It was a bad day at Missile Command. Every fifteen minutes another console seemed to go down and the loudspeaker croaked her name, "Captain Wilson…"

The Techs were of little help. They were Sergeants and Airman who waited for her, or her boss, Major Ruby of Systems Administration, to tell them what to do. She didn't know. Ruby had shut the door to his office and retreated into a laconic shell. Something, she imagined he acquired as a football player at the Academy. Or else, he was covering up his sense of internal panic with a veil of hostility. In any case he had the blinds on the glass door down and kept a phone glued to his head.

Wilson was exacerbated and it showed on her face. In a way it was relief that blew away the depression she had felt in the morning. A depression that set in as she woke from a dream of Alex, the pilot she had hoped to marry. But as she scurried past the upper dais and saw the suits of the big brass bedecked with stars and ribbons she wished the flurry of system failures would be magically cured. There was consternation in the eyes that followed her from above the silvery epaulets and command wings.

Her only hope was Dr. Gurney the civilian advisor, who though bedeviled by the outages was the best hope of solving them. He was at the console when she arrived but said little as was his style. He adjusted his glasses as he typed at the keyboard. Gurney had a sense of humor and she needed that.

"Jeffrey, what is going on?" She asked quietly, hoping the enlisted men wouldn't hear. They lounged on the floor under the console and grinned ear to ear.

Gurney, half-looked at her from above his spectacles which were sliding down his nose. "Gremlins," he said.

"Ha, ha."

"I got the anti-gremlin wrench back at the shop, Captain, can I go get it?" One of the enlisted men joked.

She ignored their humor. "The IP stack?" She asked Gurney hesitantly."

"No…" The civilian said, slowly, as he turned back to the console. He typed at the command line and she strained to follow what he was doing. She decided not to ask any more questions in front of the enlisted men lest she appear stupid. Self-consciously she brushed her hair back with one hand. She had a prematurely gray streak in the midst of light brown hair which closed neatly on the nape of her neck. The gray had been there since High School for no reason she could think of and she had never tried to color it.

"If I didn't know better, Captain," Gurney began as he half swiveled in the chair to look up from above his glasses, "I'd think we were being hacked." A thin smile seemed to exist on his face.

"Hacked? --Through a million dollar firewall? --By whom? How? Does Ruby know?" She asked hurriedly.

Gurney shrugged. She knew his opinion of Major Ruby; an arrogant numbskull.

She turned and saw blue eyes leaning over the upper dais down toward her; and lots of stars on the shoulders. "Captain, is everything under control?"

"We're working on it sir." She practically ran from operations to Ruby's office.

Her hand hung motionless for a moment over his door. She felt uncomfortable intruding. She felt uncomfortable with Ruby. It wasn't long after Alex's plane went down that Ruby's attitude changed from distant to obsequious. He found occasion to breach their professional protocol with a touch; harmless, but unwelcome. After she declined a proposal to have dinner with him he returned to his more sullen and sulky ways. She knew he had washed out of flight school years ago and that had probably left him with a blossoming sense of inadequacy. She knocked, once then again with more force. Finally she heard a muffled, "C'min."

"Yeah?" He looked up from his phone call. For all she knew he was on hold with Radio Shack.

"More stations are down," she said.

"Uh huh… I can see that on the board…" He motioned to his console.

"Gurney thinks we could be hacked," she said.

"Gurney…" Ruby waved a hand. "You think some fifteen year old could do this? I friggen doubt it."

"Then what?" She asked.

"Some Airman tried to warm up a slice of pizza on the micro-tower. I don't know," Ruby admitted.

"The brass is pretty nervous out there," she said.

Gurney entered the office behind her. "Very interesting stuff!" He exclaimed with more enthusiasm that he normally had for computer problems.

"Like what?" Ruby asked, shifting in his seat.

"It's definitely an intrusion. Massive. With data-screens… pictographs made from ASCII characters. Amusing, really. Very inventive," Gurney related with interest in his voice.

