Artificial Evolution

by Joseph R. Lallo

  He dropped the leash and started to stalk back and forth, ranting as Squee obediently sat and watched him.

  “I can’t even remember the last time we were together when it wasn’t finagled around her schedule or about helping her out. She’s constructing this whole life where I’m just… the helper… guy. Meanwhile, I’ve got a once-in-a-lifetime chance at my fingertips, a chance to get back into the one thing I’ve ever really had a chance to be remembered for, and I’m afraid to mention it because there are mobsters involved and that just happens to be her big no-no. Well, what if hanging out around a place terrorists want to blow up is my big no-no? Does that matter? No. What the hell kind of one-sided nonsense is this? Why is she free to risk her life, and mine right along with it, but I can’t take a few chances of my own?” He looked at Squee, who was still staring at him evenly. “Well, you know what? If she just gets to go do her thing and it doesn’t matter what I say about it, then I might as well do that too, right? You know what that’s called? That’s called fair! Let’s try fair for a change.”

  Lex removed the business card from his pocket and gave himself a few moments to focus his eyes, then thumbed out the contact info. In his current state of mind, it was not an effortless process.

  “Frickin’ analog business cards,” he muttered after a fourth typo.

  Finally he got the contact info right, and the connection began to negotiate. No one answered, and the slidepad displayed a screen featuring the same logo as the one on Ms. Misra’s business card. It was offering him the chance to leave a text, audio, or video message. He mashed his finger against the screen and put the device to his ear.

  “Ms. Misra. Preethy. Hey, listen. I’ve been giving it some thought. The racing thing. That you want me to do. For your league. And I’m thinking, yeah, let’s talk about it. Send me some contracts and stuff. It’s been too long since I burned up a track, and I think it’s time to get back at it. Let’s roll on that. Boom.”

  He took the slidepad away from his head and tapped “Send,” a moment later realizing that it had been recording video. His message was therefore accompanied by a video of the side of his head.

  “Eh.” He shrugged. “She’ll figure it out. Okay. I’m done waiting for a phone call. Come on, Squee, we’re going back to the hotel.” He picked the leash back up and took a few steps down the path, then stopped and looked around. “Uh… you don’t happen to remember which way the hotel is, do you? Take me to Mitch.”

  Squee stood, yawned, and rustled her tail, then led him with obvious purpose down a path toward the street.

  “Man, if this works, you are officially the best pet ever.”

  #

  In the laboratory, Dr. Dreyfus was burning the midnight oil. His call to Ms. Modane had been a long and astoundingly enlightening experience. The woman, in addition to absorbing information with an efficiency that he could only dream of in his grad students, was encyclopedic in her knowledge of contractual loopholes. It was an indispensable skill when one was interested in extracting information from enterprises dedicated to concealing it, she assured him, and between her and her assistant they possessed an almost lawyerly knowledge of such things. The pair of journalists had helped him to identify a number of potential weaknesses in the wording of the contract that suggested the data he had unearthed thus far could be retained by the lab. Crucial for her own purposes, she theorized that said data could then be summarized, edited, and reported just as though they were any other laboratory findings. It would take some legal chicanery, but this would be far from the first time he’d been forced to call upon the services of a lawyer to complete his research.

  Ms. Modane had insisted he find the original copies of the relevant contracts, since laboratory policy required hard copy with an ink signature. It was a long shot, but the copy might contain some language that was still more ambiguous than the digital document. She had claimed that a poorly printed contract with a missing comma had recently been the opening that facilitated an exposé. Unfortunately, while he kept quite a tidy filing system for his scientific findings, his legal documents were part of a disorderly archive in the records department. The lighting there, provided by horribly inadequate wall sconces, cast shadows over the contents of the drawers. In order to make out the printed labels, he had resorted to a hefty emergency flashlight.

  “Let’s see… we signed that about four years ago. That would put it…” he muttered, leafing through folders. He leaned forward—a tricky thing to do in his hover rig—and inspected a label just as the lights around him flickered and shut off. “That’s odd.”

  He drifted to the switch and flicked it a few times, but it did no good. For a few moments he fumbled for his slidepad, but he stopped when he realized something even more unusual. Aside from his flashlight, there were no lights at all. In a power outage the emergency lights would have come up immediately. As he pondered this curiosity, his slidepad chirped.

  “Dr. Dreyfus,” he answered.

  “Doctor, this is Louis Dunlap, down in maintenance. We’ve got a problem we need your permission to deal with.” The audio of the connection was oddly flat, and the video was pixelated and jittery.

  “What is it?”

  “We’re experiencing a power drain. A big one. The internal data network is down, everything. Gotta put the radios on direct connect to even talk to you. Since it didn’t flip any circuit breakers, we’ve got to assume the drain is on one of the direct lines. Only three labs have access to one, and yours is the only one active right now.”

  “Are you telling me something in my lab is pulling enough current to black out the rest of the facility?”

  “That’s right, sir. We’ve already had to wave off three calls from the lockdown crew in Gloria because of signal losses. We’d like your permission to cut the connection.”

  “You have it, absolutely.”

