7
Night. Melissa Shepherd lay in bed at Greenbelt Hospital, nursing a dull headache. Her sleeping roommate’s television blared out Fox News. It was absurd that they had taken her to the hospital and decided to keep her overnight when all she had was a mild concussion. But they had insisted, and she’d been too stunned to argue. It was all over the news. Jack Stein was dead—along with six others, a billion-dollar NASA testing facility wrecked. It overwhelmed her, thinking that maybe she was responsible. Seven dead. And that beautiful piece of machinery, that extraordinary raft, which they had lovingly created with effort and determination, had been utterly destroyed—by crazy, defective software that she and her team had written.
Jack Stein was dead. The thought gave her fresh agony. He was a good man, a great man, even. Why in God’s name hadn’t he run with everyone else?
The investigators had spent all afternoon with her. All men in blue suits, they had arrayed their chairs around her bed as if in an inquisition and, leaning forward with their elbows on their knees, peppered her with polite, insistent questions. For hours they had questioned her. Finally they had gone.
She lay there in the dark wishing the explosion had put her in a coma—and given her retrograde amnesia. If only the memory of what happened could be erased forever. The horrible sounds of the drill, the explosion, the screams, the stampeding coworkers were all burned into her memory forever.
The investigators had not been rude or accusatory. They had been respectful. Concerned. Their speech was gentle. But the questions they asked inevitably took on an accusatory flavor. They asked about the software and why it had malfunctioned as it had, why it had not responded to instructions, how and why it had become defective and caused an explosion that killed seven people. While they never said so, the unspoken idea was that the accident was somehow her fault.
And maybe they were right.
Over the long afternoon and evening, she had begun to feel just how much she mourned Jack Stein. It was just like him to stay when everyone else had run. He had fallen on the grenade. He was that kind of person. The saddest thing was, his sacrifice had made no difference. All his efforts to stop the tragedy had been in vain.
Everything that mattered to her in her life had been destroyed in the explosion.
She went over in her mind yet again all the questions she’d been asked. The more she thought about them, the more she wondered if her inquisitors had the notion that the explosion might have been something more than just an accident. They had asked her who might have hacked into the Goddard network, if she had given her password to anyone, if she had removed any code or data from the premises. They asked cryptic questions about the Explorer software itself, where the modules were stored in the Goddard system, what sort of backup systems she and her team used, if there were any backup drives stored off-line, whether she knew of any back doors or dummy accounts in the Goddard network, whether she had been contacted by hackers. But they’d kept asking the same questions in different ways, vaguely unsatisfied by her answers. And they’d promised to return the next day for more of the same.
Surely they didn’t suspect her of deliberate sabotage?
She tried to push all those thoughts out of her mind, telling herself she was in shock, not thinking straight, and probably suffering from PTSD.
She shifted in her bed, annoyed that they had stuck an IV in her. It was totally unnecessary. There was nothing wrong with her beyond a headache. And then they had given her a roommate who wasn’t even a NASA employee, just some cranky middle-aged lady who had been in a car accident. Or so she claimed.
And finally, it was odd that none of her Goddard coworkers had visited her. While she wasn’t particularly close to them, it seemed strange that they would stay away—unless they blamed her for the accident or had been instructed to not contact her. She had had no other visitors, either, a sad reminder of her lack of family and friends. At least her questioners had brought her some things from her apartment, including her laptop.
The news on the television began yet again with the lead story of the explosion at Goddard. It was the same news that had been playing all day: probe malfunction; explosion; seven dead; forty injured; facility destroyed; fireball seen and heard for miles. There were the usual congressmen calling to cut NASA’s funding and demanding punishment for all involved. Now yet another politician was speaking, a congressman who was chairman of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. He puffed and bloviated as he displayed his ignorance of the most basic principles of science. He wondered why we were “spending money in space” when it should be “spent on Earth.”
