The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  But it had been Father who had inspired Leila to become a scientist, not a businessman like her brother or a political leader like her sister. Father, were he still alive, would be proud of her now. Pride was a temptation, even pride in one’s children, but it nonetheless warmed Leila’s heart.

  She sat, a slim, middle-aged, Chinese-born woman with smooth black hair, dressed in a blue lab coverall, and thought about the nature of pride.

  The programmable replicator, unlike its predecessors, would not be limited to nanocreating a single specific molecule. It was good to be able to create any molecule you needed or wanted, of course. The extant replicators, shaped by Chinese technology, had changed the face of the Earth. Theoretically, everyone now alive could be fed, housed, clad by nanotech. But in addition to the inevitable political and economic problems of access, the existing nanotech processes were expensive. One must create the assemblers, including their tiny self-contained programs; use the assemblers to create molecules; use other techniques, chemical or mechanical, to join the molecules into products.

  Now all that would change. The new KimWorks programmable replicator didn’t carry assembly instructions hardwired into it. Rather, it carried programmable computers that could build anything desired, including more of themselves, from the common materials of the earth. Every research lab in the world had been straining toward this goal. And Leila’s team had accomplished it.

  She sat on the bench closet to the egg. The sky arched above her, for the electromagnetic dome protecting KimWorks was invisible. Clear space had been left all around the object, except for a small flat stone visible from Leila’s bench. On the stone was engraved a verse from the Tao Te Ching, in both Chinese and English:

  THE WORDLESS TEACHING

  THE PROFIT IN NOT DOING—

  NOT MANY PEOPLE UNDERSTAND IT.

  Certainly, in all humility, Leila didn’t. Why send this egg from somewhere in deep space and have it do nothing for two and a half centuries? But that was the mystery, the power of the egg. That was why contemplating it filled her with peace.

  The others were still in nanoteam one’s lab building. Not many others; robots did all the routine work, of course, and only David and Chunquing and Rulan remained at the computers and stafils. It had taken Leila ten minutes to pass through the lab safeties, but she had suddenly wearied of the celebrations, the Chilean wine and holo congratulations from the CEO in Shanghai, who was her great-uncle. She had wanted to sit quietly in the cool sweet air of the garden, watching the long Minnesota twilight turn purple behind the egg. Shadow and curve, it was almost a poem … .

  The lab blew up.

  The blast threw Leila off her bench and onto the ground. She screamed and threw up one arm to shield her eyes. But it wasn’t necessary; she was shielded from direct line with the lab by the egg. And a part of her mind knew that there was no radiation anyway, only heat, and no flying debris, because the lab had imploded, as it was constructed to do. Something had breached the outer layers of sensors, and, in response, the ignition layer had produced a gas of metal oxides hot enough to vaporize everything inside the lab. No uncontrolled replicator must ever escape.

  To vaporize everything. The lab. The project. David, Chunquing, Rulan.

  Already, the site would be cooling. Leila staggered to her feet, and immediately was again knocked off them by an aftershock. It had been an earthquake, then, least likely of anticipated penetrations, but nonetheless guarded against. O, David, Chunquing, Rulan …

  “Dr. Kim! Are you all right?!” Keesha Ali, running toward her from Security. As her ears cleared, Leila heard the sirens and alarms.

  “Yes, I … Keesha!”

  “I know,” the woman said grimly. “Who was inside?”

  “David. Chunquing. Rulan. And the replicator project … an earthquake! Of all the bad luck of heaven …”

  “It wasn’t bad luck,” Keesha said. “We were attacked.”

  “Attacked—”

  “That was no natural quake. Security picked up the charge just seconds before it went off. In a tunnel underneath the lab, very deep, very huge. It not only breached the lab, it destroyed the dome equipment. We’re bringing the back-up on-line now. Meeting in Amenities in five minutes, Dr. Kim.”