  “Do it, Patty!” the maintenance man yelled.

  A distant hum rumbled for a few seconds, then the lights came back.

  “Okay, that did it,” said Dunlap. “Next time you are going to run an experiment that will pull that kind of amperage, you need to make sure to get a requisition form in with us. This is going to cause all sorts of problems around the lab, Doctor.”

  “I didn’t have any experiments planned. My lab is off limits pending the arrival of military oversight. We don’t even have any equipment hooked up to the direct line.”

  “Then there might have been a short, which means we could be looking at a fire. We’ve got a fault code on the fire suppression system, so if there was one, we wouldn’t know about it. And according to the security rating on your lab right now…”

  “I know, I know. I’m the only one on staff with authorization to check it out.”

  “That’s right.”

  “All right, I’m on my way to the lab. Bring a few fire extinguishers to the entryway. Do you know if security has been alerted?”

  “Oh yeah, they know about it. They’re breathing down our necks about getting surveillance back up.”

  “Good. Thanks for contacting me.”

  He closed the connection and shoved the pad into his pocket, reaching down to flick a control on his rig to increase the max speed. The hover modules took on a brighter glow, and he was whisked down the hallway faster than he would have been able to run if he’d had use of his legs. Insane as it was, the security in high-profile laboratories often created situations such as this, where even a minor janitorial task would have to be handled by a person with three doctorates or a half-century in the armed forces. The alternative was trusting an entry-level employee with the top secrets of the entire facility.

  Of course, this was not a minor janitorial task.

  The specimen was still in his lab, and by military order it had been without human supervision for the last few hours. They had only begun to study it. If there was a fire, the greatest find of his career could be lost before it could give up any of its secrets. He reached the elevator—which predi
ctably wouldn’t respond to the call button—and abandoned it for the stairs. It only took a few seconds to drift up a handful of flights to the main research level, yet another benefit of his mobility device. When he burst through the doors, he found the security night shift swarming the floor, flashlights still out and guns conspicuously displayed. Dreyfus rushed down the hall to the door of his lab. A small maintenance team was there, each with fire suppression gear. There was also the imposing figure of the night security chief, Rebecca Saunders. She was blocking the way, a high-caliber rifle in her hand and a very serious look on her face.

  “Dr. Dreyfus,” said the night security chief, “in accordance with security protocol 0, I need to know a few things before I will allow you to open that door.”

  “Of course, of course. But please hurry.”

  One of the other side effects of working on military projects was the very real threat that some of those projects might pose in the event something went wrong. In emergencies such as this, the lab had a special protocol, protocol 0, to ensure that the security staff would be prepared to deal with the consequences. It permitted an armed response team to have some basic questions relevant to defense and containment answered, regardless of security clearance.

  “Does the laboratory contain a toxic chemical agent, a radiation hazard, or a biological contagion?”

  “No. Chief, before the security rating changed, you had been fully briefed on the contents of the lab. You know what is in there.”

  “If the security rating changed, then the contents may have changed as well. Now, does the laboratory contain anything that could be considered to be autonomous?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is this autonomous experiment mobile?”

  “Minimally.”

  “Is it armed or weaponized?”

  “Not to our current knowledge. Please hurry.”

  “Is it nanoscale?”

  “No.”

  “Would you confirm that if suppression is perceived to be necessary, small arms and standard energy weapons will be sufficient to incapacitate or deactivate it?”

  “Certainly,” he said.

  The security chief pulled a bulky secure radio from her belt. “Standard arms, high alert.” She stepped aside. “Go ahead, Doctor.”

  Dreyfus nodded and grabbed a fire extinguisher from one of the maintenance men, then moved past the outer door. The security locks were on their own isolated power supplies and were unaffected by the power issue. He scanned himself in and listened as the internal motor disengaged the door lock. The door slid open, revealing the lab to be entirely dark. He shut the door behind him. The air had a chemical smell to it, one that Dr. Dreyfus recognized as refrigerant. Aside from a hissing noise, likely the coolant leak he was smelling, there was not a whisper of sound. This was worrying, as at any given moment close to a dozen instruments should be humming and beeping away, taking measurements and updating displays. There wasn’t so much as the glow of an LED.

  “Light level twenty-five percent,” he commanded. The lab remained dark. He pulled out his slidepad and keyed the push-to-talk mode, then clicked on his flashlight. “Did you cut all power to my lab, or just the direct line?”

  “Just the direct line. We had to reset some breakers, but the power should be up for the lab by now,” replied a member of the maintenance crew.

  “I’ve got no lights.” He turned the beam of the flashlight to the ceiling and quickly discovered the reason for the darkness. “Something’s happened.”

  “What is the nature of the situation?” This time it was the security chief.

  “I’m seeing massive damage to infrastructure. The lights are entirely missing. Lamps, fixtures, everything. It looks like they were chiseled out of the ceiling.” He swept the flashlight slowly across the room. “The lab stations are picked clean, too. Monitors, instruments, desks, chairs… even most of the floor grating is gone.” He drifted out over one of the larger swaths of missing floor and turned the light to the central enclosure. “I can confirm a breach. Repeat, I can confirm a breach.”

