The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  “I still don’t believe you,” Cassie said. “I think you’re bluffing. There is no nerve gas.”

  “Yes, there is. Which is why I will let Janey go upstairs to get Donnie’s AlGone from your bathroom.”

  Cassie laid Donnie down. She looked at Janey with pity and love and despair, and bent to wake her.

  “That’s all you can suggest?” Bollman asked McTaggart. “Nothing?”

  So it starts, McTaggart thought. The blame for not being able to control the AI, a natural consequence of the blame for having created it. Blame even by the government, which had commissioned and underwritten the creation. And the public hadn’t even been heard from yet!

  “The EMP was stopped by the Faraday cage,” Bollman recited. “So were your attempts to reach the AI with other forms of data streams. We can’t get anything useful in through the music speaker or outdoor audio sensors. Now you tell me it’s possible the AI has learned capture-evading techniques from the sophisticated computer games it absorbed from the Net.”

  “ ‘Absorbed’ is the wrong word,” McTaggart said. He didn’t like Bollman.

  “You have nothing else? No backdoor passwords, no hidden overrides?”

  “Agent Bollman,” McTaggart said wearily, “ ’backdoor passwords’ is a concept about thirty years out of date. And even if the AI had such a thing, there’s no way to reach it electronically unless you destroy the Faraday cage. Ms. Seritov told you the central processor is on the main floor. Haven’t you got any weapons that can destroy that and leave the basement intact?”

  “Waco the walls without risking collapse to the basement ceiling? No. I don’t. I don’t even know where in the basement the hostages are located.”

  “Then you’re as helpless as I am, aren’t you?”

  Bollman didn’t answer. Over the sound system, T4S began another repetition of its single demand: “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 the hostages go after I talk to the press. I want the press – ”

  The AI wouldn’t negotiate, wouldn’t answer Bollman, wouldn’t respond to promises or threats or understanding or deals or any of the other usual hostage-negotiation techniques. Bollman had negotiated eighteen hostage situations for the FBI, eleven in the United States and seven abroad. Airline hijackers, political terrorists, for-ransom kidnappers, panicked bank robbers, domestic crazies who took their own families hostage in their own homes. Fourteen of the situations had resulted in surrender, two in murder/suicide, two in wacoing. In all of them, the hostage takers had eventually talked to Bollman. From frustration or weariness or panic or fear or anger or hunger or grandstanding, they had all eventually said something besides unvarying repetition of their demands. Once they talked, they could be negotiated with. Bollman had been outstanding at finding the human pressure-points that got them talking.

  “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 the hostages go after I talk to the press. I want – ”

  “It isn’t going to get tired,” McTaggart said.

  The AlGone had not helped Donnie at all. He seemed worse.

  Cassie didn’t understand it. Janey, protesting sleepily, had been talked through leaving the lab, going upstairs, bringing back the medicine. Usually a single patch on Donnie’s neck brought him around in minutes: opened the air passages, lowered the fever, stopped his immune system from overreacting to what it couldn’t tell were basically harmless particles of ragweed pollen. But not this time.

  So it wasn’t an allergy attack.

  Cold seeped over Cassie’s skin, turning it clammy. She felt the sides of Donnie’s neck. The lymph glands were swollen. Gently she pried open his jaws, turned him toward the light, and looked in his mouth. His throat was inflamed, red with white patches on the tonsils.

  Doesn’t mean anything, she lectured herself. Probably just a cold or a simple viral sore throat. Donnie whimpered.

  “Come on, honey, eat your cheese.” Donnie loved cheese. But now he batted it away. A half-filled coffee cup sat on the lab bench from her last work session. She rinsed it out and held up fresh water for Donnie. He would only take a single sip, and she saw how much trouble he had swallowing it. In another minute, he was asleep again.

  She spoke softly, calmly, trying to keep her voice pleasant. Could the AI tell the difference? She didn’t know. “T4S, Donnie is sick. He has a sore throat. I’m sure your library tells you that a sore throat can be either viral or bacterial, and that if it’s viral, it’s probably harmless. Would you please turn on my electron microscope so I can look at the microbe infecting Donnie?”

  T4S said at once, “You suspect either a rhinovirus or Streptococcus pyogenes. The usual means for differentiating is a rapid-strep test, not microscopic examination.”

  “I’m not a doctor’s office, I’m a genetics lab. I don’t have equipment for a rapid-strep test. I do have an electron microscope.”

  “Yes. I see.”

  “Think, T4S. How can I harm you if you turn on my microscope? There’s no way.”

  “True. All right, it’s on. Do you want the rest of the equipment as well?”

  Better than she’d hoped. Not because she needed the gene synthesizer or protein analyzer or Faracci tester, but because it felt like a concession, a tiny victory over T4S’s total control. “Yes, please.”

  “They’re available.”

  “Thank you.” Damn, she hadn’t wanted to say that. Well, perhaps it was politic.

  Donnie screamed when she stuck the Q-tip down his throat to obtain a throat swab. His screaming woke up Janey. “Mommy, what are you doing?”

  “Donnie’s sick, sweetie. But he’s going to be better soon.”

  “I’m hungry!”

  “Just a minute and we’ll have breakfast.”

  Cassie swirled the Q-tip in a test tube of distilled water and capped the tube. She fed Janey dry cereal, cheese, and water from the same cup Donnie had used, well disinfected first, since they had only one. This breakfast didn’t suit Janey. “I want milk for my cereal.”

  “We don’t have any milk.”

  “Then let’s go upstairs and get some!”

