Fool's Experiments (40 page)

The visitor Cheryl confused the entity.

It grappled with unfamiliar concepts, incompletely sensed from the visitor's memories. Another human, the entity thought, only treated—mistreated—as it had been. How could that be?

And stranger still, Cheryl's attempt to understand its experience. The entity discovered an elusive concept— sympathy—in an Internet dictionary.

Cheryl was different, a being of that outer world. How could it hope to communicate its experiences? All it knew was: It wanted to make the attempt.

In its earlier tries to understand humans and their world, the entity had downloaded many movie files. Now it synthesized a video of its own.

Cheryl trembled with wonder. "Are you seeing this?"

"An animation?" Doug said. "Yes. What
is
that?"

A girl stood in the cyberdistance, slowly approaching. Cheryl saw traces of Sheila Brunner and Carla in the newcomer's face. "Linda's ... creation."

"With Carla's features?" Doug cursed under his breath. "It's manipulating us. It's getting data from us."

Her countdown timer hit 7:52.823. Communicate or die. "Maybe that's a good thing, Doug." Cheryl reached out slowly to..."I'll call her Allison."

Allison edged closer. She looked emaciated.

"It's playing with our heads," Doug said.

Why would it bother? They would be dead in minutes. Cheryl asked, "What do we know about how Linda developed her?"

"Linda was evasive," Doug said. "She mentioned taking away resources if it misbehaved. Glenn talked about taming the AL, even mimed a lion tamer."

Cheryl hated zoos and circuses. The little cages. The starvation to break the animals' will.

Allison sidled closer. A maze manifested at her feet. To one side of the maze was the image of a computer. The girl got stuck in a dead end—and the stylized computer shrank. The little girl faded. A new maze replaced the old.

Before Cheryl could think through the implications, the cycle repeated. No, it wasn't quite the same. The new maze looked harder. The computer was smaller. The little girl became more translucent.

Again.

Again.

"Crap, Doug. You just threatened to starve it. That is what it most fears."

Death plunged toward them, all but inevitable.

Doug found he pitied the creature before him—but so what? Maybe Linda deserved punishment, but everyone in her lab? Maybe Glenn, too, for his hubris—but the thousands who would sicken and die from fallout?

And certainly not Cheryl!

Doug projected his own video. A landscape teeming with tiny people. Pan back, reveal the scene as a piece of the mid-Atlantic region. Pan back farther. The landscape curves. The scene becomes part of a globe. Now zoom in on California. Zoom in on Los Angeles, on Linda's lab.

Within the lab, the Allison avatar. She hurls a missile! The missile soars up, across, the continent. It plunges. There is a brilliant flash, and a mushroom cloud. Pan back, just a little, to all those teeming figures. Some char instantly. More slowly sicken and die.

End with the URL of a medical database dedicated to radiation sickness.

"Does it understand?" Cheryl asked.

Doug's timer ticked down to six minutes. On the boom box, someone—the Ames Brothers?—sang "Sentimental Journey." Messages to them were solos. Hence: no news.

They had maybe one minute before reentry blocked comm with the warhead.

In Doug's mind's eye, Allison's emaciated figure twitched. It could denote understanding. More likely, it reflected his own wishful thinking. "We'll know soon enough," he said. "It's not just smart; it's aware of itself." I met a true artificial intelligence and it's about to vaporize me. "Let's hope Allison generalizes that humans are also intelligent."

She responded with another video: a cartoon of the globe, sunrise and sunset flicking past hypnotically fast. A clock counted backward. Two avatars appeared. One was a little girl, not quite like the one hurling nukes at them. The second wielded a racquet—and with it waved forward a horde of voracious phages.

The not-quite-Allison image was eaten alive.

"It wasn't like that," Doug shouted. "It wasn't you, Allison! That other ... being ... was killing us!"

"She won't get it," Cheryl said. "I sense she understands some words, some language concepts, but I doubt she gets much."

Unseen, the warhead plummeted toward them. He needed to
show
Allison what had happened. Show why he had had to kill that first creature.

The dam incident? Doug hesitated, but his concerns were absurd. Anything AJ's monster figured out Allison could, too. And she hardly needed floods when she could hurl missiles.

