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
Truth was, she was beginning to get a feeling about DMS. About what DMS might be like. She felt as if she could sort of sense the edges of DMS’s personality, and although she knew it wasn’t true, she knew it was just because Damien had used it as an example, more and more she thought of DMS as a shark. Not in a predatory way. She had an image of a shark in her head, a small shark, a nurse shark. She could see its eye, a black circle in white, overly simple, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Although the whole point of DMS was that it was not someone else speaking through the code.
The shark in her head swam, purposeful and opaque, its eyes tracking, its mouth open and curved. Sharks don’t have a neocortex. Their brain is simple. They aren’t moral or immoral, ethical or unethical. DMS was like that, because for DMS, nothing else was alive. The world for DMS was data, and DMS swam in the data. She was beginning to feel as if she wanted it to. DMS was creepy.
She dragged herself in again the next day. She swore she would not read late. She would go to bed early.
The good news was, Damien was pretty sure they had a way to catch DMS when it started screwing with the electrical system. At 3:15, Tony and most of the department came over to watch. What Damien had done was make sure that when DMS did its electrical-system trick, the system would catch it as soon as the lights started going out and reroute so that DMS wasn’t actually touching the electrical system. At 3:17, Damien and Sydney’s printers started up. Damien had set them to send a report if DMS tried to do its thing.
DMS would know that the electrical system wasn’t responding. Sydney imagined DMS trying to run the pattern that sent the blackout rolling and finding yet again that nothing was happening. Was it perplexing? If data was DMS’s reality, and it couldn’t affect the data, what would that mean for DMS?
She ran the program that sent DMS the string of a thousand 10101s, a thousand times.
Instantly, her printer light blinked. DMS had started the electrical pattern sequence again.
She ran the program again.
DMS started over again.
She ran the program a third time. And a third time her printer hummed. She ran the program a fourth time, thinking, “I’m talking to you. I’m responding to you. Do you know someone else is out here? Or is it like a toddler knocking something off a high chair just to see it fall?” The fourth time, there was no response. DMS didn’t start the sequence that should have started the lights going out at DM Kensington Medical but which would, in actual fact, simply send an alert to Damien and Sydney. DMS had responded three times and ignored it the fourth. She felt a chill.
Years later, she would tell about this moment. There really wasn’t enough proof to know that this wasn’t just an intermittent software glitch. But she had believed at that moment that this was proof. DMS was choosing to act or not act. Software didn’t choose. It ran. She would give talks and lectures and would come back to this moment again and again until like a coin it had worn so smooth that she couldn’t actually feel anything about it. What should would never tell, and would eventually mostly forget, was how afraid she was.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Damien asked.
“It answered me,” Sydney said. She told him.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Damien said.
“What are you talking about?” Tony asked.
“Damien thinks that DMS might be aware,” Sydney said.
“What the fuck?” Tony said. “I don’t have time for this. Are you screwing around with this system? This four-point-two-million-dollar system on which people’s lives depend?”
“I don’t really think that,” Damien said. “It was just kind of an idea to kick around, you know?” The look he shot Sydney was murderous.
“We’re going to have to go to backup. This is a mess,” Tony said. “Admin wants us to go back to when the system was stable. Damien, can you fly to Texas on Saturday?”
DMS wasn’t “in one place.” DMS was a complex system spread across multiple servers. Damien would end up spending the weekend in Texas, babysitting part of the reload.
Damien was looking at Sydney. She should have said, “We can’t.” She should have said, “It’s aware. It’s the only one of its kind.” She should have said a lot of things. Instead she looked at her desk.
“Yeah,” Damien said. “I can go. I’m racking up the comp time, Tony.”
