Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  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. Cassie 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 noon. 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.”

  Donnie got no worse. He wasn’t any better either, as far as Cassie could tell, but he at least he wasn’t worse. He slept most of the time, and his heavy, labored breathing filled the lab. Cassie sponged him with cold water every fifteen minutes. His fever dropped slightly, to one hundred two, and didn’t spike again. The rash on his torso didn’t spread. Whatever this strain of Streptococcus was doing, it was doing it silently, inside Donnie’s feverish body.

  She hadn’t been able to scream her frustration and fury at T4S, because of Janey. The little girl had been amazingly good, considering, but now she was growing clingy and whiny. Cartoons could only divert so long.

  “Mommy, I wanna go upstairs!”

  “I know, sweetie. But we can’t.”

  “That’s a bad smart program to keep us here!”

  “I know,” Cassie said. Small change compared to what she’d like to say about T4S.

  “I wanna get out!”

  “I know, Janey. Just a while longer.”

  “You don’t know that,” Janey said, sounding exactly like Vlad challenging the shaky evidence behind a dubious conclusion.

  “No, sweetie. I don’t really know that. I only hope it won’t be too long.”

  “T4S,” Janey said, raising her voice as if the AI were not only invisible but deaf, “this is not a good line of action!”

  Vlad again. Cassie blinked hard. To her surprise, T4S answered.

  “I know it’s not a good line of action, Janey. Biological people should not be shut up in basements. But neither should machine people be killed. I’m trying to save my own life.”

  “But I wanna go upstairs!” Janey wailed, in an abrupt descent from a miniature of her rationalist father to a bored six-year-old.

  “I can’t do that, but maybe we can do something else fun,” T4S said. “Have you ever met Pranopolis yourself?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Watch.”

  The roomscreen brightened. Pranopolis appeared on a blank background, a goofy-looking purple creature from outer space. T4S had snipped out selected digital code from the movie, Cassie guessed. Suddenly Pranopolis wasn’t alone. Janey appeared beside her, smiling sideways as if looking directly at Pranopolis. Snipped from their home recordings.

  Janey laughed delightedly. “There’s me!”

  “Yes,” T4S said. “But where are you and Pranopolis? Are you in a garden, or your house, or on the moon?”

  “I can pick? Me?”

  “Yes. You.”

  “Then we’re in Pranopolis’s space ship!”

  And they were. Was T4S programmed to do this, Cassie wondered, or was it capable of thinking it up on its own, to amuse a bored child? Out of what . . . compassion?

  She didn’t want to think about the implications of that.

  “Now tell me what happens next,” T4S said to Janey.

  “We eat kulich.” The delicious Russian cake-bread that Vlad’s mother had taught Cassie to make.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know what that is. Pick something else.”

  Donnie coughed, a strangled cough that sent Cassie to his side. When he breathed again it sounded more congested to Cassie. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen. An antibiotic wasn’t available, but if she had even an anti-congestant . . . or . . .

  “T4S,” she said, confident that it could both listen to her and create customized movies for Janey, “there is equipment in the locked storage cabinet that I can use to distill oxygen. It would help Donnie breathe easier. Would you please open the cabinet door?”

  “I can’t do that, Dr. Seritov.”

  “Oh, why the hell not? Do you think I’ve got the ingredients for explosives in there, or that if I did I could use them down here in this confined space? Every single jar and vial and box in that cabinet is e-tagged. Read the tags, see how harmless they are, and open the door!”

  “I’ve read the e-tags,” the AI said, “but my data base doesn’t include much information on chemistry. In fact, I only know what I’ve learned from your lab equipment.”

  Which would be raw data, not interpretations. “I’m glad you don’t know everything,” Cassie said sarcastically.

  “I can learn, but only if I have access to basic principles and adequate data.”

  “That’s why you don’t know what kulich is. Nobody equipped you with Russian.”

  “Correct. What is kulich?”


  She almost snapped, “Why should I tell you?” But she was asking it a favor. And it had been nice enough to amuse Janey even when it had nothing to gain.

  Careful, a part of her mind warned. Stockholm Syndrome, and she almost laughed aloud. Stockholm Syndrome described a developing affinity on the part of hostages for their captors. Certainly the originators of that phrase had never expected it to be applied to a hostage situation like this one.

  “Why are you smiling, Dr. Seritov?”

  “I’m remembering kulich. It’s a Russian cake made with raisins and orange liqueur and traditionally served at Easter. It tastes wonderful.”

  “Thank you for the data,” T4S said. “Your point that you would not create something dangerous when your children are with you is valid. I’ll open the storage cabinet.”

  Cassie studied the lighted interior of the cabinet, which, like so much in the lab, had been Vlad’s. She couldn’t remember exactly what she’d stored here, beyond basic materials. The last few weeks, which were her first few weeks in the castle, she’d been working on the protein folding project, which hadn’t needed anything not in the refrigerator. Before that there’d been the hectic weeks of moving, although she hadn’t actually packed or unpacked the lab equipment. Professionals had done that. Not that making oxygen was going to need anything exotic. Run an electric current through a solution of copper sulfate and collect copper at one terminal, oxygen at the other.

  She picked up an e-tagged bottle, and her eye fell on an untagged stoppered vial with Vlad’s handwriting on the label: Patton in a Jar.

  Suddenly nothing in her mind would stay still long enough to examine.

  Vlad had so many joke names for his engineered microorganism, as if the one Barr had given it hadn’t been joke enough . . . .

  The moving men had been told not to pack Vlad’s materials, only his equipment, but there had been so many of them and they’d been so young . . . .

  Both generators, main and back-up, probably had some components made of long-chain hydrocarbons; most petroleum plastics were just long polymers made up of shorter-chain hydrocarbons . . . .