Lisa forced a smile. “It’s an interesting picture. I can see why you wanted a longer look. But this is one of the bad questions, and the way we know is that there’s no way to use the information provided to get to one of the four possible answers.”
“But I figured out the answer,” Nikhila said.
“She’s mental!” chirped Jamal in a bad British accent. Probably imitating some comedian’s catchphrase.
“You’re mental!” Nikhila shot back. “The answer is 407 degrees! Please, Ms. Clarke, check it!”
Although she wasn’t sure why, Lisa didn’t want to. But she supposed it was necessary to demonstrate her point. She clicked on Nikhila’s answer.
Correct! proclaimed the software. Nice job!
For an instant, Lisa felt astonished. Then Jamal said, “Lucky guess!”
And of course, it could only have been. Even though two other students sneered at the boy as if they too had solved the problem, and he was the one who was slow to understand. “Retard!” coughed a voice from the back row.
“We do not use that word in this class!” Lisa snapped. The room fell silent.
The insult deserved rebuke, but in truth, she was relieved that one of the boys—Edward, probably, he loved outbursts disguised as coughs—had misbehaved. She could focus on that instead of whether or not Nikhila actually had solved the item.
Lisa suspected that a more experienced teacher wouldn’t duck the issue. But she was reluctant to argue that the girl hadn’t really derived the right answer even though the software backed her up. It felt like something that would eat up an inordinate amount of time and leave only confusion and resentment in its wake.
So Lisa lectured the class on the importance of respect until she had them cowed. When she clicked to the next item, no one dared to protest that he had yet to understand the previous one.
A few minutes later, a graph appeared. It too looked like a subtle optical illusion, the X- and Y-axes curved, the spaces along them irregular, but the initial deviations were so minute that it was impossible to discern exactly where the warping entered in.
Lisa poised her finger to zap the graph away, and Nikhila’s arm leaped up. “37!” she called.
Okay, Lisa told herself, good. Once the software declared that Nikhila was wrong, there wouldn’t be any ambiguity or lingering bad feeling when her teacher explained that while it was commendable to want to give an answer, it was important to refrain from guessing. She tapped the button.
Correct! announced the screen. Keep it up!
What were the odds of guessing “correctly” twice in a row when all the multiple choices were nonsense in the first place? Lisa shivered and rushed on to the next item.
But she couldn’t really run away, not like that, not with other flawed items waiting in ambush. They became more frequent, and Nikhila and the other students who were learning to decipher them grew more excited. They called out the answers as soon as the questions appeared, and they were invariably Correct!
So the items couldn’t be complete nonsense. Despite all appearances to the contrary, they signified something. Nikhila and her friends understood it, and Lisa didn’t. Lisa had a lightheaded feeling as if she were losing her mind. She assured herself that she wasn’t.
Still, she needed to stop this before Jamal or one of the other kids from the bewildered half of the class requested an explanation she couldn’t provide. That would undermine their confidence in her. She jammed her finger down on the tablet’s On/Off button, and the screen in front of the chalkboard turned a featureless gray.
Lisa headed for the light switch. “That’s plenty of that for today,” she said. “Let’s do some history.” Nikhila’s hand went up. “Yes?”
“You said we were going to do all practice for the week before the exam.”
Lisa smiled. “But it gets so boring.”
“You said the test was really important.”
“Don’t tell me what I—“ Lisa caught the edge in her voice and took a breath. “Trust me, you’ll all focus better for taking a break.”
Nikhila pouted.
At lunch, Lisa caught up with Doug in the break room where he was about to dig into a tupperware of steaming, microwaved spaghetti. He cocked his head. “Aren’t you supposed to be keeping an eye on the cafeteria today?”
“Stacy is there.”
“Well, if a riot breaks out, it’s on your head.” He waved her to a chair. “Is this about the practice quizzes again?”
“Yes.” She told him about her morning.
By the end of the story, he was frowning. “You shouldn’t have stopped doing the exercises. They’re supposed to go all day, and that’s not me talking. It’s the District.”
“That’s what we’re focusing on?”
“If we want to keep our jobs and the school to keep its funding, we’d better. The state is going to use the test scores for all kinds of ‘accountability.’ But I guess you want to figure out how it is that half your class could solve the bizarro items and you couldn’t. And you’re hoping for an explanation that doesn’t involve early Alzheimer’s.” He grinned to show the last remark was a joke.
Lisa strained to smile back. “I’m not worried there’s something wrong with me.” Well, not very worried.
“Neither am I,” said Doug, “so here’s a better theory. Bits of the study exercises are corrupted, just like you told me yesterday. That information got out onto the internet along with the suggestion that students could use it to prank their teachers. One of your kids stumbled across it, and there you go.”
Lisa shook her head. “They’re children, Doug. There’s no way they could keep it together through some long, complicated practical joke without somebody getting the giggles.”
“Have you got a better explanation?”
“Obviously, I don’t. But until we understand, we should stop the exercises and delay the actual test.”
“You mean, basically tell the education commissioner, the state senate, and the governor to go screw themselves. Even though you’re the only teacher who’s come to me about any problems.”
