Maureen McHugh - After the Apocalypse

This made it difficult to know if DMS was screwing with the numbers. If DMS did report something, like an epidemic of onchocerciasis (parasitical river blindness) in Seattle, that would get caught fast. But if DMS were just, say, overreporting the incidence of TB in Seattle, that might not. Sydney ran an ep report and started working on a program that would check the DAMBALLAH database for raw numbers of cases of illnesses that DMS was tracking for the CDC, to see if she could spot anything that looked weird.

Damien had been cranky and quiet all day. Then at 3:17, the lights at Meridian Health in Macon, Georgia, did the wave. The same thing that had happened the day before happened again, except this time in reverse order, ending with DM Kensington Medical. They found out it was happening again when the power outage rolled through headquarters early in the sequence. Within minutes Tony, their boss, was screaming at people to stop it, but they decided that stopping it would be more complicated than letting it run its course, so they called the last three hospitals and gave them a heads-up.

Damien was set to write code that would catch the beginning of the sequence and stop it from happening. Together, he and Sydney pored over the tangle of spaghetti that was SAMEDI code. The next day, at 3:17 they could at least switch the electrical systems to maintenance mode for the time it took for DMS to run through its sequence. (According to the log, it would have started with DM Kensington again.) Hospitals bitched about slowdowns in the DMS while SAMEDI was not running. It shouldn’t have affected everything else, but DMS was so weirdly interconnected that SAMEDI had evidently been doing something that optimized read/write functions. Which SAMEDI wasn’t supposed to do at all.

“Why 3:17?” Sydney asked. “Why the electrical system?”

Damien shrugged. They were poring over printouts, looking for ways to, in Damien’s words, “build a box around the bug.” Tony was alternating between asking them if they’d found it yet and telling the head of operations that the admin IT team was doing a great job and to get out of their faces and let them work. Tony was a screamer, but as far as he was concerned, the only one allowed to scream at his people was him.

Mostly Sydney noticed that Damien did not seem to be “in the zone.” He had talked a lot about being “in the zone.” About time passing without his even realizing it. Pouing over printouts, he sighed, exasperated. He got up and went to the bathroom a lot. He got coffee a lot. He talked about what they might do, and although his ideas were smart, they more he talked the more she got an idea about how he thought about stuff like this; and for the first time she found herself thinking, maybe with some experience, she could code pretty good, too.

She finished her database checker for DAMBALLAH, the program that tracked disease trends. The results were mostly … complicated. But there was one area she thought was a problem.

“Damien?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I think DAMBALLAH is messing with the numbers.”

He looked at her. Carefully he said, “How do you know?”

“I don’t,” she said. “Not for certain. But I ran a raw compilation of what was in the Seattle database, and compared it to what DMS is reporting. And DMS is reporting a nosocomial infection rate of seven percent.” Benevola was involved in a big program to reduce nosocomial infections. Nosocomial infections were infections that the patient caught as a result of medical care. Benevola was working with a huge government double-blind study.

“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.