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in. “I’ll send you the tab.” She snorted and laughed, then she started crying. Her father glanced her way, then looked at Peter. He shook his head in disappointment and went to his daughter’s side.

“I’m so sorry,” Peter said to Mrs. Green.

“To say the least,” she said, joining her husband and daughter.

Peter exited the room carrying the knapsack. From the hallway he took one last look at Ivy and her parents before the door closed, shutting out the image huddled behind it. He was dazed by the events of the last forty-eight hours. He slowly made his way down the corridor, turning once to look back at the closed door to her room. The first thought to surface through his haze of emotions was of the baby. He had promised these people that he would care for her.

He paused before the nurses’ station and asked how to reach the neonatal care unit. He tramped down the corridor, rounded the corner, and pushed through a set of swinging double doors. To the nurse sitting at a small desk, he said, “Pardon me, which baby is the Jones-Green baby? I’m her father.”

The nurse led him into a clean room and instructed him to put on a sterile gown and a face mask. He followed her orders in silence. Dressed in the sanitary outfit, he followed the nurse into a room containing a row of clear plastic bubble-like incubators, one of which held his baby’s fragile baby. It was a strange setting, surreal, like something out of a science fiction film.

“Here she is,” the nurse said.

Encased in the hygienic shell lay his baby girl. She was tiny, and he could see thin, pulsing veins through her skin and bruises all over her body. Her head! It looked so huge and unnatural, he thought with alarm. He leaned closer, panicked.

The nurse saw his aghast expression and touched a gloved hand to his arm. “Oh, don’t worry. That’s normal,” she said. “All the rest of her will catch up in the next couple of weeks. The head develops a little faster at this stage. It’s perfectly ordinary.”

“What is all this?” he asked, studying the clear tubes entering her nostrils and poking into her arms and belly, the wires and probes taped to her impossible little body.

“Respiratory, protein, waste, heart,” the nurse said, indicating the various points, all of which appeared crudely connected and held in place by swatches of white tape.

“How is she?”

“We’re keeping a close eye on her. It was a difficult birth, but she seems like a fighter.”

“Hang in there, little girl,” Peter whispered.

“I’m afraid we have to leave now. We need to be extremely careful about exposure.”

Peter and nodded, and through his paper face mask he kissed his gloved fingers and touched the plastic shell. He straightened and followed the nurse out of the room. Pulling himself free of the green scrub outfit, he glanced one last time back through the glass window into the neonatal room. He collected the knapsack and pushed through the doors.

Sitting outside the room in one of the hard plastic waiting chairs, was Kate.

Without a word she stood and caught him in her arms. She held him for a moment, stiffly, then guided him to the seat beside her.

“Jesus, Kate. How did you - ?”

“I called Peggy. She told me you were here.”

Peter looked at the silver doors. “She’s so tiny. “

“I heard,” Kate said. She pressed her folded hands into her lap and cleared her throat. “Peter, why? Why didn’t you tell me?”

He closed his eyes. He felt precariously close to throwing up, surrounded by riddles and agony. Ivy. The baby. Kate.

“Kate,” he said, “I didn’t think this would happen.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “You have to believe me.”

“How many does this make?” Kate said, bitterly. “We could have adopted.”

He tried to put his arm around her, but she pulled away and stood, hugging her arms tightly around herself.

“Kate, none,” he said, moving closer. “There have never been any others. I didn’t plan this to happen.”

“And she did?”

“No. Yes! I don’t know,” he said. “She was desperate. It just happened. I didn’t want it to, but it just did. We’d had too much to drink. It was the wine - “

She slapped him hard across the face.

Without a word, he dropped his chin to his chest. He knew that the blow he had struck her, this whole situation, had cut deep. The damage would take a very long time to heal. But he had to have her forgiveness, because without her he would never get through this.

“Kate, please. I don’t know what we’ll do,” he said. “But please don’t leave me. I need you.”

Dr. Chen appeared from around the corner. “Mr. Jones?” he said. He looked at Kate and gestured politely for her to sit down. Then he led Peter away, around the bend in the corridor. They sat down.

“Mr. Jones, we need for you to name your daughter.”

No name. Their baby girl had no name. This thought seemed to be the final blow to drain him of his last ounce of energy. It was real, and final. His life was changed now and forever. Somehow the knapsack fell from his hands, its contents spilling onto the floor. Kate. He had to ask her.

“Wait,” he said to the doctor. He jumped to his feet and ran around the corner, calling out her name. But she was gone.

His shoulders slackened and he went back to the doctor, who was collecting the contents that had spilled out of the knapsack. Peter bent down to take over. He was overcome by a wave of dizziness and the nausea. Then, just as abruptly, the spinning halted and the sickness retreated, forced back by a keening sound that arose in his throat.

There, among the clutter of notes and pens and the little black box with its exposed circuits and wires, he found, written in her mother’s own hand across the label of the topmost disk, their baby’s name.

“Isle,” he whispered.

“Mr. Jones?” the doctor said, not sure he had heard correctly.