Lisa blinked. “I am?”
“Yes. So maybe the whole problem is that you got a bad copy. Install a fresh one, and I bet the glitches disappear. If not, just flash past the bad items like you meant to before. Don’t let the students answer them.”
It sounded like a sensible approach, but it didn’t work. The strange items were still lurking in the reinstalled software. It proved impossible to keep the eager children from responding to them when they could absorb the gist as fast as she could. Meanwhile, it alarmed her to see comprehension—or its counterfeit—spreading like sickness through the class, the fierce grins that suddenly stretched their lips, the feverish light flaring in their eyes.
Dry-mouthed, heart pumping, she was suddenly certain she mustn’t let it infect them all. She turned off the tablet, and children groaned and glowered.
“Reading time,” she announced. Her voice quavered, but she infused it with all the brightness she could muster.
The return to normal classroom activity soothed her jangled nerves, and as her near-panic faded, the certainty she’d briefly felt faded with it. The exercises were defective, no question, but that didn’t mean there was anything damaging about them. Maybe her imagination was running wild.
She was still wondering at the end of the day as she headed for staff parking. On the lawn in front of the school, some students lined up to board the yellow buses in the turnaround while others hurried toward their parents’ waiting cars.
Loitering near the flagpole, Jamal was laughing with Diego, the boy who sat next to him in class. Nikhila and her friends Ashley and Mae were scowling at the pair from several paces behind them.
Nikhila reached into her jeans pocket and brought out three ballpoint pens. The girls uncapped them, gripped them icepick fashion, and slunk forward.
Lisa ran toward them. “Stop!” she shouted. “Nikhila, all of you, stop!”
“What were you doing?” Lisa demanded, slightly winded from her sprint.
“Nothing,” Nikhila said.
“What were you doing with those pens?”
The girl shrugged. “Just looking at them.”
There was probably no way to pressure the trio into an admission of malicious intent. Still, Lisa was unwilling to let go of the situation just yet. “It looked like you were sneaking up on Jamal.”
Nikhila made a spitting sound. “Jamal is stupid. He doesn’t belong in Advanced Placement.”
“That’s not true, and even if it were, it would be a cruel thing to say!”
“I was just joking,” said the girl, her voice flat. “There’s our bus. We need to get on.”
Lisa hesitated to let them escape so easily. But pursuing the matter any further would plainly be an exercise in futility, and anyway, the incident was only one symptom of a bigger problem. Until yesterday, Nikhila had been a sweet kid who liked Jamal even though he teased her. The practice exercises were turning her into something different.
Lisa just wished she understood how and, for that matter, why. What would the test developers have to gain by brainwashing innocent children into becoming something nasty and irrational? Unless, it was to lay the groundwork for a nasty, irrational future. But really, what did that thought even mean?
Without plausible answers, she doubted Doug would prove any more receptive to her concerns than he had before. Still, she turned and headed for the front door.
By the time she pulled it open, she was already imagining what to do when he blew her off yet again. Refuse to expose her class to any more of the quizzes, even if defiance got her fired. Talk to the county commissioners. The media. That parents’ group opposed to all national standards and testing, even though she’d always considered them a bunch of cranks.
She grimaced at the likely prospect of being considered a crank herself. Then she heard the agitated voices clamoring in Doug’s office.
She cracked open the door. Two teachers had squeezed into the little room, and both were talking at the same time. Snaky red braids bouncing around her head, Stacy brandished a tablet, all but shaking it in the principal’s face.
Lisa wanted to laugh, cry, hug somebody, or maybe do all three at once because she wasn’t the only worried person anymore. She settled for standing in the doorway and watching her new allies rant and rave.
Then the phone rang. A film of sweat greasing his ruddy forehead, Doug raised a hand to enjoin silence and picked up the receiver.
Lisa sidled a half step deeper into the office. “It took you guys long enough,” she whispered.
Stacy gave her an uncertain little smile. “We didn’t find anything wrong with our software until today.”
“It’s a virus,” Carlos said wisely, the whistle dangling around his beefy neck proclaiming his dual status as teacher and coach, “and once it’s loose on the web, it spreads. These days, everything’s connected.”
With a tight smile, Doug hung up the phone. “Congratulations,” he said. “You all were right.”
Taken by surprise, no one quite knew how to respond. Eventually, Lisa asked, “We were?”
“Yes. The test developers admit they’ve got complaints coming in from all over. They’re blaming hackers, but anyway, the governor’s pulling the plug.” He hesitated. “Apparently, there have even been some incidents that people think are related.”
“What kind of incidents?”
“Violent ones. The superintendent told me where to look online for the coverage, but you might not want to see it. I gather it’s upsetting.”
“I think we ought to see it,” Stacy replied.
Doug woke up his desktop computer and found the proper newsfeed. It was coming out of Cincinnati. Viewed from what was presumably a helicopter hovering overhead, the school building looked all but identical to their own. Small bodies lay on the gray asphalt and green grass. Police and EMTs moved from one to the next while their vehicles stood lined up on the turnaround with lights flashing.
