AI Unbound by Nancy Kress
“I see. I am a sort of bioremedialist myself.”
“What?”
“I was created to remedy certain specific biological conditions the government thinks need attention.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“I can’t say. Classified information.”
She tried, despite her tension and tiredness, to think it through. If the AI had been designed to…do what? “Bioremediation.” To design some virus or bacteria or unimaginable other for use in advanced biological warfare? But it didn’t need to be sentient to do that. Or maybe to invade enemy computers and selectively administer the kind of brainwashing that the crazy builder of this castle had feared? That might require judgment, reason, affect. Or maybe to…
She couldn’t imagine anything else. But she could understand why the AI wouldn’t want the press to know it had been built for any destructive purpose. A renegade sentient AI fighting for its life might arouse public sympathy. A renegade superintelligent brainwasher would arouse only public horror. T4S was walking a very narrow line. If, that is, Cassie’s weary speculations were true.
She said softly, “Are you a weapon, T4S?”
Again the short, too-human pause before it answered. And again those human inflections in its voice. “Not anymore.”
They both fell silent. Janey sat awake but mercifully quiet beside her mother, sucking her thumb. She had stopped doing that two years ago. Cassie didn’t correct her. Janey might be getting sick herself, might be finally getting genuinely scared, might be grasping at whatever dubious comfort her thumb could offer.
Cassie leaned over Donnie, cradling him, crooning to him.
“Breathe, Donnie. Breathe for Mommy. Breathe hard.”
“We’re going in,” Bollman told McTaggart. “With no word from the hostages about their situation, it’s more important to get them out than anything else.”
The two men looked at each other, knowing what neither was saying. The longer the AI existed, the greater the danger of its reaching the public with its story. It was not in T4S’s interest to tell the whole story—then the public would want it destroyed—but what if the AI decided to turn from self-preservation to revenge? Could it do that?
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 T4S would have made a genuine contribution to national security. But he wasn’t at all sure 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 upwards 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 of 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 AI 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 Cassie didn’t really think it had, out of revenge. Donnie couldn’t withstand that, not in his condition. But the AI 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 it was herself.
“Dr. Seritov…oh..” And then, “Oh, please…”
The lights went out.
Janey screamed. Cassie clapped her hands stupidly, futilely, over her 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 AI 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 carried Donnie and dragged 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 Elya 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 off T4S for you.”
“You wacoed so you could get the back-up storage facility as well, didn’t you? So T4S couldn’t be re-booted.”
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 AI 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 things to say to 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 been 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 non-competing technologies. Or non-competing 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.
***
SAVIOR
I: 2007
The object’s arrival was no surprise; it came down preceded, accompanied, and followed by all the attention in the world.
The craft—if it was a craft—had been picked up on an October Saturday morning by the Hubble, while it was still beyond the orbit of Mars. A few hours later Houston, Langley, and Arecibo knew its trajectory, and a few hours after that so did every major observatory in the world. The press got the story in time for the Sunday papers. The United States Army evacuated and surrounded twenty square miles around the projected Minnesota landing site, some of which lay over the Canadian border in Ontario.
“It’s still a shock,” Dr. Ann Pettie said to her colleague Jim Cowell. “I mean, you look and listen for decades, you scan the skies, you read all the arguments for and against other intelligent life out there, you despair over Fermi’s paradox—”
“I never despaired over Fermi’s paradox,” Cowell answered, pulling his coat closer around his skinny body. It was cold at 3:00 A.M. in a northern Minnesota cornfield, and he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Maybe longer. The cornfield was as close as he and Ann had been allowed to get. It wasn’t very close, despite a day on the phone pulling every string he could to get on the official Going-In Committee. That’s what they were calling it: “the Going-In Committee.” Not welcoming, not belligerent, not too alarmed. Not too anything, “until we know what we have here.” The words were the president’s, who was also not on the Going-In Committee, although in his case presumably by choice.
Ann said, “You never despaired over Fermi’s Paradox? You thought all along that aliens would show up eventually, they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet?”
“Yes,” Cowell said, and didn’t look at her directly. How to explain? It wasn’t belief so much as desire, nor desire so much as lifelong need. Very adolescent, and he wouldn’t have admitted it except he was cold and exhausted and exhilarated and scared, and the best he could hope for, jammed in with other “visiting scientists” two miles away from the landing site, was a possible glimpse of the object as it streaked down over the tree line.
