Ana

CH 18

At Tom's urging, the scout ship took off and quickly went supersonic causing a sonic boom that shook the forest along the side of the mountain for miles. Tom wanted to put distance between himself and the now deceased Mike Rodriguez.

Still shaken by the horrible violence he had witnessed, he stammered, "Ana, explain to me how the hell this wrist band shot that guy in the head."

"The band did what you asked it to," Ana said. "You wanted to stop Mike from hurting anyone else and that's exactly what the band did."

"But I didn't tell it to do anything," Tom insisted.

"The band responds to sub-vocal commands as well as vocal ones," Ana explained. "You only have to think about what you want done for it to act."

"What are you talking about?"  Tom looked at the band suspiciously.

"Your thoughts become electrical impulses that travel along nerves from one part of your brain to others. It's simple to detect those impulses and decode what the thought is."

Tom took the device off his wrist and looked at it with renewed interest. This can read his thoughts? The strap must have some connection capable of transmitting data from his brain to this band. But how was she reading the electrical impulses to begin with. Was it possible that tiny nanobots have traveled through his blood system to his brain and were now attached to nerves there? They could monitor the electrical impulses and transmit the data to this band. If that were the case, Ana might not even need this band to receive the signals. She might be able to pick it up from other similar instruments in this ship.

As a test, Tom put down the wrist band and formed the thought that he wanted the computer to show him a picture of Naomi. As soon as he did, a photo of her appeared above the table in front of him. A chill ran up his spine now that he was certain his thoughts were being monitored.

He shifted uncomfortably in his chair while the ship continued its flight into the stratosphere. Perhaps he should take the direct approach with her on this.

"Ana, I don't think I want you in my head."

"Tom, you need to understand that one of my main functions is communication. I am the link between the computer and the operators."

"Well, I'm not sure this form of communication is such a good idea. I mean, this may have worked well for the Travelers but humans have lots of stray thoughts that aren't meant to be acted on. Killing Mike was... well, that was a complete accident and if you're going to do that every time I get mad or upset then a lot more accidents are going to happen." What if he and Naomi got in a heated argument? That could be bad, very bad.

"Tom, I'm not a simple push button machine, I can differentiate between random thoughts that fall outside your normal sociological make up and serious ones that fall in line with the current situation. Also, I think you'll find that human thoughts are not all that random and with a little practice you will learn to control what thoughts you want me to act on and which ones you don't. It's like the difference between thinking about throwing a ball and actually throwing it," Ana said.

Great, she was interactive software that might kill by mistake if he didn't control his thoughts the right way. He better stay out of rush hour traffic because having road rage with this band on could be a disaster.

***

After resigning from his job, Tom hunkered down in his apartment and practiced modeling with Ana for days. It was fascinating how every person and every action in the world was linked so that when you changed one small detail, the entire model changed. His current efforts centered on ways to introduce a better form of birth control having decided that curbing the human population growth would be a good start to making things better without too much risk of starting a war.