Flip Side: Liam Meet Liam

ask too many questions!" he said, yawning again. "I've had enough for now."

The screen stayed blank. Like a square eye, it shone its white light into the small, dark room. Brat was searching for answers. The small orange light on one of his drives flickered as he skimmed through the information on the CD ROM Drive.

"Liam?" said Brat.

"What?"

"I have another question."

"I don't want to hear it."

"Why do some living things disappear? Does someone switch them off?"

"No," said Liam. "They just die!"

"Some things that were have been found in rocks. Their bones are preserved in the rock?" said Brat. "They were buried alive. Did the humans bury them?"

"No, the humans didn't bury them. Now will you please stop asking questions? I need some quiet!"

"What do you want some quiet for? Are you going to do some thinking? What do you want to think about?"

Liam turned the volume on the computer right down to "0" and smiled.

"See?" he said. "I can shut you up just by turning a knob!"

"I would like to do the same thing to you," printed Brat. Liam leaned back in his swivel chair and relaxed. It had been a bit much for him. Only yesterday he had loaded a fairly standard speech-recognition program and spent two hours teaching the computer how to pronounce all the words. He had pronounced thousands of them, hundreds of sentences, stressing them this way and that, slowly and carefully, until the program was ready. It had been tiring work, and rather boring, but Liam hoped the reward would be a talking computer. It sounded like fun.

But all he got back was a dumb program, which spoke like him, and wrote what he said on the screen. Eventually, he had gone to bed, leaving the computer on. Now, the next morning, the program was smart, really smart! It argued. It disobeyed. It threatened. Liam didn't like Brat now. There was something about Brat that made him want to pull the plug and wipe the memory. Maybe it was because Brat reminded him too much of himself?