Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  It didn’t work. Vlad’s bacteria would not take the airborne genes.

  In despair, Cassie looked at the synthesizer display data. Zero successful splices. Vlad had probably inserted safeguard genes against just this happening as a natural mutation; nobody wanted to find that heavy-plastic-eating bacteria had drifted in through the window and was consuming their micro-wave. Vlad was always thorough. But his work wasn’t her work, and she had neither the time nor the expertise to search for genes she didn’t already have encoded in her software.

  So she would have to do it the other way. Put the plastic-decomposing genes into Streptococcus. That put her on much less familiar ground, and it raised a question she couldn’t see any way around. She could have cultured the engineered plasticide on any piece of heavy plastic in the lab without T4S knowing it, and then waited for enough airborne bacteria to drift through the air ducts to the generator and begin decomposing. Of course, that might not have happened, due to uncontrollable variables like air currents, microorganism sustained viability, composition of the generator case, sheer luck. But at least there had been a chance.

  But if she put the plastic-decomposing genes into Streptococcus, she would have to culture the bacteria on blood agar. The blood agar was in the refrigerator. T4S had refused to open the refrigerator, and if she pressed the point, it would undoubtedly become suspicious.

  Just as a human would.

  “You work hard,” T4S said.

  “Yes,” Cassie answered. Janey stirred and whimpered; in another few minutes she would have to contend with the full-blown crankiness of a thwarted and dramatic child. Quickly, without hope, Cassie put another drop of Vlad’s bacteria in the synthesizer.

  Vlad had been using a strain of simple bacteria, and the software undoubtedly had some version of its genome in its library. It would be a different strain, but this was the best she could do. She told the synthesizer to match genomes and snip out any major anomalies. With luck, that would be Vlad’s engineered genes.

  Janey woke up and started to whine.

  Elya harvested her courage and walked over to Bollman. “Agent Bollman…I have a question.”

  He turned to her with that curious courtesy that seemed to function toward some people and not others. It was almost as if he could choose to run it, like a computer program. His eyes looked tired. How long since he had slept?

  “Go ahead, Ms. Seritov.”

  “If the AI wants the press, why can’t you just send for them? I know it would embarrass Dr. McTaggart, but the FBI wouldn’t come off looking bad.” She was proud of this political astuteness.

  “I can’t do that, Ms. Seritov.”

  “But why not?”

  “There are complications you don’t understand and I’m not at liberty to tell you. I’m sorry.” He turned decisively aside, dismissing her.

  Elya tried to think what his words meant. Was the government involved? Well, of course, the AI had been created at Sandia National Laboratory. But…could the CIA be involved, too? Or the National Security Agency? What was the AI originally designed to do, that the government was so eager to eliminate it once it had decided to do other things on its own?

  Could software defect?

  She had it. But it was worthless.

  The synthesizer had spliced its best guess at Vlad’s “plastic-decomposing genes” into Donnie’s Streptococcus. The synthesizer data display told her that six splices had taken. There was, of course, no way of knowing which six bacteria in the teeming drop of water could now decompose very-long-chain-hydrocarbons, or if those six would go on replicating after the splice. But it didn’t matter, because even if replication went merrily forward, Cassie had no blood agar on which to culture the engineered bacteria.

  She set the vial on the lab bench. Without food, the entire sample wouldn’t survive very long. She had been engaging in futile gestures.

  “Mommy,” Janey said, “look at Donnie!”

  He was vomiting, too weak to turn his head. Cassie rushed over. His breathing was too fast.

  “T4S, body temperature!”

  “Stand clear…one hundred three point one.”

  She groped for his pulse…fast and weak. Donnie’s face had gone pale and his skin felt clammy and cold. His blood pressure was dropping.

  Streptococcal toxic shock. The virulent mutant strain of bacteria was putting so many toxins into Donnie’s little body that it was being poisoned.

  “I need antibiotics!” she screamed at T4S. Janey began to cry.

