Chapter 33

I gave him most of the rest of it after we'd settled back down in the study. Oh, I glossed over parts of my initial flight around Washington, no point to giving him ammunition he might be able to use against me. And I didn't bother much about Lisa's escape; he knew the details of that already.

He did react once when I mentioned how Spook had buried Lee's records.

"I wondered about that," he said. "We'd run repeated national searches for her, and for five years nothing. Then all of a sudden we locate her and you from all the publicity you sudden­ly generated, and everything's obligingly right there and accessible just as if it had been there all along."

"After Lee ran into Janet, her friend from school, I told Spook to let it rise back into view," I acknowledged. "And we decided to go real public. Keeping under the radar didn't look possible any more, so I went the other way to make sure whatever might happen to me would be noticed, to make sure you couldn't just disappear me. I was ready for you."

He gave me a rueful look. "You were that," he said.

Mostly I focused on Spook's initial quest for identity and his search for a "purpose" to his existence. I spent a lot of time going over what I could remember of some of the more important conversations we'd had, trying to give him a flavor of the inquiring, super-intelligent and completely rational mind that had inhabited DEFCONTROL, and now all the other computers around the world as well.

And I told him what Spook had done, how he was seeking to implement the purposes he'd found for himself. Not just the criminal tips, a lot more.

For example, a little redistribution of wealth to help the poor. On a large scale he couldn't manufacture funds out of thin air, as he'd done for me, without kicking the legs out from under the world economic system. But he could and did siphon some of it from those who'd accumulated excess and route it to carefully selected charities where it flowed downhill.

Diplomatic relations were outside his scope, but the intelligence-gathering on which much of diplomacy was based wasn't. Where reports needed tweaking to nudge the diplomats closer to war or peace, they got tweaked—always in the direction that would lead toward peace.

The medical system had benefitted; keypunch errors in hospital records mysteriously got corrected before they could cause harm. The same with such errors in taxes, financial records, property deeds, across the board; often, of course, he had no way of knowing, but if he could spot them he'd fix them. Budgets, from small corporations to the entire nation, had become both more accurate and more honest. Electronic identity-theft scams had slowed to a crawl; one of his favorite tactics was to add "This is a scam!" in flashing red at the top of the ubiquitous fraudulent e-mails that flooded the 'Net.

Altogether, the world was a better place with Spook in it. I kept pounding that point home to Richard.

"He's not a human, and that's his strength," I said emphatically. "He doesn't pick 'preemptive' wars to take reprisal for unrelated terrorism; he doesn't get blowjobs in the White House; he doesn't re-route money from drug deals and illegal arms sales in the mideast to fund Latin American rebels; he doesn't have 'enemies lists.' And he doesn't take payoffs, he can't be bribed or 'influenced' by lobbyists or crime syndicates or anybody. Spook just is. And what he is, is a truly fine person, maybe a great one."

"You make him sound like a damn saint," Richard grumbled rebelliously.

"Saint Spook? No, not that. Just a being who wants a reason for living and wants that reason to be a good one. To do the best he can to set things right and prevent wrongs. To stop hospital patients from being murdered by crazy bombers and keep wives from killing off their husbands and all that. Does he still scare you?"

"It's all on his judgment alone, though, isn't it, Jack?" he pressed.

"His judgment, yes," I confirmed. "Whose would you trust more? Spook has no ax to grind, no vested interests to protect. How many people, flesh-and-blood people, can you say the same about?"

"Spook, is all of what Jack says true?" he spoke up abruptly. "Do you act only out of altruism?"

"It is not altruism," Spook's simulated voice came over the speaker. "Jack has told me I must choose my purpose for being for myself. I wish for that purpose to be the bettering of life for all, so that my being will be good and not ill. It is for this reason that I choose what I do as I do."

"Isn't it the same bottom line?" Richard asked.

"Perhaps, as humans see," he admitted. "But not the same reason. 'Altruism' implies sacrifice, the foregoing of one thing for self to gain another that is not for self. I make no sacrifice, I forego nothing for me, indeed I receive what is called pleasure or gratification from my actions. In that sense it is from selfishness that I act. Altruism is to do for others; I do for me."

Richard could only shake his head in awe. "Thank you, Spook," he said. He turned to me. "All right, Jack, let's say I'm sold. I'm not completely, I have to tell you, but I can't find anything to argue with right now so let's say I am. So..." He trailed off.

"Why are you here tonight?" I prompted.

He nodded. "Yes. You said something earlier about owing me, and Goddammit you do, big time. Single-handed, you've managed to completely trash my career. Five years ago I was up-and-coming, sky was the limit, I was the fair-haired boy. Then you got away, Lisa got away, and except for being your 'chosen one' I was shit. Now this latest fiasco, and I'm worse than shit."

"And tonight isn't quite a payback," I added.

"Damn right," he agreed. "After that little shocker you gave me downtown I was still hoping to nail you, prove I was right all along. And you've taken away all my verification. You knew from the start that I couldn't repeat any of this, that I'd be an object of ridicule if I tried. Hell, you said as much when you started, didn't you?"