The Terminal Experiment

CHAPTER 41

Cathy Hobson was exhausted. It had been a long day at the office, slogging away at the Tourism Ontario account. She’d stopped at Miracle Food Mart on the way home, but the idiot in front of her had decided to unload all his change on the cashier. Some people, Cathy thought, should be forced to use debit cards.

When she finally arrived at home, she pressed her thumb against the FILE scanner, leaning on it as if it were the only thing keeping her from collapsing to the ground. The green LED atop the scanner winked at her, the dead bolt sprang back, and the heavy door slid aside. She entered her house. The door closed behind her and the lock snicked back into place.

“Lights,” she said.

Nothing happened. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Lights.”

Still nothing. She sighed, set down her shopping bags, and groped for the manual switch. She found it, but still the lights did not go on.

Cathy made her way up into the living room. She could see the glowing LEDs on the VCR, so it wasn’t a power failure; the entryway bulb was probably just burnt out. She said “lights” once more, but the three ceramic table lamps — lamps that Cathy herself had made — remained dark.

Cathy shook her head. Peter was constantly fiddling with the house controls, and it always took a while to get things working properly again.

She lowered herself to the couch, spreading her aching feet out in front of her. Such a long day. She closed her eyes, enjoying the darkness. After a moment, remembering her groceries, she hauled herself up and headed down to the entryway. She tried both the light switch and saying the word “lights” again. Still nothing. She was about to bend over and pick up the bags when she noticed the phone sitting on the little table in the hall. The large red light adjacent to its keypad was on. She moved closer. The visual display said “Line in use.” The phone hadn’t rung.

And Peter wouldn’t be home for hours yet; he had a board meeting tonight at North York General.

Unless … “Peter!” Her shout echoed slightly in the corridor. “Peter, are you home?”

No reply. She picked up the handset and heard a high-pitched whine. A modem.

She looked at the visual display again. “Private caller” — an incoming call, but whoever was using the modem had requested suppression of Call Display.

Jesus Christ, she thought. A sim.

She slammed the handset down, then picked it up again, jiggling the hook switch rapidly, trying to make enough line noise to sever the connection.

It didn’t do any good. Peter, of course, had the finest in error-correcting modems, and the sim apparently had equally good hardware.

She moved quickly to the front door and pressed the UNLOCK button next to it. Nothing happened. She grabbed the manual handle. The door refused to budge. She hit the “In Case of Fire” override. The door was still jammed. She slid open the hall closet — it, at least, had no locking mechanism — and looked at the door control panel. An LED was glowing like a drop of blood next to the phrase “thwarting break-in.” Normally the doors would instantly unlock in case of a fire, but the smoke detectors denied that there was a fire, and some other detector said someone was trying to break in from outside. Cathy left the closet and looked through the peephole in the front door. No one was there. Of course.

She was trying to remain calm. There were other doors, but the master panel showed them all to be in anti-break-in mode as well. She could try going through a window, but they were all locked, too, and the glass was, of course, the best modern safety glass money could buy.

The word she’d been fighting not to think finally pushed to the surface of her consciousness.

Trapped.

Trapped in her own home.

She thought about trying to trigger the smoke detectors, but, of course, neither she nor Peter smoked, so there were no lighters anywhere in the house. And Peter didn’t like the smell of matches or candles, so there were none of those either. Still, she could set fire to some paper on the stove. That might set off the alarms, unlocking the doors.

She hurried to the kitchen, taking care not to trip in the darkness. The moment she entered, though, she knew she was in trouble. The digital clocks on both the microwave and the regular oven were off. The kitchen power had been cut. There was a rechargeable flashlight plugged into a wall outlet. She pulled it out of the socket. It was supposed to come on automatically when the power went off, but it was dead. Cathy realized that the power must have been off in the kitchen for many hours, and so the flashlight had depleted its charge. But — that whine. The refrigerator was still on. She opened its door and a light went on inside. She felt the rush of cold air on her face.

The sim knew exactly what it was doing: the VCR and the fridge were still on, but the stove and the outlet that recharged the flashlight were off. As was typical in a smart house, every outlet was on its own circuit and fuse.

She made her way into the dining room and held on to the back of a chair for support. She tried to remain calm — calm, dammit! She thought about getting a kitchen knife, but that was pointless — there was no physical intruder. The control box for the house systems was in the basement, and that’s where the phone cables entered, too — power and telecommunication lines were being systematically buried in response to fears that unshielded overhead lines caused cancer.

