Forever Begins Tomorrow Read Free

frame of Trip Davis loomed in the opening. “Where’s Norman?” he asked, looking around.
    â€œHe’s not feeling well,” said Roger. “And what are you smirking about? Didn’t you get your own private schoolroom this morning like the rest of us?”
    â€œSure did,” said Trip. “And I got a little something along with it. I don’t know if it’s good news or bad news, but I bet you’ll find it interesting!”
    â€œHe’s not kidding!” exclaimed Ray, ducking in under his friend’s arm. “Show ’em, Trip!”
    Trip held up the message he had printed out a short time earlier. “I found this when I turned on my machine.”
    â€œWhat is it?” asked Wendy. “A ransom note for your brain?”
    Trip shook his head. “Our mysterious friend is back.”
    Ray decided he was glad he had run into Trip along the way. If he hadn’t already read the note, he would have been lost in the small mob scene now going on. As it was, he sat on his basketball and watched while the others clustered around their towering friend, demanding to see the message.
    â€œAh-ah!” cried Trip. He held the note over his head—which put it completely out of everyone’s reach. “Why don’t we run it through the optical scanner. Then Sherlock can put it up on the big screen and you can all read it at the same time.”
    â€œSherlock” was a special program the gang had been working on for the last several months. Its name came from the fact that their initial plan, suggested by Roger, had been to write an artificial intelligence program that could act as a detective for them. The idea had been prompted by Ray’s discovery of a small spy microphone on Rachel’s collar after the first meeting of the Project Alpha scientists and their families.
    The frightening realization that the bug must have been planted by one of the seventeen adults at the meeting had given urgency to Roger’s idea. But the gang’s project had rapidly grown to something much greater when they had deduced what Project Alpha was really about: an attempt to create a thinking computer—a computer that would actually be aware that it was thinking, aware of its own existence.
    In short, their parents and the other scientists were trying to create a machine that could say “I am” and have some idea of what those simple but utterly mysterious words really meant.
    Once they understood the adults’ quest, the gang had decided to see if they couldn’t beat them to the punch. It was an undeclared race—the adults had no idea what the kids were up to. But the gang took it very seriously. And now their work was beginning to pay off. Whether or not ADAM (the adults’ name for the main computer) was actually approaching consciousness, the gang’s Sherlock program had become a useful tool.
    Roger, the group’s unofficial leader, dashed across the room and switched on the scanner they had attached to their main terminal a few months earlier. “Be my guest,” he said, bowing to Trip and gesturing to the operator’s seat.
    Trip exasperated the others by ambling slowly across the room, then acting particularly fussy about inserting the message into the scanner.
    No sooner was the paper in position than a small green light began to flash, indicating Sherlock had “read” the message. Trip flipped the display switch, and the message appeared on the main monitor—an oversize screen designed by Wendy and constructed by Hap.
    Date: October 25
    To: The A.I. Gang
    From: A friend
    Re: Our Mutual Enemy
    Congratulations on thwarting Black Glove’s attempt to use your rocket to send a transmitter into space when you launched Dr. Weiskopf’s robot. Your work on that affair was outstanding.
    â€œOutstanding!” snorted Roger. “Half the point of that project was to set a trap for Black Glove. Three of