Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

relationship
and were about as close and caring as two people could be. They maintained the
illusion of independence; yet, their love for each other bound them tightly.
They shared every behavior of the happily married save one—they refused to
cohabitate. Never mind that they spent several nights each week and awoke in
each other’s bed, the idea of living together never took solid shape between
them.
    There were many things he liked about Linda. She was his best
friend; and he trusted her completely. Over the years, through some bonding
mechanism he had yet to define, they had developed common speech patterns and
similar ways to express ideas. In short, they sounded like each other, just
like most married people.
    Linda Purdy was a computer system QA analyst for AT&T in
Sylmar. “Type A” personalities are invariably good at their jobs, and Linda was
no exception. It was her unerring sense of what was logical that served her
best. Her officially stated position on analysis of any kind was that she
rarely jumped to conclusions or theorized in “advance of the facts” as she
said, because it was folly to do so. “That’s what Holmes would say,” she’d
argue.
    Once the facts were known she could extrapolate perfectly to the
extent allowed by them and could put her finger on the problem or unravel a
knotty system anomaly with unparalleled precision.
    It was her unfathomable leaps of intuition that perplexed and
amazed her co-workers. If her logical reasoning was her staid servant, intuition
was her spirited muse.
    Her job was to ensure that the software that controlled the
switching computers manufactured at the Sylmar facility was as bug-free as
possible. Linda Purdy was the first line of defense against the inevitable
“events” and “undocumented features” that create error in all software
programs approaching a million lines of instructions. Since Linda did not write
the code, hers were the fresh and vigorous eyes and mind that watched, worked
and exercised the software for relative peanuts prior to using it for keeps
when millions of dollars might be on the line. Telecommunication is a complex
realm of acronyms and arcane interactions and to gain the right perspective on
what the software did or ought to do, logical reasoning sometimes just isn’t
enough. Imagination and visualization are tools rarely used by both the right
and left sides of the brain. Phil was fairly sure that Linda’s brain used those
instruments frequently and with genius. He had studied her mind for ten years,
not with the cold detachment of a scientist, but as her warm and admiring
friend and companion.
    Phil had once misplaced his car keys and searched for hours
looking for them in every pocket of every piece of clothing he owned. After a
several minutes-long interview with Linda about where he was and what he had
been doing, she told him his keys were in the bathroom on the back of the
toilet. She said it with a calm certainty that contained no doubt about the
keys’ whereabouts. That’s exactly where they were. It wasn’t as if she had seen
him put them down on the back of the toilet, and the facts moved all around
that particular solution without ever being cemented directly to it. She had
caused that very specific event to coalesce out of the miasmic gas of one
person’s behavior—his. Amused by the talent, he was made to wonder what other
truths she had gathered in this way.
    Being the healthy male that he was, and with the gentle breeze
gliding cool over his naked body, his mind drifted back to the legs in the Honda
coupe on the freeway on the way up. The Land Cruiser’s height had provided a
good view into it. The woman behind the wheel was dressed in a light sleeveless
cotton shift. All Phil could see, though, were her legs. Her legs were not
long and perfectly shaped in a traditional sense. They were not thin but round
and full with an insinuation of warm, sexual strength. The legs were smooth and
the texture of