Cathy inched toward the top of the stairs that led to the basement. She opened the door. It was pitch black down there; for their fifth anniversary, Peter and Cathy had treated themselves to a home-theater system, so the blinds on the basement windows had been replaced with Mylar-lined curtains on electric rails — and the curtains had been drawn. Cathy thought she knew the layout well enough to find the incoming phone line even in the dark. She stepped onto the top stair—

The overhead sprinklers came on. No alarm — nothing to summon neighbors or the fire department. But cold water started showering down from the ceiling. Cathy gasped and ran back up into the living room. The sprinklers shut off behind her and came on in there. She moved onto the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. The sprinklers cut off in the living room and went on in the stairwell.

Cathy realized that they were following her — the sim had presumably keyed into the motion sensors that were part of the burglar-alarm system. Through the mist, she could see that the LEDs on the VCR were now off — presumably to avoid starting a fire by electrical shorting.

Exhausted and wet, with no way to escape, Cathy decided to head for the bathroom. If the sprinklers were destined to follow her, she might as well be in the room in which they could do the least damage. She got into the bathtub and unhooked the shower curtain, using it as a tent to shield herself from the cold water.

Three hours later, Peter came home. The front door unlocked normally for him. He found the living room carpet soaked, and could hear the sprinklers running upstairs. He hurried up to the bathroom and opened the door. The moment he did so, the sprinklers stopped.

Cathy pushed off the shower curtain. Water streamed from it as she rose to stand up in the tub. Her voice was full of tightly controlled fury. “Neither I nor any version of me would ever have done anything like this to you.” She glared at him. “We’re even.”

Cathy, quite sensibly, refused to stay in the house. Peter drove her to her sister’s apartment. She was still angry, but was slowly calming down, and she accepted his embrace as they parted. Peter then went directly to his own office and logged onto the net. He sent an E-mail message out into the world:

It didn’t take long for them to reply.

“I’m here,” said one of his ghosts.

“’Evening, Pete,” said another.

“What is it?” asked a third.

They all spoke through the same voice chip; unless they identified themselves, there was no easy way to tell which sim was speaking. And even knowing the nodes they were using wouldn’t tell him which sim was which. It didn’t matter.

“I know what’s going on,” said Peter. “I know one of you is killing people on my behalf. But tonight Cathy was threatened. I will not tolerate that. Cathy is not to be harmed. Not now, not ever. Understand?”

Silence.

“Understand?”

Still no reply.

Peter signed, exasperated. “Look, I know that Sarkar and I can’t remove you from the net, but if there’s any repetition, we will go public with your existence. The press would go apeshit over a story of a murdering AI having taken up residence inside the net. Don’t think they wouldn’t do a cold restart to get rid of you.”

A voice from the speaker: “I’m sure you’re mistaken, Peter. None of us would have committed murders. But if you go public, people will believe your claim — you are, after all, the famous Peter Hobson now. And that means you will be blamed for the deaths.”

“I don’t care at this point,” said Peter. “I’ll do whatever it takes to protect Cathy, even if it means going to jail myself.”

“But Cathy has hurt you,” said the synthesized voice. “More than anyone in the entire world, Cathy has hurt you.”

“Hurting me,” said Peter, “is not a capital crime. I’m not kidding: threaten her again, harm her in any way, and I will see to it that you are all destroyed. I’ll find a way to do that somehow.”

“We could,” said the electronic voice, very slowly, “get rid of you to prevent that from happening.”

“That would be suicide, in a sense,” said Peter. “Or fratricide. In any event, I know that’s something I wouldn’t do, and that means it’s also something that you wouldn’t do.”

“You would not have killed Cathy’s coworker,” said the voice, “and yet you believe one of us has done that.”

Peter leaned back in his chair. “No, but — but I wanted to. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I wanted to see him dead. But I would not kill myself — I wouldn’t even think about killing myself — and so I know you wouldn’t seriously think about doing it, either.”

“But you’re thinking about killing us,” said the voice.

“That’s different,” said Peter. “I’m the original. You know that. And I know in my heart of hearts that I don’t believe that computer simulacra are as alive as a flesh-and-blood person is. And because I believe that, you believe that, too.”

“Perhaps,” said the voice.

“And now you’re trying to kill Cathy,” Peter said. “At least that must stop. Don’t harm Cathy. Don’t threaten Cathy. Don’t do anything to Cathy.”

“But she hurt you,” said the synthesizer again.

“Yes,” said Peter, exasperated. “She hurt me. But it would hurt me more if she were not around. It would destroy me if she were dead.”

“Why?” said the voice.

“Because I love her, dammit. I love her more than life itself. I love her with every fiber of my being.”

“Really?” said the voice.

Peter paused, catching his breath. He considered. Was it just his anger talking? Was he blurting out things he didn’t mean? Or was it true — really true? “Yes,” he said softly, understanding at last, “yes, I really love her that much. I love her more than words can say.”

“It’s about time you admitted that, Petey-boy, even if you had to be pushed into it. Go get Cathy — doubtless you took her to her sister’s house; that’s what I would have done. Go get her and take her home. Nothing more will happen to her.”