“Jim, that sounds so…so…”
“A man has to believe in something,” he said in a gruff voice, quoting a recent bad movie, swaggering a little to point up the joke. It fell flat. Ann went on staring at him in the harsh glare of the floodlights until someone said, “Bitte? Ein Kaffee, Ann?”
“Hans!” Ann said, and she and Dr. Hans Kleinschmidt rattled merrily away in German. Cowell knew no German. He knew Kleinschmidt only slightly, from those inevitable scientific conferences featuring one important paper, ten badly attended minor ones, and three nights of drinking to bridge over the language difficulties.
What language would the aliens speak? Would they have learned English from our secondhand radio and TV broadcasts, as pundits had been predicting for the last thirty-six hours and writers for the last seventy years? Well, it was true they had chosen to land on the American-Canadian border, so maybe they would.
So far, of course, they hadn’t said anything at all. No signal had come from the oval-shaped object hurtling toward Earth.
“Coffee,” Ann said, thrusting it at Cowell. Kleinschmidt had apparently brought a tray of Styrofoam cups from the emergency station at the edge of the field. Cowell uncapped his and drank it gratefully, not caring that it was lukewarm or that he didn’t take sugar. It was caffeine.
“Twenty minutes more,” someone said behind him.
It was a well-behaved crowd, mostly scientists and second-tier politicians. Nobody tried to cross the rope that soldiers had strung between hastily driven stakes a few hours earlier. Cowell guessed that the unruly types, the press and first-rank space fans and maverick businessmen with large campaign contributions, had all been herded together elsewhere, under the watchful eyes of many more soldiers than were assigned to this cornfield. Still more were probably assigned unobtrusively—Cowell hoped it was unobtrusively—to the Going-In Committee, waiting somewhere in a sheltered bunker to greet the aliens. Very sheltered. Nobody knew what kind of drive the craft might have, or not have. For all they knew, it was set to take out both Minnesota and Ontario.
Cowell didn’t think so.
Hans Kleinschmidt had moved away. Abruptly Cowell said to Ann, “Didn’t you ever stare at the night sky and just will them to be there? When you were a kid, or even a grad student in astronomy?”
She shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “Well, sure. Then. But I never thought…I just never thought. Since.” She shrugged, but something in her tone made Cowell turn full face and peer into her eyes.
“Yes, you did.”
She answered him only ind
“Probably there isn’t,” he said, and knew that his voice betrayed him. Not belief so much as desire, not desire so much as need. And he was thirty-four goddamn years old, goddamn it!
“Look!” someone yelled, and every head swiveled up, desperately searching a clear, star-jeweled sky.
Cowell couldn’t see anything. Then he could: a faint pinprick of light, marginally moving. As he watched, it moved faster and then it flared, entering the atmosphere. He caught his breath.
“Oh my God, it’s swerving off course!” somebody shouted from his left, where unofficial jerry-rigged tracking equipment had been assembled in a ramshackle group effort. “Impossible!” someone else shouted, although the only reason for this was that the object hadn’t swerved off a steady course before now. So what? Cowell felt a strange mood grip him, and stranger words flowed through his mind: Of course. They wouldn’t let me miss this.
“A tenth of a degree northwest…no, wait….”
Cowell’s mood intensified. With one part of his mind, he recognized that the mood was born of fatigue and strain, but it didn’t seem to matter. The sense of inevitability grew on him, and he wasn’t surprised when Ann cried, “It’s landing here! Run!” Cowell didn’t move as the others scattered. He watched calmly, holding his half-filled Styrofoam cup of too-sweet coffee, face tilted to the sky.
The object slowed, silvery in the starlight. It continued to slow until it was moving at perhaps three miles per hour, no more, at a roughly forty-five degree angle. The landing was smooth and even. There was no hovering, no jet blasts, no scorched ground. Only a faint whump as the object touched the earth, and a rustle of corn husks in the unseen wind.
It seemed completely natural to walk over to the spacecraft. Cowell was the first one to reach it.
Made of some smooth, dull-silver metal, he noted calmly, and unblackened by re-entry. An irregular oval, although his mind couldn’t pin down in precisely what the irregularity lay. Not humming or moving, or, in fact, doing anything at all.