  Leila stared at Keesha. The woman was American, of course, born here, with no Chinese ancestry. But surely even such people first mourned their dead … . Yes. They did, under normal circumstances. So something extraordinary was happening here.

  Leila was genemod for intelligence. She said slowly, “Data escaped.”

  “In the fraction of a second between breach and ignition,” Keesha said grimly, “while the dome was down, including, of course, the Faraday cage. They took the entire replicator project, Dr. Kim.”

  Leila understood what that meant, and her mind staggered under the burden. It meant that someone else had captured the other shimmering engineering prize. The replicator data had been heavily encrypted, and there had been massive amounts of it. Only another quantum computer could have been fast enough to steal that much data in the fraction of a second before ignition—or could have a hope of decrypting it. A quantum computer, able to perform trillions of computations per second, had been a reality for a generation now. But it could operate only within sealed parameters: magnetic fields. Optic cables.

  Qubit data, represented by particles with undetermined spin, were easily destroyed by contact with any other particles, including photons—ordinary sunlight. No one had succeeded in intrusive stealing of quantum data without destroying it. Not from outside the computer, and especially not over miles of open land.

  Until now. And anyone with a quantum computer that could do that was already a rival.

  Or a revolutionary.

  The first replicator bloom appeared within KimWorks three weeks later.

  It was Leila who first saw it: a dull, reddish-brown patch on the bright green genemod grass by Amenities. If it had been on the path itself, Leila would have thought she was seeing blood. But on grass … she stood very still and thought, No. It was a blight, some weird mutated fungus, a renegade biological … .

  She had worked too long in the sabotaged lab not to know what it was.

  Carefully, as if her arm bones were fragile, Leila raised her wrist to her mouth and spoke into her implanted comlink. “Code Heaven. Repeat, Code Heaven. Replicator escape at following coordinates. Security, nanoteam one—”

  There was no need to list everyone who should be notified. People began pouring out of buildings: some blank-faced, some with their fists to their mouths, some running, as if speed would help. People, Leila thought numbly, expressed fear in odd ways.

  “Dr. Kim?” It was a Grade 4 robotics engineer, a dark-skinned American man in an olive uniform. His teeth suddenly bared, very white in his face. “That’s it? Right there?”

  “That’s it,” Leila said, and immediately wanted to correct to That’s they. For by now, there were billions of the replicators, to be so visible. Busily creating more of themselves from the grass and ground and morning dew and whatever else lay in their path, each one replicating every five minutes if they were on basic mode. And why wouldn’t they be? They weren’t assembling anything useful, not now. Whoever had programmed Leila’s replicators had set them merely to replicate, chewing up whatever was in their path as raw materials, turning assemblers into tiny disassembling engines of destruction. “Don’t go any closer!”

  But of course, even a Grade 4 engineer knew better than to go close. Everyone inside this KimWorks facility understood the nature of the project, even if only a few could understand the actuality. Everyone inside was a trusted worker, a truth-drug-vetted loyalist.

  She looked at the reddish-brown bloom, which was doubling every five minutes.

  “You have detained everyone? Even those off duty?” asked the holo seated at the head of the conference table. Li Kim Lung, president of KimWorks, was in Shanghai, but his telepresence was so solid that it was an effort to remember
that. His dark eyes raked their faces, with the one exception of Leila’s. Out of family courtesy, he did not study her shame in the stolen uses of her creation.

  Security chief Samuel Wang said, “Everyone who has been inside KimWorks in the last forty-eight hours has been found and recalled, Mr. Li. Forty-eight hours is a three-fold redundancy; the bloom was started, according to Dr. Kim, no later than sixteen hours ago. No one is missing.”

  “Your physicians have started truth-testing?”

  “With the Dalton Corporation Serum Alpha. It’s the best on the market, sir, to a 99.9 confidence level. Whoever brought the replicator into the dome will confess.”

  “And your physician can test how many at once?”

