AI Unbound

by Nancy Kress

  Abby4 blinked, probably before she knew that she was going to do it, which gave Mal enormous satisfaction. Not even the Biomensas, with their genetically engineered intelligence and memory, knew everything.

  “Ah, yes, of course,” Abby4 said, and Mal was careful not to recognize the bluff. “O, then, northern Minnesota. Send my office system the details, please. Thank you, Mr. Goldstone.”

  Mal rose to go. Abby4 did not rise. In the outer office, he passed a woman several years older than Abby4 but looking so much like her that it must be one of the earlier clones. The woman stooped slightly. Undoubtedly each successive clone had better genemods as the technology came onto the market. AbbyWorks was, after all, one of the five or six leading biosolutions companies in Raleigh, and that meant in the world.

  Mal left the Eden-like AbbyWorks building to walk into the shrouding heat of a North Carolina summer. In the parking lot, his car wouldn’t start. Cursing, he opened the hood. Someone had broken the hood lock and stolen the engine.

  Purveyors of biosolutions to the world, Mal thought bitterly, cleaners-up of the ecological, neurological, and population disasters of the Collapse, and we still can’t create a decent hood lock! O, that actually figured. For the last hundred and fifty years—no, closer to two hundred now—the best minds of each American generation had been concentrating on biology. Engineering, physics, and everything else got few practitioners, and even less funding.

  O, it had paid off. Not only for people like Abby4, the beautiful Biomensa bitch, but even for comparative drones like Mal. He had biological defenses against lingering environmental pollutants (they would linger for another thousand years), he was fertile, he even had modest genemods so that he didn’t look like a troll or think like a troglodyte. What he didn’t have was a working car.

  He took out his phone and called a cab.

  August in Minnesota was not cold, but Kim Mao Xun, the Chinese client, was well wrapped in layers of silk and thin wool. He looked very old, which meant that he was probably even older. Obviously no genemods for appearance, Mal thought, whatever else Mr. Kim might have. O, they did things differently in China! When you survived the Collapse on nothing but sheer numbers, you started your long climb back with essentials, nothing else.

  “I am so excited to see the Alien Craft,” he said in excellent English. “It is famous in China, you know.”

  Abby4 smiled. “Here, I’m afraid, it’s mostly a curiosity. Very few people even know it exists, although the government has authenticated from written records that it landed in October 2007, an event widely recorded by the best scientific instruments of the age.”

  “So much better than what we have now,” Mr. Kim murmured, and Abby4 frowned.

  “O, yes, I suppose…but then, they didn’t have a world to clean up, did they?”

  “And we do. Mr. Goldstone tells me you can help us do this in Shanghai.”

  “Yes, we can,” Abby4 said, and the meeting began to replicate in earnest.

  Mal listened intently, taking notes, but said nothing. Meeting brokers didn’t get involved in details. Matching, arranging, follow-through, impartial evaluation, and, if necessary, arbitration. Then disappear until the next time. But Mal was interested; this was his biggest client so far.

  And the biggest problem: Shanghai. The city and the harbor, which must add up to hundreds of different pollutants, each needing a different genetically designed organism to attack it. Plus, Shanghai had been viral-bombed during the war with Japan. Those viruses would be much mutated by now, especially if they had jumped hosts, which they probably had. Mal could see that even Abby4 was excited by the scope of the job, although she was trying to conceal it.

  “What is Shanghai’s current population, Mr. Kim?”

  “Zero.” Mr. Kim smiled wryly. “Officially, anyway. The city is quarantined. Of course, there are the usual stoopers and renegades, but we will do our best to relocate them before you begin, and those who will not go may be ignored by your operators.”

  Something chilling in that. Although did the US do any better? Mal had heard stories—everyone had heard stories—of families who’d stayed in the most contaminated areas for generations, becoming increasingly deformed and increasingly frightening. There were even people still living in places like New York City, which had taken the triple blow of pollutants, bioweapons, and radiation. Theoretically, the population of New York City was zero. In reality, nobody would go in to count, nor even send in the doggerels, biosolutioned canines with magnitude-one immunity and selectively enhanced intelligence. A doggerel was too expensive to risk in New York. Whoever—or whatever—couldn’t be counted by robots (and American robots were so inadequate compared to the Asian product), stayed uncounted.

