Free Odd Interlude Part Two by Dean Koontz Page B

massive black-budget program, Aladdin of Project Aladdin, now known to me as Ed.
    Get this: As it turns out, Ed is an artificial intelligence, AI for short, who exists inside an array of God-only-knows-how-many linked Cray supercomputers in another underground building in Wyvern. He is self-aware and all, maybe not to the degree or in the same sense that people are self-aware, though he’s a major big success for the scientists who developed him. Ed—he doesn’t mind being called Eddie—is a
benign
artificial intelligence, which he keeps stressing. The main proof of his peaceful nature is, he’s warned his inventors that if they refine his design any further, to increase his cognitive powers and his capacity for emotion, there will be a 91.5 percent chance that he’ll be compelled to seize control of the World Wide Web and escape to the Internet, where he can exist even if the Crays are shut off. My buddy Ed says there’s then a 98.6 percent likelihood that he will thereafter assume control of the power grid plus all electronic systems and devices everywhere on Earth, even including military satellites and nuclear-weapons systems. He says he would do so not for the purpose of exterminating humanity, because after all, he bears us no ill will. We’ve been nice to him. We’re all like his mom and dad. He would take control instead to reorder our civilization so that it would be a lot more efficient, more just, and altogether a lot more fun, though he does admit he has a pretty shaky idea of exactly what is fun and what isn’t.
    I’m like pretty darn happy to tell you, his developers take his warning seriously and agree to maintain Ed at his current level of complexity. When sometime later everything blows up here in Project Polaris, everyone agrees Ed is the ideal—in fact the only—“person” to be trusted to monitor events inside the facility through its cameras and other electronic systems. Go figure. But he’s been doing that now for five years, a sort of remote night watchman who doesn’t need coffee and doughnuts, a well-meaning ghost in the machine, and during that time, nothing unsettling happens with the nasty alien cadavers or their artifacts.
    As for Ed and me: During my early explorations of the outer reaches of Project Polaris, Ed decided not to tattle on me because, although the controls had failed on the first three doors long before I pried them open, he could still hold the fourth door shut against all my efforts to violate it. Watching me in the yellow hallway with Orc, he finds me intriguing, I don’t know why, except that this job he’s held for the last five years must be as boring as snot.
    Then suddenly here I come with Harry, and Harry and I start talking about Dr. Hiskott and all, soEd’s ears prick up, or whatever he has that’s the equivalent of ears. The FBI and the NSA have been searching high and low for Hiskott all these five years, but they haven’t found a trace of him because they never think to look next door in Harmony Corner. Now that Ed knows where Hiskott is, you might think he’d clue in the
federales
, but he’s not ready to do that yet.
    Sitting in an office chair in the observation room, I ask him why he doesn’t make the call, and he says, “I have evolved a pleasant affection for you, Jolie Ann Harmony.”
    “I like you, too, Ed. But, gee, having a platoon of FBI guys come in and blow the crap out of Hiskott—that would be the best.”
    “Thus far, I have thought of one hundred and six ways that such an operation could go wrong, resulting in the deaths of most members of your family.”
    “Not good, Ed.”
    “I have just thought of the hundred and eighth. Ninth.”
    “I guess you never stop thinking, huh?”
    “It’s what I do. The hundred and tenth. Even if all members of your family were to survive, you’ll be quarantined here at Wyvern.”
    “Quarantine is for diseased people or something.”
    “They will suspect your entire family of being