“I believe I made myself clear at the meeting. The satellite went silent. No signal at all.”
Quinton struggled for the right words. “I heard what you said. But I thought maybe there was something you weren’t saying.”
“Sandbagging?” Rebbin sounded suspicious. “No, I wasn’t holding back.”
“So the satellite is definitely gone?”
“Ask Professor Timms. He knows more than I do about it.” She paused. “What sort of message did you want to send?”
“Never mind. Sorry to bother you.” Quinton began walking back to the campus.
“What’s there to do?” shouted Rebbin. “We’re helpless! And there’s only a day or two until…”
Quinton didn’t answer. The flashlight beam shined on his back and he saw his shadow in front of him until Rebbin turned to go. Then the darkness enveloped Quinton, but the stars shined so brightly that he could see the hazy outline of the concrete sidewalk.
A gentle breeze blew. The air had become fresh in the last few weeks and smelled pure—no exhaust fumes.
The campus was quiet, like a graveyard. Almost all the undergraduate students had gone home or were staying with friends in the city, though many graduate students had stayed because most of them, like Quinton, weren’t from the area. A few candles lit up dorm windows, and the student lounge was occupied. Things hadn’t gotten bad on and around campus yet. Stragglers coming from other parts of the city told horror stories about the lawlessness they had witnessed, but the campus remained relatively safe.
Quinton wondered what would happen when the “population solution” began to take effect. Would DCC really carry out the plan? Could it succeed? How? Several DNA inactivation molecules had been identified, but how could the machine and its helpers expose so many people? Aerosol dispersion, perhaps. But worldwide? I could be torturing myself for nothing, Quinton thought. It all sounded a little bit far-fetched.
But Distributed Computer Control maintained its grip on the world’s digital and electronic infrastructure, and apparently some loyal government workers still served it. There’d been stories in the newspapers, just before the blackout, of a few government employees wearing swastika armbands. And some people apparently had begun worshiping DCC, maybe even offering sacrifices in horrific ceremonies.
It had seemed like such a good idea to put an advanced artificial intelligence in charge of the world. A world without politics, no more bias. It was a worthy goal. Rational decision-making would prevail. Or so people thought.
Was it rational to kill half of the world’s population? Even if you were convinced it was ultimately necessary to save the other half? Perhaps there’d been a bug in DCC’s programming. But people had insisted on an enormous variety of safeguards before handing over control, and computer experts had tested DCC for years before implementation. Yet experts clearly underestimated the degree to which civilization relies on infrastructure—and also underestimated DCC’s ability to introduce small but precisely directed glitches that snowballed into debilitating problems.
Which half would be chosen? With genetic sequences, you could do it randomly or you could target a specific trait, depending on the sequence. DNA varied, with some people having one sequence and others having a slightly different one. Sometimes the sequences varied in ways that didn’t seem to be important—the result of convergent evolution, with distinct genes having evolved to perform the same function. In these cases the sequence differences were irrelevant, and randomly distributed among the population; select one or the other of these sequences, and your targets would be random. You could also select repeating sequences whose number and location seemed to vary randomly in the population. On the other hand, genetic differences often led to functional or behavioral differences. Pick one of these sequences and you could attack a specific trait.
Which would it be? The Chicago scientists had indicated the selection would be random, but they weren’t 100 percent certain.
He desperately wanted to talk to someone. But whom could he trust?
Quinton stopped beside the biology building that housed Timms’s laboratory and the other biomedical labs. Rays of light shot out of a couple of windows. A few people had lamps with batteries recharged by solar power that would last well beyond midnight; Quinton’s flashlight began to fade around ten o’clock if he left it on, so he conserved it as much as possible.
Something stirred in the shadows behind the bushes. The branches rustled.
Probably cats, thought Quinton. Some people had turned their pets loose because they could no longer care for them or they had left town and set them free. Cats swarmed the campus.
The rustling stopped.
Quinton paused, then looked at the dorm, situated on the other side of the pedestrian walkway at the heart of the campus. The twenty-story building loomed into the starry sky, blocking a large swath of precious starlight.
He took a few steps when he heard the bushes rustle again. And then something that sounded like voices. Quinton stood still, straining to hear. Definitely voices.
Quinton ran toward the dorm. His path was lit by solar lamps that threw out a ring of fading light around the statue of the university’s founder, at the center of campus. He reached the dorm entrance and raced to the stairs. Lights were dim but not extinguished. Twelve flights went by, and he paused only once, at the ninth floor, to catch his breath.
He remembered that Mark Leidenhauser had stared at him a couple of times during the meeting. He and Timms both had noticed something. They had probably noticed the struggle, Quinton’s internal debate.
Professor Timms didn’t know what project Quinton had chosen for his thesis because Quinton hadn’t told him yet. Quinton hadn’t assembled his thesis committee yet—the first year at the university had been filled with class work and laboratory rotations, although Quinton had spent all of his time since then working on DNA activation because he found it fascinating. Nobody knew why the body silenced certain genes and DNA sequences at certain times.
And nobody could have guessed that DCC would hit upon the scheme of inactivating critical sequences at inappropriate times for genocidal purposes.
Timms may have had a vague idea what Quinton had in mind for his thesis project because they had discussed DNA inactivation a few times, but Timms was a well-funded researcher with an army of postdocs and more than a dozen graduate students besides Quinton and Mark Leidenhauser. He couldn’t possibly keep track of everything that went on in his lab.
What did Mark know? Probably, thought Quinton grimly, as much as he could learn by snooping.
Quinton inserted his magnetized ID card, and his room door popped open. He grabbed his flashlight and raced out.
He paused at the top of the stairs. Hefting his flashlight, he tapped the wall with the end of the flashlight that held the heavy, rechargeable batteries. Lots of mass. It made a pretty good weapon. Not optimal, but it would have to do.
Twelve flights of stairs came and went, two steps at a time, and then he exited the dorm.
Quinton figured they were guarding the entrance to the lab. Mark Leidenhauser and some of his friends. They probably suspected he would go into the lab tonight.
But Quinton hoped they hadn’t thought about the door at the unloading dock. It’d be locked, but the projectionist, who had also helped cart and store supplies, had told him the code. Quinton was glad that Mark belittled instead of befriended the university staff. Quinton listened to Timms when he’d said, “Smart people are nice to secretaries and assistants. You never know when you’ll need a favor to gain a competitive advantage.”