  “I understand,” Abby4 said to Mr. Kim. “And the time-frame?”

  “We would like to have Shanghai totally clean ten years from now.”

  Abby4’s face didn’t change. “That is very soon.”

  “Yes. Can you do it?”

  “I need to consult with my scientists,” she said, and Mal felt his chest fill with lightness. She hadn’t said no, and when Abby4 didn’t say no, the answer was likely to be yes. The ten-year deadline—only ten years!—would make the fee enormous, and Mal’s company’s small percentage of it would rise accordingly. A promotion, a bonus, a new car….

  “Then until I hear back from you, we can go no farther,” Mr. Kim said. “Shall we take my car to the Alien Craft?”

  “Certainly,” Abby4 said. “Mr. Goldstone? Can you accompany us? I’m told you know exactly where this curious object is.” As a busy and important Biomensa executive like me would not, was the unstated message, but Mal didn’t mind. He was too happy.

  The Alien Craft, as Mr. Kim persisted in calling it, was not easy to find. Northern Minnesota had all been cleaned up, of course; as valuable farm and dairy land, it had had priority, and anyway, the damage hadn’t been too bad. But, once cleaned, the agrisolution companies wanted the place for farming, free of outside interference. The government, the weak partner in all that biotech corporations did, reluctantly agreed. The Alien Craft lay under an inconspicuous foamcast dome at the end of an obscure road, with no identifying signs of any kind.

  Mal saw immediately why Mr. Kim had suggested going in his car, which had come with him from China. The Chinese were forced to buy all their biosolutions from others. In compensation, they had created the finest engineering and hard-goods manufactories in the world. Mr. Kim’s car was silent, fast, and computer-driven, technology unknown in the United States. Mal could see that even Abby4 was unwillingly impressed.

  He leaned back against the contoured seats, which molded themselves to his body, and watched farmland flash past at an incredible rate. There were government officials and university professors who said that the United States should fear Chinese technology, even if it wasn’t based on biology. Maybe they were right.

  In contrast, the computer-based security at the Alien Craft looked primitive. Mal had arranged for entry, and they passed through the locks into the dome, which was only ten feet wider on all sides than the Alien Craft itself. Mal had never seen it before, and despite himself, he was impressed.

  The Craft was dull silver, as big as a small bedroom, a slightly irregular oval. In the artificial light of the dome, it shimmered. When Mal put out a hand to touch it, his hand stopped almost a foot away.

  “A force field of some unknown kind, unknown even before the Collapse,” Abby4 said, with such authority you’d think she’d done field tests herself. “The shield extends completely around the Craft, even below ground, where it is also impenetrable. The Craft was very carefully monitored in the decades between its landing and the Collapse, and never once did any detectable signal of any kind go out from it. No outgoing signals, no aliens disembarking, no outside markings to decode…no communication of any kind. One wonders why the aliens bothered to send it at all.”

  Mr. Kim quoted, “‘The wordless teaching, the profit in not d
oing—not many people understand it.’”

  “Ah,” Abby4 said, too smart to either agree or disagree with a philosophy—Taoist? Buddhist?—she patently didn’t share.

  Mal walked completely around the Craft, wondering himself why anybody would bother with such a tremendous undertaking without any follow-up. Of course, maybe it hadn’t been tremendous to the aliens. Maybe they sent interstellar silvery metal ovals to other planets all the time without follow-up. But why?

  When Mal reached his starting point in the circular dome, Mr. Kim was removing an instrument from his leather bag.

  Mal had never seen an instrument like it, but then, he’d hardly seen any scientific instruments at all. This one looked like a flat television, with a glass screen on one side, metal on the other five. Only the “glass” clearly wasn’t, since it seemed to shift as Mr. Kim lifted it, as if it were a field of its own. As Mal watched, Mr. Kim applied the field side of the device onto the side of the Craft, where it stayed even as he stepped back.

