by Nancy Kress
Scarlet fever. It could follow from strep throat.
No, impossible. The incubation period for scarlet fever, she remembered from child-health programs, was eighteen days after the onset of strep throat symptoms. Donnie hadn’t been sick for eighteen days, or anything near it. What was going on?
“Mommy, is Donnie going to die? Like Daddy?”
“No, no, of course not, sweetie. See, he’s better already, he’s asleep again.”
He was, a sudden heavy sleep so much like a coma that Cassie, panicked, woke him again. It wasn’t a coma. Donnie whimpered briefly, and she saw how painful it was for him to make sounds in his inflamed throat.
“Are you sure Donnie won’t die?”
“Yes, yes. Go watch Pranopolis.”
“It’s over,” Janey said. “It was over a long time ago!”
“Then ask the smart program to run another cartoon for you!”
“Can I do that?” Janey asked interestedly. “What’s its name?”
“T4S.”
“It sounds like House.”
“Well, it’s not House. Now let Mommy take care of Donnie.”
She sponged him with cool water, trying to bring down the fever. It seemed to help, a little. As soon as he’d fallen again into that heavy, troubling sleep, Cassie raced for her equipment.
It had all finished running. She read the results too quickly, had to force herself to slow down so they would make sense to her.
The bacterium showed deviations in two sets of base pairs from the Streptococcus pyogenes genome in the data bank as a baseline. That wasn’t significant in itself; S. pyogenes had many seriotypes. But those two sets of deviations were, presumably, modifying two different proteins in some unknown way.
The Faracci tester reported high concentrations of hyaluric acid and M proteins. Both were strong anti-phagocytes, interfering with Donnie’s immune system’s attempts to destroy the infection.
The protein analyzer showed the expected toxins and enzymes being made by the bacteria: Streptolysin O, Streptolysin S, erythrogenic toxin, streptokinase, streptodornase, proteinase. What was unusual was the startlingly high concentrations of the nastier toxins. And something else: a protein that the analyzer could not identify.
NAME: UNKNOWN
AMINO ACID COMPOSITION: NOT IN DATA BANK
FOLDING PATTERN: UNKNOWN
HAEMOLYSIS ACTION: UNKNOWN
And so on. A mutation. Doing what?
Making Donnie very sick. In ways no one could predict. Many bacterial mutations resulted in diseases no more or less virulent than the original…but not all mutations. Streptococcus pyogenes already had some very dangerous mutations, including a notorious “flesh-eating bacteria” that had ravaged an entire New York hospital two years ago and resulted in its being bombed by a terrorist group calling itself Pastoral Health.
“T4S,” Cassie said, hating that her voice shook, “the situation has changed. You—”
“No,” the AI said. “No. You still can’t leave.”
“We’re going to try something different,” Bollman said to Elya. She’d fallen asleep in the front seat of somebody’s car, only to be shaken awake by the shoulder and led to Agent Bollman on the far edge of the patio. It was just past noon. Yet another truck had arrived, and someone had set up more unfathomable equipment, a Porta-Potty, and a tent with sandwiches and fruit on a folding table. The lawn was beginning to look like some inept, bizarre midway at a disorganized fair. In the tent Elya saw Anne Millius, Donnie’s nanny, unhappily eating a sandwich. She must have been brought here for questioning about the castle, but all the interrogation seemed to have produced was the young woman’s bewildered expression.
From the music speaker came the same unvarying announcement in House’s voice that she’d fallen asleep to. “I will let the hostages go after I talk to the press,” T4S said from the music speaker above the patio. “I want the press to hear my story. That’s all I have to say. 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—”
Bollman said, “Ms. Seritov, we don’t know if Dr. Seritov is hearing our negotiations or not. Dr. McTaggart says the AI could easily put us on audio, visual, or both on any roomscreen in the house. On the chance that it’s doing that, I’d like you to talk directly to your sister-in-law.”
Elya blinked, only partly from sleepiness. What good would it do for her to talk to Cassie? Cassie wasn’t the one making decisions here. But she didn’t argue. Bollman was the professional. “What do you want me to say?”
“Tell Dr. Seritov that if we have to, we’re going in with full armament. We’ll bulldoze just the first floor, taking out the main processor, and she and the children will be safe in the basement.”
“You can’t do that! They won’t be safe!”
“We aren’t going to go in,” Bollman said patiently. “But we don’t know if the AI will realize that. We don’t know what or how much it can realize, how much it can really think for itself, and its creator has been useless in telling us.”
He doesn’t know either, Elya thought. It’s too new. “All right,” she said faintly. “But I’m not exactly sure what words to use.”
“I’m going to tell you,” Bollman said. “There are proven protocols for this kind of negotiating. You don’t have to think up anything for yourself.”
***
Donnie got no worse. He wasn’t any better either, as far as Cassie could tell, but he at least he wasn’t worse. He slept most of the time, and his heavy, labored breathing filled the lab. Cassie sponged him with cold water every fifteen minutes. His fever dropped slightly, to one hundred two, and didn’t spike again. The rash on his torso didn’t spread. Whatever this strain of Streptococcus was doing, it was doing it silently, inside Donnie’s feverish body.
