9
Two hours later, they had shifted her and her roommate into a new room. It was now two o’clock in the morning. Melissa lay in her bed, wide awake and almost paralyzed with fear. All around her she could hear the soft beeping and chirruping sounds of computer-controlled machinery. From the hall came more electronic noises.
Do you have any idea how vulnerable you are in that hospital …
Melissa was having a hard time wrapping her mind around it. The Dorothy software had somehow escaped the explosion and evidently ended up on the Internet. It must have jumped out of the Titan Explorer at the last minute, copying itself into the Goddard network, and from there gotten into the Internet. The AI was now wandering about, an autonomous self-functioning aggregate of code. Naturally, it would be totally baffled, unable to understand where it was or what it was supposed to be doing. It had no Explorer spacecraft to operate—it was just a mass of naked code running through its routines in a confused and malfunctioning manner. God knows how its visualization routines were rendering the chaos of the Internet, what kind of confusing world it was trying to navigate. The software had been designed to work on multiple hardware platforms. But it had not been designed to be mobile—at least, not intentionally. Yet clearly it had somehow become mobile and was now wandering about. And it was after her. Resenting her. Hating her. Blaming her.
An insane software bot. Trying to kill her.
Of course, this was not the correct way to think about it. The software didn’t feel anything—emotions or urges for vengeance. It was merely code running. The emotions were entirely simulated. It had no feelings, no self-awareness, nothing like what a human being actually experiences. It was just unfeeling, unaware, lifeless output.
Which made it all the more dangerous.
And this hospital was the most dangerous place she could be. Dorothy had set the battery of Melissa’s laptop on fire—had tried to set her on fire. What else might Dorothy do to subvert one of the machines around her? As the software had noted, the hospital was packed with networked, computer-controlled machines—CAT scanners, X-ray generators, MRI devices, linear accelerators to deliver radiation to cancer patients, EKGs. There must be a dozen such machines in this very room.
She had to get out of there immediately.
The problem was, the little incident had revealed to her something startling: there was a cop stationed outside her room—the man who had rushed in with the fire extinguisher. Now that same cop was sitting in a chair outside her new room. Why was he there? To protect her? Or to make sure she didn’t escape? She was pretty sure it was the latter. She was being detained—only she wasn’t supposed to know it.
She lay in bed, trying to think of what to do. When she pictured a malevolent, disturbed, disembodied software program roaming about, determined to kill her, her heart began to race. She could go to NASA with the information, but who would believe it? She had to get her panic under control and come up with a plan to get herself past the cop guarding her door and out of the hospital, to some safe place.
As she lay there, wondering what to do, she began to feel a spark of anger and disbelief. Everyone blamed her. Even Dorothy thought she was responsible. It was unfair. For the past two years she had devoted her life, body and soul, to the Kraken project. She’d worked eighty-hour weeks, pulling all-nighters and often sleeping in the lab, driving herself to the limit. They had asked her for an autonomous, strong AI program, and she had delivered it. She had made the coding breakthroughs and created the exact software they wanted. Dorothy performed according to the specs she had been given. It was the specs that should be blamed, not her software. She was not going to be a lamb led to the slaughter. Nor was she going to lie there and wait for Dorothy to kill her.
Time to act. Gritting her teeth, Melissa jerked off the strip of tape holding the IV in place and slid the needle out of her arm. A drop of blood oozed out, and she quickly pressed the tape back in place to stop the bleeding. She got out of bed, steadying herself during a momentary dizziness, and went to the clothes closet next to her bed. Inside, she found her street clothes, neatly hung up, still smelling faintly of smoke. From the top drawer of the bedside table she retrieved her purse, cell phone, and car keys.
Her car must still be where she left it, in the Goddard parking lot.
Slipping out of her hospital gown, she put on her clothes, shook out and fixed her hair with a comb from her purse, and made herself look presentable. She went to the door and peered out. The cop was still sitting in the chair, face buried in his iPhone, fat thumbs poking away. It was quiet in the hall. There was no way she could just walk out without him seeing her. She had to create a diversion. And the irascible lady in the next bed was just what was needed.
