Up Against It - M. J. Locke [68]
“The depressurization lockdown failures in my warehouses up top were caused by an emergent feral sapient,” she said, “tampering with our systems. My people are mapping it and we will be extracting it tonight.”
His eyes and mouth opened wide.
“You’re not quite old enough to remember what happened on Kasbah,” she went on, “when that feral sapient emerged from their systems, forty years ago, but you’ve probably heard about it—”
“Kasbah? Oh, the Saudi Earth-orbital. Oh, my God.” He blanched, drew a deep breath, and said, “One moment, please.”
His image blinked out. Benavidez appeared. “Thomas tells me you have something urgent.”
Jane repeated what she had told Thomas. The PM’s expression grew grave. “What are our options?”
“Tania Gravinchikov is in charge of the cluster resource computer systems, and she’s one of the best. She says that our best bet is to attempt a live extraction, rather than an excision.”
“Sounds risky.”
“I won’t lie to you, sir; until the sapient is out of our systems, we are all at risk. But Tania did her post-doc work at MIT, and she specializes in complexity and emergent computer systems. She has a great team working for her. If she says it’s safer to extract this thing live than to try to destroy it, I believe her.
“I’ve ordered her to be ready to erase the sapient’s identity-structures at the slightest hint that it’s about to replicate itself or damage any critical systems. My people are also bringing up Phocaea’s disaster recovery systems. Our physical resources are strained right now, but we have redundancy built into our computer systems when it comes to life support. I feel confident that in the worst case, we could keep the situation stable long enough for Tania to bring us back up with minimal losses if the sapient took our computer systems down.”
“The public is already jittery. If anything else goes wrong, we could have widespread riots on our hands.”
“Yes, sir. But wiping the sapient out poses some serious risks of its own. I believe that a careful extraction is the better of two, admittedly bad, options.”
The prime minister said nothing, merely looked at her.
“The sapient is still young. Dr. Gravinchikov believes it’ll be a day or so before it poses a serious threat of self-replication. I’ve given her eight hours to prepare for an extraction. If that’s not enough time, she’ll pull the plug on it and we’ll trigger our disaster response plan.
“With your support,” she went on, “we’ll also put out a citywide alert, so the populace can be prepared if something goes wrong. We won’t reveal the feral sapient’s presence, but simply state that we’re making major changes to the life-support systems and want to be prepared.”
His gaze went titanium-hard. “You’re sure this is the right way to go?”
Her heart pounded and her mouth went spitless. She wasn’t just betting her job; she was betting human lives. “Yes.”
“All right.” He gave a brisk nod. “Do it. Anything else?”
“We also need to discuss the public relations angle,” she said. “Regarding the riot this morning in New Little Austin. It looks as if someone in that neighborhood got word from a local Upside-Down tech working on the show that we’re tracking a feral sapient. It’s unlikely that rumors would start circulating about our life-support systems a short while after my people began tracking a computer problem in life support, otherwise.”
“Why do you think it was a local technician?”
“The timing. Tania informs me that there’s a twelve-hour lag between when Upside-Down captures the signals and when they broadcast them Downside. Before that, it’s only the local technical staff and the show’s executives who have access. And the execs would most likely call the city government or us, rather than some random person in New Little Austin.
“I could be wrong,” she added. “It’s an educated guess.”
“I see what you’re saying,” he said. He fell silent. Jane waited.
“I’m pulling the plug on the broadcasts,” he decided. “We can’t have lives endangered because of an entertainment broadcast. I’ll call John Sinton myself. He has no