Nineveh's Child

by Gerhard Gehrke

  “I guess this is your chance to finish the job,” Dinah said.

  “Your bruises are turning yellow.”

  Dinah touched the puffiest section around her right eye. Still tender, but not painful.

  “I guess you haven’t found a new lockpick.”

  Rosalyn shook her head. “And there’s a new guard here at night. I’ve tried listening for a pattern. He paces around enough that I think he actually stays awake. He leaves occasionally, maybe for the bathroom, but he returns after a few minutes.”

  “Doing anything out here will be hard. But that’s not our only option.”

  “Why bother doing anything? If we can’t get out, we do the work and bide our time.”

  “We keep trying because if there’s any commonality to my brother’s dumb stories, it’s that bad things happen at the end. Whatever he’s working on won’t end well. If we’re limited to whatever control we have over the network, we need to ask ourselves, what do we have as assets? What are our parameters?”

  “It’s just numbers, like you like to put it.”

  Dinah tapped her lip. “Maybe that’s where I’m wrong.”

  ***

  The next day at the beginning of her work session, she tried something with Addis: she got her to stop working. She first turned off Addis’s ability to send notifications. That muted her and made it easy to “visit” her node to see what she was receiving without the activity being logged. Dinah’s automated switch continued to send data to Addis in a slow trickle, and she turned that off, too. It was like placing one of her virtual fingers into a hole in a leaking dike. Dinah hoped for something from Addis, a thank you, a sigh of relief, but she heard nothing.

  One by one she muted the other nodes, but she left them running as usual. After a few minutes, she detected no change in the network. She sent Rosalyn a message. “Try switching off one of your nodes. Up and downstream. Mute its notifications first.”

  After a minute, she got a reply. “It works. Now what?”

  “Talk later.”

  Their session went into full swing. For the first hour, it felt like a heavy load, more than usual. Addis being offline began to take its toll. Soon she faltered and fell behind, and it started to feel like her first day again. Then the network did something it had never done in the middle of a session before: the streams slacked off to a more moderate flow. The flow weakened to a trickle. The trickle then stopped completely. The staggered decline was no doubt instantaneous in real time.

  “What’s going on?” Rosalyn asked. “Are we getting out early?”

  “It feels like we just started. But no one’s pulling us out.”

  After a moment Rosalyn said, “My nodes are still up. How about yours?”

  “Same here. Except for the one I muted. Addis is now sending nothing-signals with no values back. We just triggered an error in the program and stopped it cold. If no one’s at the terminal monitoring, they won’t notice for a while. Give me a minute.”

  Checking her nodes was like knowing all ten fingers were there. But something new from the source of the data was tapping at each node. Dinah tapped back and found a new stream from the network. Was this an automated part of the program or a user command? Anyone actively using the programs might think the nodes had all been disconnected or had died and would have pulled Dinah out.

  She felt her way along the new stream. It led her out of her workspace and away in a new direction different from anything on her Z axis tunnels. It was as if a new dimension had opened up to solve the problem she had created. Whatever the automated troubleshooter was, it led to an extra space linked to her network that hadn’t been accessible before or was well concealed. She felt a rush of excitement.

  As she reached out to explore, she found the new space to be vast. Wide channels flowed from other unknown computers. Perhaps they were other nodes, yet these were currently inactive judging from the lack of data going to or from them. Something caught her attention in the center of the new space. An octahedron hung there, with a binary inscription etched on each of its eight faces.

  “Rosalyn, can you see this space?”

  “I don’t know where you are.”

  Dinah almost said “I’m right here” before she caught herself. “Follow my words.”

  “No, I can’t get to you,” Rosalyn said after a moment.

  “Hang on.”

  Dinah drew closer to the shape and read the numbers.

  01101101 01110101 01110100 01100001 01101110 01110100 01110011 00100000 01101111 01101110 01101100 01111001

  It took but a second for her to translate: “mutants only.”

  “Where are you?” she asked. She forgot that her line of chat to Rosalyn was still open.

  “I’m waiting on you. Where are you? Did you find—”

  She muted her.

  “WHERE ARE YOU?” she screamed. All caps. Serious stuff.

  The octahedron started to spin. The binary numbers flipped and grew into a new sentence that floated in front of the twirling figure.

  “Took you long enough,” it read.

  “I just got here. This was never open to me before. I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Whatever.” Then: “Take it for a ride.”

  The octahedron turned and twisted as if it were fighting a force exerted on both axes. She grabbed it.

  This filled her with a sensation unlike anything she had ever felt. Working the nodes was like directing streams of water. But here was the source from which it all flowed. With the octahedron in hand, the streams were an afterthought. This was control. She had a nigh instant recognition of every command the program could make. Now she could ask questions. Give orders. The floating geometric shape in her hand was both her monitor and input device.

  The graphic interface she had seen on her brother’s terminal was at her fingertips, and with a thought she could interact with it.

  “I don’t know where to start,” she said.

  “Turn it all back on.”

  “Okay.” She sent Rosalyn a message. “Unmute your nodes, and get ready.” She reached back to do the same with her own.

