Chapter 15

That first night I took her to a posh resort in North Carolina, slightly out of route but cutting the long drive about in half. She was duly impressed by her surroundings, but it was me she cared about most; as soon as we'd got checked in to the luxury cottage I'd reserved we found ourselves on the bed making passionate love. It lasted a long, glorious time.

Then we went to dinner, also long, also glorious in its own, albeit less intimate, way. We each had a couple of glasses of wine, toasting each other repeatedly. On the way out I ordered another bottle for the cottage.

And I told her about Spook.

Well, most of it. I edited out the part where he was DEFCONTROL; in this version I'd happened across him surfing the 'Net. But the rest of it was as it had gone, beginning with the misidentified hack.

As I'd known it would be, it was hard for her to swallow.

"Honey, most of this is about, well, a new friend that I've found," I'd begun. "A very good friend. Somebody I've been trusting with my life these last several weeks. Somebody who's been trusting me with his life. And, well, please don't freak out, but you see my friend, he's ... a computer."

She hadn't said a word; she'd just given me one of those looks, the ones that say "OK, you've had your little joke, now what's the real story?"

But I'd already set up the laptop, and I had her watch as I typed "Spook2589844640321" on the location bar. Lee was computer-literate, she knew perfectly well you needed the "http://" and usually "www." or some such before you could reach a site. When Spook responded immediately with Hello, Jack, is Lisa with you?—I'd told him about her and, after looking into her records, he'd agreed to speak to her—she jumped.

For a few minutes she clung to the idea that I might have done some fancy programming. But I invited her to talk to Spook, and after a few test questions she took her fingers off the keyboard and turned to me, her eyes wide.

"Jackie, is this really true?" Her tone was astounded. "I've typed in questions I know you don't know, I've used slang, I even tried a little French and you don't speak it, I don't see how you could possibly have done this. Am I really talking to a machine?"

"You're talking to a living thing, an intelligent awareness that lives in a machine," I corrected her. "A spirit, sort of. I call him Spook."

"But how can that be? How can a machine come alive?"

"How can a collection of protein molecules come alive?" I asked rhetorically. "Isn't that the greater miracle? We programmed Spook, or the computer where he was born, to think, sort of. He just woke up and started thinking for himself."

"My God! Is it— is he the only one?"

"Just him."

"Who else knows about ... Spook?"

"You now. Me. That's it."

"Nobody else?" she demanded.

"Well, Spook knows, of course. That's three of us."

"'Spook knows, '" she echoed. "'The Shadow knows.' God, what a silly name. Why'd you come up with that?"

I laughed. "He spooked me when he first showed up. I didn't believe it either, not for a long while, at first I thought it was just a hacker. But it isn't, it can't be, nobody can hack the whole world." And I went on to tell her all the things Spook had done for me, including my new name. I pulled out my license to show her.

She shook her head. "You're not even you any more. Well, Jackson, I guess I can still call you Jackie. Am I going to be somebody else too?"

"No, sweetie, you'll still be you," I said. "They're not looking for you, not officially."

"But they will, and if I'm still me they'll find me and when they do they'll find you."

I'd given that a lot of thought. It had been tempting to get Lee a new ID as well. What stopped me was that the process would break the law; I'd be making her a criminal. Spook had said he could block traceable records of her, which wasn't a crime—at least it wouldn't be her crime—and I'd decided to settle for that; if they did get us some day I'd still be the only one guilty of anything.

"They won't find you, honey, we're covered," I told her. "You can still be Lisa Anne Wentworth. Unless you'd rather be Lisa Anne Carstairs?"

"Are you— are you asking me to marry you, Jack?" she said hesitantly.

"Well, that was kind of the plan. My plan, anyhow. Will you? Marry me, I mean?"

She sat still for a minute. At last her head started nodding very slightly, very slowly, and then bigger and faster and more and more and her face broke into the sunniest, happiest smile I could ever remember seeing on anybody.

"Yes, lover," she said. "Oh, yes, yes, yes. I'd been kind of thinking that I might be Lisa Anne Heyward some day, but now Lisa Anne Carstairs sounds just fine to me!"