  “Six, sir. There are 243 testees.” Wang did not insult Mr. Li by doing the math for him.

  “You are including the nanoteams and Security, of course?”

  “Of course. We—”

  “Mr. Wang.” A telepresence suddenly beside the security chief, a young man. Leila knew this not from his appearance—they all looked young, after all, what else were biomods for?—but from his fear. He had not yet learned how to hide it. “We have … we found … a body. A suicide. Behind the dining hall.”

  Wang said, “Who?”

  “Her name is—was—June Juana Selkirk. An equipment engineer. We’re checking her records now, but they look all right.”

  Mr. Li’s holo said dryly, “Obviously they are not all right, no matter what her DNA scan says.”

  Mr. Wang said, “Sir, if people are recruited by some other company or by some revolutionary group after they come to KimWorks, it’s difficult to discover or control. American freedom laws …”

  “I am not interested in American freedom laws,” Mr. Li said. “I am interested in whom this woman was working for, and why she planted our own product inside KimWorks to destroy us. I am also interested in knowing where else she may have planted it before she killed herself. Those are the things I am interested in, Mr. Wang.”

  “O, yes,” Wang said.

  “I do not want to destroy your facility in order to stop this sabotage, Mr. Wang.” Mr. Wang said nothing. There was, Leila thought, nothing to say. No one was going to be allowed to leave the facility until this knot had been untied. Even the Americans accepted this. No one wanted military intervention. That truly might destroy the entire company.

  Above all, no one wanted a single submicroscopic replicator to escape the dome. The arithmetic was despairingly simple. Doubling every five minutes, unchecked replicators could reduce the entire globe to rubble in a matter of days.

  But it wasn’t going to come to that. The bloom had been “killed” easily enough. Replicators weren’t biologicals, but rather tiny computers powered by nanomachinery. They worked on a flow of electrons in their single-atom circuitry. An electromagnetic pulse had wiped out their programming in a nanosecond.

  The second bloom was discovered that night, when a materials specialist walking from the dining hall to the makeshift dorms stepped on it. The path was floodlit, but the bloom was still small and faint, and the man didn’t know his boot had made contact.

  Some replicators stuck to his boot sole. Programmed to break down any material into usable atoms for construction, they ate through his boot. Then, doubling every five minutes, they began on his foot.

  He screamed and fell to the floor of the dorm, pulling at his boot. Atoms of tissue, nerve cell, bone, were broken at their chemical bonds and reconfigured. No one knew what was happening, or what to do, until a physician arrived, cursed in Mandarin, and sent for an engineer. By the time equipment had been brought in to encase the worker in a magnetic field, he had fainted from the pain, and the leg had to be removed below the knee.

  A new one would be grown for him, of course. But the nanoteam met immediately, and without choice.

  Leila said, “We must use a massive EMP originating in the dome itself.”

  Samuel Wang said, “But, Dr. Kim—”

  “No objections. Yes, it will destroy every electronic device we have, including the quantum computer. But no one will die.”

  Mr. Li’s telepresence said, “Do so. Immediately. We can at least salvage reputation. No one outside the dome knows of this.”

  It was not a question, but Wang, eyes downcast, answered it like one. “O, no, Mr. Li.”

  “Then use the EMP. Following, administer a forty-eight-hour amnesia block to everyone below Grade 2.”

  “Yes,” Wang said. He knew what was coming. Someone must bear responsibility for this disaster.

  “And administer it also to yourself,” Mr. Li said. “Dr. Kim, see that this is done.”

  “O, yes,” said Leila. It was necessary, however distasteful. Samuel Wang would be severed from KimWorks. Severed people sometimes sought revenge. But without information, Wang would not be able to seek revenge, or to know why he wanted to. He would receive a good pension in return for the semi-destruction of his memory, which would in turn cause the complete destruction of his career.

