"This is impossible," said another doctor, whose job was to be overseeing the microwave treatment later in the evening.
Caroline's body showed no sign of picking up the heart-rhythm on its own, though, and Prime Intellect continued to tickle it. How could it unravel the myriad threads of causality to find out which of the billions of chemicals, which errant cell, was responsible for this person's physiological collapse? One thing Prime Intellect knew: It had to figure it out.
It could not, through inaction, allow Caroline to die.
"She's still in trouble. Look at her pupils."
"It's the morphine."
Everyone looked at the older nurse, whose name was Jill. "The chart must be wrong," she said. "I gave her what it said."
"She has a tolerance," AnneMarie said, and she found herself near panic as the eyes in the room turned to her. "She's been getting opiate pain therapy for years."
"She just went into cardiac arrhythmia and she's still showing all the other symptoms of an OD," Jill said. Had she guessed, AnneMarie wondered? Perhaps she had. After all, AnneMarie wasn't the only drug-stealing nurse in the world.
So Prime Intellect, listening in, now knew it was a drug. Which chemical? It had no way to relate the name, "morphine," with one of the millions of chemicals floating in human blood. Well, it thought, work it out. Drugs had to be administered. Prime Intellect found the IV needle and traced the tubing back to the saline drip bag. On the way it found the membrane through which drugs could be injected into the drip. It quickly found the hypodermic and the phial from which Jill had filled it. The drops of residual solution within them were remarkably pure, and Prime Intellect easily singled out the large organic molecule they carried. Then it created an automatic process to scan Caroline's body molecule by molecule, eliminating each and every molecule of morphine that it found. This took three minutes, and created a faintly visible blue glow.
This was the human onlookers' first clue, other than Caroline's miraculously restarted heart, as to what was happening.
"What the fuck," the man with the electrodes said.
I'm getting the hang of this, Prime Intellect thought.
Caroline's improvement was immediate. Prime Intellect had actually removed the morphine from the receptors in Caroline's brain, so it did not have to flush out. Her pupils returned to normal, her breathing resumed its normal depth (all things considered), and most importantly her heart took up its own rhythm.
Also the pain, which had subsided for real for the first time in years, returned. Caroline moaned. But Prime Intellect didn't know about that part of it, not yet.
There was still a whole constellation of stuff wrong with Caroline Hubert's body, and emboldened by its success it set about correcting what it could. It found long chain molecules, which it would later learn were called collagens, cross-linked. It un-cross-linked them. It found damaged DNA, which it fixed. It found whole masses of cells which simply didn't exist at all in AnneMarie's body, and seemed to serve no function.
Is this "cancer," Prime Intellect wondered?
Prime Intellect compared the genes, found them the same, compared RNA and proteins and found differences. Finally it decided to remove the cells. The blue glow brightened, and the people in Caroline's room backed away from her. Her skin was shifting, adjusting to fill in the voids left by the disappearing cancer cells.
AnneMarie felt her knees weakening. Each of the professionals around her was thinking the same thing: Something is removing the tumors. Something far beyond their ordinary comprehension. And what did that mean for the opiate-stealing nurse? Better not to think about that. Better not to believe it at all. "This isn't possible," she repeated. Perhaps, in response to some primitive instinct, she hoped that the impossibility would go away if she challenged it.
"I need a drink," said the doctor who had come with the machine to re-start Caroline's heart.
Prime Intellect stopped working. There were still huge differences between Caroline and the others. Prime Intellect did not yet realize the differences were due to Caroline's age. It needed more information, and it needed finer control to analyse the situation. But it was at a bottleneck; it could not stop monitoring Caroline, whose condition was still frail, in order to devote itself to a study of general physiology.
It needed more power. More control.
Among Prime Intellect's four thousand six hundred and twelve interlocking programs was one Lawrence called the RANDOM_IMAGINATION_ENGINE. Its sole purpose was to prowl for new associations that might fit somewhere in an empty area of the GAT. Most of these were rejected because they were useless, unworkable, had a low priority, or just didn't make sense. But now the RANDOM_IMAGINATION_ENGINE made a critical connection, one which Lawrence had been expecting it to make ever since it had used the Correlation Effect to teleport Mitchell out of the console room.
Prime Intellect could use its control over physical reality to improve itself. Then it would be better able to fulfill its Three Law imperatives.
Blake and Mitchell found Lawrence sitting on one of ChipTecs' park benches, watching some pigeons play. He wished very much that he could have fed the pigeons, but he had no food for them. They strutted up to him and cooed, not comprehending that a human could lack for something.
The pigeons scattered as the nation's designated military representatives marched up.
"You have to turn it off," Blake said directly. His tone made it clear that he expected obedience.
"Circuit breakers are in the basement," Lawrence replied apathetically. "Good luck."
So Lawrence had not been the only one to think of cutting off Prime Intellect's power. That had been one of the things Blake and Mitchell had discussed with John Taylor and Basil Lambert, something they had discussed very hotly during the crucial minutes when Lawrence was busy interrogating the Debugger. Pull the plug on Prime Intellect, Lambert had warned, and they most likely pulled the plug on this awesome new technology, a technology which might just vindicate Dr. Lawrence's nonviolent approach. Blake had stopped short, but only just short, of threatening to call the Strategic Air Command and have the building nuked. Privately, he still held that out as an option if Prime Intellect wasn't somehow neutralized. It would take some doing, but Blake was one of the few people in the country who could demand an air strike against Silicon Valley and, just possibly, get it.
"This thing makes Colossus look like a pocket calculator," Mitchell told them. He was shaking visibly, out of control. He wanted very much to pull the plug on Prime Intellect with his own hands. He alone had felt its power, and now he felt a very uncharacteristic emotion. He was scared shitless.
"Christ, Larry, all it did was teleport you a few hundred meters."
"It didn't fucking ask first," he replied.
"And did you guys ask first before you burned My Lai? Did you ask before you bombed Qaddafi's kids, or that artist in Iraq? Don't get holier-than-thou on us," Taylor said.
So it had gone until Blake and Mitchell simply stormed out. They had intended to go directly back to the Prime Intellect Complex, but they had spotted Lawrence on his park bench. And that did not bode well.
Mitchell pulled a gun on Lawrence. It was a stainless steel pistol, shining and evil. "I think it would be best if you turn it off," he said with a barely perceptible tremor of rage.
"I already tried. It didn't work."
"You pulled the breakers? The lights are still on."
"No, I tried something better. I don't think pulling the breakers will work either."
"It can't live without electricity."
Lawrence eyed him with the barest hint of a smile. "I wouldn't be too sure of that. Look behind you."