Even at two o’clock in the morning, her roommate’s television was on, tuned to some late-night talk show. An idea started to gather in Melissa’s head. She went over and turned off the television. Sure enough, the woman opened her rheumy eyes.
“I told you, I’m watching.”
“Like hell. You were sleeping.”
“Don’t speak to me like that, young lady.” The woman raised the remote and clicked the TV back on.
As soon as she put the remote down, Melissa snatched it off her bed and clicked it to turn the television back off.
“You can’t use that remote. It’s mine!” the lady said in a querulous voice.
Melissa held it away from her. “It’s two in the morning. It’s supposed to be quiet time. If you don’t like it, call the nurse.”
The woman jabbed the buzzer for the nurse, once, twice, three times, and kept jabbing.
Meanwhile, Melissa retreated back to her bed, climbed in with her street clothes on, pulled up the covers, and arranged the IV to look like it was still attached. A few minutes later one of the night nurses came in, an irritated look on her face. Melissa’s bed was the one nearer the door; the roommate’s bed was by the window.
“What’s the problem?” the nurse asked.
The roommate launched into a long, heated complaint about how Melissa had stolen her remote. The nurse rebuffed her argument, pointing out it was in fact quiet hours in the hospital. The roommate raised her voice, arguing that she was hard of hearing and a night person and this rule was discrimination against her and they would hear from her attorney.
God bless the woman, thought Melissa, she was playing her role perfectly.
From her bed, covers pulled up to her chin, Melissa egged her on: “That woman’s been keeping me awake for hours. And she threatened me!”
That got the old lady going. “I certainly did not! I never threatened her! She stole my remote!”
“I took it so I could sleep! I’m never giving it back!”
“Give it back! That’s theft! Someone call the police!”
Better and better. The night nurse, exasperated beyond belief, raised her own voice in counterargument. And then—just as Melissa hoped—the cop appeared in the door.
“Problem?”
“Officer!” screeched the roommate. “That woman stole my remote!”
The policeman looked at her, unsure how to respond.
“If you don’t mind,” said Melissa wearily, covers still drawn up, “I’m going to sleep. Here’s the remote. You deal with it.” She proffered it to the cop. “Draw the privacy curtains, please.”
The policeman dutifully drew the curtains around her bed.
The old lady continued to argue and complain, and the cop went to her bed to try to reason with her. This was just the opportunity Melissa had been hoping for. While the nurse and cop were fully engaged with the woman, Melissa eased back the covers and slid out of the far side of the bed, near the door. Crouching behind the bed, she stuffed the pillows under the covers in a classic ploy to make it look like she was still there. Then she ducked out from under the far side of the privacy curtain and slipped out the door. Once outside, she straightened up and strode down the hall in a professional manner, trying to look like someone full of purpose and self-confidence. As she passed the nurses’ station, she gave a curt nod to the nurse on duty and continued to the stairwell, taking the stairs to the lobby.
When she got to the lobby, she walked past the front desk. No one even looked up. Beyond the hospital entrances stood a convenient cabstand, with a lonely idling taxi. She opened the door and gave her apartment address in Greenbelt, Maryland.
She settled back as the cab accelerated onto the Beltway. It was almost three o’clock but there was still traffic, as there almost always was, day or night. Ten minutes later the cab was pulling into the parking lot of her apartment building. After telling the cabbie to wait, she went up to her third-floor walk-up. She hauled her backpack out of the closet, jammed in her climbing boots, camping gear, and outdoor clothing, along with some food and two liters of water, and slung it over her back. She carried it down to the cab and directed him to the back gate of the Goddard Space Flight campus.
When they arrived, she paid the cab driver and got out, putting on the pack. The gate was locked and the guardhouse shuttered, as she knew it would be. But security at Goddard was low at the entrances to the campus. The serious security started at the building entrances. Looking about, she saw no one, and quickly climbed the chain-link fence, dropping down on the grass on the other side.
She took a moment to orient herself. The service drive, illuminated with streetlamps, snaked in gentle curves past a grove of trees and a defunct Saturn V rocket engine mounted on a pedestal. Beyond, she could see a grouping of buildings bathed in light, the far one of which was the now-destroyed test facility. The air was crisp and smelled like fall. She felt a moment of deep regret. She had worked so hard to get here. This had been the dream of a lifetime. But now she would never see this place again. This part of her life was over. She had to survive and, if she wanted her life back, she had to destroy Dorothy. She was already thinking of ways to track her down online and terminate her. But she needed time to think and plan, in a place far from any computer access.
