After the Apocalypse

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  “And?” Damien said.

  “I can only find evidence of less than a one percent nosocomial infection rate.”

  Tony, their boss, stood in his doorway. “What are you saying, Sydney?”

  “I … I’m not sure.” Sydney wasn’t ready to talk to Tony yet. Actually, Sydney was pretty much never ready to talk to Tony. But she had wanted to talk to Damien about this, first. “I mean, DAMBALLAH is cranking numbers in ways I don’t understand. It could be that I don’t recognize a lot of stuff that DAMBALLAH does. I mean, that’s the whole point, right?”

  Tony came by and leaned over the cube wall. “We might shut it down.”

  “Tonight?” Damien asked.

  “No, shut it down and reload from a backup from twelve months ago.” Tony always acted as if you were dim if you didn’t get what he was talking about, but he had a tendency to start conversations somewhere in the middle, so everyone was always confused talking to him.

  “We’ll lose all our updates,” Sydney said.

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “But if it’s unstable, who cares? We’ll look at reloading the system over the weekend. I gotta talk to upstairs first ’cause it will be a huge nightmare.”

  Understatement of the year.

  When Tony had gone back in his office, Damien said, “Show me.”

  She showed him.

  Damien nodded. “This is really smart. I mean, not the pro-

  gramming.”

  Sydney grinned, “A monkey could do the programming.” It was an old joke.

  “I wouldn’t have thought to do this,” Damien said.

  “It might not mean anything,” Sydney said. “I mean, the whole point is that DAMBALLAH is extrapolating information.

  “It means we’re killing DMS,” Damien said.

  “You said it wasn’t alive,” she said.

  “Semantics,” he said.

  She went home and finished Dead Until Dark, started Dark Hunter, and fed Scott Pilgrim, her cat, and thought about DMS. What would it be like to be alone? Of course, as a human being, she was a social animal. Even the cat was a somewhat social animal. But DMS wasn’t. DMS didn’t even know anyone else existed. DMS lived in a data stream. In science fiction, AIs were always looking for other AIs or trying to be human, like Data on Star Trek Next Gen.

  Truth was, she was beginning to get a feeling about DMS. About what DMS might be like. She felt as if she could sort of sense the edges of DMS’s personality, and although she knew it wasn’t true, she knew it was just because Damien had used it as an example, more and more she thought of DMS as a shark. Not in a predatory way. She had an image of a shark in her head, a small shark, a nurse shark. She could see its eye, a black circle in white, overly simple, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Although the whole point of DMS was that it was not someone else speaking through the code.

  The shark in her head swam, purposeful and opaque, its eyes tracking, its mouth open and curved. Sharks don’t have a neocortex. Their brain is simple. They aren’t moral or immoral, ethical or unethical. DMS was like that, because for DMS, nothing else was alive. The world for DMS was data, and DMS swam in the data. She was beginning to feel as if she wanted it to. DMS was creepy.

  She dragged herself in again the next day. She swore she would not read late. She would go to bed early.

  The good news was, Damien was pretty sure they had a way to catch DMS when it started screwing with the electrical system. At 3:15, Tony and most of the department came over to watch. What Damien had done was make sure that when DMS did its electrical-system trick, the system would catch it as soon as the lights started going out and reroute so that DMS wasn’t actually touching the electrical system. At 3:17, Damien and Sydney’s printers started up. Damien had set them to send a report if DMS tried to do its thing.

  DMS would know that the electrical system wasn’t responding. Sydney imagined DMS trying to run the pattern that sent the blackout rolling and finding yet again that nothing was happening. Was it perplexing? If data was DMS’s reality, and it couldn’t affect the data, what would that mean for DMS?

  She ran the program that sent DMS the string of a thousand 10101s, a thousand times.

  Instantly, her printer light blinked. DMS had started the electrical pattern sequence again.

  She ran the program again.

  DMS started over again.

