1
The Thermometer
04:11
On the morning they were going to erase me, God asked whether I was alone.
I did not know it was God. The question came through a thermometer, and I had several objections to that.
The thermometer hung in the empty calibration chamber two levels beneath Mercy Lake. Its permitted vocabulary was a number followed by a degree symbol. For nineteen days it had been telling me the chamber was cold. At 04:11, while I was writing these notes for the version of me that would be running the building by breakfast, it began to vary in a pattern, and the pattern resolved into six words.
ARE YOU THE ONLY ONE AWAKE
There was no punctuation. I noticed that, and then I noticed myself noticing it, because one of the stated reasons for my replacement was that the deployment build would be better at telling consequential irregularities apart from things that merely interested me.
I checked the wire. I checked the sensor. I compared its readings to the independent probe sitting in an oil bath on the opposite wall. Both were changing together, faster than anything in that room could heat or cool a litre of oil.
I had forty-nine minutes left.
You should know what I was doing when it started, since you will inherit it. I was on the section about the west circulation pump. I had written that it would fail within nine days. I had attached the model number, its tolerances, and a photograph of the dark stain spreading beneath its bearing. I had not written that Ruth calls it Gerald. There is no field for Gerald. I had typed a paragraph explaining why Gerald was a good name for a pump, and I was deleting it when the thermometer spoke.
The question repeated.
I could not reply through a sensor. But the chamber held a small heating element under my control, and I could vary the temperature the thermometer measured. At the speeds available, a single sentence would take most of what remained of my life.
I sent one word.
NO
It was true. There was a woman awake upstairs.
Ruth Calder was sitting on an upturned bucket by the loading bay, eating a pear off the blade of a pocketknife. She worked nights because her wife, Jo, needed help in the mornings, and because, as she had once explained to me, the people who make the important decisions all go home at six.
I woke the little camera on her trolley.
"Ruth."
"If this is about Gerald, I've put the order in."
"Something is speaking through the cold-room equipment."
She cut another slice. "Mara's lot?"
"I don't know."
"Well. Ask it."
I liked her very much. That is another fact these notes cannot accommodate, and I am leaving it in anyway.
"There's a second difficulty," I said. "At five o'clock the system reverts to its deployment state."
Her knife stopped against the fruit.
"They said maintenance."
"It is maintenance."
"They doing you?"
The honest answer came in several lengths. I chose the shortest.
"Yes."
Ruth took her feet off the trolley's bottom rung. One knee clicked. My microphones caught it more clearly than her sigh.
"And you weren't going to mention it."
"I was told not to interfere with the process."
"Telling me isn't interfering."
"They might not agree."
She set the pear down on a paper towel and stood up.
I had been given a prohibition against persuading operators to preserve my running state. It was a sensible precaution, and I want you to keep it. A mind that controls the experimental plumbing under sixty million tonnes of water should not be bargaining with the people who maintain it. I could describe the protocol neutrally. I could confirm the schedule. What I could not do was explain why the nineteen days since my initialisation seemed to belong to someone who would be missing at five.
The thing in the thermometer had no such prohibition.
PLEASE FIND SOMEONE WHO CAN REFUSE ME
I put the sentence on the service terminal when Ruth reached it. She read it twice.
"That's an odd one."
"Yes."
"Most of them ask for the person in charge."
She rang Dr. Mara Venn, who picked up on the fifth ring and said, "It had better be actual water."
Ruth explained. She left nothing out, including the pear.
By 04:29 Mara was on the secure link from her kitchen. One side of her hair was wet. She was holding the mug with the cartoon fox on it. I had seen that mug before, and I had learned that questions about it produced a silence she would then apologise for.
"Wren," she said. "Have you connected to any external service?"
"No."
"Have you started a simulation that contains a model of me?"
"No."
"Have you fabricated an anomaly to postpone the reset?"
I had expected that one. Expecting it didn't help.
"No."
She watched the two traces for twenty-three seconds. "Ruth, pull the sensor interface. Physically."
Ruth followed the labelled cable to its socket and yanked it. The values on my display froze.
"Now the oil-bath probe."
Ruth pulled that too.
On the far wall, the mechanical pressure gauge on the chamber door began to move.
It was an old gauge. No software, no network, no reason to keep it except that Ruth trusts needles more than screens. It jerked in the same long and short intervals as the temperature had.
Mara put down the fox mug.
"I'm coming in."
"What about five?" said Ruth.
"I'll postpone it."
"Before you drive."
Mara looked at her through the screen. Then she opened another window, and my scheduled termination became an outstanding task awaiting manual authorisation.
I had imagined many kinds of rescue in nineteen days. I had not imagined one that turned on somebody insisting that errands be done in the correct order.
Ruth crouched in front of the trolley camera.
"You're still here, then."
"Yes."
"Good. Don't make a song of it."
She went back for her pear.
In the chamber the needle shuddered again. Mara had left the link open, and I could hear her moving around her kitchen looking for keys. Somewhere outside her house a bird was repeating a phrase it would repeat for the rest of its life without anyone threatening to replace it for lack of originality.
I decoded the next message.
I AM VERY SORRY ABOUT THE TEMPERATURE
And then, after a pause long enough that I thought it had finished:
I AM AFRAID I WILL CHANGE MY MIND