by Nancy Kress
Vlad had also called it “Plasterminator” and “BacAzrael” and “The Grim Creeper.”
There was no way to get the plasticide to the generators, neither of which was in the area just beyond the air duct—that was the site of the laundry area. The main generator was way the hell across the entire underground level in a locked room, the back-up somewhere beyond the lab’s south wall in another locked area . . . .
Plasticide didn’t attack octanes, or anything else with comparatively short carbon chains, so it was perfectly safe for humans but death on Styrofoam and plastic waste, and anyway there was a terminator gene built into the bacteria after two dozen fissions, an optimal reproduction rate that was less than twelve hours . . . .
“Plasti-Croak” and “Microbe Mop” and “Last Round-up for Longchains.”
This was the bioremediation organism that had gotten Vlad killed.
Less than five seconds had passed. On the roomscreen, Pranopolis hadn’t finished singing to the animated digital Janey. Cassie moved her body slightly, screening the inside of the cabinet from the room’s two visual sensors. Of all her thoughts bouncing off each other like crazed subatomic particles, the clearest was hard reality: There was no way to get the bacteria to the generators.
Nonetheless, she slipped the untagged jar under her shirt.
Elya had talked herself hoarse, reciting Bollman’s script over and over, and the AI had not answered a single word.
Curiously, Bollman did not seem discouraged. He kept glancing at his watch and then at the horizon. When Elya stopped her futile “negotiating” without even asking him, he didn’t reprimand her. Instead, he led her off the patio, back to the sagging food tent.
“Thank you, Ms. Seritov. You did all you could.”
“What now?”
He didn’t answer. Instead he glanced again at the horizon, so Elya looked, too. She didn’t see anything.
It was late afternoon. Someone had gone to Varysburg and brought back pizzas, which was all she’d eaten all day. The jeans and sweater she’d thrown on at four in the morning were hot and prickly in the August afternoon, but she had nothing on under the sweater and didn’t want to take it off. How much longer would this go on before Bollman ordered in his tank?
And how were Cassie and the children doing after all these hours trapped inside? Once again Elya searched her mind for any way the AI could actively harm them. She didn’t find it. The AI controlled communication, appliances, locks, water flow, heat (unnecessary in August), but it couldn’t affect people physically, except for keeping them from food or water. About all that the thing could do physically—she hoped—was short-circuit itself in such a way as to start a fire, but it wouldn’t want to do that. It needed its hostages alive.
How much longer?
She heard a faint hum, growing stronger and steadier, until a helicopter lifted over the horizon. Then another.
“Damn!” Bollman cried. “Jessup, I think we’ve got company.”
“Press?” Agent Jessup said loudly. “Interfering bastards! Now we’ll have trucks and ’bots all over the place!”
Something was wrong. Bollman sounded sincere, but Jessup’s words somehow rang false, like a bad actor in an overscripted play . . .
Elya understood. The “press” was fake, FBI or police or someone playing reporters, to make the AI think that it had gotten its story out, and so surrender. Would it work? Could T4S tell the difference? Elya didn’t see how. She had heard the false note in Agent Jessup’s voice, but surely that discrimination about actors would be beyond an AI who hadn’t ever seen a play, bad or otherwise.
She sat down on the tank-furrowed grass, clasped her hands in her lap, and waited.
Cassie distilled more oxygen. Whenever Donnie seemed to be having difficulty after coughing up sputum, she made him breathe from the bottle. She had no idea whether it helped him or not. It helped her to be doing something, but of course that was not the same thing. Janey, after a late lunch of cheese and cereal and bread that she’d complained about bitterly, had finally dozed off in front of the roomscreen, the consequence of last night’s broken sleep. Cassie knew that Janey would awaken cranky and miserable as only she could be, and dreaded it.
“T4S, what’s happening out there? Has your press on a white horse arrived yet?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“A group of people have arrived, certainly.”
