1993, Stallion's Gate, NM; night.
Her heart was pounding out of her chest. Janis sat bolt-upright in the bed. She was fine, she was home, in her bed. Not lost in the underground maze of Dad's office like she'd been dreaming. Or rather, nightmare-ing. She'd only been six years old the first time Dad had taken her down there. The time she got lost. Now, any time she was away from her parents, she had The Nightmare. Not that she told anyone. She was Almost Ten – and ten-year-olds don't feel scared when they're not with their parents, so she was getting in her practice now.
As her breathing slowed and her eyes adjusted to the dark, Janis realized she wasn't actually in her room, but it was a familiar room. This was her room at uncle Sam and aunt Donna's house. Over there was the big bookshelf that took up almost a whole wall, filled top to bottom with thick books. Janis had tried reading one before, but the words were too big and the pictures too confusing. Maybe now that she was Almost Ten, she'd understand them better. She was one of the best readers in her class, after all.
That's what she'd do. She'd read one of uncle Sam and aunt Donna's big books to get her mind off The Nightmare. Janis reached to her right to turn on the lamp and… nothing. Her lamp was on the right, this room's lamp was on the left. Once the soft, golden glow of the bulb illuminated the room, Janis pulled off the covers and carefully shifted her weight from the bed to the floor. It was late, and if aunt Donna was anything like Mom, she'd hear the moment Janis's feet hit the floor and come rushing in to make sure she was alright. And she was fine, really. No one needed to wake up to comfort her. She was Almost Ten, she could get herself back to sleep after a Nightmare on her own.
She tentatively took the few steps between the bed and the bookshelf, then scanned the spines for something interesting. A deep blue book labeled Introduction to Quantum Computing was the tome she selected, carefully wiggling it out of its tightly-fitted spot on the shelf. Hopefully this one would be easier to understand since it was an introduction.
Janis settled back onto the bed, crossing her legs and sitting the textbook on top. She opened the book somewhere in the middle and was surprised to see her uncle Sam looking back at her from the page. He was with another, unfamiliar, man, and the two were standing in front of a massive computer. It kind of looked like some of the hallways in Dad's office – the hallways everyone called Ziggy, and not because they zig-zagged everywhere. She'd asked.
Drs. Sebastian LoNigro and Samuel Beckett present a quantum computer prototype at the inaugural Conference on the Physics of Computation at MIT, 1981 .
Intrigued, Janis started reading the rest of the text, but she hadn't gotten far when the sound of footsteps in the room next door broke her concentration. The feet sounded like they were moving just as slowly as she had when she'd gotten up to grab the book, but the steps sounded heavier. Either uncle Sam or aunt Donna was up. Janis turned to look out her window just to make sure she hadn't stayed up all night – no, the only lights out there were the constellations of the New Mexico night sky, no sun to be seen.
Janis held her breath as she listened to the person next door trying their best to not be heard moving about. But Janis was good at hearing people sneak around – she did have three teenage sisters, and all of them had tried to sneak off to a party or a boyfriend at some point. Even Vanessa. Janis knew there was no stopping Heather and Kim from being boy-crazy, and Vanessa had become the same way when she started high school last year. There must be something in the air there. Of course, none of her sisters were very successful; Dad would always catch them just as they reached the door.
A light clicked on in another room, and the glow snuck under the crack of Janis's door. More sounds; a chair sliding, the clicks of a keyboard, and a series of muffled electronic beeps. Then footsteps, again, coming closer to her door. Janis closed the textbook, keeping a finger between the pages, then laid down and pulled the covers over her head in one swift motion.
There was a gentle knock on the door, then the sound of the knob slowly turning and a quiet squeak of protest from the hinges as the door opened.
"Janis?"
Janis didn't move, but the bed did. It was her uncle Sam, sitting on the lower corner.
"I know you're awake under there."
Janis slowly lifted the covers from her face, but in a way she hoped looked like natural tossing and turning in her sleep, trying to catch a glimpse of Sam. She was successful at only the latter; the moment she met her uncle's eyes he gave her a knowing smile.
"How did you know?" Janis pulled the covers back from her face.
Sam nodded at the rectangular lump under the covers. "I saw the light was on, and either you have a very square teddy bear, or that's a book under there."
"Guilty." Janis sat up and pulled out the book, keeping her finger marking the page with Sam's photo. "I didn't bring any of my own so I got one off your shelf."
"Intro to Quantum Computing. That's some heavy reading for a nine-year-old at three AM,"
"Almost ten," Janis corrected, taking offense to the single-digit descriptor.
"Your birthday is next week, isn't it? It's still a pretty big book for ten. You know, I didn't read this book until just a couple of years ago, and I was a lot older than ten."
"You couldn't have read it when you were ten!" Janis flipped open the page she'd diligently kept marked, and a decade-younger Sam looked back up at the two. "You're in it all grown up! You can't read a book you're in before you're in it!"
Sam smiled to himself, thinking on what had woken him up in the first place. "Maybe you can."
"What do you mean?"
"Janis, do you know what your dad and I are working on, down at the office?"
Janis shook her head. "I know you call it Ziggy, and it looks kind of like this, but a lot bigger. Dad says he's not allowed to talk about it too much."
"Well, this little Ziggy was just the first piece of the big Ziggy we have now, and I couldn't have built it without your dad's help."
