The Mother Code

by Carole Stivers

  God, he didn’t even have all the answers. Blankenship’s words hung in his mind: The Presidio might be more important now than ever. What had he meant? And why were they locking down the Presidio so soon? He was still waiting for the general’s call.

  Something glimmered in the dim light, throwing tiny shards of color across the room. He approached the window to wrap his fingers around the small silver figure of a woman with wings made of delicate metal feathers, suspended on a thin chain from the window lock. Hopi, he thought, remembering Rose’s tale of the Native American pilot.

  The phone on Rose’s desk buzzed. Without thinking, he pocketed the necklace as he crossed the room to punch on the line. “Yes?”

  “Rick? It’s Joe.”

  “Yes.” Joe. General Blankenship was Joe now.

  “Did you manage to lock down the base?”

  “In progress. Is Rose there in D.C.?”

  “She just got here. But, Rick . . . we’re in a hell of a jam.”

  “What—?”

  “There’s been a hack. Inside job. At Fort Detrick. They know.”

  “Who knows?”

  “Looks like a Russian job. And whoever the hell else they’re in league with now.” Blankenship’s voice was plaintive, choked. “They got access to the IC-NAN history files, the archaebacteria tracking files, the antidote work. All of it. They know about Tabula Rasa, the IC-NAN project. Sam Lowicki thinks it’s only a matter of time before they connect the dots to an outbreak over there, accuse us of an attack on their soil.”

  “Los Alamos.” Rick’s mind raced, shifting into autodrive. “Do they know about the connection to Los Alamos?”

  “No. Not so far as we can tell. Information about each segment of the project was compartmented. Only the intel on the Fort Detrick computers was hacked.”

  “What about the communications between Said and Garza?”

  “All compartmented.”

  “But we need to alert Los Alamos, right? Just in case?”

  “I’ve just spoken to the New Dawn security chief there.”

  “Kendra Jenkins?”

  “Correct. She’s been closely monitoring all communications in and out of the facility. We’ve decided we’re gonna give her the go-ahead to shut down at midnight, just in case. All nonessential communications will be cut off, and only our classified personnel will be allowed onto the site until we issue the all clear.”

  “Where’s Dr. Garza?”

  “At Los Alamos. Two days ago, he accompanied a shipment of antidote for the cleared folks there.”

  “And the Gen5s?”

  “Dr. Garza delivered the Gen5 embryos to Los Alamos as well. They’re ready to go. But they’re still in cold storage. The Gen5 bots won’t be ready for a while . . .”

  Rick sat down, holding his hand to his forehead. “General . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Is Rose safe? Can you guarantee her safety?”

  “She’s as safe as any of us here. As safe as I am. I can assure you of that.”

  His head beginning to throb, Rick sucked in a long, slow breath. He took little comfort in the general’s assurances. If the Russians knew about Tabula Rasa, they might not wait to challenge Washington, to go public with what they knew. They might simply opt to destroy the probable source of the suspected biowarfare agent and ask questions later. After all, wasn’t that what the U.S. had always done with such intelligence when it came to Russia’s covert chemical warfare? No one was safe, least of all Rose if she was still at Fort Detrick. “And me?” he muttered. “What are my orders?”

  “None yet. Stay put and keep an eye on things out there. We’ll have another call as soon as we learn more.”

  16

  JAMES SAT BACK to rub his eyes. Save for the ghostly blue of his computer screen and the thin line of bright neon seeping under the door from the Los Alamos bio lab, his office was dark. Reaching into the top drawer of his desk, he fished out a small white cardboard box. He inserted a thumb under the top flap, prying it open to reveal two small canisters. In a separate compartment lay an L-shaped plastic tube with a round opening. He withdrew one of the canisters, holding it up to the light of his screen. C-343. In his mind, he ran through Rudy’s instructions for the scaled-up dosage form. There are one hundred doses in each canister. Snap on the inhaler attachment, press the release, and breathe deeply. You only need to use it once each day. There should be plenty there to last you until we can make more. He fitted the inhaler to one of the canisters and took a deep breath of the mist, a bitter taste rising at the back of his throat. He prayed they’d gotten it right.