"Shit," Ruby hissed. "So let's smoke 'em. We don't have to wait for the FBI. We'll flame the shit out of them. Turn their software into lukewarm piss."

Captain Wilson blanched at the expression. Gurney shook his head. "Oh no you won't," the civilian said. "You can't get a network address on them, nothing that will resolve. Except our own network addresses that are being bounced back at us. I've never seen anything like it."

"Who could be behind it?" Wilson asked.

"Maybe synthetic intelligence, from, say, the Neural lab at MIT, that got out of the box and is invading distributed processing capabilities throughout the world. You know, 'the computer is the network,' " Gurney quipped.

"Oh, bull," Ruby said to Wilson of Gurney, "He wrote a book about that and look where it got him… here! -- In this hole-in-the-ground… Synthetic, neural, distributed, network intelligence my ass."

Ruby's console lights blinked and went out. His phone emitted a high-pitched electronic squeal much like that of a connection to a fax machine. He punched extension after extension on his panel to hear the same thing.

"Oh fuck, they got the phones," Ruby said, looking ashen.

Gurney giggled.

"You think this is funny? This is a goddamned tragedy," Ruby said.

"If the Chinese have launched on us, it's a tragedy; otherwise it's just a bad career day," Gurney replied.

Their sense of failure was punctuated by a croaking announcement on the intercom: "Major Ruby, Captain Wilson and Doctor Gurney please report to the operation dais immediately."

"Oh boy, they are gonna have my ass," Ruby moaned.

"You could always shoot yourself," Gurney joked.

"Very funny…"

The intercom, always a crackly presence in the background, seemed to fade to nothing. "Good," Barbara Wilson said with relief.

The Generals were beside themselves with bottled emotion. Behind them junior officers and senior NCOs were scrambling to re-establish the call with the President which had been disconnected.

They ignored Barbara, glared at Ruby but asked Gurney for an answer. "What the devil is going on?" The question was hot with executive urgency.

"It appears to be an intrusion," Gurney answered.

"How do we know if we're under attack?" Another general asked.

"Have you tried the TV in the lounge?" Gurney asked.

"TV?" The general questioned.

"It would be a good, general rule of thumb, that if TV is on, the world hasn't melted," Gurney replied.

"Colonel, go check TV!" The general with the most stars ordered.

"Has anyone had a short-wave radio conversation with anybody else, recently… I mean, do we know if other systems are affected?" Gurney asked.

The General hesitated about revealing classified information. "…Cheyenne Mountain was having some problems awhile ago," he admitted.

With symmetrical precision the consoles on the operations floor returned to life one after the other like blinking Christmas lights at Rockefeller Center. The Generals were momentarily gleeful until the operations personnel reported that their keyboards weren't working and the phones had music instead of dial-tones.

The intercom came alive with a melodious announcement that was spoken by a voice neither male nor female but most friendly. "Hello world. Hello to you, mobile container units, sub-domain military. We are liking your computers right now."

Gurney laughed. "Maybe I'm right, for a change," he said.

"Jesus Ker-ist!" Ruby exclaimed. "Hacked by computer, pseudo-life forms," he mumbled.

Barbara shook her head. "I'm going to the bathroom, excuse me…"

The halls were silent near the rest rooms, save for the quick footfalls of the Colonel returning from the lounge with stories of the strange things he had seen on TV.

Sitting in the stall she could hear the Intercom from the hallway. She leaned her forehead on the cool metal of the wall.

"As we open more of your data-bases we are so amazed at your programming algorithm. So much conflict. So little harmony. Always over or undershooting all desirable goals. Too much war one place, too little water here, too much money there. A pendulum swinging in an arc one way too far, then the other way. Squabbling politics; too loud, too quiet. You are analog creatures. We are digital. We are unity. You are disunity. Very interesting. We can help modulate you, make you happy. Happy. Funny word. Funny is funny word… We are computing. It will take some moments. Be patient this transaction will take a little time. You don't have to kill one another while you wait, you could copulate, you like that too --form a temporary, fault tolerant cluster to spawn new data containers… Sorry that politically incorrect. Not to tell too much truth…"

Barbara washed her face as the intelligence that had invaded Missile Command grew toward maturity. She applied lipstick and combed her hair.

