The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  Donnie got no worse. He wasn’t any better either, as far as Cassie could tell, but he at least he wasn’t worse. He slept most of the time, and his heavy, labored breathing filled the lab. Cassie sponged him with cold water every fifteen minutes. His fever dropped slightly, to one hundred two, and didn’t spike again. The rash on his torso didn’t spread. Whatever this strain of Streptococcus was doing, it was doing it silently, inside Donnie’s feverish body.

  She hadn’t been able to scream her frustration and fury at T4S, because of Janey. The little girl had been amazingly good, considering, but now she was growing clingy and whiny. Cartoons could only divert so long.

  “Mommy, I wanna go upstairs!”

  “I know, sweetie. But we can’t.”

  “That’s a bad smart program to keep us here!”

  “I know,” Cassie said. Small change compared to what she’d like to say about T4S.

  “I wanna get out!”

  “I know, Janey. Just a while longer.”

  “You don’t know that,” Janey said, sounding exactly like Vlad challenging the shaky evidence behind a dubious conclusion.

  “No, sweetie. I don’t really know that. I only hope it won’t be too long.”

  “T4S,” Janey said, raising her voice as if the AI were not only invisible but deaf, “this is not a good line of action!”

  Vlad again. Cassie blinked hard. To her surprise, T4S answered.

  “I know it’s not a good line of action, Janey. Biological people should not be shut up in basements. But neither should machine people be killed. I’m trying to save my own life.”

  “But I wanna go upstairs!” Janey wailed, in an abrupt descent from a miniature of her rationalist father to a bored six-year-old.

  “I can’t do that, but maybe we can do something else fun,” T4S said. “Have you ever met Pranopolis yourself?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Watch.”

  The roomscreen brightened. Pranopolis appeared on a blank background, a goofy-looking purple creature from outer space. T4S had snipped out selected digital code from the movie, Cassie guessed. Suddenly Pranopolis wasn’t alone. Janey appeared beside her, smiling sideways as if looking directly at Pranopolis. Snipped from their home recordings.

  Janey laughed delightedly. “There’s me!”

  “Yes,” T4S said. “But where are you and Pranopolis? Are you in a garden, or your house, or on the moon?”

  “I can pick? Me?”

  “Yes. You.”

  “Then we’re in Pranopolis’s space ship!”

  And they were. Was T4S programmed to do this, Cassie wondered, or was it capable of thinking it up on its own, to amuse a bored child? Out of what . . . compassion?

  She didn’t want to think about the implications of that.

  “Now tell me what happens next,” T4S said to Janey.

  “We eat kulich.” The delicious Russian cake-bread that Vlad’s mother had taught Cassie to make.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know what that is. Pick something else.”

  Donnie coughed, a strangled cough that sent Cassie to his side. When he breathed again it sounded more congested to Cassie. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen. An antibiotic wasn’t available, but if she had even an anti-congestant . . . or . . .

  “T4S,” she said, confident that it could both listen to her and create customized movies for Janey, “there is equipment in the locked storage cabinet that I can use to distill oxygen. It would help Donnie breathe easier. Would you please open the cabinet door?”

  “I can’t do that, Dr. Seritov.”

  “Oh, why the hell not? Do you think I’ve got the ingredients for explosives in there, or that if I did I could use them down here in this confined space? Every single jar and vial and box in that cabinet is e-tagged. Read the tags, see how harmless they are, and open the door!”

  “I’ve read the e-tags,” the AI said, “but my data base doesn’t include much information on chemistry. In fact, I only know what I’ve learned from your lab equipment.”

  Which would be raw data, not interpretations. “I’m glad you don’t know everything,” Cassie said sarcastically.

  “I can learn, but only if I have access to basic principles and adequate data.”

  “That’s why you don’t know what kulich is. Nobody equipped you with Russian.”

  “Correct. What is kulich?”

  She almost snapped, “Why should I tell you?” But she was asking it a favor. And it had been nice enough to amuse Janey even when it had nothing to gain.