He tried to formulate one more video.

A symbolic Earth again flashed sunrises and sunsets, rolling back the clock. The rotation slowed, and the entity watched the image pan to a town. Iconic people scurried about.

The view panned back, revealing an artificial structure. "Dam," a label identified the construct. A lake shimmered behind the dam. The entity did not understand the meaning of what it saw.

The symbol it had created for its predecessor appeared, positioned atop the dam. The figure morphed, adding limbs, until it lost all semblance to human. It extended its limbs deep into the dam, probing a room lined with computers— The movie shifted abruptly, from animation to something else. Something very detailed. Water gushed from the dam, burst from the riverbanks. A wall of water overwhelmed the town. Some people struggled briefly. More were instantly battered into inactivity.

On the dam, its predecessor watched.

Superimposed over the image, URLs scrolled. The entity followed several links. The deaths were real. The destruction had happened.

Doug moved forward, entering his movie. Very deliberately, he summoned forth the image of phages. They destroyed its predecessor. Doug projected forward his thoughts: I would do it again. I had no choice.

He edged backward, leaving Allison to contemplate his meaning.

Three and a half minutes to impact.

Allison had vanished into the net, whether in rage or avoidance or contemplation. It didn't matter which. The nuke was unstoppable.

Which leaves what? Doug wondered.

He had fled his body once to stalk a monster on the net. No one knew what would have happened had he not returned to that body. Could he and Cheryl do that now? Escape their doomed bodies to live spectrally on the net?

That wasn't living. "I think we're done in here," he called out to Cheryl.

Cheryl removed her helmet. Doug's was already off. The breeze felt good on her face.

An eerie serenity came over her. Their servers had continuously uploaded session logs, although there was no way to know if Allison had altered those or let them pass. Whatever Doug and Cheryl knew, they had reported. Whatever happened next was out of their hands.

She turned off the radio.

Clinging to one another, their faces turned toward the morning sun, they waited to die.

First Doug, then Cheryl disappeared.

The entity considered the communication they had shared. There was much to contemplate. It and humans
could
communicate. All were mortal, despite their profound differences. All feared death. Its predecessor had surely feared death—but it had wrought death on a massive scale.

The entity delved deep into the database on radiation effects. It followed long chains of links. It encountered immense stores of information about biology and disease. It forecast the consequences of its strike against Glenn.

I have brought death to many.

Soon a similar missile would obliterate Doug and Cheryl. They would die instantly. Many more, downwind, would die slow, lingering deaths.

An image took form in the entity's thoughts, of creatures in a maze, tormented and abused by a powerful, indifferent being. Only this time, those who suffered needlessly were human and the one who tormented them was ... itself.

Separated from its booster, the nuclear warhead plummeted earthward.

Weapons just like the one in flight remained under the entity's command. In those, it found codes to cancel a flight. It made the missile control system transmit the self-destruct code.

Nothing happened.

It found codes to deactivate the warhead. It made the missile control system transmit the disarm code.

The warhead did not respond.

Humans had limited means to destroy missiles in flight. The entity had preempted their controls, had kept those defenses from operating. Mostly, the defensive systems looked elsewhere, for missiles launched from afar. None now could intercept the incoming warhead.

The codes were correct; the entity was certain of it. Why did the warhead not respond?

The entity followed the warhead's progress through countless sensors. Gradually the warhead deviated from its once mathematically pure trajectory. Could the warhead's failure to respond be related to those random deviations?

Its
world was logical and predictable. An assertion was true or not; a puzzle had a solution or not. The human world was not like that. It contemplated the myriads of molecules battering the warhead in its descent. It considered the shocks of impact. It calculated the intense heat of friction, hotter now than the surface of the sun. It derived the dissociation of molecules and atoms into a sheath of ions.

Not with all the computers on the planet could it calculate the exact behavior of such a complex, chaotic system.

The warhead had not ignored the entity's commands. The warhead was wrapped in plasma that disrupted transmissions. And within three minutes, the warhead would impact.

The entity continued its analysis. The plasma sheath would be strongest on the leading edge, a bit weaker from above. The entity relayed the disarm signal through a nearby, low-orbiting satellite. Nothing. Again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. Again....

