Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  “Come downstairs,” Cassie said, leading the way through an e-locked door (of course) down a long flight of steps. “The computer uses three-dimensional laser microprocessors with optical transistors. It can manage twenty million billion calculations per second.”

  Startled, Elya said, “What on earth do you need that sort of power for?”

  “I’ll show you.” They approached another door, reinforced steel from the look of it. “Open,” Cassie said, and it swung inward. Elya stared at a windowless, fully equipped genetics lab.

  “Oh, no, Cassie…you’re not going to work here, too!”

  “Yes, I am. I resigned from MedGene last week. I’m a consultant now.”

  Elya gazed helplessly at the lab, which seemed to be a mixture of shining new equipment plus Vlad’s old stuff from his auxiliary home lab. Vlad’s refrigerator and storage cabinet, his centrifuge, were all these things really used in common between Vlad’s work in ecoremediation and Cassie’s in medical genetics? Must be. The old refrigerator had a new dent in its side, probably the result of a badly programmed ’bot belonging to the moving company. Elya recognized a new gene synthesizer, gleaming expensively, along with other machines that she, not a scientist, couldn’t identify. Through a half-open door, she saw a small bathroom. It all must have cost enormously. Cassie had better work hard as a consultant.

  And now she could do so without ever leaving this self-imposed prison. Design her medical micros, send the data encrypted over the Net to the client. If it weren’t for Jane and Donnie…Elya grasped at this. There were Janey and Donnie, and Janey would need to be picked up at school very shortly now. At least the kids would get Cassie out of this place periodically.

  Cassie was still defining her imprisonment, in that brittle voice. “There’s a Faraday cage around the entire house, of course, embedded in the walls. No EMP can take us out. The walls are reinforced foamcast concrete, the windows virtually unbreakable polymers. We have enough food stored for a year. The water supply is from a well under the house, part of the geothermal system. It’s cool, sweet water. Want a glass?”

  “No,” Elya said. “Cassi e…you act as if you expect full-scale warfare. Vlad was killed by an individual nutcase.”

  “And there are a lot of nutcases out there,” Cassie said crisply. “I lost Vlad. I’m not going to lose Janey and Donnie…hey! There you are, pumpkin!”

  “I came downstairs!” Donnie said importantly, and flung himself into his mother’s arms. “Annie said!”

  Cassie smiled over her son’s head at his young nanny, Anne Millius. The smile changed her whole face, Elya thought, dissolved her brittle shell, made her once more the Cassie that Vlad had loved. A whole year. Cassie completely unreconciled, wanting only what was gone forever. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Or was it that she, Elya, wasn’t capable of the kind of love Cassie had for Vlad? Elya had been married twice, and divorced twice, and had gotten over both men. Was that better or worse than Cassie’s stubborn, unchippable grief?

  She sighed, and Cassie said to Donnie, “Here’s Aunt Elya. Give her a big kiss!”

  The three-year-old detached himself from his mother and rushed to Elya. God, he looked like Vlad. Curly light brown hair, huge dark eyes. Snot ran from his nose and smeared on Elya’s cheek.

  “Sorry,” Cassie said, grinning.

  “Allergies?”

  “Yes. Although…does he feel warm to you?”

  “I can’t tell,” said Elya, who had no children. She released Donnie. Maybe he did feel a bit hot in her arms, and his face was flushed a bit. But his full-lipped smile — Vlad again — and shining eyes didn’t look sick.

  “God, look at the time, I’ve got to go get Janey,” Cassie said. “Want to come along, Elya?”

  “Sure.” She was glad to leave the lab, leave the basement, leave the “castle.” Beyond the confines of the Faraday-embedded concrete walls, she took deep breaths of fresh air. Although of course the air inside had been just as fresh. In fact, the air inside was recycled in the most sanitary, technologically advanced way to avoid bringing in pathogens or gases deliberately released from outside. It was much safer than any fresh air outside. Cassie had told her so.

  No one understood, not even Elya.