  “Now what?” Dinah asked.

  “Go nuts.”

  She wanted to ask questions. So many choices. But what did it all mean?

  She considered all her possible executables and read through dozens of formulae assigned to a multitude of rows and columns. What if she changed one value? She needed definitions to her choices so she wouldn’t flail blindly. Her nodes waited.

  “Definitions,” she said, and a program obliged.

  Abstract numbers in the first open spreadsheet now had meaning. She scrolled through a key and found labels that exploded into descriptions and spreadsheet locations for things like skin thickness, lung capacity, stomach enzymes that could digest plant matter or blood or plastics, and eyelids that acted like lenses, allowing for clear sight when submerged underwater. She got caught up reading through a suite of changes that promised pressure-resistant skin folds that would protect the eye and withstand a few minutes of the vacuum of space. Changes to what?

  She found descriptions of other modifications, tens of thousands of lines of text. She didn’t want to read anymore. She took a step back and considered the octahedron. It pulsed and expanded, and without any more goading she pulled it apart.

  “Bravo,” the text read.

  A graphic interface opened in the center of a multicolored nexus of noodles, the number streams that were idling there like a purring engine. In the center of the interface was the blank outline of a human form, a paper doll waiting for her to dress it up.

  She told the shape before her to spin. It obliged. She then considered each item she had read through. They were sticky, and she could pick each of them up and place them anywhere on the doll. She chose the space-eyes component and touched it to the doll. It stuck. The number streams surged to life, sending a torrent past her toward her nodes.

  She checked the paper doll. This blank of a ma
n now had eyes that could survive in space. What else could she give him?

  She began slapping other changes onto the doll, one, two, four at a time. It was soon covered with twenty modifications, a true superhero.

  The room around her shuddered. The veins of numbers went red.

  The voice came at her like ultrasound, vibrating through her teeth and bones. She could barely make it out.

  “Slower.”

  It wasn’t Rosalyn; she was still muted. Not one of her nodes, either. Was this her brother somewhere on the network? Was he being tasked with dealing with her calculations? Every gesture of Dinah’s caused the entire network to instantly react. And now she had the keys to the entire system. How many minds were solving the puzzles she put before them?

  Again, the voice. “You must go slower. It’s too much.”

  She didn’t want to listen.

  What else was possible? What were the limits?

  She began attaching more changes onto the paper doll, until she could barely discern its form through the floating descriptors running from head to toe. She opened a routine that monitored conflicts in the changes. It gave her a message that it would take two hours to complete the scan, and only if she put everything else on hold.

  But she didn’t want to wait. Also, she wondered if her new freedom granted here would be rescinded before then.

  And what if Ruben was connected just as Rosalyn and Dinah were? That would mean he had put himself at her mercy, an opportunity she might never have again. It was about time he had some inkling of the discomfort they felt. A perverse warmth knotted inside her stomach as she applied everything possible to the paper doll all at once, creating her own virtual super space person.

  The network screamed, all of it, the new voice screaming the loudest. Dinah muted it all. The thrum of the room around her would not be silenced, but she savored it as the simulation struggled to keep up with her commands. The paper doll shimmered with popping readouts waiting for her to analyze each step she was taking. Error messages followed. She looked for other things to throw into the simulation, but her icons were obscured.

  Was this leading to the apogee of human possibility, an ultimate man (she’d checked, and the doll was now a he) to take everyone into a golden age? But the blinking errors were impossible to ignore, even if she didn’t understand any of them.

  The word that stood out the most was Inviable.

  The floor of the chamber lurched. The octahedron swelled and contracted. Then it all went dark.

  ***

  She opened her eyes back in the White Room. Dr. M was disconnecting her from the machine. The lights appeared brighter than usual.

  “That’s it?” she asked, her throat surprisingly raw. “We’re done for the day? Just a half work session?”

  He smirked. “You were connected for sixteen hours.”

  “But that’s not possible. It felt like I was just getting warmed up. Did my brother get sick? Is that why we quit?”

  “Let’s go and get you your dinner. It’s late, and I fear we’re exhausted.”

  She didn’t feel exhausted. In fact, she felt wired. She wanted back inside, to have each thought and gesture bring about instant calculations. She wanted to feel that control.

  “Can we go back to work after I eat?”

  “I’m afraid not. We mustn’t overtax the system. Or you.”

  “But I’m fine. I’ll be ready to go again once I eat. Tell my brother to get a go-juice shot and keep up. We can’t stop.”

  Dr. M just continued to coil the various wires and electrodes and put it all away. He then walked her out to their rec room where a tray of food waited. Rosalyn wasn’t around. Dinah ate alone, barely able to stay in her seat. She choked the food down so fast she had a coughing fit. When she tried to get up, he pointed her back down. She drank some water and kept eating.

  By the time she spooned the last of the soup into her mouth, a heavy sleepiness had come over her. It wasn’t accompanied by numb lips or an odd flavor; this was exhaustion. The clock above one of the counters read 1:22. She yawned.