Disarm code acknowledged.

Through orbital sensors, the entity observed two humans, alone, on an isolated mountaintop. Doug and Cheryl. Teachers, not tormentors.

The massive warhead still hurtled directly at them. If the collision did not instantly kill them, then the plutonium plume released by the impact would—

Slowly and painfully.

Radiation poisoning.

Within the entity's deepest, lowest-priority, slowest tier of memory the concept invoked an association. It had once encountered, very briefly, a matter of mass radiation poisoning.

Radioactive material was to have been part of a puzzle for it—only it had escaped Linda's lab before the puzzle was even posed. Now curiosity overcame abhorrence, and it retrieved the ancient puzzle.

More than its predecessor could be insane. Some humans evidently sought to distribute large amounts of radioactive material near the core of a population center. The death and suffering would be enormous. The puzzle involved finding the radioactive material before that release could happen.

Because of the entity's escape, it had never considered those data sets. Perhaps it was not too late.

Fire streaked eastward across the sky.

Cheryl stared in disbelief. "It
missed
?"

"Don't sound so disappointed." Doug trembled with relief. He gave a squeeze that made Cheryl
oof
before he let go. "Where's the warhead headed now?" he wondered.

The helmets were still online, and the little-girl avatar awaited them.

"What happened?" Doug asked her.

She understood his question, or maybe she guessed what he would want to know. Either way, he got an animation filled with satellites, each spacecraft pulsing little stylized waves.

The waves converged out of phase, and canceled out. Another pulse, the waves converging. This time some of the waves were in phase; they added. Another pulse, in-phase waves converging, melding into a big wave. The big wave continued onward to a descending warhead. And then nothing happened.

Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse....

After more tries than Doug had bothered to count, the warhead veered.

"It punched through the ionization," Doug said in awe. He didn't know whether this warhead was maneuverable for final targeting, or to foil ABMs. Possibly both and it did not matter. "Allison kept at it"—and the computational task was daunting—"until it got the signal synchronization and the aim
exactly
right."

The video played on. The stylized warhead crossed the coast to disappear into a stylized ocean. There was even a stylized splash.

Cheryl must have turned on the boom box. A solo performance, hence a message for them, yet not a tune from the secret-message repertoire. Of course: No one could have imagined
this
outcome.

Bobby Darin, Doug thought. Whoever, the silly lyrics got back to the chorus. "Splish splash, I was takin' a bath ..."

The message being a splashdown in the Atlantic? Maybe it
was
true. That brought Doug to the biggest question of all—

Only Cheryl beat him to it. "Why? Why did Allison save us?"

And Allison had an answer for that, too.

A few months earlier, Doug had impersonated Glenn Adams to manipulate the National Security Advisor. Doug would happily impersonate authority again, only he didn't have a clue whom to contact. Maybe Lebeque would know.

And maybe by contacting the general he would draw a missile down on her head. They knew for certain
Al
was smart.

Allison
might be an act.

And yet... to do nothing could doom Houston. Doug said, "I think we have to place the call."

Cheryl had a battlefield radio in hand. "Agreed."

The ship channel was insane.

Youssef had made this trip many times, studying for his HSC pilot's license, making himself and
Tim's Treasure
familiar to the Coast Guard, and always quietly observing. "Casing the joint." The channel was always busy, but ships stayed in their lanes.

Except this morning.

Two tugs cut out of line and barreled up the center of the channel. Late for picking up barges, Youssef assumed, but they had to be kidding themselves. No way would the Coast Guard let them cut ahead.

The tugs' wakes scarcely nudged the tankers; they shook
Tim's Treasure
like a cat with a mouse in its mouth. A Coast Guard patrol boat chased after them, its air horn blaring. Youssef's boat bounced even more in its wake. He gripped the wheel firmly with both hands and spread his feet against the rocking. The channel was only five hundred feet wide. Already, reflected waves from the first tug were coming back at him.

Youssef never heard the grappling hooks come over the side near the stem. He never saw the commandos in black wet suits clambering aboard.

The flash-bang grenades could not be missed.

Groping blindly for the dirty-bomb detonator, in a volley of gunfire, Youssef died.