  Deployment of the Gen4 stationary units had been delayed while he and Rudy worked out the bugs on the NAN sequence. And as three months had passed in the blink of an eye, he’d made peace with the fact that Gen4 would never be deployed. The assumption of human survivors, still alive to parent the children, was no longer tenable. Gen5 would have to be their next step. Rudy’s Fort Detrick team had performed the genetic transformations on the candidate embryos, checking the genome of each resulting embryo to make sure that the NAN sequence had been incorporated. On a trip back east, James had personally chosen the most viable embryos for launch. Ready to go, these were now securely stored in a freezer at the back of the XO-Bot building.

  On the screen, James checked and rechecked the gene sequence data on the embryos. According to Kendra, the Gen5 bots wouldn’t be ready to receive their charges for a few months yet. But as far as James was concerned, that was fine. Just the thought of deploying the Mothers, animate and autonomous, vexed him.

  He shook his head. His concerns regarding the Gen5 bots were nothing compared to his fears that the C-343 sequence might still be imperfect. But they weren’t being given time for further trials. Now the lives of the Gen5 babies depended on the success of the C-343 sequence. And, as of a few days ago, those with clearance had become the new adult test subjects. After only two months of “preliminary clinicals” in Somalia, James himself was a test subject.

  “Sorry to disturb you, James.” He looked up to find Kendra standing in his doorway, a thin tablet clasped in one hand. “I was monitoring the grid, and I needed to make sure it was you in here.”

  “It’s late. No one here but us ghosts.”

  “Don’t talk that way, James. We need to think positive.”

  In the dim light, James inspected Kendra’s normally sanguine face, noticed her furrowed brow. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

  Kendra sighed. “Computer systems breach at Detrick. James, we’re gonna need to go dark for a while until they’re sure we’re secure.”

  James sat up straight in his chair. “A breach? By whom? What did they take?”

  “They didn’t take anything. If they had, cyber ops mighta caught it sooner. But they were in there for a while, wormin’ around. Anyway, the IC-NAN data are compromised.”

  “Shit!” James stood up, pacing the office. “When did this happen?”

  “Detrick discovered it this morning,” Kendra replied, frowning. “General Blankenship hemmed and hawed about whether we would have to shut down here. But this afternoon I received confirmation. I’ve spent the last few hours figuring out the best way to do it without too much obvious disruption.”

  “Is Rudy still here?”

  “I am here.” As if on cue, Rudy slipped through the door behind Kendra. “I received a call from General Blevins. He told me to stay here. It seems we are being locked down?”

  “Yes,” Kendra said. “In fact, we’ll be securing all of Los Alamos, not just XO-Bot. And, James, I’ll need to shut down your computer system for a security scan.”

  James stared at the screen, the little white symbols marching across it. His thoughts drifted to Sara—at home, unaware.

  When he’d first arrived at Los Alamos, the government had provided him with a modest bungalow
across the Omega Bridge, with a view of the Lab to the south. Though it wasn’t much, it was better than the apartment he’d shared with Rudy in Harpers Ferry, and it afforded a quick drive to work. Then a few weeks ago, he’d been asked to move into makeshift housing in the XO-Bot building. Instead he’d taken Kendra’s advice—intent on spending as much time as possible with Sara, he’d slipped out to her apartment at every opportunity, his own shuttered house yet another secret he couldn’t share with her. But he hadn’t seen Sara in days now—she’d gone to Caltech for a seminar last week, and on Wednesday she’d called in sick. “What about the other personnel?”

  “We’ll shut down at midnight tonight. That’s in a little under an hour. Until further notice, only us New Dawn people will have access through the Omega Bridge gate or the south gate—you, me, Rudy, and Paul MacDonald . . . We’ll especially need Mac to keep this building up and running in case of emergency.”

  “Emergency?”