"My dad is helping build a computer? He can barely work the computer we have at home!" This was true; the Calavicci family, spurred on by Sam's embrace of the new technology, had purchased a top-of-the-line Windows 3.1 personal computer earlier that year. Heather used it the most, to write all of her papers for college; Kim and Vanessa used it for school sometimes, too. Janis and her mom mostly used it for games – Solitaire for Mom and Chip's Challenge for Janis. Dad – he could barely find his way around the desktop.
Sam knew otherwise – Al's time with the space program meant he'd been one of the first to adopt computer usage; he just wasn't used to this new "user-friendly" era. Too many doo-dads and whatzits on the screen, he said. Then again, who was Sam to correct the almost-ten Janis? "Ziggy works a lot differently than your computer at home. For one, it can talk."
"Really?"
"Well, not quite yet. But I'm working on it. I actually was writing some of the code for that before I came to check on you."
"But it's night time. Why are you working on it now?"
"Because having dreams helps me figure things out. When we sleep, our brains go through everything we saw and heard and felt that day, and it tries to sort them out and make a story. Those are our dreams. And tonight, I had a dream about how to program Ziggy to talk. But if I wait until work tomorrow, I'll forget what I figured out in my dream."
Janis looked down to her lap, hiding her face behind her long hair. "I had a dream about Ziggy, too, but I don't think it will help."
Sam already knew the answer, but he asked anyway, "What kind of dream?"
"When I was little, Dad took me down to the office with him, and while he was working, I went out in the hall. And I got lost, and I couldn't find anyone, and everywhere I went there was just more Ziggy. And when it happened, aunt Donna found me and took me back to Dad… but sometimes I have this dream where I'm just walking around and around and no one can hear me and I can't get out."
Sam remembered that day, but he didn't realize Janis had. She was only five or six, and enrolled in a half-day kindergarten at the time. Beth typically worked the early shift at the hospital so she could be home with Janis in the afternoons, but every now and then she would get called in and Al had to bring Janis down to the Project until the older girls were home from school to watch her. When Janis vanished from his office, Al had been just as much of a wreck as Janis was when Donna found her in the back halls.
"You won't tell anyone, will you?" Janis wasn't making eye contact. Maybe if she looked away, all of these uncomfortable feelings would go away, too. She sounded like such a little kid right now, nowhere near Almost Ten.
"If you don't want me to, no." Sam paused, wanting to reach an arm around Janis's shoulder but not knowing if it would be the right move. "But Janis, you really should tell your parents. They love you, and they want to know if you're hurting or scared. Even if it seems like a little thing."
"But they've done so many scarier things, like going to war, and space."
"Sure, they've done a lot of big, scary things. But I know, for a fact, that your dad still has things he's afraid of."
"Like what?" Janis raised an eyebrow, meeting Sam's eyes for the first time since she'd admitted to having The Nightmare.
"Vampires."
"Vampires‽"
"Vampires." Sam nodded. "He keeps a clove of garlic in his desk, just in case."
Janis finally cracked a smile, a few giggles escaping her lips.
"Now, if your dad wasn't afraid to tell me about that silly little fear of his, why do you think he wouldn't want to know if you were having a nightmare? Nightmares are a lot more real than vampires."
"Okay, I'll tell Dad when he gets home tomorrow. But don't tell my sisters."
"I won't," Sam knew all too well the comparison game of being younger and wanting nothing more than to be as grown-up as your older sibling. Then, an idea came to him. Something that would help Janis feel grown-up and help with her fears. "You know, since you've been reading that book, I think you can help me out with Ziggy. Do you want to help me teach Ziggy to talk?"
"Are you sure? I only read a page, and I didn't understand a lot of it."
"You're a bright kid, I think you'll do fine." Sam rose from the bed and walked to the door. He turned back to Janis, a playful smile on his face and a shoulder raised in a shrug. "Are you in?"
"Oka-ay," Janis, smiling but still a little skeptical, slid out of the bed and followed Sam down the hall to the great room, where he had a home office set up in the corner. The computer here looked just like the Calavicci's, but instead of the familiar desktop and icons on the screen, there was only green text. On the desk, to the left of the keyboard and mouse, was a notepad where Sam had already scrawled his code. He motioned for Janis to sit in the plush office chair, and she hopped up, swiveling back and forth a couple of times before centering herself on the screen. Sam picked up the notebook and leaned down so the two were at eye level with each other.
"Okay, I'll read off the code I have here, and you type it in."
Janis nodded, then Sam began reading, and letter by letter, symbol by symbol, Janis entered the code for Ziggy's speech module. Once she was done, Sam reached across to take the mouse, and with a few clicks, the text window Janis had been typing in was closed and in its place was the familiar Windows desktop. Janis swiveled toward Sam, who was now crouched down to the PC tower situated underneath the desk.
"So now Ziggy can talk?"
"It should tomorrow." Sam ejected the floppy disk from the drive, labeled it, then placed it on a stack of other floppy disks labeled for other Ziggy functions – the top one, Janis saw, was labeled Location data: 1968.
"So next time I'm down in the office, if I get lost, I can just ask Ziggy for the way out and it'll tell me?"
"It sure will," Sam made a mental note to add a map of the Project to Ziggy's data banks. Not just for Janis, it would be useful for everyone to have access to automated mapping directions from a computer. This was the future, and Sam Beckett was creating it.
And Janis Calavicci, Almost Ten, had helped make it happen.
All I knew going into this was that Janis needed to "code" something into Ziggy, as an explanation for why adult Janis is so set that she's the only one who can run the Project properly. The heart-to-heart (and the garlic clove) just decided to show up on their own volition.