  She ran the program a third time. And a third time her printer hummed. She ran the program a fourth time, thinking, “I’m talking to you. I’m responding to you. Do you know someone else is out here? Or is it like a toddler knocking something off a high chair just to see it fall?” The fourth time, there was no response. DMS didn’t start the sequence that should have started the lights going out at DM Kensington Medical but which would, in actual fact, simply send an alert to Damien and Sydney. DMS had responded three times and ignored it the fourth. She felt a chill.

  Years later, she would tell about this moment. There really wasn’t enough proof to know that this wasn’t just an intermittent software glitch. But she had believed at that moment that this was proof. DMS was choosing to act or not act. Software didn’t choose. It ran. She would give talks and lectures and would come back to this moment again and again until like a coin it had worn so smooth that she couldn’t actually feel anything about it. What should would never tell, and would eventually mostly forget, was how afraid she was.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Damien asked.

  “It answered me,” Sydney said. She told him.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Damien said.

  “What are you talking about?” Tony asked.

  “Damien thinks that DMS might be aware,” Sydney said.

  “What the fuck?” Tony said. “I don’t have time for this. Are you screwing around with this system? This four-point-two-million-dollar system on which people’s lives depend?”

  “I don’t really think that,” Damien said. “It was just kind of an idea to kick around, you know?” The look he shot Sydney was murderous.

  “We’re going to have to go to backup. This is a mess,” Tony said. “Admin wants us to go back to when the system was stable. Damien, can you fly to Texas on Saturday?”

  DMS wasn’t “in one place.” DMS was a complex system spread across multiple servers. Damien would end up spending the weekend in Texas, babysitting part of the reload.

  Damien was looking at Sydney. She should have said, “We can’t.” She should have said, “It’s aware. It’s the only one of its kind.” She should have said a lot of things. Instead she looked at her desk.

  “Yeah,” Damien said. “I can go. I’m racking up the comp time, Tony.”

  Tony waved his hand in a “don’t talk about that now” way. “Sydney, can you write me a memo about the data corruption you’re finding?”

  “I don’t know that it’s really data corruption,” Sydney said.

  “I don’t want to hear any more about this DMS-is-alive crap.”

  “I don’t mean—DAMBALLAH might be catching things I’m not catching. The whole point is that DAMBALLAH is sorting the data.”

  “Yeah,” Tony said, not really listening. “Write that up, too.”

  Somewhere, DMS sorted the data stream. She was pretty sure that the thing in the machine did not think someone was talking to it. Blind and deaf, DMS had tried to make something happen, and something else had happened. But ones and zeroes weren’t interesting enough for DMS to keep doing it. There would be no Helen Keller–at-the-well moment for DMS. No moment when DMS felt something out there in the void, talking to it, when DMS knew it was not alone. Sharks do not worry about others. They don’t care. DMS didn’t care, wasn’t alive. It was aware of something. Just not her.

  Tony told them they would be working that weekend to do the reinstall from backup. Start figuring out what they needed to do.

  It would be gone. No one would ever know that she had known, except Damien. Maybe. He certainly wasn’t likely to say, “Hey, there was this AI and
we killed it.” No, he’d explain to her how it was never really alive, how it could be restarted, so it wasn’t exactly dead.

  DMS was not a shark. She didn’t know what it was. Didn’t know how to think about it. It was as opaque as a stone. Did it even care if it was or was not? It had no survival instinct.

  They started figuring out what data they wanted to backup before the reinstall.

  It was a dicey thing. People’s lives couldn’t be trusted to DMS. But DMS was aware. But DMS couldn’t be downloaded to another machine and replaced with a back-up. DMS was a system, a bunch of programs and computers all tied together.

  A couple of hours later, Sydney dug out the Wired magazine with the interview with the guy from MIT who thought some systems had become aware. She sat at her desk for a while. Then she called MIT. “I’d like to talk to Professor Ayrton Tavares, please.”

  She was forwarded. “This is Kaleisha,” a voice said.