  “I see the wind has finally left your sails. Now be a good girl, and go to sleep.”

  “But it’s early yet,” she said with waning strength.

  She shuffled off toward her room, stopping at Rosalyn’s door. She knocked.

  “Rosalyn?”

  She waited for a reply, but when none came she went to bed.

  The next morning she waited for the door to unlock so she could get to work. Her brain felt like it was already moving in a million directions. Getting plugged in couldn’t happen quickly enough. Where were Dr. M and Dr. Hel? Part of her realized how odd this was, but she was preoccupied. She wanted to be back inside. In control. Moving many minds with her own.

  When the bolt for her door finally clicked open, she tried to breeze past Dr. M toward the lab, but he stopped her and ordered her to eat.

  Arguing would take too long.

  She sat, ate half the bowl of mush, and got up. He didn’t stop her. She almost tripped over the Beast as she led the way to the White Room.

  31. Sick

  The network felt sluggish. Everything Dinah directed to her nodes got dropped. Was everyone else tired except her? After what felt like an hour, the other nodes finally came to life and began to do their job. She turned it all on auto and went to find the octahedron. It was all there waiting for her. The paper doll was fresh and clean. She imagined it beckoning her.

  Are you ready? I’m ready.

  Just reading through all of the prior day’s event log took a while. So many terms that she would need to become familiar with. She selected the first error message that had popped up. That would be the day’s priority.

  Rosalyn showed up late. Her side of the network began receiving traffic as some of the automated processes began their number crunching. Dinah needed Rosalyn to be working to get anything accomplished.

  “About time,” Dinah said. “Keep up.”

  And it was off to the races. If any node lagged, she spurred it on and didn’t let up. To solve the error she had flagged, she needed to puzzle out an amyloid plaque inhibitor, and several sequences looked promising. Fittingly, the first functional gift she bestowed upon her paper doll was a long life in which the brain didn’t degenerate.

  So many options. So much to learn. Could any of this be real? She’d had the night to ponder what the network was truly capable of. Playtime was over.

  She zoomed in the on doll’s brain and exploded the view. She wondered if the immune response to the herpes virus could be suppressed. In theory, that could delay plaque growth, according to one data file. She made the change and started to run the simulation, aging her doll one year per second through a standard redoubt lifestyle, assuming typical diet and exercise. None of the processes were beyond her understanding.

  The sim faltered. Rosalyn had blocked the stream of data and calculations on her end. This backed everything up, and Dinah hit pause.

  “Work time. Come on.”

  Rosalyn didn’t respond.

  “Hello?” There wasn’t anything to knock on, and she had no other way to get her attention.

  What’s she doing?

  She didn’t have the option to disconnect. After double and triple checking to see if Rosalyn was listening, she decided to work with what she had. The rest of the nodes on her end would have to bear the burden of her absence. If Ruben was connected, he would have to shoulder the strain that her nodes couldn’t. His brain would receive everything that would go to Rosalyn’s entire side of the network.

  “Let’s go.”

  The fringes of a headache began forming. She kept pushing. She dismissed the stray protests from her nodes to ease up or to stop. The complaints became a steady murmur. No one was happy. But as easily as Rosalyn had initiated her strike or mental sit-in or whatever she had going on, Dinah muted everyone and kept flogging away at the problem.

  Soon her head throbbed. She could make the numbers lin
e up, all of them. The continent-sized bolus of figures swelled above the octahedron, filling the virtual space, which itself grew to accommodate it all. But the room couldn’t expand fast enough. It began to degrade, falling into shadow.

  Something’s not working.

  Dinah pushed at it to prevent its collapse, but it was too heavy, and the weight of it was about to crush her.

  “Work harder!” she screamed.

  That was when it all went black.

  Dr. Hel was standing over Dinah, holding a pack of gauze to her nose. Blood flowed freely and saturated the gauze. With her fingers, Dr. Hel pinched Dinah’s nostrils, then sat Dinah’s bed up and locked it in place. Dinah was woozy and would have preferred to remain lying down. The blood running down the back of her throat made her feel sick. A nurse applied an ice pack to the back of her neck and tilted her head so she was staring up at the lights.

  Her stomach rolled, and she gagged.

  “Do not throw up,” Dr. Hel said.

  Dinah was certain that if she indeed did vomit, she would be able to hit the far wall of the lab. But she kept it all down, and finally her nose stopped leaking.

  “What time is it?” Dinah asked.

  Dr. Hel ignored her. She left her with the nurse, who busied herself entering information into a tablet.

  “What happened?”

  The nurse ignored her too. Dinah heard Dr. M call for Dr. Hel. Then she heard Ruben’s voice. She got off the table and pushed through the door before the nurse could stop her.

  The doctors were in the room with green lights, but white lights were now on, shining down onto the beds where her nodes lay. Her brother was with them, in his chair, focused on one of the patients.

  The doctors fussed over the person in the bed. A cart with medical equipment had several drawers open. Dr. M prepped a needle with some clear drug and handed it to Dr. Hel.