She thought Damien would say to poke DAMBALLAH. Damien seemed a lot less concerned about getting in trouble than she did. She had a theory that the fear of getting in trouble was what made her not as good a programmer and that, in fact, it was all linked to testosterone, and that was why there were more guy programmers than women. It was a very hazy theory, and she didn’t like it, but she had pretty much convinced herself it was true, although she couldn’t bear to think of sharing it with anybody, because it was a lot better to think that there were social reasons why girls didn’t usually become code monkeys than to think there were biological reasons. But right now she was pretty sure that she would say stop and Damien would say go.
He surprised her. “Not DAMBALLAH. You think that DMS might be fucking with the outputs on DAMBALLAH?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe tomorrow we can try to check that.”
Tomorrow was tough, because when Sydney got home she was too keyed up to sleep, and she was up until almost four reading a book called Dead Until Dark. The book had been recommended to her by Addy, her college roommate from junior and senior years. It was the first in a series about a paranormal detective and had been just about the most perfect thing to read after coming home from a failed attempt to prove that a computer system was aware.
She was still worried about DAMBALLAH and whether DMS was doing weird things with the epidemiological reports. DAMBALLAH was a complicated system. It made decisions about reporting data. She couldn’t easily check its decisions—that was the point. Every two weeks they got a report from the NIH and the CDC about epidemiological trends, and if there was something new that the CDC was looking for, say an outbreak of shigella in preschools in the South, there was an elaborate way they entered additional parameters to DAMBALLAH’s tracking system. The CDC and the NIH also sent them error reports and WRs. WRs were to correct when DMS was reporting something that wasn’t important or was overreporting. The result was the DMS “learned” epidemiology.
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.