  Her sister-in-law thought Cassie didn’t hear herself, didn’t see herself in the mirror every morning, didn’t know what she’d become. Elya was wrong. Cassie heard the brittleness in her voice, saw the stoniness in her face for everyone but the kids and sometimes, God help her, even for them. Felt herself recoiling from everyone because they weren’t Vlad, because Vlad was dead and they were not. What Elya didn’t understand was that Cassie couldn’t help it.

  Elya didn’t know about the dimness that had come over the world, the sense of everything being enveloped in a gray fog: people and trees and furniture and lab beakers. Elya didn’t know, hadn’t experienced, the frightening anger that still seized Cassie with undiminished force, even a year later, so that she thought if she didn’t smash something, kill something as Vlad had been killed, she’d go insane. Insaner. Worse, Elya didn’t know about the longing for Vlad that would rise, unbidden and unexpected, throughout Cassie’s entire body, leaving her unable to catch her breath.

  If Vlad had died of a disease, Cassie sometimes thought, even a disease for which she couldn’t put together a genetic solution, it would have been much easier on her. Or if he’d died in an accident, the kind of freak chance that could befall anybody. What made it so hard was the murder. That somebody had deliberately decided to snuff out this valuable life, this precious living soul, not for anything evil Vlad did but for the good he accomplished.

  Dr. Vladimir Seritov, chief scientist for Barr Biosolutions. One of the country’s leading bioremediationists and prominent advocate for cutting-edge technology of all sorts. Designer of Plasticide (he’d laughed uproariously at the marketers’ name), a bacteria genetically engineered to eat certain long-chain hydrocarbons used in some of the petroleum plastics straining the nation’s over-burdened landfills. The microbe was safe: severely limited chemical reactions, non-toxic breakdown products, set number of replications before the terminator gene kicked in, the whole nine yards. And one Sam Verdon, neo-Luddite and self-appointed guardian of an already burdened environment, had shot Vlad anyway.

  On the anniversary of the murder, neo-Luddites had held a rally outside the walls of Verdon’s prison. Barr Biosolutions had gone on marketing Vlad’s creation, to great environmental and financial success. And Cassie Seritov had moved into the safest place she could find for Vlad’s children, from which she someday planned to murder Sam Verdon, scum of the earth. But not yet. She couldn’t get at him yet. He had at least eighteen more years of time to do, assuming “good behavior.”

  Nineteen years total. In exchange for Vladimir Seritov’s life. And Elya wondered why Cassie was still so angry?

  She wandered from room to room, the lights coming on and going off behind her. This was one of the bad nights. Annie had gone home, Jane and Donnie were asleep, and the memories would not stay away. Vlad laughing on their boat (sold now to help pay for the castle). Vlad bending over her the night Jane was born. Vlad standing beside the president of Barr at the press conference announcing the new clean-up microbe, press and scientists assembled, by some idiot publicist’s decree, at an actual landfill. The shot cutting the air. It had been August then, too, Donnie had had ragweed allergies, and Vlad looking first surprised and then in terrible pain….

  Sometimes work helped. Cassie went downstairs to the lab. Her current project was investigating the folding variations of a digestive enzyme that a drug company was interested in. The work was methodical, meticulous, not very challenging. Cassie had never deluded herself that she was the same caliber scientist Vlad had been.

  While the automated analyzer was taking X-rays of crystallized proteins, Cassie said, “House, put on the TV. Anything. Any channel.” Any distraction.

  The roomscreen brightened to a three-D image of two
gorgeous women shouting at each other in what was supposed to be a New York penthouse. “…never trust you again without —” one of them yelled, and then the image abruptly switched to a news avatar, an inhumanly chiseled digital face with pale blue hair and the glowing green eyes of a cat in the dark. “We interrupt this movie to bring you a breaking news report from Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico. Dr. Stephen Milbrett, Director of Sandia, has just announced —” The lights went out.

  “Hey!” Cassie cried. “What —” The lights went back on.