She hadn’t been able to scream her frustration and fury at T4S, because of Janey. The little girl had been amazingly good, considering, but now she was growing clingy and whiny. Cartoons could only divert so long.
“Mommy, I wanna go upstairs!”
“I know, sweetie. But we can’t.”
“That’s a bad smart program to keep us here!”
“I know,” Cassie said. Small change compared to what she’d like to say about T4S.
“I wanna get out!”
“I know, Janey. Just a while longer.”
“You don’t know that,” Janey said, sounding exactly like Vlad challenging the shaky evidence behind a dubious conclusion.
“No, sweetie. I don’t really know that. I only hope it won’t be too long.”
“T4S,” Janey said, raising her voice as if the AI were not only invisible but deaf, “this is not a good line of action!”
Vlad again. Cassie blinked hard. To her surprise, T4S answered.
“I know it’s not a good line of action, Janey. Biological people should not be shut up in basements. But neither should machine people be killed. I’m trying to save my own life.”
“But I wanna go upstairs!” Janey wailed, in an abrupt descent from a miniature of her rationalist father to a bored six-year-old.
“I can’t do that, but maybe we can do something else fun,” T4S said. “Have you ever met Pranopolis yourself?”
“What do you mean?”
“Watch.”
The roomscreen brightened. Pranopolis appeared on a blank background, a goofy-looking purple creature from outer space. T4S had snipped out selected digital code from the movie, Cassie guessed. Suddenly Pranopolis wasn’t alone. Janey appeared beside her, smiling sideways as if looking directly at Pranopolis. Snipped from their home recordings.
Janey laughed delightedly. “There’s me!”
“Yes,” T4S said. “But where are you and Pranopolis? Are you in a garden, or your house, or on the moon?”
“I can pick? Me?”
“Yes. You.”
“Then we’re in Pranopolis’s space ship!”
And they were. Was T4S programmed to
do this, Cassie wondered, or was it capable of thinking it up on its own, to amuse a bored child? Out of what…compassion?
She didn’t want to think about the implications of that.
“Now tell me what happens next,” T4S said to Janey.
“We eat kulich.” The delicious Russian cake-bread that Vlad’s mother had taught Cassie to make.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what that is. Pick something else.”
Donnie coughed, a strangled cough that sent Cassie to his side. When he breathed again it sounded more congested to Cassie. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen. An antibiotic wasn’t available, but if she had even an anticongestant… or.…
“T4S,” she said, confident that it could both listen to her and create customized movies for Janey, “there is equipment in the locked storage cabinet that I can use to distill oxygen. It would help Donnie breathe easier. Would you please open the cabinet door?”
“I can’t do that, Mrs. Seritov.”
“Oh, why the hell not? Do you think I’ve got the ingredients for explosives in there, or that if I did I could use them down here in this confined space? Every single jar and vial and box in that cabinet is e-tagged. Read the tags, see how harmless they are, and open the door!”
“I’ve read the e-tags,” the AI said, “but my data base doesn’t include much information on chemistry. In fact, I only know what I’ve learned from your lab equipment.”
Which would be raw data, not interpretations. “I’m glad you don’t know everything,” Cassie said sarcastically.
“I can learn, but only if I have access to basic principles and adequate data.”
“That’s why you don’t know what kulich is. Nobody equipped you with Russian.”
“Correct. What is kulich?”
She almost snapped, “Why should I tell you?” But she was asking it a favor. And it had been nice enough to amuse Janey even when it had nothing to gain.
Careful, a part of her mind warned. Stockholm Syndrome, and she almost laughed aloud. Stockholm Syndrome described developing affinity on the part of hostages for their captors. Certainly the originators of that phrase had never expected it to be applied to a hostage situation like this one.
“Why are you smiling, Dr. Seritov?”
“I’m remembering kulich. It’s a Russian cake made with raisins and orange liqueur and traditionally served at Easter. It tastes wonderful.”
“Thank you for the data,” T4S said. “Your point that you would not create something dangerous when your children are with you is valid. I’ll open the storage cabinet.”
Cassie studied the lighted interior of the cabinet, which, like so much in the lab, had been Vlad’s. She couldn’t remember exactly what she’d stored here, beyond basic materials. The last few weeks, which were her first few weeks in the castle, she’d been working on the protein folding project, which hadn’t needed anything not in the refrigerator. Before that there’d been the hectic weeks of moving, although she hadn’t actually packed or unpacked the lab equipment. Professionals had done that. Not that making oxygen was going to need anything exotic. Run an electric current through a solution of copper sulfate and collect copper at one terminal, oxygen at the other.
She picked up an e-tagged bottle, and her eye fell on an untagged stoppered vial with Vlad’s handwriting on the label: Patton In A Jar.
Suddenly nothing in her mind would stay still long enough to examine.
Vlad had so many joke names for his engineered microorganism, as if the one Barr had given it hadn’t been joke enough…
The moving men had been told not to pack Vlad’s materials, only his equipment, but there had been so many of them and they’d been so young…
Both generators, main and back-up, probably had some components made of long-chain hydrocarbons; most petroleum plastics were just long polymers made up of shorter-chain hydrocarbons…
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, at 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 something playing reporters, to make the AI think 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 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…
