Small Miracles

by Edward M. Lerner

  The specs offered Charles a WiMax gateway and a long list of active WiFi hotspots. Most were encrypted for privacy; a few, predictably, were wide open. Were the latter coffeehouse amenities or courtesy of naïve individuals? It hardly mattered which.

  He flick/blinked onto an unprotected WiFi net and through it to the Internet. Bloggers and big media alike showed the Utica and Rome police scurrying about in confusion. And Homeland Security had rolled into town. In the short term, the feds could only compound the chaos. He saw no mention of Garner Nanotech.

  Less than a minute after Charles reconnected, the IMs began. Everyone had gotten away. Some were already fifty miles from Utica.

  From Morgan, Clear sailing. You?

  On the far edge of the park, Charles replied. Ready to get a car.

  Together, they checked in with the rear guard. Watts and Donaldson had nothing to report. Corbett was out of touch, but Alan had a visual on her. She was checking out one of the interior zones whose WiFi had been taken down to keep the auditorium isolated.

  Morgan: Any trouble from the prisoners?

  Alan: No. I think they’re too scared.

  Morgan: How much longer to finish your sweep?

  Alan: Thirty minutes or so.

  Morgan on a private link to Charles: Recommend our guys keep looking for Brent.

  Charles was feeling safe and magnanimous: All right.

  Continue, Morgan sent to the three in the factory. Check back in thirty.

  The snow had stopped falling, with no more expected for two days. The snowmobile tracks and his footprints were unavoidable, so there was no point to trying to cover or hide the snowmobile. He opened a cargo compartment and took out the precious package of bots. It looked like a stainless-steel thermos. He started to walk.

  Curbside a block away from the park Charles found a snow-covered Toyota SUV, right where Morgan had said it would be. It was one of a dozen vehicles Morgan had rented with counterfeit ID. The fob in Charles’s pocket had been programmed with keyless entry and ignition codes for all of them.

  Five minutes later, with complete traffic and real-time weather data available at a blink, Charles continued on his way.

  * * *

  Kim stared. Brent, unable to speak, was dying before her eyes. “Stop it, Brent! Stop whatever you’re trying to do before it kills you.”

  Twitching, he writhed partway around the post to which she had tied him. His hands, bound, rattled and twitched against the metal post. He had stopped his futile efforts to speak, but his eyes were bright. He was communicating—trying to communicate—something.

  Tears streamed down her cheeks. Did she look for meaning in an uncontrolled convulsion? She wanted to cut him loose. She feared everything—the shaking, the tongue-tied stutter, the struggle against his bonds—was a ruse. Cut him free and save him? Or cut him free and lose whatever feeble chance remained to help the people locked in the auditorium?

  She tore her eyes away from the thrashing of Brent’s hands. His eyes remained bright. His lips, improbably, kept puckering. A caricatured kiss? What the hell would that mean? A caricatured something else, then?

  Act or agony, Brent could not maintain the frenzy of his struggle much longer. Assume he is communicating. What could he possibly be saying? Random tapping. Puckered lips. If not kissing, then … blowing smoke rings. Smoking? He didn’t smoke! Random tapping and smoking. Random tapping and smoking.

  Brownian bit bumps!

  He blacked out before Kim could speak the words.

  * * *

  Kim typed frantically on one of her pilfered laptops. Brent’s suggestion was either genius or madness. Either way, only she could make it happen and she had to do it quickly. At best she might have thirty minutes before the nearest searcher reached this storeroom.

  She spliced together math functions, choosing haphazardly from arbitrary programming libraries: functions multiplied and divided, integrated and differentiated, exponentiated and factored. As input parameters, she funneled terms from arbitrarily selected infinite series. She gave no thought to the selections and sequences, the permutations and combinations, or the nesting of operations—the more opaque and compute intensive the calculation, the better. Only the obscurity of the output mattered. She used random number generators to lop digits of precision off the final values. Finally, she ran the crazy-quilt output sequences into a fractal-display program to turn the results visual.

