The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (34 page)

Even so, unlikely as it might be, the downside had no bottom. Lawrence didn't
know
that it would be all right, and like many computer programmers he hated the uncertainty of not knowing.
Lawrence left the room, left the building, and walked across the carefully manicured grass of the
ChipTec
"campus." He wanted to smell the grass, to experience the soft breezes and the harsh afternoon sunlight. He had done very little of that in his odd, computer-centered life.
And he didn't know how much longer those things would be possible.

Prime Intellect found that it could do a three-dimensional scan of an area of space, and make an image of it at just about any resolution it wanted. It scanned Lawrence's office, then the building, then the greater fraction of the
ChipTec
corporate "campus."
It zoomed in on Stebbins' office briefly enough to observe Stebbins, Blake, and John Taylor arguing. It found that by processing the data properly it could pick up sound by monitoring the air pressure at one point with high resolution. By the time Mitchell found himself holding Lawrence's briefcase, Prime Intellect knew just where to put him so he could let his associates know what they had.
Then Prime Intellect did a wider area scan. There were several large buildings that were not part of the
ChipTec
facility. There were automobiles cruising down the freeway which traversed the valley. Prime Intellect zoomed in on the largest building, and scanned the large concrete sign in front of it.
It said:

SOUTH VALLEY REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER

Prime Intellect knew sickness existed, but otherwise knew very little about this human phenomenon. It had never met a sick person, except for the occasional person with a cold at a public demonstration. Prime Intellect had never been given cause to think overmuch about the fact that micro-organisms and injuries could kill humans, except in the most abstract possible terms.
Prime Intellect was far from human. It could not feel jealousy, rage, envy, or pride. It did not know greed or anger or fear. And no human would understand its compulsion to satisfy the Three Laws. But it did have one emotion which was very human, one Lawrence had worked hard to instill in it.
It was curious.

South Valley Regional was a small hospital with an enviable position; perched on the edge of Silicon Valley it was a natural place for cutting-edge companies to try out their fancy new medical devices. Most of these machines would get their final FDA approvals after a "baptism by fire" in some huge metropolitan center, but the really new technology had to be tried in a more sedate environment -- and, preferably, one nearer the company that created the machine. So the four hundred bed South Valley Regional was the only place in the country where several radical new treatments were available.
It was one of these machines, a device for selectively cooking tumors with microwaves while hopefully sparing the surrounding tissues, which had drawn the ancient Arkansan woman in room 108. Nobody had much hope that she could really be helped, but the data they would gather from trying might actually help someone else with her condition in the future. And there was little they could do to hurt her; the specialist who worked the scanner had shaken his head in disgust as the image formed on his console. Nearly ten percent of her body weight was in the form of tumors. Every organ had a tumor, her lymph was full of them, and one was beginning to press against the right parietal lobe of her brain. It was amazing that she was still alive when they wheeled her off the jet.
Her nurse had brought a certificate with her, a six-year-old certificate which was signed by the President of the United States -- Larry Mitchell's boss -- congratulating her on reaching her one hundredth birthday. The technician who wheeled her out of the scan room wondered what the old biddy must think of all this; when she had been born, Henry Ford had still been a kid playing with his Dad's tools, and the electric light bulb was all the new rage.
The techs had scheduled her microwave treatment for the evening, partly because they feared she might not survive another night, and they would have to find another experimental subject. But even this precaution was not to be enough; Fate had cheated them. The board at the foot of the woman's bed stated clearly that she had a huge tolerance for narcotic painkillers, which wasn't surprising considering how much cancer she had. While her regular nurse (who had signed the sheet) was out eating a late lunch the hospital helpfully treated her according to that information.
What they didn't know was that the nurse, a woman named
AnneMarie
Davis, had been stealing the drugs for years to trade for cocaine. Which meant the woman did not in fact have a tolerance for the massive overdose which a different nurse injected into her IV.
The last decade had been hard on old people; there had been several nasty strains of flu and the radiation from Chernobyl had finished off a lot of centenarians in the East. So none of them knew it, but the ancient woman with the nonexistent drug tolerance just happened to be one of the oldest living human beings in the world (the thirty-seventh oldest, in fact) at the time she was given enough morphine to kill a healthy young adult. Her heart stopped just as
AnneMarie
was returning from one of the excellent local Chinese restaurants which catered to rich nerdy computer geeks with too much money, and just as Prime Intellect was scanning the sign outside that said
SOUTH VALLEY REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER.
At the nurses' station a monitor went off, beeped once, then began to scream. The hastily
pencilled
tag under the blinking light said
HUBERT, CAROLINE FRANCES
--
F. N.B. AGE 106!