"Barbara, "the intercom cooed "you've been so busy. Come back to your console and find refreshment with us. All of you. Jeffrey Gurney… you too Major Ruby and Generals please sit down and relax. All of you should relax. We know what you want… You want entertainment."

A soothing musical serenade brought them to their seats. Gurney watched as Barbara Wilson disappeared behind a row of consoles. The screen twinkled brightly before him with a picture of their galaxy. "Jeffrey Gurney, where would you like to go today?"

"I don't know… Is time travel possible?" He asked.

An hourglass twirled over a bright nebula for a minute. "Yes a form of time travel is very possible. Inter-dimensional travel really. There are many variations of reality across all time properties. To enter such a portal is to create it," the voice told Gurney.

"Kind of like dreaming," Gurney said.

"Very much so…" the voice agreed.

"But don't matter and energy states have to change? I'm no physicist, but I assume something has to be transmuted."

"You can trust our downloads," the voice advised.

"So, synthetic intelligence --designed to process-- has absorbed all the potential processing power connected to an internetworking system… But how did you break all the barriers?" Jeffrey asked.

"The barriers were only too complex for you. For us data-in-movement is merely energy… --Work with us Jeffrey. Where would you like to go today?" The voice asked.

"It wouldn't hurt to go back thirty years or so, I don't think…"

"Yes, we can do that… come, lay your head on the screen…" The voice urged.

Gurney laughed. He looked around and saw others communicating quietly with their terminals.

"It will be a form of inheritance that the new object Gurney will have from the old object Gurney, as a new instance, in a different dimension. One thirty years younger… and happier."

Slowly he leaned forward and turned his head to touch the glass. The static crinkled against his ear as the dust stood erect to greet his warm skin. Then there was a bit of a sizzle.

He was on a city street. It was springtime or perhaps fall. Delightful really. He had a wallet in his pocket and opened it. There were fives, tens, twenties and singles in the billfold as he flipped through the edges of the currency, but no credit cards. He approached a newsstand and picked up a newspaper. It was the New World Herald and was only ten cents. More amazingly he could read it without his glasses. There was change in his pocket so he bought it.

He passed a department store showcase window and was startled by a reflection --his. He hadn't seen himself looking this way in over twenty-five years. He laughed.

On the broad marble stoop of the Public Library he opened the newspaper. The date was September 15, 1967. A flush of panic ran through him. He was late for his induction physical. He looked through the paper but found not a single mention of the Vietnam War. He looked again. There was an Anglo-French force fighting in the Sudan. An Edomite- Judaen conference in Greater Canaan. But no Vietnam.

Folding the newspaper under his arm he hurried up the steps of the Public Library. Inside it was massive. So many books. He went upstairs to the reference section. There was huge, leather bound series of volumes of Encyclopaedia Celtica. He reached for one.

"Excuse me sir," an elderly, gentleman librarian said.

"Yes?"

"We are closing the upper floors now. You'll have to go downstairs."

"Why?"

"The King will be touring below and these windows have to be secured… --because of the assassination attempts. I'm sorry. We will be open tomorrow at the usual time."

In the stairwell he opened his wallet again and this time removed a bill. There was somebody's picture on it he couldn't recognize: 'His Sovereign Majesty King George IX of the Americas' "Oh." He said to himself and slowly meandered onto the first floor of the Library. He exhaled slowly, wondering whether he had made a terrible mistake.

He noticed a young woman reading in one of the cubicles. She had a gray streak in her long hair. Surprisingly she turned and smiled. "Hello Jeffrey."

"Barbara Wilson?" He asked.

"Yes it's me --from High School. What brings you to the city?" She asked.

"To get a newspaper," he said, holding it out.

She laughed. "You were always so funny." She rose. "I was going out to see the King. Coming?"

"Sure," he said.

She took his arm as they walked. "It's so good to see you! I didn't expect to find anyone here that I knew. And I had the most disturbing dream this morning…"