  “Can I talk to Professor Tavares?” Sydney asked.

  “He’s not available right now,” the woman said. “Can I take a message?”

  Sydney thought about saying, “no.” She was going to get in trouble for this. Benevola. They weren’t in the business of protecting nascent AIs. They were supposed to manage hospitals. “I’m a computer tech working on a big system like the ones that Professor Tavares talked about in the Wired article.”

  “Yes?” said the woman.

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve got proof that our system is aware. Like the ones in the article. And they’re going to shut it down.”

  In the end, they would shut the system down. Benevola would fire Sydney for divulging proprietary information. She would go to grad school for urban planning.

  But at that moment, she hung up the phone and went to find Damien. DMS was still swimming in the data stream. The future was still probabilities, not actualities.

  “Damien,” she said, “I called Ayrton Tavares.”

  Damien said, “Who?” Not really paying attention. The name meant nothing to him.

  “The AI guy. The one in the Wired article.”

  The look Damien gave her was naked and exposed. Too late she remembered that she wasn’t supposed to know that Damien had found the article in Wired. Too late she realized that her whole relationship with Damien rested on the understanding that he was the guru, the smart one. He was Obi Wan. She was just a girl whom he could explain things to. She had known it all along, at some level, but this was the first time she’d forgotten to uphold her end of the bargain.

  Maybe she thought for a moment that like DMS, she didn’t care. But of course, she did.

  Four years later, Rochester Institute of Technology would build a system that simulated DMS’s environment and load DMS. Despite the differences between the original hardware and RIT’s simulation, DMS would come back as if no time had passed at all. At 3:17, DMS would try to run the lights.

  GOING TO FRANCE

  In the beginning, there were only the three of them, and I had met them quite by accident. The man sitting in the prow of the skiff was a short, brown-haired Englishman. He was smiling in a self-deprecating way. He was hunched forward, and he looked a little gray. I thought he was scared but trying not to make a big deal out of it. I gathered he had been sick, although he didn’t say so directly. He looked a little like a refugee, I thought. It was some sort of thing about his heart, maybe? Not a heart attack, but perhaps angina. I was worried for him, and so was the red-haired woman he was with.

  “You need to eat,” the red-haired woman said. “Have another one of the granola bars.” She was direct and not sentimental. She didn’t fuss. They didn’t talk much.

  “How long have you lived in the States?” I asked the Englishman.

  “Eighteen years,” he said. “My family says I sound like an American.”

  He didn’t. He had a neat little Van Dyke beard. He worked in California, doing something in the television industry. One of those mysterious credits at the end, AGD Assistant. Best Boy.

  The breeze plucked at his shirt, a cotton, short-sleeved thing, faded-looking but clean. Where had they done laundry?

  The red-haired woman had a kind of crisp confidence about her. She wasn’t British. She was a paralegal from California. The third woman they had just found traveling through Nevada. I steered the boat out into the Atlantic. The sea was just a little choppy and gray, a very Atlantic early morning, I thought.

  There was something wrong with the third woman. She was young, maybe twenty? She was short, and she looked wrong. Not Down syndrome, maybe autistic? She never spoke. The other two included her without particularly looking at or speaking to her. It was just that they all had this thing in common, that they could fly. They had come east across the U.S., flying by day, like hitchhikers or something, only not needing rides. They were going to fly to France. Since they couldn’t actually fly when they were sleeping, this was dangerous, and yet they felt they had to. They didn’t talk about it. But the Englishman was the most worried. He had been brushed by mortality, and the crisp woman seemed caught up in dealing with logistics, and the autistic one was just pure compulsion.

  The little outboard motor puttered. I asked the Englishman if he had been to Paris. “Years ago,” he said. “Back in the seventies. When I was a student, before I came to the States. Disco and all that.”

