The Terminal Experiment - Robert J. Sawyer Page 0,91

the corridor. “Peter, are you home?”

No reply. She picked up the handset and heard a high-pitched whine. A modem.

She looked at the visual display again. “Private caller”—an incoming call, but whomever was using the modem had requested suppression of Call Display.

Jesus Christ, she thought. A sim.

She slammed the handset down, then picked it up again, jiggling the hook switch rapidly, trying to make enough line noise to sever the connection.

It didn’t do any good. Peter, of course, had the finest in error-correcting modems, and the sim apparently had equally good hardware.

She moved quickly to the front door and pressed the UNLOCK button next to it. Nothing happened. She grabbed the manual handle. The door refused to budge. She hit the “In Case of Fire” override. The door was still jammed. She slid open the hall closet—it, at least, had no locking mechanism—and looked at the door control panel. An LED was glowing like a drop of blood next to the phrase “thwarting break-in.” Normally the doors would instantly unlock in case of a fire, but the smoke detectors denied that there was a fire, and some other detector said someone was trying to break in from outside. Cathy left the closet and looked through the peephole in the front door. No one was there. Of course.

She was trying to remain calm. There were other doors, but the master panel showed them all to be in anti-break-in mode as well. She could try going through a window, but they were all locked, too, and the glass was, of course, the best modern safety glass money could buy.

The word she’d been fighting not to think finally pushed to the surface of her consciousness.

Trapped.

Trapped in her own home.

She thought about trying to trigger the smoke detectors, but, of course, neither she nor Peter smoked, so there were no lighters anywhere in the house. And Peter didn’t like the smell of matches or candles, so there were none of those either. Still, she could set fire to some paper on the stove. That might set off the alarms, unlocking the doors.

She hurried to the kitchen, taking care not to trip in the darkness. The moment she entered, though, she knew she was in trouble. The digital clocks on both the microwave and the regular oven were off. The kitchen power had been cut. There was a rechargeable flashlight plugged into a wall outlet. She pulled it out of the socket. It was supposed to come on automatically when the power went off, but it was dead. Cathy realized that the power must have been off in the kitchen for many hours, and so the flashlight had depleted its charge. But—that whine. The refrigerator was still on. She opened its door and a light went on inside. She felt the rush of cold air on her face.

The sim knew exactly what it was doing: the PVR and the fridge were still on, but the stove and the outlet that recharged the flashlight were off. As was typical in a smart house, every outlet was on its own circuit and fuse.

She made her way into the dining room and held on to the back of a chair for support. She tried to remain calm—calm, dammit! She thought about getting a kitchen knife, but that was pointless—there was no physical intruder. The control box for the house systems was in the basement, and that’s where the phone cables entered, too—power and telecommunication lines were being systematically buried in response to fears that unshielded overhead lines caused cancer.

Cathy inched toward the top of the stairs that led to the basement. She opened the door. It was pitch black down there; for their fifth anniversary, Peter and Cathy had treated themselves to a home-theater system, so the blinds on the basement windows had been replaced with Mylar-lined curtains on electric rails—and the curtains had been drawn. Cathy thought she knew the layout well enough to find the incoming phone line even in the dark. She stepped onto the top stair—

The overhead sprinklers came on. No alarm— nothing to summon neighbors or the fire department. But cold water started showering down from the ceiling. Cathy gasped and ran back up into the living room. The sprinklers shut off behind her and came on in there. She moved onto the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. The sprinklers cut off in the living room and went on in the stairwell.

Cathy realized that they were following her—the sim had presumably keyed into