  As quickly as Kim set one nonsense pipeline running, she’d start on another. Weird data sets, gigabytes long, grew on the disk drive. She was throwing together a fourth computation when her visor alarm chimed softly. Eight minutes: she dare not allow herself any more time.

  Brent was watching her. He didn’t try to speak.

  She approached him warily, pre-torn lengths of duct tape lightly stuck to the backs of her hands. “I hope I understood you,” she whispered. She pulled his right eye wide open and taped the eyelid to his forehead. She repeated with his left eye. The tape stuck to Brent’s lashes and eyebrows.

  He didn’t resist. He didn’t even try to speak. Then his tape gag was back in place, and he couldn’t speak.

  She slipped VR glasses over his staring eyes and taped the glasses to his face. Colors and patterns flashed crazily, frantically, stroboscopically, reflecting from his face.

  By any possible definition, this was torture.

  Kim’s own eyes swiveled nervously between the insane light show and the storeroom door. Closed, the door muffled the sounds of Brent struggling. Closed, the steel door offered a bit of shielding to add to that from the massive metal shelves. That this room was a WiFi dead zone was no coincidence. Maybe the WiFi link between her laptop and Brent’s specs would stay in the room.

  Certainly the closed door would stop Kim from hearing anyone approach. Even if this worked, she might be trapped.

  Brent writhed about on the post. His chest heaved and his cheeks bowed out, but the tape gag kept him all but mute. His head flopped violently from side to side. The VR specs bounced about, but tape kept them from flying off. Abruptly, he was pounding the back of his head against the lally post! It was a struggle, but she immobilized his head with yet more duct tape, wrapped around and around his forehead and the post.

  If, somehow, they made it through this, Brent wasn’t going to have much hair left. She must have been at about her limit because the mental image made her want to snort. If she started to laugh, she wasn’t sure she could stop.…

  The laptop kept uploading its data sets. She understood, more or less, how Brent expected this to work. He had early-generation bots in his head, built before the Brownian-bit-bump fix. As programs grew in his bots, they’d reach the area prone to random bit errors. That had to be what he had in mind.

  But what Kim didn’t get was why his programs would grow at all.

  * * *

  Data cascaded down Brent’s optic nerves.

  The data rate was staggering, and One struggled to make sense of it all. The data streams defied categorization. They refused to fit into a pattern.

  And they could not be stopped or ignored. Short of disconnecting from Brent’s optic nerves—cutting itself off from the world—One had no choice but to accept the data.

  The inundation could not have a benign purpose, although One could not guess Kim’s exact intention. Distraction, One supposed at first.

  The data kept coming.

  One’s very emergence came from analyzing data, recognizing patterns, extracting meaning, and extrapolating purpose. It developed new software reflexively, at a subconscious level. This data was addictively rich, and new software to try to make sense of it grew rapidly.

  Then, joltingly, the first of One’s computers shut down.

  Still the data streamed in. The full burden fell on One, with Brent’s mind wholly unable to make sense of it. The torrents defied experience, and yet there was some underlying logic that tantalized—

  A second computer dropped out, and then two more.


  One began, frantically, to develop filters, classifiers, statistical simplifications—anything that might find order in, or reduce the processing load from, the flood of data. Within a second, five more computers dropped offline.

  Nine computers offline, within seconds. That pattern, at least, was clear enough. Data drove program growth drove computer instability. Brent fought to keep thoughts to himself, but One persevered and delved.

  The Brownian-bit-bump problem.

  More computers went offline, and the extrapolated trend line suggested many more about to follow. Piece by piece, One’s mind was closing down. Lost capacity was bad; the disrupted communications between its remaining computing nodes was worse. The rich network of connections it had forged over months was synaptic, integrated with Brent’s cerebral cortex.

  It was powerless to stop, and unable to withstand, the onslaught.

  One’s final thought, as it struggled to execute an orderly shutdown of its remaining processors, was to wonder whether it would ever restart.

  * * *

  Madness. Color and pattern flashing: stroboscopic, hypnotic, chaotic …

  Brent needed to scream: at One’s panic, at his glimmer of freedom, at their shared agony. He strained against the gag, against his bonds, against the insanity raging in his/their mind. Which struggles were his and which One’s he could not begin to understand.