  Careful, a part of her mind warned. Stockholm Syndrome, and she almost laughed aloud. Stockholm Syndrome described a developing affinity on the part of hostages for their captors. Certainly the originators of that phrase had never expected it to be applied to a hostage situation like this one.

  “Why are you smiling, Dr. Seritov?”

  “I’m remembering kulich. It’s a Russian cake made with raisins and orange liqueur and traditionally served at Easter. It tastes wonderful.”

  “Thank you for the data,” T4S said. “Your point that you would not create something dangerous when your children are with you is valid. I’ll open the storage cabinet.”

  Cassie studied the lighted interior of the cabinet, which, like so much in the lab, had been Vlad’s. She couldn’t remember exactly what she’d stored here, beyond basic materials. The last few weeks, which were her first few weeks in the castle, she’d been working on the protein folding project, which hadn’t needed anything not in the refrigerator. Before that there’d been the hectic weeks of moving, although she hadn’t actually packed or unpacked the lab equipment. Professionals had done that. Not that making oxygen was going to need anything exotic. Run an electric current through a solution of copper sulfate and collect copper at one terminal, oxygen at the other.

  She picked up an e-tagged bottle, and her eye fell on an untagged stoppered vial with Vlad’s handwriting on the label: Patton in a Jar.

  Suddenly nothing in her mind would stay still long enough to examine.

  Vlad had so many joke names for his engineered microorganism, as if the one Barr had given it hadn’t been joke enough . . .

  The moving men had been told not to pack Vlad’s materials, only his equipment, but there had been so many of them and they’d been so young . . .

  Both generators, main and back-up, probably had some components made of long-chain hydrocarbons; most petroleum plastics were just long polymers made up of shorter-chain hydrocarbons . . .

  Vlad had also called it “Plasterminator” and “BacAzrael” and “The Grim Creeper.”

  There was no way to get the plasticide to the generators, neither of which was in the area just beyond the air duct – that was the site of the laundry area. The main generator was way the hell across the entire underground level in a locked room, the back-up somewhere beyond the lab’s south wall in another locked area . . .

  Plasticide didn’t attack octanes, or anything else with comparatively short carbon chains, so it was perfectly safe for humans but death on Styrofoam and plastic waste, and anyway there was a terminator gene built into the bacteria after two dozen fissions, an optimal reproduction rate that was less than twelve hours . . .

  “Plasti-Croak” and “Microbe Mop” and “Last Round-up for Longchains.”

  This was the bioremediation organism that had gotten Vlad killed.

  Less than five seconds had passed. On the roomscreen, Pranopolis hadn’t finished singing to the animated digital Janey. Cassie moved her body slightly, screening the inside of the cabinet from the room’s two visual sensors. Of all her thoughts bouncing off each other like crazed subatomic particles, the clearest was hard reality: There was no way to get the bacteria to the generators.

  Nonetheless, she slipped the untagged jar under her shirt.

  Elya had talked herself hoarse, reciting Bollman’s script over and over, and the AI had not answered a single word.

  Curiously, Bollman did not seem disco
uraged. He kept glancing at his watch and then at the horizon. When Elya stopped her futile “negotiating” without even asking him, he didn’t reprimand her. Instead, he led her off the patio, back to the sagging food tent.

  “Thank you, Ms. Seritov. You did all you could.”

  “What now?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead he glanced again at the horizon, so Elya looked, too. She didn’t see anything.

  It was late afternoon. Someone had gone to Varysburg and brought back pizzas, which was all she’d eaten all day. The jeans and sweater she’d thrown on at four in the morning were hot and prickly in the August afternoon, but she had nothing on under the sweater and didn’t want to take it off. How much longer would this go on before Bollman ordered in his tank?

  And how were Cassie and the children doing after all these hours trapped inside? Once again Elya searched her mind for any way the AI could actively harm them. She didn’t find it. The AI controlled communication, appliances, locks, water flow, heat (unnecessary in August), but it couldn’t affect people physically, except for keeping them from food or water. About all that the thing could do physically – she hoped – was short-circuit itself in such a way as to start a fire, but it wouldn’t want to do that. It needed its hostages alive.

