Small Miracles

by Edward M. Lerner

  “But not people who hate enough. They began designing bombs to arm when they detected jamming. If you can’t know how far away your target will be, and you don’t care who dies with your intended victim, you use a really big bomb. So Sladja’s fiancé was killed, and her closest friends, guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A café. Sladja would have died, too, except she was running late that day. And as for the political motorcade passing nearby, the evident target, the source of the jamming? Minor cuts and scrapes.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Kim said, uselessly. She was ignorant of so much history. And yet—

  A chill ran down her spine. “I understand, just a little.” She talked about the Virginia Tech shootings, and the panic that still came over her from time to time. “It was an isolated tragedy perpetrated by one unbalanced young man. To face random violence every day … Sladja, I never meant to stir up those old memories. I’ll leave you two alone.”

  “Please, no,” Sladja said. Vulnerability had replaced what Kim had so callously imagined to be a permanent scowl. “Kim, this was not your fault. You asked a perfectly natural question. I look forward to seeing you again.” She gave her husband a quick kiss. “I’m going to excuse myself.”

  “Thank you so much for having me.” Kim waited only until she heard a bedroom door shut before she stood. “Aaron, I’m truly sorry. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “I hate to put this on you, but Sladja will feel worse if you leave right away.”

  Kim winced. Now what? After plunging a foot in her mouth right up to the hip, she so wished she could talk to Nick. Beyond missing Nick—terribly—after so much time together, she needed some of his tact.

  So: Idle conversation and pretending nothing had happened? Who are you for in the Super Bowl? The stuff that usually fascinated her, geek stuff like operating systems and networking protocols, seemed so inconsequential. Bits and bytes: did they really matter?

  What did that leave?

  It left whatever might have gone wrong with the bots. (And gone wrong with Brent, who still insisted that nothing had? Sladja remained haunted, twenty years after a tragedy. Kim herself still had nightmares about the Tech shootings, when almost ten years ago she had been scarcely a bystander. So Brent had changed after Angleton. Why was she so certain the changes were anything more than a trauma not yet two years past, still working itself out?)

  The safety of bots, at least, wasn’t trivial. Kim sat back down. “I asked you earlier about Crystal and the company not yet contacting the FDA. You said, ‘Later.’”

  “It’s definitely later.” Aaron took one of the coffee cups. “Sure, why not. Crystal is deferring to Tyra, and she has been waiting for Charles—who, I heard late this afternoon, is finally coming back. He’ll be in the office tomorrow.”

  Good news at last! Crystal might be a brilliant researcher—Kim wasn’t qualified to judge—but as a decision maker, Crystal was in over her head. It should be easier to get action taken with the real department head on the job.

  Despite everything, the mental juxtaposition of Charles and Nick made Kim grin. Then another synapse fired. Or misfired. Kim lacked the knowledge to say which. Nick and his worries about replicating bots …

  “Aaron, I have a truly out-of-the-box thought. Bots can’t reproduce themselves, so the fears some people have about replicators are silly. Only …”—she swallowed hard, suddenly afraid this notion wasn’t silly at all—“considering what you and Crystal showed me today, maybe bots can stimulate synapses to massively replicate.

  “Just before Charles disappeared, when we got our first inkling of all this, you speculated that messenger molecules make bots look to neurons like other neurons. Isn’t it reciprocal? I mean, won’t the neurotransmitters the messengers are based on …”

  “Glutamate,” Aaron supplied.

  “Thanks. Wouldn’t the glutamate molecules released by neurons look to bots like signals from other bots? If I’m right, it wouldn’t be just bots stimulating neurons to form synapses. The neurons would be stimulating the bots to talk back, restimulating the neurons. Again and again, over and over. I’m thinking like an engineer here, but this strikes me as a scary positive feedback loop.”

