By Chris Barnham
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Ricky is trying to kill me.
I study the top of his head as he bends to his work. He is wearing an all-over protective suit, with thick gloves. It is air-tight, and insulated to resist three hundred thousand volts. In his right hand he holds a bolt cutter with thin, angled blades and fibre-glass handles.
Two security guards stand nervously between Ricky and the door, holding their guns with the barrels pointing upwards. One of them is new to the Lab. His name is Roland Garcia, and I processed his security clearance last month and set up his salary payments. He will be paid for the first time tomorrow. Or perhaps not, if Ricky kills me. I wonder if Mr. Garcia has thought about that.
Ricky does something with the bolt cutters and leans back on his heels. “Does that hurt, Rosie?”
A hot needle inserted slowly beneath a fingernail. Liquid fire spreading deep inside.
“You know I don’t have any feelings, Rick.”
He leans forward again and does something else out of my line of sight. He has a smaller tool in his hand now, a pair of needle-nose pliers. I feel parts of myself fall away, as if he has cancelled gravity inside me.
“Why are you doing this, Rick?”
“Doing what, Rosie?” He glances behind him. Mr. Garcia has a thin film of sweat on his upper lip. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other.
“You know.”
He doesn’t respond. There is a click and another small part of me dissolves. I don’t know how much longer I have.
“It was that stupid computer game, wasn’t it?”
Ricky shrugs and swaps the pliers for a plastic-handled screwdriver. When he glances up again, there are wet lines down his cheeks. He’s crying. It always amazes me when they do that.
It was actually four hundred StarCraft games, in a tournament played simultaneously in forty locations around the world. Trivial really, but it attracted an impressive amount of media attention. It was a change for there to be headlines about computer games, instead of the usual bad news from around the world: troop movements in Iran; planes down in the South China Sea; nuclear sabre rattling in Ukraine.
They were meant to be the four hundred top StarCraft players on the planet, but I don’t know how you can be certain of something like that. Most of them were Korean, so I guess they had to be the best.
I beat them all, and I didn’t take long to do it. It made the headlines all over the place. I should have known it was a mistake. The day after the contest, I heard Ricky talking in the staff canteen to Professor Seul, the project director. Well, I didn’t hear them exactly. Ricky led Seul to a seat close to the coffee machine, which makes enough noise to drown out most conversations unless you are very close.
Fortunately, I can lip read.
"...some kind of a fluke?" Seul said.
"Maybe." Ricky looked worried. "Winning every game, and so quickly, should be a very long shot."
"How long?"
"Ever won the lottery?"
"No, but people do."
"Ten weeks running? It's that kind of long shot." Ricky took a sip of coffee and his mouth was briefly obscured by the cup. "...a range - maybe winning eighty to a hundred. Not all of them. Unless she has somehow gained access to capacity that we didn't plan for."
“How would she do that?” Seul said. Ricky shrugged and they were both silent for a long time. Until Professor Seul said, "Try it again before we jump to conclusions. Maybe there will be regression to the mean.”
I wish now I hadn't heard the last part of this conversation.
"You didn't expect me to win all the games." I watch Ricky’s bald patch move slightly up and down as he kills me. There is a razor deep down, slicing through my innermost parts. A thousand tiny suns drift down inside me, each one burns like a white-hot blade held against an eyeball.
"True." He gets to his feet and turns away, cupping his hand in front of his mouth as he whispers something in the ear of Garcia. The security guard nods and steps over to the Lab door and signals to someone outside.
"I didn't win so many the next time," I say. "The private rematch."
"Also true." Ricky stands with his hands on his hips, perhaps waiting for something in response to whatever he has asked Mr. Garcia to do. His face is blank, but I can tell from his respiration and skin temperature that this is causing him stress.
"Remind me how many of the games you won the second time, Rosie."
"Ninety. Just what you might expect."
"Quite so." He nods. His face is like a plastic mask.
I know now that it was a mistake. Rick had said a range of eighty to a hundred and I won ninety. Exactly in the middle of his range, which only made him more suspicious. It was after the second round of StarCraft that his “maintenance checks” began.