  Leila made her way to the meditation garden. Most people would wait indoors for the EMP; strange how human beings sought shelter within walls, even from things they knew walls could not affect. Leila’s brain would be no more or less exposed to the EMP in the garden than inside a building. She would experience the same disorientation, and then the same massive lingering headache as her brain fought to regain its normal patterns of nerve firing.

  Which it would do. The plasticity of the brain, a biological, was enormous. It was not so with computers. All microcircuitry within the dome would shortly be wiped of all data, all programming, and all ability to recover. This was not the only KimWorks facility, of course, but it was the flagship. Also, it was doing the most advanced physical engineering, and Leila wasn’t sure how the company as a whole, her grandfather’s company, would survive the financial loss.

  She sat in the floodlit meditation garden and waited, staring at the egg. The night was clear, and when the floodlights failed, moonlight would edge the egg. Probably it would be beautiful. Twenty minutes until the EMP, perhaps, or twenty-five.

  What would Lao Tzu have said of all this?

  “To bear and not to own; to act and not lay claim; to do the work and let it go—”

  There was a reddish-brown stain spreading under the curve of the egg.

  Leila walked over, careful not to get too close, and squatted on the grass for a better look. The stain was a bloom. The replicators, mindless, were spreading in all directions. Leila shone her torch under the curve of the egg. Yes, they had reached the place where the egg’s curved surface met the ground.

  Was the egg’s outer shield, its nature still unknown after 257 years, composed of something that could be disassembled into component particles? And if so, what would the egg do about that?

  Swiftly Leila raised her wristlink. “Code Heaven to Security and all nanoteams. Delay EMP. Again: delay the EMP! Come, please, to the southeast side of the space egg. There is a bloom attacking the egg … come immediately!”

  Cautiously, Leila lowered herself flat on the grass and angled her torch under the egg. Increasing her surface area in contact with the ground increased the chance of a stray replicator disassembling her, but she wanted to see as much as possible of the interface between egg and ground.

  Wild hope surged in her. The space egg might save KimWorks, save Samuel Wang’s job, thwart their industrial rival. Surely those alien beings who had built it would have built in protection, security, the ability to destroy whatever was bent on the egg’s destruction? There was nothing in the universe, biological or machine, that did not contain some means to defend itself, even if it was only the cry of an infant to summon assistance.

  Was that what would happen? A cry to summon help from beyond the stars?

  Leila was scarcely aware of the others joining her, exclaiming, kneeling down. Bringing better lights, making feverish predictions. She lay flat on the grass, watching the bloom of tiny mechanical creatu
res she herself had created as they spread inexorably toward her, disassembling all molecules in their path. Spreading toward her, spreading to each side—

  But not spreading up the side of the egg. That stayed pristine and smooth. So the shield was a force field of incredible hardness, not a substance. The solution to the old puzzle stirred nothing in Leila. She was too disappointed. Irrationally disappointed, she told herself, but it didn’t help. It felt as if something important, something that held together the unseen part of the world that she had always believed just as real as the seen, had failed. Had dissolved, taking with it illusions that she had believed as real as bone and blood and brain.

  They waited another hour, until they could wait no more. The egg did not save anything. KimWorks Security set the dome to emit an EMP, and everything in the facility stopped. Several billion credits of equipment became scrap. Leila’s headache, even with the drugs given out by the physician, lasted several hours. When she was allowed to leave the facility, she went home and slept for fourteen hours, awaking with an ache not in her head but in her chest, as if something vital had been removed and taken apart.

  Two weeks later, the first bloom appeared near Duluth, over sixty miles away. It appeared outside a rival research facility, where it was certain that someone would recognize what they were looking at. Someone did, but not until two people had stepped in the bloom, and died.

  Leila flew to Duluth. She was met by agents of both the United States Renewed Government and the Chinese-American Alliance, all of whom wanted to know what the hell was going on. They were appalled to find out. Why hadn’t this been reported to the Technology Oversight Office before now? Did she understand the implications? Did she understand the penalties?