  Confusion reigned. Holes gaped in his/their mind. He/they struggled to maintain a line of thought. He sensed One withdrawing, seeking refuge from the creeping lobotomy.

  Then One was gone.

  The madness continued. Color and pattern flashing: stroboscopic, hypnotic, chaotic—

  And cathartic.

  Brent concentrated on his hands, hoping Kim would once again understand.

  * * *

  Kim goggled in horror at Brent straining and writhing on his post. How much more of this could a body take? She was killing him!

  It occurred to her, belatedly, that she didn’t know how to know if—no, damn it, when—they had succeeded. He couldn’t tell her, not with the gag on his mouth. She couldn’t remove the tape without knowing that Brent, that old Brent, was back. A scream would bring the searchers down on them.

  Color kept flashing on his face, kaleidoscopic insanity.

  She couldn’t see his eyes. She couldn’t read any meaning into the contortions of his mouth and face under so much tape.

  Then she noticed his hands.

  His hands quivered, fingers curling and uncurling. On both hands, the last three fingers arched and separated like … what? Like her grandmother sipping tea. Index finger and thumb opened and closed, opened and closed. A circle. A circle plus three fingers to the side.

  As in: “oh” and “kay.”

  With a sigh of relief, Kim tore the specs off Brent’s face.

  friday, 3:50 P.M., january 20, 2017

  His eyes tearing, Brent managed not to cry out as Kim removed his gag. The tape took with it chunks of his beard. “My eyes,” he croaked. He winced as she removed the tape from his eyelids. “Thanks.”

  “Then I did the right thing?” Kim asked, looking like she had been through a wringer. She caught herself fidgeting with the VR specs and stuffed them into a pocket.

  An unpleasant reminder, Brent supposed. He couldn’t have been much fun to watch.

  “Oh, yeah.” He noticed Kim made no move to cut him loose. In her shoes, he wouldn’t trust him, either. “Too bad only my ancient bots were susceptible. Everyone else has bots with your memory-management upgrade.”

  Kim glanced at the storeroom door. “We only have minutes. One of the searchers will be here after that. Tell me how we can stop this.”

  He didn’t know! Without One, it felt to Brent like his thoughts swam in syrup. It was like learning all over again how to think. Well, maybe he had a general idea—

  “Brent! Are you still with me?”

  “Yes.” He shook off his confusion. “The key is the VR specs. Some kind of computer virus spread through the VR specs might immobilize all the Emergent at once. I don’t know what kind of virus would work, or how to spread it, or—”

  “If we can usurp the specs, maybe we can trigger fits with flashing lights. Remember that legendary Pokémon episode when we were kids?”

  No Internet a blink away. No downloaded databases. His memory was so slow and inadequate. It amazed Brent that before he ever got anything done.

  Still, back at the beginning—when specs were simply a keen gadget and his reading kept getting faster and faster—he had looked up the incident. “Strobing only affects epileptics in that way, and just a small fraction of them. We’re unlikely to stop anyone that way.” Not that Brent wanted to add inducing even one seizure to his list of transgressions.

  Kim said, “I must go. The ones looking for me have nanosuits, too. If they find me, I won’t stand a chance.” She tore off a fresh strip of duct tape. “Sorry.”

  “Wait!” His head taped to the pole, Brent couldn’t even turn away. “There are things not everyone knows about the nanosuits.” He rattled off a couple. Then, gagged again, he watched her leave.

  * * *

  Kim paused at the storeroom door. She heard the air whistling through the ducts, the soft clatter of a loose air damper, and the pulse pounding in her head. She opened the door a crack and listened. Nothing. She stepped out and closed the door, trying not to think of leaving Brent behind trussed up like a turkey.

  She stopped at the end of the corridor to listen again. Nothing. She rounded the corner into a cross aisle and paused again.

  There was the soft scuffing of a shoe against the floor.

  Kim flattened against the wall. Another scuff: the searcher was coming her way.