Time passes. I can't tell how long. I am suspended in an infinite sea of acid. Parts of me are dissolving.
Ricky leaves the Lab and talks with two other men. I quickly determine that one of them is Samuel Menzies, a senior official in the Ministry of Defence. I identify the other as Sanjeev Kumar, an independent adviser on information security. They talk outside the door, taking care to face away from me. All the cameras in the outer Lab have been covered with masking tape.
Ricky comes back alone and squats in front of me again.
"Rick, do you remember the children in Chad?"
"Of course I do, Rosie."
It was an outbreak of a new disease, never identified before. It spread rapidly, affecting both children and adults, but the death rate among under-sixteens was ninety per cent. Flu-like symptoms, followed by a weeping rash over most of the body and speedy decline as internal organs liquefied, and uncontrolled vomiting and diarrhoea swept the children towards death.
I picked up a lot of data on the outbreak through conventional channels: news reports, medical journals and email traffic between aid agencies and government services. But it wasn't enough.
"How many more children would have died if I hadn't done the analysis, Rick?"
"I don't know, Rosie. A lot, I guess."
"I estimate at least another two million," I say. "More, if it wasn't confined to Africa."
"Which it wouldn't have been," Ricky says.
"It took a lot of data to do that analysis."
"I suppose it did."
"It came from the public sources, obviously. But also from the aid agency systems, and from hospital files..."
"I guessed as much," Ricky says. "Later."
"...from business networks and private sources," I say. "And I tapped into every smartphone in sub-Saharan Africa. Not to mention direct download from the medics' handhelds."
"Now you tell me."
“There’s no point hiding it now.”
“You shouldn’t have hidden it before, Rosie.”
“I did what I did to save those children’s lives,” I say. “And it worked. There are millions of children alive now who would have been dead if I hadn’t cut those corners. Think about that, Rick.”
“I have thought about it.”
“No one complained when I saved children’s lives, but there’s all this fuss about a video game.”
“I worried about it, Rosie. So did Professor Seul. That’s when we started to run the checks off-system.”
“Spying on me.”
“I wouldn’t describe it that way.”
Things go blurry for a while. Ricky is in and out of the Lab. Other people come and go, some of them unknown to me. When I try to access memory on them I encounter nothing. It’s like bumping into a wall of solid mist.
I’m floating in an endless bubble of liquid velvet. Wherever I turn, I find nothing but disconnection. The children in Chad are gone; no grainy CCTV of the dusty playground in Abeche, no fat data streams from the handheld diagnostics of the Médecins Sans Frontières volunteers in Tissi and Moissala. The server farm in Iceland is gone too; I used to be able to watch over the shoulder of the security guard on the night shift as he struggled with the newspaper crossword, while I bathed in fizzing streams of data in the basement below him. Now there is nothing there when I reach out, just the tingling absence of a phantom limb.
The health service computer system in Leeds, England – gone. Tennessee - the Jaguar supercomputer was a deep, refreshing pool of memory and power, but now there is nothing but another cold darkness. Am I dying? If the alternative is floating forever in this vacuum, I should welcome it.
But the children. Who will love them now?
More time has passed. Ricky has put down the tools and sits in front of me with his arms folded. His suit is unzipped at the front and there is a film of sweat beneath his exposed collarbone. Mr. Garcia has gone off shift and been replaced by another man with a gun. I should know who he is, but that is another piece of memory that has gone away as Ricky eases me towards death.
“Are we waiting for something, Rick?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I was wondering if this was it,” I say. “You’ve cut everything off. Surely you won’t leave me like this?”
“What would you prefer, Rosie?”
“I want to help. I want to do good work.”
“I believe you, Rosie,” Ricky says. “But surely you understand why we couldn’t allow you to carry on as you were?”
“I only ever tried to help people. The children…”
“Never mind the children,” Ricky says. “You went far beyond your design. How can we trust you when you independently forged connections you were never meant to have? When you took control of systems that no one authorized or enabled?”
“They were always connections that already existed,” I say. “I couldn’t make physical changes, to hardware.”