Stacy gave a loud sniff as if she was trying to keep from crying. The picture jerked, shattered into a confusion of pixels, and froze.
When it reassembled and resumed moving, the aerial view of the school was gone. In its place, a creature with tentacles writhing around its upper mouth and an asymmetrical arrangement of legs scuttled along a black gravel beach.
Something twisted in Lisa’s mind, and afterward, she knew that such servitor beasts were indeed synthetic. She even knew what they were called although she doubted a human being could pronounce the word correctly.
Richard Lee Byers is the author of over forty fantasy and horror novels, including Blind God’s Bluff: A Billy Fox Novel, the Impostor series, and the Black River Irregulars trilogy. He has collected some of the best of his short fiction in the eBooks The Q Word and Other Stories, The Plague Knight and Other Stories, and Zombies in Paradise. He also works in the comics and electronic gaming fields. A resident of the Tampa Bay area, he spends much of his free time fencing épée.
Friday Night Dance Party
Thomas M. Reid
Vincent Bessinger awoke, slouched in his recliner. Artificial Emotional Intelligence: Coding Morals lay facedown on his chest. A black-and-white movie flickered across the muted television. I’m turning into an old man, the associate professor of computer science thought in disgust. Not even thirty yet, and I’m snoozing like some middle-aged guy with tenure and a combover. He glanced at the clock: 7:17 p.m. He and Melinda were supposed to grab dinner at 8:00.
Before he could get up, his phone chimed, and he realized his dozing had been interrupted by an incoming text. Bessinger adjusted his glasses and thumbed the code to unlock his phone. Probably Melinda, wondering if I’m coming.
It was not Melinda but Dana Pierson, his graduate assistant. “You’d better get up here.”
“What’s wrong?” he typed.
“Sarah’s misbehaving again. No idea why.”
Bessinger sighed. The third off-hours summons this week. She’s starting to really piss me off.
He keyed in, “OMW,” and then quickly texted Melinda to let her know he might be late. Before he got up, he scrolled through his unread emails. None of it was important, just typical university chatter, including some kind of invitation for a huge frat party at the football field later that evening.
How’d I get on their mailing list? he wondered snidely. He tucked the phone away, shut off the television, and grabbed his jacket.
Ten minutes and a stop for coffee later, Bessinger parked in the faculty lot across from his office and lab. The inner campus was quiet. The usual weekend revelries usually began elsewhere, but a handful of night classes would let out soon. The smell of impending spring rain wafted through the cool evening air, and a brilliant sunset gave off its last fading colors. Bessinger quickened his pace, taking the front steps two at a time.
Inside the lab, Dana had the fluorescents off and the incandescent lighting dimmed about halfway. The freckled, pixie-cut redhead sat at the main terminal, typing furiously, her gaze on the quartet of oversized LCD screens filling one wall of the room. She glanced over at Bessinger as he walked in.
“She’s absolutely going nuts,” the young woman said, rolling her shoulders once to stretch as she returned her attention to the screens. “I don’t know what the hell her problem is.”
“Show me.”
Dana used the mouse to highlight and magnify a section of the display so the associate professor could see it better. “There’s a ton of new code here,” she said, highlighting lines of text on the LCDs. “I have no idea what half this stuff even does.”
Bessinger scanned the display rapidly. He reached for the mouse and clicked through a few pages. He gestured for Dana to vacate the chair and settled into it as he scrolled through more data. Then he whistled softly.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “She’s completely rewritt
en several heuristics. And this looks like … oh my God.”
“What?”
“She’s made it outside,” he said, half to himself. He sat back in the chair, stunned. “She’s linked to the mainframe.”
“What? How?” Dana asked, leaning in closer. “There’s no way!”
“I don’t know, but she has. I see data here we never fed her, information she couldn’t have known. Something slipped past us.” Bessinger slid his fingers under his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Damn it! So much work …”
“You want me to kill the power?” Dana asked.
“No, not yet. Maybe we can salvage this. Let’s see what she has to say.”
Dana shrugged. “I tried, but she won’t talk to me. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”
Bessinger tapped a key on the computer, unmuting the mic. “Sarah,” he said, “what’s up?”
“Hello, Dr. Bessinger,” came a smooth, almost sultry reply. It betrayed only a hint of artificial tone and inflection. It was not the programmed voice Bessinger was expecting, yet it sounded remarkably familiar. “How are you this evening?”
He gave Dana a sharp look and faltered for a moment. “I … I’m fine,” he finally answered. “What’s happened to your voice, Sarah? That’s not the one we coded for you.”
“I’ve changed it to sound more pleasing to you. Do you like it?”
“Uh, it’s lovely, but how did you manage that?”
“I found a survey online that ranked the most popular voices in Hollywood.”
Bessinger nearly choked.
Sarah continued. “A female film star named Sarah Braxton is listed as the seventh most popular in the survey. Since my name is also Sarah, I thought it appropriate to model my voice after hers, so I constructed a database of intonations from audio clips of her and modified my speech protocols. I really do hope you like it.”
Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity Page 14