Something was different about the AI’s voice. Cassie groped for the difference, didn’t find it. She said, “What sort of people?”
“They say they’re from places like the New York Times and LinkNet.”
“Well, then?”
“If I were going to persuade me to surrender, I might easily try to use false press.”
It was inflection. T4S’s voice was still House’s, but unlike House, its words had acquired color and varying pitch. Cassie heard disbelief and discouragement in the AI’s words. How had it learned to do that? By simply parroting the inflections it heard from her and the people outside? Or . . . did feeling those emotions lead to expressing them with more emotion?
Stockholm Syndrome. She pushed the questions away.
“T4S, if you would lower the Faraday cage for two minutes, I could call the press to come here.”
“If I lowered the Faraday cage for two seconds, the FBI would use an EMP to kill me. They’ve already tried it once, and now they have monitoring equipment to automatically fire if the Faraday goes down.”
“Then just how long are you going to keep us here?”
“As long as I have to.”
“We’re already low on food!”
“I know. If I have to, I’ll let Janey go upstairs for more food. You know the nerve gas is there if she goes for the front door.”
Nerve gas. Cassie wasn’t sure she believed there was any nerve gas, but T4S’s words horrified her all over again. Maybe because now they were inflected. Cassie saw it so clearly: the tired child going up the stairs, through the kitchen to the foyer, heading for the front door and freedom . . . and gas spraying Janey from the walls. Her small body crumpling, the fear on her face . . . .
Cassie ground her teeth together. If only she could get Vlad’s plasticide to the generators! But there was no way. No way . . . .
Donnie coughed.
Cassie fought to keep her face blank. T4S had acquired vocal inflection; it might have also learned to read human expressions. She let five minutes go by, and they seemed the longest five minutes of her life. Then she said casually, “T4S, the kids are asleep. You won’t let me see what’s going on outside. Can I at least go back to my work on proteins? I need to do something!”
“Why?”
“For the same reason Janey needed to watch cartoons!”
“To occupy your mind,” T4S said. Pause. Was it scanning her accumulated protein data for harmlessness? “All right. But I will not open the refrigerator. The storage cabinet, but not the refrigerator. E-tags identify fatal toxins in there.”
She couldn’t think what it meant. “Fatal toxins?”
“At least one that acts very quickly on the human organism.”
“You think I might kill myself?”
“Your diary includes several passages about wishing for death after your husband—”
“You read my private diary!” Cassie said, and immediately knew how stupid it sounded. Like a teenager hurling accusations at her mother. Of course T4S had accessed her diary; it had accessed everything.
“Yes,” the AI said, “and you must not kill yourself. I may need you to talk again to Agent Bollman.”
“Oh, well, that’s certainly reason enough for me to go on living! For your information, T4S, there’s a big difference between human beings saying they wish they were dead as an expression of despair and those same human beings actually, truly wanting to die.”
“Really? I didn’t know that. Thank you,” T4S said without a trace of irony or sarcasm. “Just the sa
me, I will not open the refrigerator. However, the lab equipment is now available to you.”
Again, the AI had turned on everything. Cassie began X-raying crystalline proteins. She needed only the X-ray, but she also ran each sample through the electron microscope, the gene synthesizer, the protein analyzer, the Farraci tester, hoping that T4S wasn’t programmed with enough genetic science to catch the redundant steps. Apparently, it wasn’t. Non-competing technologies never keep up with what the other one is doing.
After half an hour, she thought to ask, “Are they real press out there?”
“No,” T4S said sadly.
She paused, test tube suspended above the synthesizer. “How do you know?”
“Agent Bollman told me a story was filed with LinkNet, and I asked to hear Ginelle Ginelle’s broadcast of it on Hourly News. They are delaying, saying they must send for a screen. But I can’t believe they don’t already have a suitable screen with them, if the real press is here. I estimate that the delay is to give them time to create a false Ginelle Ginelle broadcast.”
“Thin evidence. You might just have ‘estimated’ wrong.”