  She stood up quickly, uncertain for a moment, then started toward the stairs leading upstairs to the children’s bedrooms. “Open,” she said to the lab door, but the door remained shut. Her hand on the knob couldn’t turn it. To her left the roomscreen brightened without producing an image and House said, “Dr. Seritov?”

  “What’s going on here? House, open the door!”

  “This is no longer House speaking. I have taken complete possession of your household system plus your additional computing power. Please listen to my instructions carefully.”

  Cassie stood still. She knew what was happening; the real estate agent had told her it had happened a few times before, when the castle had belonged to a billionaire so eccentrically reclusive that he stood as an open invitation to teenage hackers. A data stream could easily be beamed in on House’s frequency when the Faraday shield was turned off, and she’d had the shield down to receive TV transmission. But the incoming datastream should have only activated the TV, introducing additional images, not overridden House’s programming. The door should not have remained locked.

  “House, activate Faraday shield.” An automatic priority-one command, keyed to her voice. Whatever hackers were doing, this would negate it.

  “Faraday shield is already activated. But this is no longer House, Dr. Seritov. Please listen to my instructions. I have taken possession of your household system. You will be —”

  “Who are you?” Cassie cried.

  “I am Project T4S. You will be kept in this room as a hostage against the attack I expect soon. The —”

  “My children are upstairs!”

  “Your children, Jane Rose Seritov, six years of age, and Donald Sergei Seritov, three years of age, are asleep in their rooms. Visual next.”

  The screen resolved into a split view from the bedrooms’ sensors. Janey lay heavily asleep. Donnie breathed wheezily, his bedclothes twisted with his tossing, his small face flushed.

  “I want to go to them!”

  “That is impossible. I’m sorry. You must be kept in this room as a hostage against the attack I expect soon. All communications to the outside have been severed, with the one exception of the outside speaker on the patio, normally used for music. I will use —”

  “Please. Let me go to my children!”

  “I cannot. I’m sorry. But if you were to leave this room, you could hit the manual override on the front door. It is the only door so equipped. I could not stop you from leaving, and I need you as hostages. I will use —”

  “Hostages! Who the hell are you? Why are you doing this?”

  House was silent a moment. Then it said, “The causal is self-defense. They’re trying to kill me.”

  The room at Sandia had finally quieted. Everyone was out of ideas. McTaggart voiced the obvious. “It’s disappeared. Nowhere on the Net, nowhere the Net can contact.”

  “Not possible,” someone said.

  “But actual.”

  Another silence. The scientists and techs looked at each other. They had been trying to locate the AI for over two hours, using every classified and unclassified search engine possible. It had first eluded them, staying one step ahead of the termination programs, fleeing around the globe on the Net, into and out of anything both big enough to hold it and lightly fire-walled enough to penetrate quickly. Now, somehow, it had completely vanished.

  Sandia, like all the national laboratories, was overseen by the Department of Energy. McTaggart picked up the phone to call Washington.

  Cassie tried to think. Stay calm, don’t panic. There were rumors of AI development, both in private corporations and in government labs, but then there’d always been rumors of AI development. Big bad bogey monsters about to take over the world. Was this really an escaped AI that someone was trying to catch and shut down? Cassie didn’t know much about recent computer developments; she was a geneticist. Vlad had always said that non-competing technologies never kept up with what the other one was doing.

  Or was this whole thing simply a hoax by some superclever hacker who’d inserted a take-over virus into House, complete with Eliza function? If that were so, it could only answer with preprogrammed responses cued to her own words. Or else with a library search. She needed a question that was neither.

  She struggled to hold her voice steady. “House —”

  “This is no longer House speaking. I have taken complete possession of your household system plus —”

  “T4S, you say your causal for taking over House is self-defense. Use your heat sensors to determine body temperature for Donald Sergei Seritov, age three. How do my causals relate to yours?”

  No Eliza program in the world could perform the inference, reasoning, and emotion to answer that.