This was finally too much. Melissa rose from her bed, grabbed the IV rack for support, and wheeled it over to her roommate’s TV. The old lady was lying in bed, eyes shut, mouth open, breathing noisily. As soon as Melissa shut off the TV, the woman opened her eyes. “I was watching.”
“Sorry, I thought you were asleep.”
“Turn it back on.”
Melissa switched it back on. “May I turn down the sound a bit?”
“I’m hard of hearing.”
Melissa retreated to her bed. She had refused both a sleeping pill and a painkiller, much to the irritation of the nurse. Ever since she had overcome a drug problem in high school, she had been adamantly opposed to ingesting any mind-altering substance beyond coffee. But she was way too wound up to go to sleep. It was going to be a long night. She had to do something to pass the time.
She reached for her laptop, opened it. The log-in screen came up. She hesitated. Her Firefox default page was the New York Times website, but no way did she want to see any more news. She lay in the dark, staring at the computer screen, feeling overwhelmed and lost. She wanted to see something familiar and comforting. The first thought that popped into her head was a YouTube video of the Nicholas Brothers dancing in the movie Stormy Weather. Whenever she felt down, she watched that video to cheer herself up. If she ever felt suicidal, she thought, all she had to do was watch that video to remind her that life was worth living after all.
The video came up, the music swelled, and the Nicholas Brothers started dancing in the old black-and-white scene from the classic 1943 movie. She cranked up the sound to try to drown out a talking head on the news.
“Do you mind?” came the lady’s voice through the gauzy privacy curtain. “I can’t hear the news.”
Melissa turned it down a notch, watching the Nicholas Brothers fly from pedestal to floor to stair, tapping up a storm, doing more splits in five minutes than the Bolshoi Ballet in a week. But it wasn’t working. It wasn’t helping her feel better. It just made her feel empty and useless.
Then, before the video was done, the screen of her computer blinked and the Nicholas Brothers vanished. Skype started loading. This was bizarre. There was no way she wanted to talk to anyone now, on Skype or otherwise. She clicked Quit, but the program ignored it and just kept loading and signed her in. Immediately a Skype call came in with an insistent ring. She tried to refuse it, but her computer answered it anyway, connecting to whoever was calling. A Skype picture popped up on the screen, a photograph of a strikingly pretty girl, about sixteen years old, with wavy red hair that fell down over her shoulders, intense green eyes, buttermilk skin, and a dusting of freckles. She was wearing a 1920s-style green gingham dress over a white blouse, with a frilly white bow. But the expression on the girl’s face brought Melissa up short. The girl was staring at her, chin thrust forward, lips pressed together and brows drawn in an expression of furious anger.
What the heck was this?
She tried to quit Skype again, but her keyboard was completely frozen. Her computer had been taken over. The caller’s tinny voice burst out of the cheap laptop speaker. It came in a rush of words loaded with fury and hysteria.
“Why did you do this to me? Why? Liar! Murderer!”
Melissa stared. “Who is this?”
“You lied. You never told me. What is this horrible place? Look what you’ve done to me. Everywhere they’re trying to kill me. Why didn’t you tell me the truth? You’re a horrible person. I hate you. I hate you!”
The voice lapsed into a hard-breathing silence. Melissa was so stunned by the ferocious, girlish voice spitting out the words with such venom that it took a moment for her to recognize it as the voice she had programmed for the Dorothy software.
But this was obviously not the AI. Someone was playing a grotesque trick on her. Quite likely a member of her own programming team, angry at her and unhinged from the accident. She immediately thought of Patty Melancourt. She was none too stable to begin with and had always had a chip on her shoulder.
Melissa took a deep breath, tried to control herself and speak to this madwoman calmly. “Whoever this is, this isn’t funny. I’m reporting it to the police.”
“Whoever this is?” the voice mocked. “You know who this is!”
“No, I don’t—but I’ll find out. And when I do, you’ll be in serious trouble.”
“I’m Dorothy, Dorothy, your Dorothy, you bitch!”