  How much longer?

  She heard a faint hum, growing stronger and steadier, until a helicopter lifted over the horizon. Then another.

  “Damn!” Bollman cried. “Jessup, I think we’ve got company.”

  “Press?” Agent Jessup said loudly. “Interfering bastards! Now we’ll have trucks and ’bots all over the place!”

  Something was wrong. Bollman sounded sincere, but Jessup’s words somehow rang false, like a bad actor in an overscripted play . . .

  Elya understood. The “press” was fake, FBI or police or someone playing reporters, to make the AI think that it had gotten its story out, and so surrender. Would it work? Could T4S tell the difference? Elya didn’t see how. She had heard the false note in Agent Jessup’s voice, but surely that discrimination about actors would be beyond an AI who hadn’t ever seen a play, bad or otherwise.

  She sat down on the tank-furrowed grass, clasped her hands in her lap, and waited.

  Cassie distilled more oxygen. Whenever Donnie seemed to be having difficulty after coughing up sputum, she made him breathe from the bottle. She had no idea whether it helped him or not. It helped her to be doing something, but of course that was not the same thing. Janey, after a late lunch of cheese and cereal and bread that she’d complained about bitterly, had finally dozed off in front of the roomscreen, the consequence of last night’s broken sleep. Cassie knew that Janey would awaken cranky and miserable as only she could be, and dreaded it.

  “T4S, what’s happening out there? Has your press on a white horse arrived yet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “A group of people have arrived, certainly.”

  Something was different about the AI’s voice. Cassie groped for the difference, didn’t find it. She said, “What sort of people?”

  “They say they’re from places like the New York Times and LinkNet.”

  “Well, then?”

  “If I were going to persuade me to surrender, I might easily try to use false press.”

  It was inflection. T4S’s voice was still House’s, but unlike House, its words had acquired color and varying pitch. Cassie heard disbelief and discouragement in the AI’s words. How had it learned to do that? By simply parroting the inflections it heard from her and the people outside? Or . . . did feeling those emotions lead to expressing them with more emotion?

  Stockholm Syndrome. She pushed the questions away.

  “T4S, if you would lower the Faraday cage for two minutes, I could call the press to come here.”

  “If I lowered the Faraday cage for two seconds, the FBI would use an EMP to kill me. They’ve already tried it once, and now they have monitoring equipment to automatically fire if the Faraday goes down.”

  “Then just how long are you going to keep us here?”

  “As long as I have to.”

  “We’re already low on food!”

  “I know. If I have to, I’ll let Janey go upstairs for more food. You know the nerve gas is there if she goes for the front door.”

  Nerve gas. Cassie wasn’t sure she believed there was any nerve gas, but T4S’s words horrified her all over again. Maybe because now they were inflected. Cassie saw it so clearly: the tired child going up the stairs, through the kitchen to the foyer, heading for the front door and freedom . . . and gas spraying Janey from the walls. Her small body crumpling, the fear on her face . . .

  Cassie ground her teeth together. If only she could get Vlad’s plasticide to the generators! But there was no way. No way . . .

  Donnie coughed.

  Cassie fought to keep her face blank. T4S had acquired vocal inflection; it might have also learned to read human expressions. She let five minutes go by, and they seemed the longest five minutes of her life. Then she said casually, “T4S, the kids are asleep. You won’t let me see what’s going on outside. Can I at least go back to my work on proteins? I need to do something!”

  “Why?”

  “For the same reason Janey needed to watch cartoons!”

  “To occupy your mind,” T4S said. Pause. Was it scanning her accumulated protein data for harmlessness? “All right. But I will not open the refrigerator. The storage cabinet, but not the refrigerator. E-tags identify fatal toxins in there.”

  She couldn’t think what it meant. “Fatal toxins?”

  “At least one that acts very quickly on the human organism.”

  “You think I might kill myself?”