  “We have orders to stay on alert. We have orders to be ready for an extended shutdown. And from the general, we have orders to protect the Gen5 source codes at all costs.”

  “I hope that this thing will be over soon. We need to get them ready for launch . . .” Rudy said.

  “Yes.” Kendra stared at her tablet, its blue glow glinting off her aqua-rimmed glasses. “This hack is a huge deal. Somebody out there knows about IC-NAN. And if they’ve made any connections between Detrick and Los Alamos, they might think we’re in on it too. But it’d be a shame if this shutdown stalled the Gen5 program. I’ve grown attached to the Mothers. And to Rose McBride.”

  “I have heard that she is brilliant,” Rudy said.

  “She’s not only an excellent programmer, but a psychologist as well. For someone so unversed in AI, she’s done some pretty groundbreaking stuff.” Even as she spoke, Kendra was scanning her mobile site map, her fingers running deftly over the tablet’s smooth surface.

  James resumed his pacing. He knew that McBride’s team had been fully dedicated to the Gen5 program ever since his transfer to Los Alamos. To ensure the safety and comfort of a small human in the sole company of a bot, the team had taken advantage of every advance in the mechanics of human-machine interaction, every programming fail-safe that would ensure the survival of a human—over, if necessary, that of his robot guardian. They’d utilized every promising development in learning theory, biofeedback, and artificial neural networks that was applicable to both machine and human minds. As a child learns from its mother, this new child would learn from his bot. And she would respond to his every physical need.

  “I assume that you have heard about the personalities?” Rudy asked.

  “Personalities?” James flicked on his office light, and beside him Kendra blinked.

  “It has long been a dream to prolong the life of a mind. Of a consciousness. I cannot be certain, of course. But I think that Dr. McBride has made significant advances in this regard,” Rudy said.

  “How so?”

  “It is routine for women on their way to missions in space or dangerous military assignments to store away their eggs on the off chance that normal procreation might not be possible for them when they return to civilian life.”

  “Yes, I’m well aware of the donor source . . .”

  “Dr. McBride went one step further in preserving the lives of her donors. She calls it the Mother Code.”

  Mother Code. James smiled, thinking about the outdated term, once used in genetics as well. “But it’s just a computer program.”

  “It is,” Kendra said. “Still, it’s uncanny . . . When I listen to one of these bots speak . . . If I close my eyes, it’s difficult to believe she’s just a machine.”

  “Oh.” James sighed. “I guess I’ve never had a conversation with one . . .” He shuddered. Was this what it had come to? Humans preserved in code? “Has Dr. McBride ever had children of her own?”

  “No . . . These will be her children. If we can get them launched,” Kendra replied. She tapped her tablet with a decisive index finger. “Looks like we’re in luck. I’m not picking up anyone else in the XO-Bot building right now. And the other buildings are already secured.”

  James felt a vibration in his left arm and glanced down at the small illuminated screen of his wrist phone. DAD. “Sorry, I need to take this,” he murmured, walking toward better reception in the hallway outside. Though he knew it was only just past ten p.m. in California, his parents rarely stayed up past nine. And they rarely used the phone.

  “Dad? What’s up? Why are you calling so late?”

  “James, is that you?” His father’s voice was raspy, barely audible.

  “Yes . . .” There was a distracted silence at the other end of the line. Imagining his father huddled in the dark kitchen of his small home, James felt his heart begin to race. Something wasn’t right. “What’s happened?”

  “I did not want to call you at such an hour. I would have waited until morning. But your mother, she . . .”

  “Is she ill?”

  “She was diagnosed with the flu. A few weeks ago now. We thought she was getting better. But now, though she has no fever, she cannot stop coughing. There is blood . . .”

  “Dad.” James fell back against the cinder block wall of the corridor, his limbs limp, his mind racing. “I’m coming. I’ll get there as quick as I can. But you need to promise me. You need to get her to the hospital right away. Get her on a ventilator. Can you do that?”

  “But she is too ill to move . . .”

  “Call an ambulance.”

  “I will drive.”

