No one knew.
Forty-eight hours was a credible time to negotiate before wacoing. That would play well on TV. And anyway, the white-haired man from Washington, who held a position not entered on any public records, had his orders.
“All right,” McTaggart said unhappily. All those years of development . . . This had been the most interesting project McTaggart had ever worked on. He also thought of himself as a patriot, genuinely believing that T4S would have made a real contribution to national security. But he wasn’t at all sure that the president would authorize the project’s continuance. Not after this.
Bollman gave an order over his phone. A moment later, a low rumble came from the tank.
* * *
A minute and another minute and another hour . . .
Cassie stared upward at the air duct. If it happened, how would it happen? Both generators were half-underground, half-above. Extensions reached deep into the ground to draw energy from the geothermal gradient. Each generator’s top half, the part she could see, was encased in tough, dull gray plastic. She could visualize it clearly, battleship gray. Inside would be the motor, the capacitors, the connections to House, all made of varying materials but a lot of them plastic. There were so many strong tough petroleum plastics these days, good for making so many different things, durable enough to last practically forever.
Unless Vlad’s bacteria got to them. To both of them.
Would T4S know, if it happened at all? Would it be so quick that the A.I. would simply disappear, a vast and complex collection of magnetic impulses going out like a snuffed candle flame? What if one generator failed a significant time before the other? Would T4S be able to figure out what was happening, realize what she had done and that it was dying . . . ? No, not that, only bio-organisms could die. Machines were just turned off.
“Is Donnie any better?” T4S said, startling her.
“I can’t tell.” It didn’t really care. It was software.
Then why did it ask?
It was software that might, if it did realize what she had done, be human enough to release the nerve gas that Cassie didn’t really think it had, out of revenge. Donnie couldn’t withstand that, not in his condition. But the A.I. didn’t have nerve gas, it had been bluffing.
A very human bluff.
“T4S—” she began, not sure what she was going to say, but T4S interrupted with, “Something’s happening!”
Cassie held her children tighter.
“I’m . . . what have you done?”
It knew she was responsible. Cassie heard someone give a sharp frightened yelp, realized that it was herself.
“Dr. Seritov . . . oh . . .” And then, “Oh, please . . .”
The lights went out.
Janey screamed. Cassie clapped her hands stupidly, futilely, over Donnie’s mouth and nose. “Don’t breathe! Oh, don’t breathe, hold your breath, Janey!”
But she couldn’t keep smothering Donnie. Scrambling up in the total dark, Donnie in her arms, she stumbled. Righting herself, Cassie shifted Donnie over her right shoulder—he was so heavy—and groped in the dark for Janey. She caught her daughter’s screaming head, moved her left hand to Janey’s shoulder, dragged her in the direction of the door. What she hoped was the direction of the door.
“Janey, shut up! We’re going out! Shut up!”
Janey continued to scream. Cassie fumbled, lurched—where the hell was it?—found the door. Turned the knob. It opened, unlocked.
* * *
“Wait!” Elya called, running across the trampled lawn toward Bollman. “Don’t waco! Wait! I called the press!”
He swung to face her and she shrank back. “You did what?”
“I called the press! They’ll be here soon and the A.I. can tell its story and then release Cassie and the children!”
Bollman stared at her. Then he started shouting, “Who was supposed to be watching this woman! Jessup!”
“Stop the tank!” Elya cried.
It continued to move toward the northeast corner of the castle, reached it. For a moment, the scene looked to Elya like something from her childhood book of myths: Atlas? Sisyphus? The tank strained against the solid wall. Soldiers in full battle armor, looking like machines, waited behind it.
The wall folded inward like pleated cardboard and then started to fall.
The tank broke through and was buried in rubble. She heard it keep on going. The soldiers hung back until debris had stopped falling, then rushed forward through the precariously overhanging hole. People shouted. Dust filled the air.
A deafening crash from inside the house, from something falling: walls, ceiling, floor. Elya whimpered. If Cassie was in that, or under that, or above that . . .
