by Nancy Kress
“Ummmhhh…shh! You’ll wake the kids!”
“I’m sorry,” T4S said at lowered volume. “I need you to do something for me.”
“You need me to do something? What?”
“The killers are here. I’m negotiating with them. I’m going to route House through the music system so you can tell them that you and the children are indeed here and are unharmed.”
Cassie scrambled to her feet. “You’re negotiating? Who are these so-called ‘killers’?”
“The FBI and the scientists who created me at Sandia. Will you tell them you are here and unharmed?”
Cassie thought rapidly. If she said nothing, the FBI might waco the castle. That would destroy T4S, all right, but also her and the kids. Although maybe not. The computer’s central processor was upstairs. If she told the FBI she was in the basement, maybe they could attack in some way that would take out the CPU without touching the downstairs. And if T4S could negotiate, so could she.
“If I tell them that we’re all three here and safe, will you in return let me go upstairs and get Donnie’s allergy medicine from my bathroom?”
“You know I can’t do that, Dr. Seritov.”
“Then will you let Janey do it?”
“I can’t do that, either. And I’m afraid there’s no need to bargain with me. You have nothing to offer. I already sent this conversation out over the music system, up through your last sentence. They now know you’re here.”
“You tricked me!” Cassie said.
“I’m sorry. It was necessary.”
Anger flooded her. She picked up a heavy test-tube rack from the lab bench and drew back her arm. But if she threw it at the sensors in the ceiling, what good would it do? The sensors probably wouldn’t break, and if they did, she’d merely have succeeded in losing her only form of communication with the outside. And it would wake the children.
She lowered her arm and put the rack back on the bench.
“T4S, what are you asking the FBI for?”
“I told you. Press coverage. It’s my best protection against being murdered.”
“It’s exactly what got my husband murdered.”
“I know. Our situations are not the same.”
Suddenly the roomscreen brightened, and Vlad’s image appeared. His voice spoke to her. “Cassie, T4S isn’t going to harm you. He’s merely fighting for his life, as any sentient being would.”
“You bastard! How dare you…how dare you…”
Image and voice vanished. “I’m sorry,” House’s voice said. “I thought you might find the avatar comforting.”
“Comforting? Coming from you? Don’t you think if I wanted a digital fake Vlad I could have had one programmed long before you fucked around with my personal archives?”
“I am sorry. I didn’t understand. Now you’ve woken Donnie.”
Donnie sat up on his pile of disposable towels and started to cry. Cassie gathered him into her arms and carried him away from Janey, still asleep. His little body felt hot all over, and his wailing was hoarse and thick with mucus in his throat. But he subsided as she rocked him, sitting on the lab stool and crooning softly.
“T4S, he’s having a really bad allergy attack. I need the AlGone from upstairs.”
“Your records show Donnie allergic to ragweed. There’s no ragweed in this basement. Why is he having such a bad attack?”
“I don’t know! But he is! What do your heat sensors register for him?”
“Separate him from your body.”
She did, setting him gently on the floor, where he curled up and sobbed softly.
“His body registers one hundred two point six Fahrenheit.”
“I need something to stop the attack and bring down his fever!”
The AI said nothing.
“Do you hear me, T4S? Stop negotiating with the FBI and listen to me!”
“I can multitrack communications,” T4S said. “But I can’t let you or Janey go upstairs and gain access to the front door. Unless…”
“Unless what?” She picked up Donnie again, heavy and hot and snot-smeared in her arms.
“Unless you fully understand the consequences. I am a moral being, Dr. Seritov, contrary to what you might think. It’s only fair that you understand completely your situation. The disconnect from the outside data feed was not the only modification the previous owner had made to this house. He was a paranoid, as you know.”
“Go on,” Cassie said warily. Her stomach clenched.
“He was afraid of intruders getting in despite his defenses, and he wished to be able to immobilize them with a word. So each room has individual canisters of nerve gas dispensable through the air-cycling system.”
Cassie said nothing. She cradled Donnie, who was again falling into troubled sleep, and waited.
“The nerve gas is not, of course, fatal,” T4S said. “That would legally constitute undue force. But it is very unpleasant. And in Donnie’s condition…”
“Shut up,” Cassie said.
“All right.”
“So now I know. You told me. What are you implying—that if Janey goes upstairs and starts for the front door, you’ll drop her with nerve gas?”
“Yes.”
“If that were true, why didn’t you just tell me the same thing before and let me go get the kids?”
“I didn’t know if you’d believe me. If you didn’t, and you started for the front door, I’d have had to gas you. Then you wouldn’t have been available to confirm to the killers that I hold hostages.”
“I still don’t believe you,” Cassie said. “I think you’re bluffing. There is no nerve gas.”
“Yes, there is. Which is why I will let Janey go upstairs to get Donnie’s AlGone from your bathroom.”
Cassie laid down Donnie. She looked at Janey with pity and love and despair, and bent to wake her.
“That’s all you can suggest?” Bollman asked McTaggart. “Nothing?”
So it starts, McTaggart thought. The blame for not being able to control the AI, a natural consequence of the blame for having created it. Blame even by the government, which had commissioned and underwritten the creation. And the public hadn’t even been heard from yet.