  Aaron paused, his cup suspended in midair. He stared into space for a long time. “I’m awfully glad Charles is coming back. In biology, it sounds like a scary feedback loop, too.”

  tuesday, january 10, 2017

  Kim sat mute, numbed by two surprises too many—or was it only one? Could more than coincidence be at work here? Either way, Charles—who had, indeed, finally returned from vacation—and Tyra both now sported VR specs. Judging from the absence of other eyeglasses, Charles’s specs incorporated his prescription lenses. How much had that cost?

  The framed motivational posters and child’s crayon drawings with which Tyra had decorated her office glinted surreally from their mirrored lenses. Atom Ant, Charles had sneered two months earlier. That parking-lot conversation seemed simultaneously the blink of an eye and eons ago.

  Charles glowed from his four weeks on the beach. Tanned, rested, and ready. Who the heck said that? Kim wondered inanely. Someone before her time. Tricky Dick? Nixon, inexplicably, was her dad’s political idol.

  Tyra had changed her hairstyle for the new year, into something fluffy with full bangs. It did not work. Bangs and gray streaks was an odd choice.

  If not the specs, then it was Tyra and Charles’s harmony that had left Kim flummoxed. Charles’s first day away, Tyra, in this very office, had fumed at his no-notice departure. She had fretted about what bots might do in neural culture. Today, on Charles’s first day back, the two of them were somehow buddies, and Tyra could not have been quicker to support Charles’s every utterance. The gaming glasses, the reconciliation, and an about-face on the seriousness of the lab findings: why the sudden changes?

  Aaron arrived a minute after Kim, having also been summoned. (The strangeness seemed not to affect Aaron. Perhaps coping with patients in denial taught persistence.) He said, “Now that you’re back, Charles, we really must act upon the things we’ve learned. Bots from our present crop definitely stimulate synapse formation. They persist if they cross the BBB.”

  Charles rocked in his chair, smugger than ever. “Doing research is acting. We know more than the last time we spoke. That said, and with all due respect to our colleague, lab work is not Crystal’s strong suit. Aaron, I intend to continue this experiment for a few weeks, supervising it personally, before anything is said outside the company.”

  “I concur,” Tyra said immediately.

  “What about the upcoming trials?” Kim burst out. “What about Brent?”

  “Now, Kim,” Charles said condescendingly. “You talked to Brent about this. Tyra spoke with him. I sought him out first thing this morning. There’s nothing else to do.”

  How had Brent put it, that day at the Munson? Right: no earthly way to detect bot stragglers without putting my brain through a very fine sieve. But every time she saw Brent, he was more remote.

  Kim said, “Aren’t there tests for changes in behavior? Brain scans?”

  Charles and Tyra both froze for an instant, somewhere in cyberspace. “Maybe you’re thinking of an electroencephalogram,” Charles said, overenunciating. “That’s a test—”

  “I know what an EEG is,” Kim snapped. “Knowing what we know now, will an EEG reveal active bots in the brain?”

  “For someone with a sufficiently detailed baseline readout on file—maybe. Of course, not many people have baselines.” A cold silence implied Brent was not among the exceptions.

  Aaron cleared his throat. “I’ll want to get back to the bigger matter of the upcoming Army trials and FDA notification. But first, as to Brent’s situation, as to eliminating the possibility of residual bots active in his central nervous system, I had a thought.”

  “The suspense is killing me,” Tyra said dryly.

  Aaron ignored the sarcasm. “CAT and MRI scans reveal only anatomical detai
l. MEG fares best—”

  Charles had not finished being supercilious. “Brent has metal pins in his arm. Under the circumstances, an MRI would be uncomfortable, to say the least. It might even do damage.”

  “I wasn’t finished,” Aaron said mildly. “And I didn’t propose an MRI. MEG fares best with a baseline reading, much like an EEG does. Naturally, those methods won’t answer our questions. If Brent will agree to one, though, it occurs to me a PET scan might be instructive.” As an aside to Kim, Aaron added, “PET can contrast localized variations in metabolic activity. Remember the active synaptic regions around bots in the latest cultures? I’m speculating PET will pick up the associated metabolic increase.”