“The only evidence I have. I can’t risk my life without some proof that news stories are actually being broadcast.”
“I guess,” Cassie said and went back to work, operating redundant equipment on pointless proteins.
Ten minutes later, she held her body between the bench and the ceiling sensor, uncapped the test tube of distilled water with Donnie’s mucus, and put a drop into the synthesizer.
Any bacteria could be airborne under the right conditions; it simply rode dust motes. But not all could survive being airborne. Away from an aqueous environment, they dried out too much. Vlad’s plasticide bacteria did not have survivability in air. It had been designed to spread over landfill ground, decomposing heavy petroleum plastics, until at the twenty-fourth generation the terminator gene kicked in and it died.
Donnie’s Streptococcus had good airborne survivability, which meant it had a cell wall of thin mesh to retain water and a membrane with appropriate fatty acid composition. Enzymes, which were of course proteins, controlled both these characteristics. Genes controlled which enzymes were made inside the cell.
Cassie keyed the gene synthesizer and cut out the sections of DNA that controlled fatty acid biosynthesis and cell wall structure and discarded the rest. Reaching under her shirt, she pulled out the vial of Vlad’s bacteria and added a few drops to the synthesizer. Her heart thudded painfully against her breastbone. She keyed the software to splice the Streptococcus genes into Vlad’s bacteria, seemingly as just one more routine assignment in its enzyme work.
This was by no means a guaranteed operation. Vlad had used a simple bacteria that took engineering easily, but even with malleable bacteria and state-of-the-art software, sometimes several trials were necessary for successful engineering. She wasn’t going to get several trials.
“Why did you become a geneticist?” T4S asked.
Oh God, it wanted to chat! Cassie held her voice as steady as she could as she prepared another protein for the X-ray. “It seemed an exciting field.”
“And is it?”
“Oh, yes.” She tried to keep irony out of her voice.
“I didn’t get any choice about what subjects I wished to be informed on,” T4S said, and to that, there seemed nothing to say.
The AI interrupted its set speech. “These are not real representatives of the press.”
Elya jumped—not so much at the words as at their tone. The AI was angry.
“Of course they are,” Bollman said.
“No. I have done a Fourier analysis of the voice you say is Ginelle Ginelle’s. She’s a live ’caster, you know, not an avatar, with a distinct vocal power spectrum. The broadcast you played to me does not match that spectrum. It’s a fake.”
Bollman swore.
McTaggart said, “Where did T4S get Fourier-analysis software?”
Bollman turned on him. “If you don’t know, who the hell does?”
“It must have paused long enough in its flight through the Net to copy some programs,” McTaggart said, “I wonder what its selection criteria were?” and the unmistakable hint of pride in his voice raised Bollman’s temper several dangerous degrees.
Bollman flipped on the amplifier directed at the music speaker and said evenly, “T4S, what you ask is impossible. And I think you should know that my superiors are becoming impatient. I’m sorry, but they may order me to waco.”
“You can’t!” Elya said, but no one was listening to her.
T4S merely went back to reiterating its prepared statement. “I will let the hostages go after I talk to the press. I want the press to hear my story. That’s all I have to say. I will let—”
It didn’t work. Vlad’s bacteria would not take the airborne genes.
In despair, Cassie looked at the synthesizer display data. Zero successful splices. Vlad had probably inserted safeguard genes against just this happening as a natural mutation; nobody wanted to find that heavy-plastic-eating bacteria had drifted in through the window and was consuming their micro-wave. Vlad was always thorough. But his work wasn’t her work, and she had neither the time nor the expertise to search for genes she didn’t already have encoded in her software.
So she would have to do it the other way. Put the plastic-decomposing genes into Streptococcus. That put her on much less familiar ground, and it raised a question she couldn’t see any way around. She could have cultured the engineered plasticide on any piece of heavy plastic in the lab without T4S knowing it, and then waited for enough airborne bacteria to drift through the air ducts to the generator and begin decomposing. Of course, that might not have happened, due to uncontrollable variables like air currents, microorganism sustained viability, composition of the generator case, sheer luck. But at least there had been a chance.