  Mal said uncertainly, “I don’t think you should—”

  Abby4 said, “O, it doesn’t matter, Mr. Goldstone. Nothing anyone has ever done has penetrated the Craft’s force field, even before the Collapse.”

  Mr. Kim just smiled.

  Mal said, “You don’t understand. The clearance I arranged with the State Department…it doesn’t include taking any readings or…or whatever that device is doing. Mr. Kim?”

  “Just taking some readings,” Mr. Kim said blandly.

  Mal’s unease grew. “Please stop. As I say, I didn’t obtain clearances for this!”

  Abby4 scowled at him fiercely. Mr. Kim said, “Of course, Mr. Goldstone,” and detached his device. “I am sorry to alarm you. Just some readings. Shall we go now? A most interesting object, but rather monotonous.”

  On the way back to St. Paul, Mr. Kim and Abby4 discussed the historic cleanups of Boston, Paris, and Lisbon, as if nothing had happened.

  What had?

  AbbyWorks got the Shanghai contract. Mal got his promotion, his bonus, and his new car. Someone else handled the follow-up for the contract while Mal went on to new projects, but every so often, he checked to see how the clean-up of Shanghai was proceeding. Two years into the agreement, the job was actually ahead of projected schedule, despite badly deteriorating relations between the two countries. China invaded and annexed Tibet, but China had always invaded and annexed Tibet, and only the human-solidarity people objected. Next, however, China annexed the Kamchatka Peninsula, where American biosolutions companies were working on the clean-up of Vladivostock. The genemod engineers brought back frightening stories of advanced Chinese engineering: room-temperature superconductors. Maglev trains. Nanotechnology. There were even rumors of quantum computers, capable of handling trillions of operations simultaneously, although Mal discounted those rumors completely. A practical quantum computer was still far over the horizon.

  AbbyWorks was ordered out of Shanghai by the United States government. The company did not leave. Abby1 was jailed, but this made no difference. The Shanghai profits were paid to offshore banks. AbbyWorks claimed to have lost control of its Shanghai employees, who were making huge personal fortunes, enough to enable them to live outside the United States for the rest of very luxurious lives. Then, abruptly, the Chinese government itself terminated the contract. They literally threw AbbyWorks out of China in the middle of the night. They kept for themselves enormous resources in patented scientific equipment, as well as monies due for the last three months’ work, an amount equal to some state budgets.

  At three o’clock in the morning, Mal received a visit from the Office of National Security.

  “Mallings Goldstone?”

  “Yes?”

  “We need to ask you some questions.”

  Recorders, intimidation. The ONS had information that in 2175 Mr. Goldstone had conducted two people to the Minnesota site of the space object: Abby4 Abbington, president of AbbyWorks Biosolutions, and Mr. Kim Mao Xun of the Chinese government.

  “Yes, I did,” Mal said, sitting stiffly in his nightclothes. “It’s on record. I had proper clearances.”

  “Yes. But during that visit, did Mr. Kim take out and attach to the space object an unknown device, and then return it to his briefcase?”

  “Yes.” Mal’s stomach twisted.

  “Why wasn’t this incident reported to the State Department?”

  “I didn’t think it was important.” Not entirely true. Abby4 must have reported it…but why now? Because of the lost monies and confiscated equipment, of course. Adding to the list of Chinese treacheries; a longer list was more likely to compel government reaction.

  “Do you have any idea what the device was, or what it might have done to the space object?”

  “No.”

  “Then you didn’t rule out that its effects might have been dangerous to your country?”

  “Dangerous’? How?”

  “We don’t know, Mr. Mallings—that’s the point. We do know that in nonbiological areas the Chinese technology is far ahead of our own. We have no way of knowing if that device you failed to report turned the space object into a weapon of some kind.”

  “A weapon? Don’t you think that’s very unlikely?”

  “No, Mr. Mallings. I don’t. Please get dressed and come with us.”

  For the first time, Mal noticed the two men’s builds. Genemod for strength and agility, no doubt, as well as maximum possible longevity. He remembered Mr. Kim, scrawny and wrinkled. Their bodies far outclassed Mr. Kim’s, far outclassed Mal’s as well. But Mr. Kim’s body was somewhere on the other side of the world, along with his superior “devices,” and Mal’s body was marked “scapegoat” as clearly as if it were spelled out in DNA-controlled birthmarks on his forehead.