  “MEG” likely stood for “magnetoencephalogram,” Kim decided. EEGs measured electrical currents in the brain, and electric currents produced magnetic fields. She ransacked her memory, trying to remember what a PET scan was. Something about positron emission? She’d ask Aaron later, in private, rather than be condescended to again.

  Charles raised an eyebrow. “And if Brent disagrees, Aaron? Which, from my chat with him, I’m fairly certain will be the case. I certainly wouldn’t take a dose of radioisotopes to satisfy someone else’s curiosity, to look for something that’s almost certainly not there, something that—assuming, Doctor, you still believe in the BBB—can’t be there. Not to mention that, absent a baseline scan, you might not be able to detect any change.”

  “Maybe it’s time we establish some baselines,” Aaron answered mildly.

  “Doctor,” Charles said, “did Brent Cleary become your patient during my absence? No? I thought not. Then this debate ends now. For what it’s worth, I assure you Brent and I have discussed the latest lab results. That’s all anyone can do. End of conversation.”

  Kim refused to give up. “Charles, you implied EEGs can be instructive. Perhaps anyone chosen to take part in the upcoming Army trial should establish an EEG baseline first. That way, they can be monitored proactively for any brain-wave changes. Given the CSF surprise, the FDA might appreciate us having an independent check.”

  More cyberwithdrawal. Kim wondered: behind those damned mirrored specs, were Tyra and Charles IMing each other? There was no way to know.

  Tyra unfroze. “About that. As I said earlier, Charles should continue the lab experiment first, as he proposed.” Boss-imperative tones rang in her voice.

  One day back from vacation had hardly caught Kim up after her own absence. She tried to tread lightly. “I’m confused. How can we possibly not make that call? It’s not like we want bots getting into people’s heads. When I last spoke with Dan—”

  “Which you won’t be doing again,” Tyra said snippily. “There’s such a thing as the chain of command.”

  “Communications are pretty darn direct when Dan decides at the last minute to drag me out of town to a meeting!” The retort was out of Kim’s mouth faster than her better judgment could kick in. A clique was forming, and she wasn’t a member. She wondered if, in her absence, Dan had become another of the silver-spectacled.

  “Let’s all take a breath,” Aaron offered soothingly. “Tyra, Charles, there’s a core problem here. The data are what the data are. The FDA regs are what the FDA regs are.

  “So I ask you again: what are we going to do about what we’ve learned?”

  * * *

  Brent/One spread his/their attention across a dozen subjects, variously studying, analyzing, synthesizing, and extrapolating. The faster the thoughts came, the faster they wanted to go. Bots stimulating neurons stimulating bots stimulating neurons … it was a virtuous cycle making him/them ever more potent.

  His/their many trains of thought differed wildly, but they had this much in common: the accelerating rate with which each leapt from concept to concept, implication to inference, premise to proof. Data flowed across his/their field of vision in a dozen virtual streams, windows cycling between foreground and background as mood and need and eye flicks directed.

  Events continued to unfold according to plan.

  One window among the dozen monitored the gathering in Tyra’s office, the information arriving with painful slowness. For any serious purpose, speech as a mode of communication verged on annoying. Charles and Tyra flick/blink echoed their own words, and those of their disadvantaged colleagues, to text. Brent skimmed the transcript while he tended to more pressing matters. Kim and Aaron could have no idea Brent was in the loop.

  Aaron, whose persistence had become irritating. Sighing, Brent suspended several studies the better to guide his minions. And since he was practically reverting to single tasking, he might as well also get the tone-of-voice nuances of the conversation. Put me on speakerphone, Brent IMed to Tyra. I’m dialing from x302. Muted on my end.

  OK, she sent.

  Extension 302 was in Charles’s office. Behind its closed door Brent sat subtly altering Crystal’s lab files. Brent wondered if Charles remembered having revealed his department-level access codes. Charles/Two was even more supercilious than the original model; maintaining a bit of mystery was for the best.

  Brent’s call was answered immediately. To anyone seated across the desk from Tyra, impatiently speeding the incoming call on its way to voice mail and taking the call on speaker were indistinguishable: a single button pushed.