  As with the lights and equipment, there was very little left to suggest the enclosure had ever been there. Every shred of glass and metal was missing. All that remained was a scattering of the gravel and flora brought from the planet around a large hole in the floor of the lab.

  “It looks like the quick release let go, but the blast doors didn’t engage. There must have been a malfunction. Even with the top-level security in place, automated alarms should have gone off the instant that happened.”

  “Dr. Dreyfus, I must insist that you evacuate the laboratory so that we can engage a full lockdown,” the security chief stated.

  “In a moment,” he replied. He drifted over the hole in the floor and investigated the edges. “It looks like… yes, the sensors on the blast doors are missing, just like the rest of the electronics.” He angled the flashlight down into the mouth of the pit. The refrigerant leak had been pouring into it, filling it with a dense fog of water vapor and coolant. The beam of the flashlight didn’t cut through far. Briefly he considered drifting closer to the hole, but after letting his university education have its way for the last few minutes, his common sense finally spoke up. He raised his slidepad. “Give me a system check on the blast doors of the containment pit.”

  “We’re getting an orange light,” replied a maintenance tech. “Minor damage, but we should be able to close them.”

  “Get them shut. I’m leaving the lab now. I recommend a lockdown on the full facility. If restoring surveillance isn’t already the priority, make it so. And Chief Saunders, I’ll need you to bring up the classified surveillance feed for me to review. I need to know the scope and nature of this breach if I’m to advise you of how best to contain it. Do we have long-range communication yet?”

  “No, the power issues have got the systems spinning their wheels.”

  “Second priority is getting the communications up. We may need outside help on this one. Worse comes to worst, just get someone outside the radio shielding and call with a slidepad.”

  A clacking sound echoed through the lab.

  “Let’s get moving, people,” he said.

  #

  It was nearing 10 p.m. when Lex finally found his way back to the hotel. Squee had indeed been able to lead him there, but she took him by way of the same roundabout path he’d taken when he was trying to blow off steam. It turned out that marching angrily was a good deal faster than staggering drunkenly. Eventually they reached their destination, where Lex gave Squee a well-deserved scratch on the head before knocking on the door.

  “You done yet?” he asked bluntly.

  “Trev? Is that you?” Michella asked.

  “Oh hey, you remember me!”

  She opened the door. “What are you talking about? Of course I remember you.” Her expression hardened. “You’ve been drinking.”

  “I had to do something to pass the time.”

  “Don’t be silly, it’s only been…” She checked the clock, then covered her mouth. “Oh my gosh. Trev, I’m so sorry. I completely lost track of time. The phone call with Stu went long, and then there was follow-up work with Jon, and I had to do some research into… look, it doesn’t matter. Come inside.”

  She took him by the hand and led him into the room. Along the way he kicked off his shoes, then flopped down into a chair that turned out not to be nearly as cushioned as he’d anticipated.

  “Stupid cheap hotel furniture,” he grumbled. “So. Did you get what you were after? Are you going to get your ET story?”

  “I might get something. Stu is digging up the signed contract.”

  “Stu… are you on a first name basis with all of your interviewees?”

  “I find a bit of familiarity helps build trust.”

  “What about fixing your hair and batting your eyes. Does that build trust, too?”

  Michella put her hands on her hips and smirked.

  “Trevor Alexander. Are you jealous of D
r. Stuart Dreyfus?”

  “Well, he was able to hold the attention of my girlfriend for three hours, which is more than I’ve been able to do lately.”

  Her expression hardened slightly. “I still feel bad about leaving you outside for so long, so I’ll let that slide, but you’re burning through the guilt pretty quick, buster.”

  “Then I guess I better sober up before things start to swing in the other direction. Pass me a bottle of water. And the leftover Hunan duck I forgot to take with me. And the cold sesame noodles.”

  “I finished the noodles,” she said, offering up the drink and a takeout container.

  “Is there no end to your treachery, woman?”

  He pulled a packet marked Sobrietin from his overnight bag and swallowed one of the small pink pills with some water. The pills were one of Lex’s all-time favorite miracles of modern science: a 100 percent effective antidote for alcohol and all of its many short-term ills. It had spared him many a hangover and more than one traffic ticket in recent years.

  “You know, some people would say that carrying that stuff around is proof you have a problem.”

  “I say that carrying this around is proof I have a solution.”

  His head began to clear. At the sound of food, Squee suddenly realized she’d been on the ground like a normal dog for far too long. She hopped onto Lex’s shoulders to nibble on his ear and maneuver herself into a position to intercept a few bites of duck on the way to his mouth.

  “Did she eat?” Michella asked.

  “Bar burritos.” He wrestled with his chopsticks as his booze-addled coordination rigidly refused to return.

  “I swear the two of you eat like you’re still in college.”

  “I’ve got the same policy with food as I’ve got with all the other bad stuff I do. I’ll keep doing it until it starts to take its toll. So, if I remember correctly, this is the part where you give me the rundown of all the juicy stuff you’ve discovered.”