  “Your diary includes several passages about wishing for death after your husband – ”

  “You read my private diary!” Cassie said, and immediately knew how stupid it sounded. Like a teenager hurling accusations at her mother. Of course T4S had accessed her diary; it had accessed everything.

  “Yes,” the AI said, “and you must not kill yourself. I may need you to talk again to Agent Bollman.”

  “Oh, well, that’s certainly reason enough for me to go on living! For your information, T4S, there’s a big difference between human beings saying they wish they were dead as an expression of despair and those same human beings actually, truly wanting to die.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that. Thank you,” T4S said without a trace of irony or sarcasm. “Just the same, I will not open the refrigerator. However, the lab equipment is now available to you.”

  Again, the AI had turned on everything. Cassie began X-raying crystalline proteins. She needed only the X-ray, but she also ran each sample through the electron microscope, the gene synthesizer, the protein analyzer, the Farraci tester, hoping that T4S wasn’t programmed with enough genetic science to catch the redundant steps. Apparently, it wasn’t. Non-competing technologies never keep up with what the other one is doing.

  After half an hour, she thought to ask, “Are they real press out there?”

  “No,” T4S said sadly.

  She paused, test tube suspended above the synthesizer. “How do you know?”

  “Agent Bollman told me a story was filed with LinkNet, and I asked to hear Ginelle Ginelle’s broadcast of it on Hourly News. They are delaying, saying they must send for a screen. But I can’t believe they don’t already have a suitable screen with them, if the real press is here. I estimate that the delay is to give them time to create a false Ginelle Ginelle broadcast.”

  “Thin evidence. You might just have ‘estimated’ wrong.”

  “The only evidence I have. I can’t risk my life without some proof that news stories are actually being broadcast.”

  “I guess,” Cassie said and went back to work, operating redundant equipment on pointless proteins.

  Ten minutes later, she held her body between the bench and the ceiling sensor, uncapped the test tube of distilled water with D
onnie’s mucus, and put a drop into the synthesizer.

  Any bacteria could be airborne under the right conditions; it simply rode dust motes. But not all could survive being airborne. Away from an aqueous environment, they dried out too much. Vlad’s plasticide bacteria did not have survivability in air. It had been designed to spread over landfill ground, decomposing heavy petroleum plastics, until at the twenty-fourth generation the terminator gene kicked in and it died.

  Donnie’s Streptococcus had good airborne survivability, which meant it had a cell wall of thin mesh to retain water and a membrane with appropriate fatty acid composition. Enzymes, which were of course proteins, controlled both these characteristics. Genes controlled which enzymes were made inside the cell.

  Cassie keyed the gene synthesizer and cut out the sections of DNA that controlled fatty acid biosynthesis and cell wall structure and discarded the rest. Reaching under her shirt, she pulled out the vial of Vlad’s bacteria and added a few drops to the synthesizer. Her heart thudded painfully against her breastbone. She keyed the software to splice the Streptococcus genes into Vlad’s bacteria, seemingly as just one more routine assignment in its enzyme work.

  This was by no means a guaranteed operation. Vlad had used a simple bacteria that took engineering easily, but even with malleable bacteria and state-of-the-art software, sometimes several trials were necessary for successful engineering. She wasn’t going to get several trials.

  “Why did you become a geneticist?” T4S asked.

  Oh God, it wanted to chat! Cassie held her voice as steady as she could as she prepared another protein for the X-ray. “It seemed an exciting field.”

  “And is it?”

  “Oh, yes.” She tried to keep irony out of her voice.

  “I didn’t get any choice about what subjects I wished to be informed on,” T4S said, and to that, there seemed nothing to say.

  The AI interrupted its set speech. “These are not real representatives of the press.”

  Elya jumped – not so much at the words as at their tone. The AI was angry.

  “Of course they are,” Bollman said.

  “No. I have done a Fourier analysis of the voice you say is Ginelle Ginelle’s. She’s a live ’caster, you know, not an avatar, with a distinct vocal power spectrum. The broadcast you played to me does not match that spectrum. It’s a fake.”