against. O, David, Chunquing, Rulan…
“Dr. Kim! Are you all right?!” Keesha Ali, running toward her from Security. As her ears cleared, Leila heard the sirens and alarms.
“Yes, I…Keesha!”
“I know,” the woman said grimly. “Who was inside?”
“David. Chunquing. Rulan. And the replicator project…an earthquake! Of all the bad luck of heaven…”
“It wasn’t bad luck,” Keesha said. “We were attacked.”
“Attacked-”
“That was no natural quake. Security picked up the charge just seconds before it went off. In a tunnel underneath the lab, very deep, very huge. It not only breached the lab, it destroyed the dome equipment.
We’re bringing the back-up online now. Meeting in Amenities in five minutes, Dr. Kim.”
Leila stared at Keesha. The woman was American, of course, born here, with no Chinese ancestry. But surely even such people first mourned their dead…Yes. They did, under normal circumstances. So something extraordinary was happening here.
Leila was genemod for intelligence. She said slowly, “Data escaped.”
“In the fraction of a second between breach and ignition,” Keesha said grimly, “while the dome was down, including, of course, the Faraday cage. They took the entire replicator project, Dr. Kim.”
Leila understood what that meant, and her mind staggered under the burden. It meant that someone else had captured the other shimmering engineering prize. The replicator data had been heavily encrypted, and there had been massive amounts of it. Only another quantum computer could have been fast enough to steal that much data in the fraction of a second before ignition-or could have a hope of decrypting it. A quantum computer, able to perform trillions of computations per second, had been a reality for a generation now. But it could operate only within sealed parameters: magnetic fields. Optic cables.
Qubit data, represented by particles with undetermined spin, were easily destroyed by contact with any other particles, including photons-ordinary sunlight. No one had succeeded in intrusive stealing of quantum data without destroying it. Not from outside the computer, and especially not over miles of open land.
Until now. And anyone with a quantum computer that could dothat was already a rival.
Or a revolutionary.
The first replicator bloom appeared within KimWorks three weeks later.
It was Leila who first saw it: a dull, reddish-brown patch on the bright green genemod grass by Amenities. If it had been on the path itself, Leila would have thought she was seeing blood. But on grass…she stood very still and thought,No. It was a blight, some weird mutated fungus, a renegade biological…
She had worked too long in the sabotaged lab not to know what it was.
Carefully, as if her arm bones were fragile, Leila raised her wrist to her mouth and spoke into her implanted comlink. “Code Heaven. Repeat, Code Heaven. Replicator escape at following coordinates.
Security, nanoteam one-”
There was no need to list everyone who should be notified. People began pouring out of buildings: some blank- faced, some with their fists to their mouths, some running, as if speed would help. People, Leila thought numbly, expressed fear in odd ways.
“Dr. Kim?” It was a Grade 4 robotics engineer, a dark-skinned American man in an olive uniform. His teeth suddenly bared, very white in his face. “That’s it? Right there?”
“That’s it,” Leila said, and immediately wanted to correct toThat’s they. For by now, there were billions of the replicators, to be so visible. Busily creating more of themselves from the grass and ground and morning dew and whatever else lay in their path, each one replicating every five minutes if they were on basic mode. And why wouldn’t they be? They weren’t assembling anything useful, not now. Whoever had programmed Leila’s replicators had set them merely to replicate, chewing up whatever was in their path as raw materials, turning assemblers into tiny disassembling engines of destruction. “Don’t go any closer!”
But of course, even a Grade 4 engineer knew better than to go close. Everyone inside this KimWorks facility understood the nature of the project, even if only a few could understand the actuality. Everyone inside was a trusted worker, a truth-drug-vetted loyalist.
She looked at the reddish-brown bloom, which was doubling every five minutes.
“You have detained everyone? Even those off duty?” asked the holo seated at the head of the conference table. Li Kim Lung, president of KimWorks, was in Shanghai, but his telepresence was so solid that it was an effort to remember that. His dark eyes raked their faces, with the one exception of Leila’s. Out of family courtesy, he did not study her shame in the stolen uses of her creation.
Security chief Samuel Wang said, “Everyone who has been inside KimWorks in the last forty-eight hours has been found and recalled, Mr. Li. Forty-eight hours is a three-fold redundancy; the bloom was started, according to Dr. Kim, no later than sixteen hours ago. No one is missing.”
“Your physicians have started truth-testing?”
“With the Dalton Corporation Serum Alpha. It’s the best on the market, sir, to a 99.9 confidence level.
Whoever brought the replicator into the dome will confess.”
“And your physician can test how many at once?”
“Six, sir. There are 243 testees.” Wang did not insult Mr. Li by doing the math for him.
“You are including the nanoteams and Security, of course?”
“Of course. We-”
“Mr. Wang.” A telepresence suddenly beside the security chief, a young man. Leila knew this not from his appearance-they all looked young, after all, what else were biomods for?-but from his fear. He had not yet learned how to hide it. “We have…we found…a body. A suicide. Behind the dining hall.”
Wang said, “Who?”
“Her name is-was-June Juana Selkirk. An equipment engineer. We’re checking her records now, but they look all right.”
Mr. Li’s holo said dryly, “Obviously they are not all right, no matter what her DNA scan says.”
Mr. Wang said, “Sir, if people are recruited by some other company or by some revolutionary group after they come to KimWorks, it’s difficult to discover or control. American freedom laws…”
“I am not interested in American freedom laws,” Mr. Li said. “I am interested in whom this woman was working for, and why she planted our own product inside KimWorks to destroy us. I am also interested in knowing where else she may have planted it before she killed herself. Those are the things I am interested in, Mr. Wang.”
“O, yes,” Wang said.
“I do not want to destroy your facility in order to stop this sabotage, Mr. Wang.”
Mr. Wang said nothing. There was, Leila thought, nothing to say. No one was going to be allowed to leave the facility until this knot had been untied. Even the Americans accepted this. No one wanted military intervention. That truly might destroy the entire company.
Above all, no one wanted a single submicroscopic replicator to escape the dome. The arithmetic was despairingly simple. Doubling every five minutes, unchecked replicators could reduce the entire globe to rubble in a matter of days.
But it wasn’t going to come to that. The bloom had been “killed” easily enough. Replicators weren’t biologicals, but rather tiny computers powered by nanomachinery. They worked on a flow of electrons in their single-atom circuitry. An electromagnetic pulse had wiped out their programming in a nanosecond.
The second bloom was discovered that night, when a materials specialist walking from the dining hall to the makeshift dorms stepped on it. The path was floodlit, but the bloom was still small and faint, and the man didn’t know his boot had made contact.
Some replicators stuck to his boot sole. Programmed to break down any material into usable atoms for construction, they ate through his boot. Then, doubling every five minutes, they began on his foot.
He screamed and fell to the floor of the dorm, pulling at his boot. Atoms of tissue, nerve cell, bone, were broken at their chemical bonds and reconfigured. No one knew what was happening, or what to do, until a physician arrived, cursed in Mandarin, and sent for an engineer. By the time equipment had been brought in to encase the worker in a magnetic field, he had fainted from the pain, and the leg had to be removed below the knee.
A new one would be grown for him, of course. But the nanoteam met immediately, and without choice.
Leila said, “We must use a massive EMP originating in the dome itself.”