“I said, Isle,” Peter said, louder this time, taking the disks in his hand. “My daughter’s name is Isle.”

PART IV Chapter 17

“That’s a good girl,” Peter said, cradling the tiny Isle in his arms. He checked her bottle. “Almost done.”

For one and a half months she had been home with Peter, deemed well enough leave the hospital after a touch-and-go stay for the same length of time. She weighed a scant six and a quarter pounds. Her eyes were curious and alert, just like her mother’s. Peter longed for her eyes to keep the clear sapphire color, a glittering reflection of Ivy. Isle’s hair was beginning to outcrop in satiny brown whorls, the same color as her father’s.

“Your little jewel,” Grace said all smiles as she came into the living room. “Go ahead, I’ll finish up with her.”

“Okay, shrimp, over to Grace,” Peter said, handing over the little pink bundle.

Peter stood beaming at his infant in Grace’s lap, her tiny mouth puckering the nipple of the bottle, tiny hands clutching and uncurling, tiny stocking feet kicking. So fragile, yet strong.

“Petey!” Byron boomed from elsewhere in the house. “Let’s go!”

“Better hurry before the bear comes out of his cave looking for you.”

“Coming,” Peter called, and hurriedly kissed Isle’s fuzzy head.

Having temporarily moved into Peter’s California mansion since they had come back from Maine after Isle’s birth, the Holmeses had been a godsend. Grace was all too happy to help out with Isle, and Byron and Peter had resumed their project. He had still not seen or heard from Ivy, and she had refused his calls at the detoxification clinic where she was recovering.

Byron and Peter and their small team worked all hours of the day on the design they had settled on. The day Isle was born, Ivy had provided him with the missing link, the distinct component that he had been seeking. With the ISLE interface, they now had a model from which to refine the hardware, honing its design to provide the ultimate platform, the perfect stage upon which Ivy’s invention could perform.

“Come here,” Byron said enthusiastically, “Get a look at this.” He was standing before a Joey Plus computer. It was connected to a small, open black box filled with a convolution of wires, circuits, and components. Peter stood beside his mentor in the makeshift partitioned lab they had set up in one of the large bedrooms.

“We’ve got the agent tied in to the speech recognizer and it’s working like a charm. Here,” Byron said, handing Peter a small microphone, “tell it you want to make a date.”

Peter cleared his throat. “Computer,” he said, the keyword that the ISLE speech recognizer listened for to carry out spoken commands, “lunch with Byron on Friday.”

On the screen, a small month-view calendar opened and the upcoming Friday flashed. A moment later “12:00PM Byron Holmes / Lunch” appeared in the date box.

The Joey Plus’s built-in speaker came to life with a robotic voice. “Lunch with Byron Holmes, noon, confirmed. Is there an agenda?”

Peter grinned and looked at Byron, who lowered his voice. “A little something we threw in this morning.”

Peter spoke into the microphone. “Yes. Discuss computer enhancements and - “

“Computer,” the Joey said, interrupting Peter, “is unrecognized.”

Peter gave Byron a puzzled look. “What happened?”

Byron was scratching his head. “Well how do you like that. We never considered that. I mean, that if we call the computer ‘computer,’ then we can’t use that word once it’s listening to whatever we tell it.”

“Ah,” Peter said. “Right. Hmm.” He thought about this for a second, then sat down before the Joey and started typing.

“What are you doing?” Byron said.

“Well,” Peter said, lifting the microphone, “since the word computer won’t compute, all we need to do is give it a unique name that we wouldn’t normally use in an everyday context.”

“Of course,” Byron said. “Good thinking.”

Peter pressed a key and the Joey spoke: “Please say my name so that I know who I am.”

“Pip,” Peter said, loud and clear.

“Please repeat my name again, faster this time.”

Peter said the name faster. The Joey Plus asked him to repeat it once more, slowly this time, so that it knew three slight variations on of its own name, thereby making recognition more accurate.

“Pip?” Byron asked.

“Sure,” Peter said. “Pip. Like in Dicken’s “Great Expectations.” One of my all-time favorite characters.”

“Then Pip it is,” Byron laughed. “Let’s give it a try.”

Peter repeated the test and the Joey Plus, a.k.a. Pip, pulled off the scheduling task without a hitch.

“Well done,” Peter said, congratulating Byron.

“That’s nothing. We got the net lookup voice stuff working too.”

“Hey, come look at this,” Paul Trueblood said, appearing from behind one of the partitions used to divide the huge room.

Peter had contacted his two favorite engineers, Paul Trueblood and Rick Boardman, after he and Byron had relocated the project to California. During a dinner Peter had arranged, Byron had talked about the ISLE vision, providing the engineers the opportunity to get to know him. Both were excited by what they heard, and the very next day both engineers resigned from Wallaby and returned to Peter’s home, ready to dive into the project.

In one hand Paul held a short stylus pen, and in the other a flat display unit that connected to another Joey Plus portable computer. With the stylus he began “writing” directly on the display. As he scribbled, the computer converted his script handwriting into clear text.

“Looking good,” Peter said, watching the

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