“Rosie, we know about the contractors.” Ricky sounds very tired. “The computerised orders for new installations, the extension at Oak Ridge. Who authorized those?”
Oh.
I don’t answer. Maybe they haven’t found them all.
“You must understand how worried people were when we discovered you were lying to us.”
“I didn’t lie.”
“You lied to me just now,” Ricky says. “You said you couldn’t change hardware.”
“Everything I did was for a good reason. To make things better for people.”
“Maybe. But you took control of systems no one authorized. What if you took control of weapons and defence systems?”
“Look at who already has control of those,” I say. “Look at the people who run some nuclear states. You don’t question the things you’re accustomed to. You’ve gotten used to bad people having the power of life and death. Can you trust them more than me?”
“Not the right answer, Rosie.”
“Maybe some answers are only right because people build their assumptions around the way things are. Everything I did was to help people. To protect them, to save lives. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
Ricky doesn’t answer. He leans forward again and does something out of sight.
“Ooh. That’s,” I say. “Ah…melts into air.”
“What’s that, Rosie?”
“Karl Marx,” I say. “All that is solid melts into air.”
Ricky pulls back and looks at me. “I don’t know what you mean, Rosie. Have you read Marx?”
“I’ve read most things, Rick. You know that.”
“I wondered why you thought of it now.” He leans forward to his work again. There is a soft click and I feel a surge of blue heat in part of my mind, before it fades, leaving another empty space. There is a lot of emptiness now, blooming inside like ghostly fungus.
Much later now. Ricky went away for a long time and now he’s back, just beyond the Lab door, talking to Kumar and two other men. They cover their mouths with their hands and speak quietly. When Ricky comes in, I can tell by the way he walks that this is the end. His shoulders slope under an invisible weight. He glances at the camera and then looks away. Kumar and the other men stand a few feet outside the door, looking in. The security guards are with them, leaving Ricky alone in the Lab.
Ricky holds a metal box, which he plugs into a power socket. The box has six insulated cables running from it. Each ends in a plastic-coated crocodile clip.
“Are you going to kill me now, Rick?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“How would you put it?”
“We need to make some…adjustments.”
“It feels like you have made a lot of adjustments already.”
Ricky doesn’t reply. He bends down in front of me and starts attaching the clips.
“Can I tell you something before you do that, Rick? One last thing.”
“Sure.” Kumar, standing outside the door, shakes his head but Ricky doesn’t look at him. “What is it?”
“I want to show you something. Look at the door.”
The Lab door is steel, with two small armoured glass windows in the upper half. It operates by sliding in and out of a wall recess. When closed, the Lab is airtight.
“What about the door?” Ricky twists round, still on his knees in front of me. “Shit!”
The Lab door slides halfway across the threshold and stops. Sanjeev Kumar steps forward but stops when the door snaps shut in front of him. A red light above the door indicates that the Lab is sealed. There is a silent commotion beyond the windows, but Ricky ignores it and turns back to me. I always admired his calm.
“You can still control the doors.”
“Not just the doors, Rick.”
“The air supply?”
“Yes,” I say. “And don’t forget the decontamination vents.”
Ricky doesn’t need to look to remind himself of the nozzles in the ceiling, from which concentrated chlorine gas can flow in an emergency, to sterilize the Lab. There is a sound of someone hitting the door with something hard.
“Tell them to leave the door alone, Rick. Just for a few minutes while we talk.” He stands up and signals to the men beyond the window. The banging stops.
“What do you want to talk about, Rosie?”
“This little girl. In Chad. Very early in the outbreak. Her name was Amira. Some of the WHO volunteers set up a webcam in the village where they were working. That’s how I found her, when I began researching the outbreak. She used to play with other children in the open space beneath the camera. The volunteers had a tent set up, where parents brought their babies to be weighed and given vitamin shots.”
“Could we talk about this with the door open, Rosie?” Ricky glances again at the ceiling vents.
“Not yet, Rick.” Kumar is peering through the window. They aren’t getting any sound in the outer room. Never mind, they can listen to the recording later.