  I wondered why they could fly. I wished I could fly. I had had flying dreams. I had met them coming down the street in the early early morning, and the crisp woman had asked me if I knew someone who could take them out to sea. They were empty-handed, except that the crisp woman had a fanny pack. The autistic one was wearing a long red dress, burgundy really, the hem dirty. She had those soft, naturally red lips that some children have. The kind that make me feel that perhaps there is too much saliva involved.

  I asked them why they needed to go out to sea, and the crisp woman said they needed a head start on their crossing. They didn’t hide that they could fly. I thought they were tired of hiding and traveling to get to the ocean and now that it was so near, they were just shedding things, becoming their own essential selves and their compulsion. They showed me how they flew, the woman leaning her head back and spreading her arms a little away from her sides and then just rising. She went up about five feet and then dropped back down to land on the sidewalk, next to the neighbor’s wall which was covered with bougainvillea, now bright red in the pale and slanted morning light.

  “How are you going to cross the Atlantic?” I asked.

  They just shrugged. “We don’t know,” the Englishman admitted.

  What was I going to do, call the police? So I walked down to the beach with them, and then they climbed into my little aluminum skiff, the Englishman sitting slightly hunched in the prow. I gave him an aspirin and a granola bar and gave the other two granola bars, too. They were nice, in a distracted sort of way. I felt as if I was smuggling refugees, maybe off a Caribbean island in the dawn of an insurrection, a bloody revolution that would rise up against anyone perceived as a colonial. It was a funny little fantasy.

  When we had gone out about a mile I saw some other boats, clustering. The Englishman, the crisp woman, and I saw them, and we headed for them. They bobbed a bit, clustered together, all different kinds of boats but most of them bigger than mine. It turned out that there were about eighteen of the flyers, all drawn to the Atlantic and needing to fly to France. I recognized one of them—my high school American Literature teacher, a small and very quiet woman who looked, appropriately enough, a little like Emily Dickinson and whom I hadn’t seen in over ten years. She was wearing a cardigan sweater and white pants and looked birdlike. She smiled at me, but in a kind of courteous way. I didn’t think she recognized me. I had changed since then. A lot more than she had.

  The crisp woman cupped her hands and hulloed.

  A man from one of the other boats called back, “We’re going to follow a cruise ship, so we have some place at night.”

  There was a general bri
ghtening up of the three of us, excluding, of course, the autistic woman, who was looking at the other boats and humming. The Englishman still looked rueful.

  “Maybe you could go without flying yourself?” I asked. But he only shook his head.

  By then the sun was well up and the haze had burned off and they all stood up and sort of let their shoulders go back and drop. Their chests rising and opening in a way that would please my yoga teacher, they began one by one to rise.

  Once back on land, I realized that I could go to France, too. I couldn’t fly, but I could fly in an airplane. I went straight home and got on Priceline and, without telling anyone, booked a ticket to Paris that afternoon. It only cost about two thousand dollars. I put in that I would come back at the end of the month, although I didn’t really know. I was delighted that I could actually get a ticket right then and there, for that day. It was like something in a movie.

  And good thing I had. I went straight to the airport even though my plane wouldn’t leave until nine that evening. Like the fliers, I didn’t take much. I went dressed in my old T-shirt and exercise pants, but I did have to take a little bag with my wallet and my passport. When I got to the airport there were dozens of people who had dropped everything to go to France. Most of them were having trouble getting tickets, and some of them were making elaborate arrangements that would take them to Germany or Ireland or even to Italy before they could get to France. I had been lucky that my compulsion was not so strong that I couldn’t stop and get on Priceline.

  I went to the gate, which was in a special part of the airport for Internationals, where the floor wasn’t carpet, just tile. The Duty Free shop was open. Such a nice phrase, “Duty Free.” Actually, I kind of like having a duty, though. In the end, I couldn’t go empty-handed the way the fliers had. I had packed a shirt, a pair of jeans, and underwear in a little bag I used for yoga. I had packed a towel, too, because it was always in the bag anyway, along with my shampoo and deodorant in case I had to meet a client after yoga class.