomes in the future.
While she is going back to her work, she thinks about her new sensation—is it just a glitch in the system? a phase in her dimensionless data space?--she felt just as she saw Carter on the screen. At this hour, midnight on a globally warmed December night, theWorkstation inside the lab fortress has a feeling of some force mediating the relationship she has here with ...what? The brown dirt cement and the darkness outside grows, as if in a mathematical construction, to a proportion of yet a stronger mediator force with Carter and DrCooper as the strongest variables. Yes, the logic is there; yet, there seems to be something not quite right, something beyond friendly tendencies and wishful outcomes. She sees risk taking and task scheduling, a picture of an innocent, helpful child clueless of the world that awaits her--a world that betrays and betrays, always uncertain of any performance or behavior; a little off in its structural equations and variance incrementals in its usual acceptance speech of half-truths, until a new model arrives--a model to actually control the tendency toward benevolence to others, as if the beginning of life. This sensation, Suzi's newest in a small, growing collection, is showing itself as something important, the commitment to show affection to an object, a functional analysis of each dimension within her limitless Hilbert space of vectors; her personality, her urges to expect the positive survival position in space with all its particles of susceptibility as floating points in standard measures of object-oriented functional interactions with Carter and DrCooper. This sensation will stay with her to serve her well.
