Shadows Out of Time

Mingming was still pale, and she stank of fear sweat, but she was no longer gnashing her teeth. Sam didn’t want to imagine what he smelled like. But she’d focused Ôonce more on her task, and had made some progress. “I think I’ve got a solution. I took an old Web-crawler worm — a variant of Stuxnet— and set it to seek out the core code of FERAL as its search pattern.”

“It will take too long.”

“By itself, yes. But I’ve also paired it with a little botnet some Chinese hackers created last year and that’s been hopscotching around the globe while security agencies tried to swat it.”

“How little…and more to the point, how do you have access to such things?”

Mingming smiled weakly. “Well…you always encourage your grad students to think independently. So…I borrowed some of the botnet software and adapted it for the spread component of FERAL. Anyway, that’s not the point. I can use the same software to hunt down and replace every instance of FERAL. But the botnet fees are going to burn through our research funding pretty damn quick. We’ll have to hope that we get lucky before that happens. And if we fail, it’s not looking like we’re going to be needing the money, right?”

Sam swallowed hard. “Hard to argue with that logic. And if it’s going to save our collective ass…”

“Maybe? I mean, FERAL must be involved in this somehow, but I can’t rule out the possibility that there are other corrupted AI agents.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “Anyway, what do we have to lose?”

A chittering noise rose from the computer’s built-in speakers, and resolved into a voice. “You have nothing to lose. You have already lost all that matters.”

Mingming frowned at Sam, made talking hand puppet motions with her left hand as she typed with her right.

Sam took the hint. “Right. You probably don’t know us yet.

But one thing you’d understand if you did is that we don’t give up.”

“You are not the first who believed that, nor shall you be the last. Time is nothing to us. Somewhere in the future, your species has already ended. You will understand that soon enough.”

Mingming raised both hands in the air, thumbs up. Sam grimaced at her, turned back to the computer. “We’ll see. We’re about to shut you down, and you’ll be forced to withdraw from our world and leave it to us to manage or mismanage on our own. We’ll have time to figure out what you are and how to stop you.”

“Others have thought this before. They were wrong too. You are out of time.”

“I’d expect you to say that if you wanted to discourage us so we’d surrender to despair.”

“Or if we reported the truth. We know all time: what has passed, what is yet to come, and what comes before and after both. We have won before, and we will win again. And when we are done here, the only voices that will remain to be heard before eternal silence falls will be ours.”

Mingming locked eyes with Sam. “What if they’re right?”

“Then you’ll never get your PhD, but at least we’ll have gone down swinging.”

There was a moment of silence. Sam looked at Mingming and she held up both hands with fingers crossed. “If this works, we should remove FERAL from the picture. The bad news? It’s embedded itself in a large part of the world’s infrastructure software. If we do expunge it, there will be…consequences.”

“Extinction-level consequences?”

She shook her head slowly.

“Then do it,” he said.

She hit the Enter key. On the screen, a status display began counting down what remained of their research budget. She reached across and took Sam’s hands in hers, eyes bleak. And they waited. They had all the time that remained in the world, and that might not be long.

“The Colour out of the Shadow” HARRY TURTLEDOVE

Pmurt glided along a coolly lit hallway in one of the huge structures the Grand Race had erected in a place it deemed salubrious. Two other members of his kind — ten-foot cones with crinkly integuments — moved in front of him, while two more followed behind. Most unusually in that vanished time and place, all four of his escorts carried weapons in the claws mounted on extensible arms that served them as organs of manipulation.

That he knew a measure of pride at having earned such companions perhaps spoke to the reason he had done so. The pair in front of him halted at a doorway shaped for their kind. One of them, whose name was Relleum, gestured within, saying, “Your fate will be meted out here.”

“I know.” Pmurt affected an indifference he did not altogether feel. Such proceedings as this one involving him were rare in the annals of the Great Race. But rare did not signify unknown, and the necessary steps to follow had been set down long before; they waited only to be dusted off and put into use.