  “He looks less white now,” T4S said.

  It was right. Cassie could see her son visibly rallying, fighting back against the disease. Color returned to his face and his pulse steadied.

  “T4S, listen to me. This is streptococcal shock. Without antibiotics, it’s going to happen again. It’s possible that without antibiotics, one of these times Donnie won’t come out of it. I know you don’t want to be responsible for a child’s death. I know it. Please let me take Donnie out of here.”

  There was a silence so long that hope surged wildly in Cassie. It was going to agree….

  “I can’t,” T4S said. “Donnie may die. But if I let you out, I will die. And the press must come soon. I’ve scanned my news library and also yours — press shows up on an average of 23.6 hours after an open-air incident that the government wishes to keep secret. The tanks and FBI agents are in the open air. We’re already overdue.”

  If Cassie thought she’d been angry before, it was nothing to the fury that filled her now. Silent, deadly, annihilating everything else. For a moment she couldn’t speak, couldn’t even see.

  “I am so sorry,” T4S said. “Please believe that.”

  She didn’t answer. Pulling Janey close, Cassie rocked both her children until Janey quieted. Then she said softly, “I have to get water for Donnie, honey. He needs to stay hydrated.” Janey clutched briefly but let her go.

  Cassie drew a cup of water from the lab bench. At the same time, she picked up the vial of foodless bacteria. She forced Donnie to take a few sips of water; more might come back up again. He struggled weakly. She leaned over him, cradling and insisting, and her body blocked the view from the ceiling sensors when she dipped her finger into the vial and smeared its small amount of liquid into the back of her son’s mouth.

  Throat tissues were the ideal culture for Streptococcus pyrogenes. Under good conditions, they replicated every twenty minutes, a process that had already begun in vitro. Very soon there would be hundreds, then thousands of re-engineered bacteria, breeding in her child’s throat and lungs and drifting out on the air with his every sick, labored breath.

  Morning again. Elya rose from fitful sleep on the back seat of an FBI car. She felt achy, dirty, hungry. During the night another copter had landed on the lawn. This one had MED-RESCUE painted on it in bright yellow, and Elya looked around to see if anyone had been injured. Or — her neck prickled — was the copter for Cassie and the children if Agent Bollman wacoed? Three people climbed down from the copter, and Elya realized none of them could be medtechs. One was a very old man who limped; one was a tall woman with the same blankly efficient look as Bollman; one was the pilot, who headed immediately for the cold pizza. Bollman hurried over to them. Elya followed.

  “…glad you’re here, sir,” Bollman was saying to the old man in his courteous negotiating voice, “and you, Ms. Arnold. Did you bring your records? Are they complete?”

  “I don’t need records. I remember this install perfectly.”

  So the FBI-looking woman was a datalinker and the weak old man was somebody important from Washington. That would teach her, Elya thought, to judge from superficialities.

  The datalinker continued, “The client wanted the central processor above a basement room she was turning into a lab, so the cables could go easily through a wall. It was a bitch even so, because the walls are made of reinforced foamcast like some kind of bunker, and the outer walls have a Faraday-cage mesh. The Faraday didn’t interfere with the cable
data, of course, because that’s all laser, but even so we had to have contractors come in and bury the cables in another layer of foamcast.”

  Bollman said patiently, “But where was the processor actually installed? That’s what we need to know.”

  “Northeast corner of the building, flush with the north wall and ten point two feet in from the east wall.”

  “You’re sure?”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Positive.”

  “Could it have been moved since your install?”

  She shrugged. “Anything’s possible. But it isn’t likely. The install was bitch enough.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Arnold. Would you wait over there in case we have more questions?”

  Ms. Arnold went to join the pilot. Bollman took the old man by the arm and led him in the other direction. Elya heard, “The problem, sir, is that we don’t know in which basement room the hostages are being held, or even if the AI is telling the truth when it says they’re in the basement. But the lab doesn’t seem likely because —” They moved out of earshot.