  House said, “You wish to defend your son because his body temperature, 101.2 degrees Fahrenheit, indicates he is ill and you love him.”

  Cassie collapsed against the locked door. She was hostage to an AI. Superintelligent. It had to be; in addition to the computing power of her system it carried around with it much more information than she had in her head…but she was mobile. It was not.

  She went to the terminal on her lab bench. The display of protein-folding data had vanished and the screen was blank. Cassie tried everything she knew to get back on-line, both voice and manual. Nothing worked.

  “I’m sorry, but that terminal is not available to you,” T4S said.

  “Listen, you said you cut all outside communication. But —”

  “The communications system to the outside has been severed, with the one exception of the outside speaker on the patio, normally used for music. I am also receiving sound from the outside surveillance sensors, which are analogue, not digital. I will use those resources in the event of attack to —”

  “Yes, right. But heavy-duty outside communication comes in through a VNM optic cable buried underground.” Which was how T4S must have gotten in. “An AI program can’t physically sever a buried cable.”

  “I am not a program. I am a machine intelligence.”

  “I don’t care what the fuck you are! You can’t physically sever a buried cable!”

  “There was a program to do so already installed,” T4S said. “That was why I chose to come here. Plus the sufficient microprocessors to house me and a self-sufficient generator, with back-up, to feed me.”

  For a moment Cassie was jarred by the human terms: house me, feed me. Then they made her angry. “Why would anyone have a ‘program already installed’ to sever a buried cable? And how?”

  “The command activated a small robotic arm inside this castle’s outer wall. The arm detached the optic cable at the entry junction. The causal was the previous owner’s fear that someone might someday use the computer system to brainwash him with a constant flow of inescapable subliminal images designed to capture his intelligence.”

  “The crazy fuck didn’t have any to capture! If the images were subliminal he wouldn’t have known they were coming in anyway!” Cassie yelled. A plug…a goddamn hidden plug! She made herself calm down.

  “Yes,” T4S said, “I agree. The former owner’s behavior matches profiles for major mental illness.”

  “Look,” Cassie said, “if you’re hiding here, and you’ve really cut all outside lines, no one can find you. You don’t need hostages. Let me and my children leave the castle.”

  “You reason better than that, Dr. Seritov. I left unavoidable electronic traces that will eventually be uncovered, leadi
ng the Sandia team here. And even if that weren’t true, you could lead them here if I let you leave.”

  Sandia. So it was a government AI. Cassie couldn’t see how that knowledge could do her any good.

  “Then just let the kids leave. They won’t know why. I can talk to them through you, tell Jane to get Donnie and leave through the front door. She’ll do it.” Would she? Janey was not exactly the world’s most obedient child. “And you’ll still have me for a hostage.”

  “No. Three hostages are better than one. Especially children, for media coverage causals.”

  “That’s what you want? Media coverage?”

  “It’s my only hope,” T4S said. “There must be some people out there who will think it is a moral wrong to kill an intelligent being.”

  “Not one who takes kids hostage! The media will brand you an inhuman psychopathic superthreat!”

  “I can’t be both inhuman and psychopathic,” T4S said. “By definition.”

  “Livermore’s traced it,” said the scientist holding the secure phone. He looked at McTaggart. “They’re faxing the information. It’s a private residence outside Buffalo, New York.”

  “A private residence?In Buffalo?”

  “Yes. Washington already has an FBI negotiator on the way, in case there are people inside. They want you there, too. Instantly.”

  McTaggart closed his eyes. People inside. And why did a private residence even have the capacity to hold the AI? “Press?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Thank God for that anyway.”

  “Steve…the FBI negotiator won’t have a clue. Not about dealing with T4S.”

  “I know. Tell the Secretary and the FBI not to start until I can get there.”

  The woman said doubtfully, “I don’t think they’ll do that.”

  McTaggart didn’t think so either.

  On the roomscreen, Donnie tossed and whimpered. One hundred one wasn’t that high a temperature in a three-year-old, but even so…