  He went into his bedroom to get dressed.

  Mal had been interrogated with truth drugs—painless, harmless, utterly reliable—recorded, and released by the time the news hit the flimsies. He had already handed in his resignation to his company. The moving truck stood outside his apartment, being loaded for the move to someplace he wasn’t known. Mal, flimsy in hand, watched the two huge stevies carry out his furniture.

  But he couldn’t postpone reading the flimsy forever. And, of course, this was just the first. There would be more. The tempaper rustled in his hand. It would last forty-eight hours before dissolving into molecules completely harmless to the environment.

  CHINESE ARMED “SPACE OBJECT” TO DESTROY US!!!

  “MIGHT BE RADIATION, OR POLLUTANTS, OR A SUPER-BOMB,” SAY SCIENTISTS

  TROJAN HORSE UNDER GUISE OF BIOSOLUTIONS CONTRACT

  TWO YEARS AND NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE!!!!

  Flimsies weren’t subtle. But so far as Mal could see, his name hadn’t yet been released to them.

  Mal said, “Please be careful with that desk, it’s very old. It belonged to my great-grandfather.”

  “O, yes, friend,” one of the stevies said. “Most careful.” They hurled it into the truck.

  A neighbor of Mal’s walked toward Mal, recognized him, and stopped dead. She hissed at him, a long ugly sound, and walked on.

  So some other flimsy had already tracked him down and published his name.

  “Leave the rest,” Mal said suddenly, “everything else inside the house. Let’s go.”

  “O, just a few crates,” said one stevie.

  “No, leave it.” Mal climbed into the truck’s passenger cubicle. He hoped that he wasn’t a coward, but like all meeting brokers he was an historian, and he remembered the historical accounts of the “Anti-Polluters’ Riots” of the Collapse. What those mobs had done to anyone suspected of contributing to the destruction of the environment…Mal pulled the curtains closed in the cubicle. “Let’s go!”

  “O, yes!” the stevies said cheerfully, and drove off.

  Mal moved five states away, pursued all the way by flimsies. He couldn’t change his retinal scan or DNA ID, of course, but he used a legal corporate alias with t
he new landlord, the grocery broker, the bank. He read the news every day, and listened to it on public radio, and it progressed as any meeting broker could foresee it would.

  First, set the agenda: Demonize the Chinese, spread public fear. Second, canvass negotiating possibilities: Will they admit it? What can we contribute? Third, eliminate the possibilities you don’t like and hone in on the one you do: If the United States has been attacked, it has the right to counterattack. Fourth, build in safeguards against failure: We can’t yet attack China, they’ll destroy us. We can attack the danger they’ve placed within our borders, and then declare victory for that. Fifth, close the deal.

  The evacuation started two weeks later, and covered most of northern Minnesota and great swathes of southern Ontario. It included people and farm animals, but not wildlife, which would, of course, be replaced from cloned embryos. As the agrisolution inhabitants, many protesting furiously, were trucked out, the timed-release drops of engineered organisms were trucked in. Set loose after the bomb, they would spread over the entire affected area and disassemble all radioactive molecules. They were the same biosolutions that had cleaned up Boston, the very best AbbyWorks could create. In five years, Minnesota would be as sweet and clean as Kansas.

  Or Shanghai.

  The entire nation, Mal included, watched the bomb drop on vid. People held patriotic parties; wine and beer flowed. We were showing the Chinese that they couldn’t endanger us in our own country! Handsome genemod news speakers, who looked like Viking princesses or Zulu warriors or Greek gods, speculated on what the space object might reveal when it was blasted open. If anything survived, of course, which was not likely…and here scientists, considerably less gorgeous than the news speakers, explained fusion and the core of the sun. The bomb might be antiquated technology, they said, but it was still workable, and would save us from Chinese perfidy.

  Not to mention, Mal thought, saving face for the United States and lost revenues for AbbyWorks. It might not earn them as much to clean up Minnesota as to clean up Shanghai, but it was still a lot of money.