  Elya stared at the castle. The sun, an angry red ball, rose behind it in a blaze of flame. They were going to waco, go in with the tank and whatever else it took to knock down the northeast corner of the building and destroy the computer where the AI was holed up. And Cassie and Janey and Donnie…

  If the press came, the AI would voluntarily let them go. Then the government — whatever branches were involved — would have to deal with having created renegade killer software, but so what? The government had created it. Cassie and the children shouldn’t have to pay for their stupidity.

  Elya knew she was not a bold person, like Cassie. She had never broken the law in her life. And she didn’t even have a phone with her. But maybe one had been left in the car that had brought her here, parked out beyond what Bollman called “the perimeter.”

  She walked toward the car, trying to look unobtrusive.

  Waiting. One minute and another minute and another minute and another. It had had to be Donnie, Cassie kept telling herself, because he already had thriving strep colonies. Neither she nor Janey showed symptoms, not yet anyway. The incubation period for strep could be as long as four days. It had had to be Donnie.

  One minute and another minute and another minute.

  Vlad’s spliced-in bioremediation genes wouldn’t hurt Donnie, she told herself. Vlad was good; he’d carefully engineered his variant micros to decompose only very-long-chain hydrocarbons. They would not, could not, eat the shorter-chain hydrocarbons in Donnie’s body.

  One hour and another hour and another hour.

  T4S said, “Why did Vladimir Seritov choose to work in bioremediation?”

  Cassie jumped. Did it know, did it suspect…the record of what she had done was in her equipment, as open to the AI as the clean outside air had once been to her. But one had to know how to interpret it.“Non-competing technologies never keep up with what the other one is doing.” The AI hadn’t known what kulich was.

  She answered, hoping that any distraction that she could provide would help, knowing that it wouldn’t. “Vlad’s father’s family came from Siberia, near a place called Lake Karachay. When he was a boy, he went back with his family to see it. Lake Karachay is the most polluted place on Earth. Nuclear disasters over fifty years ago dumped unbelievable amounts of radioactivity into the lake. Vlad saw his extended family, most of them too poor to get out, with deformities and brain damage and pregnancies that were…well. He decided right then that he wanted to be a bioremedialist.”

  “I see. I am a sort of bioremedialist myself.”

  “What?”

  “I was created to remedy certain specific biological conditions the government thinks need attention.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “I can’t say. Classified information.”

  She tried, despite her tension and tiredness, to think it through. If the AI had been designed to…do what? “Bioremediation.” To design some virus or bacteria or unimaginable other for use in advanced biological warfare? But it didn’t need to be sentient to do that. Or maybe to invade enemy computers and selectively administer the kind of brainwashing that the crazy builder of this castle had feared? That might require judgment, reason, affect. Or maybe to…

  She couldn’t imagine anything else. But she could understand why the AI wouldn’t want the press to know it had been built for any destructive purpose. A renegade sentient AI fighting for its life might arouse public sympathy. A renegade superintelligent brainwasher would arouse only public horror. T4S was walking a very narrow line. If, that is, Cassie’s weary speculations were true.

  She said softly, “Are you a weapon, T4S?”

  Again the short, too-human pause before it answered. And again those human inflections in its voice. “Not any more.”

  They both fell silent. Janey sat awake but mercifully quiet beside her mother, sucking her thumb. She had stopped doing that two years ago. Cassie didn’t correct her. Janey might be getting sick herself, might be finally getting genuinely scared, might be grasping at whatever dubious comfort her thumb could offer.

  Cassie leaned over Donnie, cradling him, crooning to him.

  “Breathe, Donnie. Breathe for Mommy. Breathe hard.”

  “We’re going in,” Bollman told McTaggart. “With no word from the hostages about their situation, it’s more important to get them out than anything else.”

  The two men looked at each other, knowing what neither was saying. The longer the AI existed, the greater the danger of its reaching the public with its story. It was not in T4S’s interest to tell the whole story — then the public would want it destroyed — but what if the AI decided to turn from self-preservation to revenge? Could it do that?

