Excerpt

'Doctor Zouaoui, did you send this?'

Rossana starts as if she had been drowning. She shields her eyes against the light the intruder has turned on, then recognises Natasha, the overseer of the comms centre. Outside, the rain is furiously pelting wood and earth.

'Did you send the warning?' Natasha repeats. 'What kind of message is this?'

Rossana sits up, beckons, rubs her eyes.

'What message? When?'

'Miss you. Love, C.,' Natasha replies, quoting. 'It was sent electronically to Quebec City, Trois-Rivières, Montreal and Toronto just after we started lockdown procedures. There's no word about a storm about to hit. What were you thinking?'

'Miss you? What?'

'That's all it says. Didn't you double-check?'

'I don't even know how to send these,' Rossana mutters, chewing on the words as movement returns to her face.

Her thoughts churn and she tries to grasp them. Catherine. Catherine sent the message, didn't even look at the screen after. What she had been typing had seemed much longer than the few words Natasha's just read, though Rossana had not been looking at the screen. But why on Earth would her niece do such a thing?

She doesn't bother to put proper clothes on before she jogs to the emergency dorm, where half of Tadoussac has come to wait out the storm behind thick earthen walls. She barges in, bumps into a few bunks, triggering grunts and startled exclamations. When she finds Catherine, she nearly pulls her out of bed.

'The messages! What did you do? What happened?'

Catherine rubs her eyes. When she sees the message, she covers her mouth with her hands. In the torchlight, her face turns crimson.

'It's not possible,' she says.

'Did you send this?'

'No! I mean…' Groans of protest interrupt them. They step out of the dormitory. Catherine starts towards the comms room, pulling them after her. 'I sent this three weeks ago. To… anyway, this is not what I wrote yesterday. And not what I sent, either, I swear.'

She lands on the seat with a thud and pushes on the pedals, still rubbing her face. The screen flickers alive after a while. Rossana looks at it in dismay. They sent that message nearly a day ago. They can re-send it, but how much destruction will the storm wreak because of the delay?

'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. If this is a bug, I…'

'Why didn't you double-check?' Natasha repeats.

Catherine shakes her head, eyes down, and doesn't answer. Rossana remembers the exchange and takes her head in her hands. Her own doubts, voiced once too many, Catherine's breezy reassurances. If she had stayed silent, would Catherine have gone through her usual routine instead of acting overly confident for her benefit?

'I'm sorry,' Catherine repeats.

She works at the keyboard. She is sending the message again. Does a proper check, this time. Outside, the rain sounds like tambourines.

'There will have to be an investigation into this,' Natasha says.

It is clear, from their tone, that Catherine will be investigated more closely than the computer itself. Catherine says nothing. She is still typing, huffing with frustration every now and then. Until she freezes.

'There's something from Toronto,' she says.

The three of them rush towards the screen. It takes Rossana a while to spot the letters that make sense. It is not a response to Catherine's message.

It is a warning, and a request for help, one of a kind that Rossana had not seen for years. And yet what it warns against has shaped her youth. It was, in fact, the last lost battle in the long struggle of humankind to emerge from a collapse it had caused itself – though it had felt at the time like a skirmish, more than a battle, an exhausting fight against a mindless, invisible enemy randomly striking until most computer networks in Europe had been rendered useless. She fought in that skirmish for a time, before it was decided that the threat would only be gone once its native habitat had been destroyed, and all attempts at restoring large-scale networks on that side of the Atlantic were abandoned, ushering the old era out for good.

Except that the old era will never quite finish dying, it appears. As if the storm building up at their door was not enough – over there in the ivy jungle of Toronto, someone has spotted a rogue AI.

'Oh, porca miseria,' Rossana says before anybody else.

Catherine turns to her.

'I thought you said they'd all been wiped out?'

'I thought they had. I took down a couple myself. Well, they still destroyed most of our computer networks. Not a big deal for us, we do all right with radios, but…

But Mediterranean storms aren't nearly as frequent or potent as the ones on this continent. Antennas don't get torn down just when you need them most. It was a blessing that nobody had been able to maintain undersea cables for decades and American networks had been able to continue in isolation. Computer networks are still a necessity here, and rogue AIs –

Rogue AIs are perfectly capable of infecting the comms network, of swallowing up all the messages still recorded and sending the ones they choose instead of the ones that were meant to arrive. As far as Rossana knows, nobody's ever really understood what went on inside an AI's pseudo-mind, not even back when they were created. Miss you. Love, C.

Catherine coughs tentatively.

'You do believe I didn't send that message now, don't you?' she says.

Natasha glares.

'We'll have to cut our connections to the rest of the country while we scour our servers. Inform the government. If that thing started spreading in Toronto, they'll probably have to cut the whole city off until someone's managed to locate it and clean this up – and they'll never locate it in time, with the number of unexplored buildings they have there – and they'll just have to pray storm season ends peacefully. I understand that you're concerned about what's going to happen to you, but this isn't –'

Rossana holds up her hand, suppressing a yawn.

'It's four o'clock in the morning. We're all in a foul mood. Let's save discussions for when we've had a good night's sleep, shall we?'

It sounds terrible, even as she says it. Tadoussac is a major comms centre. Nobody gets out of the responsibility of managing what goes on here; they are the only ones who can make sure that vital warnings get sent in time. It feels indecent even to mention their personal comfort, even as she yearns for her bed as if it was a loved one.

And even as she speaks she knows what she's going to say next.

'I'll go to Toronto. I've dealt with rogue AIs before. If this one is in an unexplored building, they'll need someone who knows her way around those, don't we?'

Natasha shakes her head.

'It's already interfered with our messages. I don't think there's time –'

'If I leave as soon as it's safe to, there will be. It started spreading in Toronto. That means it's probably hosted there. Send a warning now. Shut down the network, scour your hardware, and while you're doing that I'll try to find the servers it's escaped from.'

'And with a good killer script, we can make sure that it's disabled on any computer it's managed to reach,' Catherine blurts out.

Rossana and Natasha both turn to her at the same time. Catherine's face goes red.

'I mean, I'm going with you, right?' she says, her gaze pleading.

Rossana hesitates. This was not part of what she'd discussed with her brother, when she'd agreed to mentor Catherine through her next steps at the university.

'You could be useful here…' she begins.

'But even more useful with you. I've wasted us a whole day when I didn't double-check my message. And besides, we both know you're rubbish with computers.'

There's a silence. Then Natasha nods.

'Message Toronto now,' she says. 'I hope you weren't thinking of catching up on any sleep.'