Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

8

"I don't understand, you mean they communicate on-line as if in conference?" I ask.

"Not quite," he says. "The committees are designed to operate inside the computer."

"Are there people inside the computer?" blurts out one of my students. "Cool," says another.

"Not in the way you’re thinking," answers the guide. "Here, maybe this will help. Picture the computer as an efficiency calculator. It’s a super-sophisticated calculator that adds, subtracts, multiplies and divides all kinds of things—not just numbers. But on the screen, it looks a lot like one of your video games. Everything that the computer needs to process and respond emails has been built into the program. There’s a research committee, a writing committee, an editing committee, a translation committee, a community liaison committee, a public relations committee, and so forth."

"Wow," say several of the kids, almost in rhythm.

"Can we see it?" ask a couple of the starry-eyed math whizzes.

"No, I’m afraid not,” says the guide as he motions us past the entrance and down the empty corridor. “You see, it's highly classified, and I've probably already said more than I should have. But remember, you promised not to tell?”

“We promised not to tell what we read in those emails,” pipes up one of the youngsters.

“Actually,” says the guide as he fishes into his jacket pocket for a piece of paper “what you recited at the beginning of the tour—here it is—covers the emails and anything else that is described as confidential.”