Da-ding, da-ding, da-ding, da-ding.
Kaitlan Goss was startled awake by the staccato ringing of her phone. The sound pierced the silence of the bedroom and seemed to echo off every wall, every mirror, every lamp. Fumbling in the darkness, in the general direction of the noise, she instead managed to scatter a pile of pillows to the four winds, upend the glass of water on her nightstand, and send the phone bungee-ing on its charger cord toward the now sodden carpet.
Da-ding-da-ding.
"Shit. LLIAM, silence alarm."
Da-ding da-ding da-ding.
LLI-AM! Fuck.
Her heart pumped against her ribs, and her mind raced to close the gap between dream state and reality. She dragged her fingernails across the carpet, and finally made contact with the device and yanked it free of the charger, her thumb feeling for the mute switch but finding only smooth metal.
Da-ding.
"LLIAM. SILENCE. ALARM." Why would it think Kaitlan needed to be woken in the middle of the night? What day is it? More panic as she remembered: Tomorrow-today-was Friday. In a few hours StoicAI would announce the biggest partnership in its history: a deal more than a year in the making, on which Kaitlan had spent countless thousands of hours of due diligence, approved billions of dollars in system security upgrades, moderated weeks of tense, occasionally furious, negotiations in congressional back rooms between engineers and Pentagon officials. At exactly nine a.m. Pacific time, Kaitlan would hold a press conference to announce that LLIAM had been appointed "official strategic decision-maker" for the United States military.
That was the reason she had found it so hard to fall asleep, even with the sleeping pill, but that didn't explain why LLIAM was now waking her up. Was there some last-minute issue with the announcement? Was she supposed to be on a call with someone in a distant time zone? But as the screen exploded into light, temporarily blinding her, Kaitlan realized her mistake. The noise that had roused her from her dream at three-thirty on a Friday morning was not in fact coming from her phone, but from a source far more terrifying.
Somebody was ringing her doorbell.
The room was still in darkness, which was frightening, too. LLIAM should have detected that she was awake and decided to switch on the lights. A power outage, then? Natural disaster? No. March was too early for wildfires, and she would have felt an earthquake. Kaitlan sat upright and found the switch of her bedside lamp, its warm glow revealing the full devastation of the scattered pillows and water.
Da-ding da-ding. Da-ding da-ding da-ding da-ding.
On the other side of their vast white bed, Tom was still asleep, expensive gray earplugs wedged into his ears, blocking out the world-and his wife. Kaitlan knew he was planning to leave early for his boys' ski trip to Tahoe, but surely not this early. Even his dumbest friend (Keith) wouldn't be so oblivious as to wake the whole neighborhood at three-thirty in the goddamn morning. She reached over to shake Tom awake, but as her fingertips brushed his shoulder, she thought better of it. She'd spent their entire five-year marriage insisting she didn't need his protection; she wasn't about to flip their entire dynamic over a single doorbell-ringing lunatic. Probably just a homeless person who had gotten lost. Yeah. Or a drunk who had innocently staggered past three levels of security into the most heavily guarded private street in Woodside.
Da-ding da-ding.
Kaitlan snatched her gray terrycloth robe from behind the bedroom door, then crept across the landing and down the stairs, the white marble icy against her bare feet. Through the frosted glass of the front door, she could just make out a diffused shadow-unthreateningly small, which was a good sign, likewise the absence of red and blue flashing lights.
When she reached the bottom step, she paused to scan the entryway for a weapon but saw only Tom's skis, leaning beside the door next to his duffel bag. Even at almost six feet tall Kaitlan wasn't sure she could convincingly wield a ski.
"Who is it?" She was ashamed to hear the tremor in her voice as she yelled at the shape outside the door.
"Who's there?" Louder this time, an octave lower. In control. A homeowner standing her ground.
The ringing finally stopped, and she heard a woman's voice shout back from behind the glass. "Kaitlan, oh thank god. It's me." Then to someone else, maybe someone on the other end of a phone: "It's okay, I found her! She's here!"
Kaitlan froze for a second, her mind processing a thousand scenarios. Had there been an accident? Was someone dead? Was the Campus on fire?
"Kaitlan?"
She managed to move and unbolt the door, letting her assistant inside. "Heather, what the hell? Why didn't you call?" The LLIAM app on Kaitlan's phone knew to always allow calls from Heather, no matter what the hour. The same setting should have automatically opened the front door for her. Also, she was pretty sure Heather was supposed to be out of town, attending a college friend's wedding or some other mandatory twentysomething obligation.
Now she took in Heather's appearance, no makeup, her normally immaculately straightened brown bob wild and disheveled, and her standard uniform of black skirt and matching turtleneck replaced tonight with a gray zip-up hoodie hanging loose over baggy jeans. Also, she appeared to be holding an old-school walkie-talkie. Was Heather having some kind of mental episode? Was she drunk? Kaitlan's eyes reflexively flicked back to the unwieldable skis and Heather followed her gaze, a look of confusion-or was it irritation?-passing over her already panicked face.
"Calling doesn't work," she blurted, her words echoing off the marble floors and minimalist white walls of the entryway, "nothing works. LLIAM is down. They need you on Campus, right now."
"Down?" The word hit Kaitlan like a ski. "What do you mean down?" In three years of LLIAM's existence, it had never once suffered an outage. The neural chip containing its decision-making algorithm was, as Martin had always loved to boast, self-updating and self-debugging. That neural chip, and its Core Memory Array, was buried deep underground, in a facility designed to withstand nuclear warfare and solar flares. In any case, the day-to-day work of LLIAM was performed by duplicates of the chip and memory array in twelve cities across the United States. And even if every one of those systems failed, there were backup data centers on six continents, each containing a hundred billion cached decisions for every conceivable question or situation. No matter what form Armageddon might take, those backups would happily continue helping users make important life choices for years before anybody noticed anything was amiss. There could be many variations of "up," but never "down."
Heather flushed red. "Crashed? Broken? I don't know the right word." In two years as Kaitlan Goss's assistant, she had almost never heard her boss yell, and definitely not directed at her. "All I know is that Sandeep is freaking out and nobody could reach you. We didn't know what to do."
Kaitlan felt lightheaded, suddenly aware of the sound of blood pumping in her ears and of the freezing winter air that now filled the entryway. We didn't know what to do. When was the last time anyone had used those words? She took a deep breath, in through her nose, then slowly out through her mouth, as she tried to process what she had learned in the few minutes she had been awake. LLIAM is down. Sandeep is freaking out. Sandeep sent Heather to get me. I am in charge.
Another breath.
I am still wearing my nightdress.
Now she was moving, ripping at a dry-cleaning bag hanging in the hallway and pulling garments free of their hangers. Of course Sandeep was freaking out-if LLIAM really was offline then the whole world would be freaking out. Almost a billion users suddenly left without the ability to make even the most basic decision. The entire Western world, paralyzed by infinite choices-what to eat for breakfast, whether to call in sick . She thought again about the Pentagon announcement-all those meetings, all that money. But no, it was impossible. This must be a misunderstanding or an exaggeration.
Kaitlan pulled the nightdress over her head and slipped on a knee-length suede skirt and a cashmere sweater. Heather glanced away as she did this-a respectful gesture but slightly ridiculous-Heather knew more intimate details of Kaitlan's life than even Tom did.
She was fully dressed now, fully awake, fully in control. She grasped Heather's shoulders with both hands. "It's okay. Breathe. What exactly did Sandeep say? The exact words he...