She hid her backpack under some shrubbery near the drive and cut through the woods toward the wrecked Environment Simulator Facility. It was about half a mile away. As she came out of the stand of trees, she saw a security vehicle cruising slowly along the drive. She waited in the shadows until it had passed, then crossed the lawn. As she approached the facility’s parking lot, she could see her beat-up Honda sitting with a scattering of other cars. Beyond stood the bombed-out facility, surrounded by crime scene tape; it looked even more awful at night, bathed in klieg lights and casting long, sinister shadows. She could see several policemen guarding the area, along with two Goddard security guards sitting in vehicles in the parking lot. Getting her car out of there was going to be tricky. There was no way she could sneak in without being seen. A direct, nothing-to-hide approach would be best.
She straightened up and walked purposefully toward the car, unlocked it, and was about to get in. The cops called out to her, waving their hands as they strode toward her. She paused. The only thing to do was talk her way out of it.
“Like to see some ID, miss,” said one of the cops as they arrived.
Mustering a smile, she pulled out her Goddard ID card. “I just came to get my car,” Melissa said. “It’s my only vehicle.”
The cop scanned the ID with his flashlight, looking at her and then back at the card. “Melissa Shepherd?”
“That’s me.”
“What are you doing here at four in the morning?”
“I’m a scientist. I keep strange hours. Like Einstein, I do my best work at night.”
He scrutinized the ID a little longer. “License and registration, please.”
Melissa fetched the registration from her glove compartment. He examined the documents with care, then grunted and nodded, handing the papers back to her. “Sorry to bother you, miss. We have to check on everyone.”
“I completely understand.”
She got into the car and started it up, enormously relieved. They didn’t seem to have an APB on her yet. She’d have no trouble getting through the main gate.
She drove to where she had stashed her backpack, tossed it in the back, and turned around, heading for the main gate. A few minutes later, she arrived. A large security guard sat in the pillbox, the gate down. She slid to a stop and rolled down her window. To her relief, she recognized the guard—she had traded pleasantries with him on many previous occasions when she was working late. What was his name? Morris.
“Hello, Mr. Morris,” she said brightly, handing him her card.
He glanced at her over his glasses. “Hello, Dr. Shepherd. Working late again, I see.” He swiped the card through a reader. She waited. The seconds ticked off. She could see Morris push his glasses up and peer more closely to read a message on his computer screen.
Oh shit.
“Um, Dr. Shepherd?” He turned. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the vehicle.”
“Really? What for?”
Morris looked uncomfortable. “Please step out.”
Melissa pretended to be unbuckling her seat belt and fussing about with her purse, and then she gunned the engine and with a squeal of rubber aimed for the gate. She hit it with a crash. It was not as flimsy as it looked, but the blow was enough to bounce it up and sideways, where it smacked across the windscreen, shattering it. She continued on, almost blind, fishtailing out onto Greenbelt Road. She could hear, through the open window, a siren going off even as she sped down the empty road. She clawed a hole in the spiderweb of broken glass in order to see.
She had to ditch the car right away. She remembered that there was a rental car place just down Greenbelt Road, next to an all-night Walmart.
She pulled into the gigantic Walmart parking lot and put the car in the middle of a group of vehicles. She pulled out her backpack, hiked across the tarmac, crossed a ditch, climbed over a low cement wall, and entered the rental car lot.
Ten minutes later, she was driving out in a Jeep Cherokee. She drove down some back roads, found an isolated dirt lane, parked, and crawled under the vehicle with a flashlight and a screwdriver. She removed the fleet tracker from underneath, and then went on and took out the GPS navigational unit from the dashboard. She threw the GPS into the woods. A few miles down the road she found a truck stop, drove in, got out with the fleet tracker in her hand, and casually tucked it underneath a parked semi. They would have fun chasing that truck for a while. She took five hundred dollars in cash from an ATM, removed the battery from her cell phone, got back on the Beltway, and headed west.