  “No. Get an ambulance. And remember to keep your phone with you. I’ll call you as soon as I’m on my way.”

  James headed back to his office. Rudy and Kendra were gone, his computer display blank. He flipped off power to the display and gathered up the small white box full of antidote. Stuffing it in his briefcase, he grabbed his jacket.

  Soon his legs were carrying him down the hall toward the front lobby as his mind ticked off the dreadful possibilities. Pneumonia? Lung cancer? Vaguely, he remembered something he’d heard on the cafeteria news feed late that afternoon as he’d waited for the robo-barista to deliver his espresso—something about a “West Coast flu.” But whatever that was, it couldn’t be IC-NAN. They had yet to receive confirmed reports of positive archaebacterial isolates in the mainland U.S.

  All he knew was that he needed to get home.

  17

  AS THE AUTOCAB shuttled him out of the LAX hyperloop station and turned north toward Bakersfield, James once more thought about Sara. He should call her, at least tell her where he was. In fact, he needed to tell Kendra and Rudy as well. Jetting off in the middle of the night—he hadn’t been thinking straight. His right hand drifted to his left wrist.

  Shit. His wrist phone was gone. He imagined the inspection bay at the Albuquerque airport, the little appliance languishing in the personals bin. Digging into his briefcase, he felt the sharp edge of the cardboard box. His antidote. At least he still had that; the coating applied to the canisters had indeed succeeded in fooling the inspection bots.

  He opened the cover on the cab’s backseat phone. But as usual, the unit was missing—the cab companies could barely keep up with the vandalism in these things. Exhausted, he fell back into the seat. He hadn’t been able to get a flight out of Albuquerque until 3:20 a.m. He’d tried to call his father before securing a spot on the red-eye and hastily clearing airport security. But there’d been no answer. And now there was no way to call him, or anyone else for that matter.

  He woke up as the driverless cab pulled off at his exit. As the cab veered onto a side street, he spotted the sign for Bakersfield General. But the building’s front entrance was all but obscured by the large crowd assembled in the lot.

  “Let me out here,” he said. He felt his seat restraints relax as the cab dutifully pulled to the curb. On
the back of the seat in front of him, red LEDs spelled out the fare as he held his paycard up to the reader. “Thank you,” said a robotic female voice. James got out, the pollen-laden air of late spring stinging his eyes. Clutching his briefcase, he stumbled through a tangle of shrubbery to head toward a massive white tent that blocked the entrance to the emergency wing.

  Inside the tent, herds of people shuffled between makeshift stations as gloved nurses measured blood pressures and pulses, placed thermoscanners into ears, and examined skin, throats, and eyes, frantically entering their observations into clip-tablets. James peered over their bowed heads, searching for his father’s familiar tweed cap. Ducking down, he skirted the wall, making his way toward the wide double doors leading to the ER. But the doors were guarded by two men in khaki uniforms, firearms visible at their sides. State militia.

  “Sorry, sir.” One of the guards stepped in front of him, blocking his path. “You’ll have to get in line.”

  “I’m just looking for my father.”

  The other guard peered at him. “Name?”

  “Mine? James Said.”

  The man nodded, then punched James’s name into his wrist phone. He adjusted his helmet, murmuring something into his mobile radio. Then he looked at James again. “Dr. Grayson says to sit tight. She’ll be out shortly.”

  Grayson . . . where had he heard that name before? James scanned the lot outside. People of all ages, though the elderly seemed the worst off. Short on wheelchairs, orderlies were forced to help them as they stumbled from their parked cars. Most were coughing—horrible dry, wracking coughs that produced nothing. He broke out in a cold sweat, his hand dropping to his briefcase to feel for his antidote.

  “James?” He turned to find a short, bespectacled woman in a white coat, a stethoscope looped over one shoulder.

  “Roberta?” He’d known Robbie for years, first as a high school friend, then as his parents’ doctor. But she’d been Robbie Waller then. He barely recognized the pale woman whose wispy strands of graying hair stirred in the slight breeze.