But if she put the plastic-decomposing genes into Streptococcus, she would have to culture the bacteria on blood agar. The blood agar was in the refrigerator. T4S had refused to open the refrigerator, and if she pressed the point, it would undoubtedly become suspicious.
Just as a human would.
“You work hard,” T4S said.
“Yes,” Cassie answered. Janey stirred and whimpered; in another few minutes she would have to contend with the full-blown crankiness of a thwarted and dramatic child. Quickly, without hope, Cassie put another drop of Vlad’s bacteria in the synthesizer.
Vlad had been using a strain of simple bacteria, and the software undoubtedly had some version of its genome in its library. It would be a different strain, but this was the best she could do. She told the synthesizer to match genomes and snip out any major anomalies. With luck, that would be Vlad’s engineered genes.
Janey woke up and started to whine.
Elya harvested her courage and walked over to Bollman. “Agent Bollman . . . I have a question.”
He turned to her with that curious courtesy that seemed to function toward some people and not others. It was almost as if he could choose to run it, like a computer program. His eyes looked tired. How long since he had slept?
“Go ahead, Ms. Seritov.”
“If the AI wants the press, why can’t you just send for them? I know it would embarrass Dr. McTaggart, but the FBI wouldn’t come off looking bad.” She was proud of this political astuteness.
“I can’t do that, Ms. Seritov.”
“But why not?”
“There are complications you don’t understand and I’m not at liberty to tell you. I’m sorry.” He turned decisively aside, dismissing her.
Elya tried to think what his words meant. Was the government involved? Well, of course, the AI had been created at Sandia National Laboratory. But . . . could the CIA be involved, too? Or the National Security Agency? What was the AI originally designed to do, that the government was so eager to eliminate it once it had decided to do other things on its own?
Could software defect?
She
had it. But it was worthless.
The synthesizer had spliced its best guess at Vlad’s “plastic-decomposing genes” into Donnie’s Streptococcus. The synthesizer data display told her that six splices had taken. There was, of course, no way of knowing which six bacteria in the teeming drop of water could now decompose very-long-chain-hydrocarbons, or if those six would go on replicating after the splice. But it didn’t matter, because even if replication went merrily forward, Cassie had no blood agar on which to culture the engineered bacteria.
She set the vial on the lab bench. Without food, the entire sample wouldn’t survive very long. She had been engaging in futile gestures.
“Mommy,” Janey said, “look at Donnie!”
He was vomiting, too weak to turn his head. Cassie rushed over. His breathing was too fast.
“T4S, body temperature!”
“Stand clear . . . one hundred three point one.”
She groped for his pulse . . . fast and weak. Donnie’s face had gone pale and his skin felt clammy and cold. His blood pressure was dropping.
Streptococcal toxic shock. The virulent mutant strain of bacteria was putting so many toxins into Donnie’s little body that it was being poisoned.
“I need antibiotics!” she screamed at T4S. Janey began to cry.
“He looks less white now,” T4S said.
It was right. Cassie could see her son visibly rallying, fighting back against the disease. Color returned to his face and his pulse steadied.
“T4S, listen to me. This is streptococcal shock. Without antibiotics, it’s going to happen again. It’s possible that without antibiotics, one of these times Donnie won’t come out of it. I know you don’t want to be responsible for a child’s death. I know it. Please let me take Donnie out of here.”
There was a silence so long that hope surged wildly in Cassie. It was going to agree . . . .
“I can’t,” T4S said. “Donnie may die. But if I let you out, I will die. And the press must come soon. I’ve scanned my news library and also yours—press shows up on an average of 23.6 hours after an open-air incident that the government wishes to keep secret. The tanks and FBI agents are in the open air. We’re already overdue.”