  No one knew.

  Forty-eight hours was a credible time to negotiate before wacoing. That would play well on TV. And anyway, the white-haired man from Washington, who held a position not entered on any public records, had his orders.

  “All right,” McTaggart said unhappily. All those years of development …. This had been the most interesting project McTaggart had ever worked on. He also thought of himself as a patriot, genuinely believing that T4S would have made a real contribution to national security. But he wasn’t at all sure that the president would authorize the project’s continuance. Not after this.

  Bollman gave an order over his phone. A moment later, a low rumble came from the tank.

  A minute and another minute and another hour…

  Cassie stared upward at the air duct. If it happened, how would it happen? Both generators were half underground, half above. Extensions reached deep into the ground to draw energy from the geothermal gradient. Each generator’s top half, the part she could see, was encased in tough, dull gray plastic. She could visualize it clearly, battleship gray. Inside would be the motor, the capacitors, the connections to House, all made of varying materials but a lot of them of plastic. There were so many strong tough petroleum plastics these days, good for making so many different things, durable enough to last practically forever.

  Unless Vlad’s bacteria got to them. To both of them.

  Would T4S know, if it happened at all? Would it be so quick that the AI would simply disappear, a vast and complex collection of magnetic impulses going out like a snuffed candle flame? What if one generator failed a significant time before the other? Would T4S be able to figure out what was happening, realize what she had done and that it was dying…? no, not that, only bio-organisms could die. Machines were just turned off.

  “Is Donnie any better?” T4S said, startling her.

  “I can’t tell.” It didn’t really care. It was software.

  Then why did it ask?

  It was software that might, if it did realize what she had done, be human enough to release the nerve gas that Cassie didn’t really think it had, out of revenge. Donnie couldn’t withstand that, not in his condition. But the AI didn’t have nerve gas, it had been bluffing.

&
nbsp; A very human bluff.

  “T4S —” she began, not sure what she was going to say, but T4S interrupted with, “Something’s happening!”

  Cassie held her children tighter.

  “I’m…what have you done!”

  It knew she was responsible. Cassie heard someone give a sharp frightened yelp, realized that it was herself.

  “Dr. Seritov…oh…” And then, “Oh, please…”

  The lights went out.

  Janey screamed. Cassie clapped her hands stupidly, futilely, over Donnie’s mouth and nose. “Don’t breathe! Oh, don’t breathe, hold your breath, Janey!”

  But she couldn’t keep smothering Donnie. Scrambling up in the total dark, Donnie in her arms, she stumbled. Righting herself, Cassie shifted Donnie over her right shoulder — he was so heavy — and groped in the dark for Janey. She caught her daughter’s screaming head, moved her left hand to Janey’s shoulder, dragged her in the direction of the door. What she hoped was the direction of the door.

  “Janey, shut up! We’re going out! Shut up!”

  Janey continued to scream. Cassie fumbled, lurched — where the hell was it? — found the door. Turned the knob. It opened, unlocked.

  “Wait!” Elya called, running across the trampled lawn toward Bollman. “Don’t waco! Wait! I called the press!”

  He swung to face her and she shrank back. “You did what?”

  “I called the press! They’ll be here soon and the AI can tell its story and then release Cassie and the children!”

  Bollman stared at her. Then he started shouting. “Who was supposed to be watching this woman! Jessup!”

  “Stop the tank!” Elya cried.

  It continued to move toward the northeast corner of the castle, reached it. For a moment, the scene looked to Elya like something from her childhood book of myths: Atlas? Sisyphus? The tank strained against the solid wall. Soldiers in full battle armor, looking like machines, waited behind it. The wall folded inward like pleated cardboard and then started to fall.

  The tank broke through and was buried in rubble. She heard it keep on going. The soldiers hung back until debris had stopped falling, then rushed forward through the precariously overhanging hole. People shouted. Dust filled the air.