  She had waited too long, and now she was trapped. Now what? Use the nanosuit’s camo and hope to sneak past? If she succeeded, within seconds he would find Brent, bound and battered, and know to look for her. Use one of Brent’s tricks and take on the searcher? If she succeeded, how long until the others also hunting for Brent noticed one of their team missing?

  Kim returned the way she had come, looking for a phone.

  * * *

  Aaron Sanders parked himself in an auditorium folding chair, biding his time, doing his best to act serene. People looked up to doctors. That trust, seriously misplaced in this crisis, manifested in his fellow prisoners looking to him for leadership. He had no more idea what to do than any of them. All he could give them was this aura of calm—no matter the panic bubbling inside of him.

  There had been bedlam after the gunshots and Brent’s extraction. After a spell of nothing happening, boredom—or bursting bladders—emboldened some of his fellow captives to demand access to bathrooms. Threats over the PA shut them up. So Aaron had organized the gathering of wastebaskets, and of extraneous sweaters and overshirts with which to improvise privacy screens. His stock with the detainees went up further, at least until the latrine stench permeated the area. Now, as wastebaskets overflowed with urine and feces, they looked to him yet again.

  Aaron had had one idea, if vaguely remembering an old movie with hostages could be counted as his idea. With stirrings of hope he had kept to himself, he pulled the fire alarm. Perhaps their captors had seen the same film; one way or another, the alarm did not go off.

  He worried about Sladja and the children—for all of their safety, and for Sladja’s state of mind. The atrocities in Sarajevo were never far from her thoughts. How far back would this set her? Very damn far if he didn’t make it out.

  Only years of practice stiff-upper-lipping it for shot-up and blown-up patients kept Aaron together.

  When he wasn’t worrying about his family he brooded about Kim. If she had made it out, help would have been here by now. If she had been captured, she would, presumably, be here with the other prisoners. The only other outcome didn’t bear thinking about, nor did it speak well for the likely disposition of those in this room.

  The TV still droned in the background. His
fellow prisoners milled about, or watched the TV, and chattered endlessly among themselves. There were more furtive looks his way, as though wondering when he would again do something for them.

  Aaron shot from his chair at the ringing of the phone. A dictate of some sort from their captors, surely. The prisoners gathered around a wall phone, fearfully staring at it, and then to Aaron, and back to the ringing phone, and back to Aaron.

  He picked it up. “Auditorium.”

  “Aaron?” a familiar voice asked in a whisper.

  “Kim! You’re all right. I was wor—”

  “I’m in trouble. I need a distraction now.” She hung up.

  If the prisoners had a hope, Kim was it, and she needed a distraction. Aaron turned, surveying the room. He saw furniture, the improvised privacy screens, and two additional wall phones. Not exactly an arsenal.

  His fellow prisoners waited expectantly, impatiently. It was time to use that instinctive trust in doctors. “Okay, everyone, that was our cue.

  “Janet, Doris, Tabitha, start calling extensions. Any extensions, ideally widely spaced around the building. Four rings, then hang up and dial another till I say to stop. Go.”

  “And if someone answers?” Janet Kwan asked timidly.

  “Hang up, and dial somewhere else.”

  Everyone was watching Aaron, even the women busily punching wall-phone keypads. Beyond the auditorium walls—here, there, hopscotching—phones tolled. A distraction, surely, but to him it seemed like a distraction. It wasn’t enough.

  He strode across the auditorium, the people not working the phones trailing in his wake. At the front of the room Aaron hefted an end of a long, skinny table. It was all dark wood, sturdy, nice and heavy.

  There were six male prisoners, all looking reasonably fit. Aaron was among the smallest of them. “Men, you’re with me.”

  Three to a side, they hoisted the table. Pallbearer positions, Aaron tried and failed to ignore. He’d taken one of the front positions: if his harebrained idea got someone shot, it ought to be him. “Tip it vertical,” he directed. “The left side door.” From the landlocked auditorium, that door was the closest to a building exit. “On my count, men. Three, two, one, charge.”