Cassie staggered around the southwest corner of the castle. She was carrying Donnie and dragging Janey, all of them coughing and sputtering. As people spotted them, a stampede started. Elya joined it. “Cassie! Oh, my dear . . .”
Hair matted with dirt and rubble, face streaked, hauling along her screaming daughter, Cassie spoke only to Elya. She utterly ignored all the jabbering others as if they did not exist. “He’s dead.”
For a heart-stopping moment, Elya thought she meant Donnie. But a man was peeling Donnie off his mother and Donnie was whimpering, pasty and red-eyed and snot-covered but alive. “Give him to me, Dr. Seritov,” the man said. “I’m a physician.”
“Who, Cassie?” Elya said gently. Clearly Cassie was in some kind of shock. She went on with that weird detachment from the chaos around her, as if only she and Cassie existed. “Who’s dead?”
“Vlad,” Cassie said. “He’s really dead.”
“Dr. Seritov,” Bollman said, “come this way. On behalf of everyone here, we’re so glad you and the children—”
“You didn’t have to waco,” Cassie said, as if noticing Bollman for the first time. “I turned T4S off for you.”
“And you’re safe,” Bollman said soothingly.
“You wacoed so you could get the backup storage facility as well, didn’t you? So T4S couldn’t be rebooted.”
Bollman said, “I think you’re a little hysterical, Dr. Seritov. The tension.”
“Bullshit. What’s that coming? Is it a medical copter? My son needs a hospital.”
“We’ll get your son to a hospital instantly.”
Someone else pushed her way through the crowd. The tall woman who had installed the castle’s wiring. Cassie ignored her as thoroughly as she’d ignored everyone else until the woman said, “How did you disable the nerve gas?”
Slowly, Cassie swung to face her. “There was no nerve gas.”
“Yes, there was. I installed that, too. Black-market. I already told Agent Bollman, he promised me immunity. How did you disable it? Or didn’t the A.I. have time to release it?”
Cassie stroked Donnie’s face. Elya thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then she said, quietly, under the din, “So he did have moral feelings. He didn’t murder, and we did.”
“Dr. Seritov,” Bollman said with that same professional soothing, “T4S was a machine. Software. You can’t murder software.”
“Then why were you so eager to do it?”
Elya picked up the screaming Janey. Over the noise she shouted, “That’s not a medcopter, Cassie. It’s the press. I . . . I called them.”
“Good,” Cassie said, still quietly, still without that varnished toughness that had encased her since Vlad’s murder. “I can do that for him, at least. I want to talk with them.”
“No, Dr. Seritov,” Bollman said. “That’s impossible.”
“No, it’s not,” Cassie said. “I have some things to say to the reporters.”
“No,” Bollman said, but Cassie had already turned to the physician holding Donnie.
“Doctor, listen to me. Donnie has Streptococcus pyogenes, but it’s a genetically altered strain. I altered it. What I did was—” As she explained, the doctor’s eyes widened.
By the time she’d finished and Donnie had be
en loaded into an FBI copter, two more copters had landed. Bright news logos decorated their sides, looking like the fake ones Bollman had summoned. But these weren’t fake, Elya knew.
Cassie started toward them. Bollman grabbed her arm. Elya said quickly, “You can’t stop both of us from talking. And I called a third person, too, when I called the press. A friend I told everything to.” A lie. No, a bluff. Would he call her on it?
Bollman ignored Elya. He kept hold of Cassie’s arm. She said wearily, “Don’t worry, Bollman. I don’t know what T4S was designed for. He wouldn’t tell me. All I know is that he was a sentient being fighting for his life, and we destroyed him.”
“For your sake,” Bollman said. He seemed to be weighing his options.
“Yeah, sure. Right.”
Bollman released Cassie’s arm.
Cassie looked at Elya. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way, Elya.”
“No,” Elya said.
“But it is. There’s no such thing as noncompeting technologies. Or noncompeting anything.”
“I don’t understand what you—” Elya began, but Cassie was walking toward the copters. Live reporters and smart ’bot recorders, both, rushed forward to meet her.
AIs Page 29