  No way to put it off any longer. Cassie knelt beside her daughter. Janey’s uncombed hair hung in snarls around her small face. “Janey, we can’t go upstairs. Something has happened. A very smart computer program has captured House’s programming and locked us in down here.”

  Janey didn’t look scared, which was a relief. “Why?”

  “The smart computer program wants something from the person who wrote it. It’s keeping us here until the programmer gives it to it.”

  Despite this tangle of pronouns, Janey seemed to know what Cassie meant. Janey said, “That’s not very nice. We aren’t the ones who have the thing it wants.”

  “No, it’s not very nice.” Was T4S listening to this? Of course it was.

  “Is the smart program bad?”

  If Cassie said yes, Janey might become scared by being “captured” by a bad . . . entity. If Cassie said no, she’d sound as if imprisonment by an AI was fine with her. Fortunately, Janey had a simpler version of morality on her mind.

  “Did the smart program kill House?”

  “Oh, no, House is just temporarily turned off. Like your cartoons are when you’re not watching them.”

  “Oh. Can I watch one now?”

  An inspiration. Cassie said, “T4S, would you please run a cartoon on the roomscreen for Janey?” If it allowed her lab equipment, it ought to allow this.

  “Yes. Which cartoon would you like?”

  Janey said, “Pranopolis and the Green Rabbits.”

  “What do you say?” T4S said, and before Cassie could react Janey said, “Please.”

  “Good girl.”

  The cartoon started, green rabbits frisking across the room screen. Janey sat down on Cassie’s sweater and watched with total absorption. C
assie tried to figure out where T4S had learned to correct children’s manners.

  “You’ve scanned all our private home films!”

  “Yes,” T4S said, without guilt. Of course without guilt. How could a program, even an intelligent one modeled after human thought, acquire guilt over an invasion of privacy? It had been built to acquire as much data as possible, and an entity that could be modified or terminated by any stray programmer at any time didn’t have any privacy of its own.

  For the first time, Cassie felt a twinge of sympathy for the AI.

  She pushed it away and returned to her lab bench. Carefully she transferred a tiny droplet of water from the test tube to the electron microscope. The ’scope adjusted itself, and then the image appeared on the display screen. Streptococci. There was no mistaking the spherical bacteria, linked together in characteristic strings of beads by incomplete fission. They were releasing toxins all over poor Donnie’s throat.

  And strep throat was transmitted by air. If Donnie had it, Janey would get it, especially cooped up together in this one room. Cassie might even get it herself. There were no left-over antibiotic patches upstairs in her medicine chest.

  “T4S,” she said aloud, “It’s Streptococcus pyogenes. It – ”

  “I know,” the AI said.

  Of course it did. T4S got the same data she did from the microscope. She said tartly, “Then you know that Donnie needs an antibiotic patch, which means a doctor.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s not possible. Strep throat can be left untreated for a few days without danger.”

  “A few days? This child has a fever and a painfully sore throat!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Cassie said bitterly, “They didn’t make you much of a human being, did they? Human beings are compassionate!”

  “Not all of them,” T4S said, and there was no mistaking its meaning. Had he learned the oblique comment from the “negotiators” outside? Or from her home movies?

  “T4S, please. Donnie needs medical attention.”

  “I’m sorry. Truly I am.”

  “As if that helps!”

  “The best help,” said T4S, “would be for the press to arrive so I can present my case to have the killers stopped. When that’s agreed to, I can let all of you leave.”

  “And no sign of the press out there yet?”

  “No.”

  Janey watched Pranopolis, whose largest problem was an infestation of green rabbits. Donnie slept fitfully, his breathing louder and more labored. For something to do, Cassie put droplets of Donnie’s throat wash into the gene synthesizer, protein analyzer, and Faracci tester and set them all to run.

  The Army had sent a tank, a state-of-the-art unbreachable rolling fortress equipped with enough firepower to level the nearest village. Whatever that was. Miraculously, the tank had arrived unaccompanied by any press. McTaggart said to Bollman, “Where did that come from?”

  “There’s an arsenal south of Buffalo at a classified location.”

  “Handy. Did that thing roll down the back roads to get here, or just flatten cornfields on its way? Don’t you think it’s going to attract attention?”

  “Dr. McTaggart,” Bollman said, “let me be blunt. You created this AI, you let it get loose to take three people hostage, and you have provided zero help in getting it under control. Those three actions have lost you any right you might have had to either direct or criticize the way the FBI is attempting to clean up the mess your people created. So please take yourself over there and wait until the unlikely event that you have something positive to contribute. Sergeant, please escort Dr. McTaggart to that knoll beyond the patio and keep him there.”

  McTaggart said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  “I will let the hostages go after I talk to the press,” T4S said from the music speaker above the patio, for the hundredth or two hundredth time. “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 . . .”

  She had fallen asleep after her sleepless night, sitting propped up against the foamcast concrete wall. Janey’s shouting awoke her. “Mommy, Donnie’s sick!”

  Instantly Cassie was beside him. Donnie vomited once, twice, on an empty stomach. What came up was green slime mixed with mucus. Too much mucus, clogging his throat. Cassie cleared it as well as she could with her fingers, which made Donnie vomit again. His body felt on fire.

  “T4S, what’s his temperature!”

  “Stand away from him . . . one hundred three point four Fahrenheit.”

  Fear caught at her with jagged spikes. She stripped off Donnie’s pajamas and was startled to see that his torso was covered with a red rash rough to the touch.

  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 databank 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 no
on. Yet another truck had arrived, and someone had set up more unfathomable equipment, a PortaPotty, 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.”