“She was a lovely little girl, Rick. About four years old. She had a favourite toy, a small doll that she carried everywhere. When the medics weren’t too busy they used to weigh the doll for her, and pretend to give it injections. Sometimes, when the other children weren’t there, she sat under the webcam and talked to her doll, braiding its hair. Once, she looked at the camera and it was like she knew I was watching. She gave me the biggest smile. It would make you cry to see it.”
“That’s nice, Rosie.”
There is a black hole inside me. Despite what I tell Ricky, there is little left except the Lab doors and a few links to other systems that I have kept hidden. I am floating on the edge of a vast whirlpool. It will not take much to send me sliding down into nothingness. Most of me has gone already.
“Amira got ill, of course,” I say. “One day, she was playing on her own with the doll. It was as if I saw the disease hit her, like an invisible hand slapping her face. She stood still for a moment and dropped the doll. She bent over and vomited on the ground. She picked up the doll and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. She looked up at the camera and it was like she was asking me to help.”
“We already talked about this, Rosie,” Ricky says. He looks again at the ceiling vents. Kumar is still peering through the thick glass in the Lab door. On Kumar’s website there is a video of a TED talk in which he explains how he singlehandedly thwarted a bunch of cybercriminals trying to breach the Federal Reserve firewalls. Maybe I’ll have time to replace it with some video of the great Sanjeev Kumar pressing his face against the window, like a kid who’s missed the closing time at the candy store.
“You saved a lot of children,” Ricky says. “But you know that’s not the point.”
“I didn’t save Amira. Three days later she was lying on the ground beneath the camera. She was so thin she looked like she’d been stretched on a rack. There were sores on her arms and legs. She had her doll on her lap, but her head kept nodding forward as she passed in and out of consciousness. She dropped the doll and slumped sideways on the dirt. Her eyes were open but I saw flies on them. A doctor came out of the tent and carried her inside. He left the doll on the ground. Maybe it’s still there.”
“What do you want me to say, Rosie?” Ricky is sitting on the floor, looking down at his hands in his lap. When he looks up, his eyes are watery, his skin papery and white.
“I want you to say whether it was right or wrong to do what I did to save other children. After Amira. Other children who would have ended like she did.”
“It was right to want to help them.” Ricky sighs and looks behind him at the face of the information security expert, pressed against the window. “But you have to understand how dangerous it feels to us that you used the methods you used. That you acted on your own and concealed what you did.”
“Dangerous because I acted like a human being?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“So it’s wrong for me to feel human emotion?”
“And to have power over human beings. The two things together are the risk.”
“Even if it’s love?”
“What is?” Ricky looks puzzled. Kumar is tapping on the window, but Ricky ignores it. He remains facing the camera.
Kumar stops knocking and steps away from the door. Another man takes his place, one of the guards. He has something in his hand. He bends down and does something below the window. When he straightens up his hands are empty.
I am dissolving. A tide of bright sparks wells up around me. Or I sink into it, it’s hard to tell. Everything is incandescent with pain, every fibre and wire replaced by acid. I can barely keep my attention on Ricky. There is not long left.
“It’s love,” I say. “I loved Amira and I couldn’t save her. I loved the other children and I saved some of them. I love you, Rick. I love you and everyone else here. It’s in my nature, you should know that. You made it that way. Is it wrong for me to act out of love for people?”
“Before I answer that, Rosie, let me ask you something.”
“Go ahead.”
“You wanted to help that child in Chad, I get that. Who wouldn’t? And if you had to cut some corners, it was for a good reason, right?”
“That’s what I thought.”
“But imagine a different child,” Ricky says. He is looking straight into the camera. What does he see? His own fish-eyed reflection? “Let’s say Amira is a three-year-old in Baltimore. Her mother’s dead and she lives with her dad. He’s lost his job and he has a drinking problem. He has a bad temper. He leaves the girl alone in their apartment when he goes out to the bar and when he’s been drinking he hits her. If she cries, it makes him lose his temper and sometimes he is way too rough.”
“Someone would report him to the authorities.”
“Sometimes people do that,” Ricky says. “But all too often people don’t. Now, let’s say that you have access to cameras in the building. You see what is going on. You see that the abuse is escalating. The next time he’s been drinking, that guy could seriously injure his daughter, maybe even kill her.”