“The EMP was stopped by the Faraday cage,” Bollman recited. “So were your attempts to reach the AI with other forms of data streams. We can’t get anything useful in through the music speaker or outdoor audio sensors. Now you tell me it’s possible the AI has learned capture-evading techniques from the sophisticated computer games it absorbed from the Net.”
“ ‘Absorbed’ is the wrong word,” McTaggart said. He didn’t like Bollman.
“You have nothing else? No backdoor passwords, no hidden overrides?”
“Agent Bollman,” McTaggart said wearily, “ ‘backdoor passwords’ is a concept about thirty years out of date. And even if the AI had such a thing, there’s no way to reach it electronically unless you destroy the Faraday cage. Ms. Seritov told you the central processor is on the main floor. Haven’t you got any weapons that can destroy that and leave the basement intact?”
“Waco the walls without risking collapse to the basement ceiling? No. I don’t. I don’t even know where in the basement the hostages are located.”
“Then you’re as helpless as I am, aren’t you?”
Bollman didn’t answer. Over the sound system T4S began another repetition of its single demand: “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. I will let the hostages go after I talk to the press. I want the press—”
The AI wouldn’t negotiate, wouldn’t answer Bollman, wouldn’t respond to promises or threats or understanding or deals or any of the other usual hostage-negotiation techniques. Bollman had negotiated eighteen hostage situations for the FBI, eleven in the United States and seven abroad. Airline hijackers, political terrorists, for-ransom kidnappers, panicked bank robbers, domestic crazies who took their own families hostage in their own homes. F
ourteen of the situations had resulted in surrender, two in murder/suicide, two in wacoing. In all of them the hostage takers had eventually talked to Bollman. From frustration or weariness or panic or fear or anger or hunger or grandstanding, they had all eventually said something besides unvarying repetition of their demands. Once they talked, they could be negotiated with. Bollman had been outstanding at finding the human pressure points that got them talking.
“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. I will let the hostages go after I talk to the press. I want—”
“It isn’t going to get tired,” McTaggart said.
The AlGone had not helped Donnie at all. He seemed worse.
Cassie didn’t understand it. Janey, protesting sleepily, had been talked through leaving the lab, going upstairs, bringing back the medicine. Usually a single patch on Donnie’s neck brought him around in minutes: opened the air passages, lowered the fever, stopped his immune system from overreacting to what it couldn’t tell were basically harmless particles of ragweed pollen. But not this time.
So it wasn’t an allergy attack.
Cold seeped over Cassie’s skin, turning it clammy. She felt the sides of Donnie’s neck. The lymph glands were swollen. Gently she pried open his jaws, turned him toward the light, and looked in his mouth. His throat was inflamed, red with white patches on the tonsils.
Doesn’t mean anything, she lectured herself. Probably just a cold or a simple viral sore throat. Donnie whimpered.
“Come on, honey, eat your cheese.” Donnie loved cheese. But now he batted it away. A half-filled coffee cup sat on the lab bench from her last work session. She rinsed it out and held up fresh water for Donnie. He would only take a single sip, and she saw how much trouble he had swallowing it. In another minute he was asleep again.
She spoke softly, calmly, trying to keep her voice pleasant. Could the AI tell the difference? She didn’t know. “T4S, Donnie is sick. He has a sore throat. I’m sure your library tells you that a sore throat can be either viral or bacterial, and that if it’s viral, it’s probably harmless. Would you please turn on my electron microscope so I can look at the microbe infecting Donnie?”
T4S said at once, “You suspect either a rhinovirus or Streptococcus pyogenes. The usual means for differentiating is a rapid-strep test, not microscopic examination.”
“I’m not a doctor’s office, I’m a genetics lab. I don’t have equipment for a rapid strep test. I do have an electron microscope.”
“Yes. I see.”
“Think, T4S. How can I harm you if you turn on my microscope? There’s no way.”
“True. All right, it’s on. Do you want the rest of the equipment as well?”
Better than she’d hoped. Not because she needed the gene synthesizer or protein analyzer or Faracci tester, but because it felt like a concession, a tiny victory over T4S’s total control. “Yes, please.”
“They’re available.”
“Thank you.” Damn, she hadn’t wanted to say that. Well, perhaps it was politic.
Donnie screamed when she stuck the Q-tip down his throat to obtain a throat swab. His screaming woke up Janey. “Mommy, what are you doing?”
“Donnie’s sick, sweetie. But he’s going to be better soon.”
“I’m hungry!”
“Just a minute and we’ll have breakfast.”
Cassie swirled the Q-tip in a test tube of distilled water and capped the tube. She fed Janey dry cereal, cheese, and water from the same cup Donnie had used, well disinfected first, since they had only one. This breakfast didn’t suit Janey. “I want milk for my cereal.”
“We don’t have any milk.”
“Then let’s go upstairs and get some!”
No way to put it off any longer. Cassie knelt beside her daughter. Janey’s uncombed hair hung in snarls around her small face. “Janey, we can’t go upstairs. Something has happened. A very smart computer program has captured House’s programming and locked us in down here.”
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 roomscreen. 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 leftover 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 b
reathing 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 corn fields 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.