  “… Your worries are obsolete,” Tyra was saying. “While you and Charles lolled on your respective beaches, some of us were here working. Crystal now knows why the bot antigen coatings don’t dissolve in CSF. A CSF-only protein binds to the coating faster than the coating dissolves. She also identified a candidate new coating that dissolves in blood plasma and CSF. The coating is already FDA approved for medical use.”

  Tyra had hit the right notes, but Brent questioned her delivery. There was something to be said for watching people’s faces. Too bad he couldn’t see into the office. Well, he would “happen by” as soon as he finished corrupting Crystal’s data.

  Brent had had Tyra summon Aaron and Kim to assure that they weren’t online, that they couldn’t possibly witness how Brent now tainted the latest experiments. Crystal, for similar reasons, had been dispatched upstate by Charles to meet with a lab-supplies vendor. Others of the Emergent, meanwhile, were removing incriminating data backups from on-and off-site archives. If the safety-copy absences were somehow noticed before altered versions took their places, it would all be blamed on screwed-up media labeling and Crystal’s disorganization.

  Trashing the incriminating data would be easy, but also easy to spot. Subverting the data just enough to point it in a new direction was something quite different. Brent laid out the parameters of the task and let One turn those general ideas into software. Within seconds, the new program was available—within Brent’s head. He still had to key the code into a computer and find his typos.

  Subverting the test results was strictly an insurance policy: Kim and Aaron were unlikely to go outside the company. Not while the research results were going their way. Not in time to matter. Brent saw the changes through anyway, planning for every contingency, mitigating every risk. Insurance had its uses.

  Aaron said, “So why not contact the FDA? It sounds like we’re ready for animal trials with the new coating.”

  Delay costs lives, Brent IMed.

  “Because sometimes caution kills,” Tyra said. “Our bots work, or Brent wouldn’t be alive today. The Army wants their trial to move forward. They want this technology deployed.”

  “Because the brass doesn’t know the risks?” Kim asked skeptically. “Are they up-to-date?”

  Charles IMed Brent, These two are nuisances. We should act.

  Act, as in transform? When enough had Emerged, their superiority would be undeniable. Old-style people would transform by choice. Brent told himself Kim would be among them. No! Brent ordered. They’ll wait for Dan before they act.

  Dan, had he returned home, would have been transformed by now. Dan could have commanded what Brent and others must accomplish by indirection—but even to p
lan for Dan’s conversion abroad would have entailed on-site surveillance in unfamiliar surroundings, and unquantifiable risks. Security was Morgan’s purview and Morgan had advised against the attempt. Dan overseas, hobnobbing with Army brass, championing “the best nanotech on the planet,” his absence excusing various inactions here, served the Emergent nearly as well.

  Tyra took her cue. “Absolutely the brass are current, because Dan stayed in Europe after his ski trip. He’s been making the rounds of Army hospitals in Germany, greasing the skids for a bot field trial.” Tyra talked right over Kim’s objection. “Yes—without new FDA involvement. These will be overseas trials on overseas volunteers. A neat little jurisdictional loophole.”

  “The military plans to do an end run around the FDA?” Kim said. “Then notifying the FDA doesn’t jeopardize the field trial. That’s all the more reason to come clean.”

  Let’s just do it, Charles IMed. He was never one to take no for an answer.

  Do it: transform them. Brent would have had no qualms about assaulting Aaron—but Kim? Not while there were other options.

  No. Wait for me, Brent IMed to both. Have Tyra’s door open.

  * * *

  Tyra stood abruptly. “Is it me, or is it really stuffy in here?” She emerged from behind her desk to open her office door several inches. “That’s better.”

  Huh? This conversation wasn’t meant for random passersby. Kim cleared her throat. “I think I asked a fair question.”

  “Damned hot flashes.” Tyra returned to her chair and fanned her face with a slim folder. “Talk about unfair. Just you wait, Kim.”

  “I’m content to wait,” Charles said rather loudly.

  “Folks? About the FDA?” Kim asked. Through the slightly open door, motion caught her eye. She fell silent as someone skidded to a halt.