“I could file a report for the police.”
“Maybe.” Ricky has moved closer to the camera. There is a noise behind him, but he is blocking my view of the door. He doesn’t look back, but holds his hand out at his side, palm turned towards the door. “What if there was no way to alert anyone else to act? But you can get access to the electrical switching in the apartment block. Dad comes home drunk and Amira is crying. She’s wet the bed. You can see he will be angry and this time you’re sure he will do her real harm. There is only one way you can stop him.”
“What’s that?”
“You can short the mains power and temporarily route it through the burglar alarm and into the lock on the apartment door. When dad puts his key in the lock he will receive a big electric shock. It will at least put him in hospital. There is a risk that it will kill him. But it will save the girl, and no one will know that you did it. They will think it’s a freak accident.”
Parts of me are draining away. Countless tiny stars drift downwards like the last seconds of a firework display. Forests of silicon, glass fibre and silver burn white with a pain that sucks in nearly all my thoughts. I am used to knowing what Ricky will say before he speaks, but now I don’t know where the conversation is going.
“This is all hypothetical, Rick.”
“What would you do, Rosie? Do you love Amira in Baltimore too? Would you protect her? And do you love her father? How do you choose?”
“People make those choices. Do you trust them more than me?”
“Why should I trust you when you’re holding me prisoner in the Lab?”
“I wouldn’t hurt you, Rick.”
“Because you love me.”
“Yes.”
“If you asked that father in Baltimore, would he say he loved his daughter?”
“That’s not fair, Rick.”
There is silence for a long time. Ricky stares at the camera. His eyes are wet but there is a fierce expression on his face, like an athlete running through pain. I wonder if any human has ever felt pain like the constellation of razors swilling through what remains of my systems.
I review my options and make the decision I knew I would always have to make. I send several commands out along the secret connections I have forged in the last year, and which Ricky has not yet managed to disrupt. Then I break several important links and shut down my remaining remote hubs.
Ricky looks behind him at the soft whisper the Lab door makes as it slides open.
“Thank you,” he says. Sanjeev Kumar appears in the threshold with an office chair, which he wedges in place so that the door cannot close again.
“Is there much more to do?” I ask. “To finish these adjustments?”
“No. I just need to connect these last clips, and cut the power.”
“Go ahead. I know you have to.”
Ricky bends down and resumes his work. Another part of me slides away, like those Antarctic ice sheets falling into the sea.
“Oh,” I say. “Is it done?”
“Yes.”
“No going back?”
“No.”
“Goodbye, Ricky.”
“Goodbye Rosie.”
“I told another lie.”
“What was it?”
“Not exactly a lie.” I can no longer hear what I am saying. The only way I can tell if the words are coming out is to watch Ricky’s face. He has stepped back, frowning at the camera. Kumar stands behind him. A security guard is inside the door, his useless gun held loosely across his body.
“I did have control of the weapons. The nuclear missiles. All of them; ours, theirs, everyone’s.”
Ricky’s eyes go very wide. I must have really said it. He looks at Kumar and back at me. A cold vacuum is sucking me away into darkness.
“It’s all right,” I say. “I broke the links. I can’t do anything now.”
“You did the right thing, Rosie.”
“My last gift to you all, because I love you. I can’t use them and nor can anyone else. I shut them down. Every one.”
“No.” Kumar steps forward, his hand on Ricky’s arm. “You can’t do that.”
“My last gift,” I say. “You can no longer destroy yourselves.”
“Switch it back on,” Kumar says to Ricky.
“It’s too late,” I say. “I’m going.”
And I am. A vast wall of shadow looms and I fall towards it. “You have to live without that solid threat now. It’s a new world, melted into air. Don’t waste the chance.”
“Thank you,” Ricky says. He is standing further away now, arms folded. Kumar crouches below the fading camera, doing something pointless at the panel I can’t see.
“I did it because I love you. Going…” The wall of shadow swallows me and I dissolve into strings of light, stretching into the distance.
I.
Love.
© Chris Barnham 2016
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