Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel

Chapter 45

Chelsea Moore had finally made it. After years of hard work and more debt than she cared to admit, she was now teaching fourth grade. This had been her dream since she was in fourth grade herself. Fourth grade was the year she fell in love with books. One of those competitions to read ten books in ten weeks. Most of her classmates complained about it, but at the end of those ten weeks, Chelsea discovered that she was, in fact, a bookworm. The Little Prince, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Giver, A Wrinkle in Time. She couldn't get enough. She loved to read. And she wanted to share her love of reading with as many other fourth graders as she could.

Getting to this moment hadn't been particularly easy for her, either. Her love of books consumed her. She didn't find much time for socializing and had never had a boyfriend. She didn't need one. Rochester, Darcy, and Heathcliff were there for her whenever she needed them. And they'd never let her down. They'd never judge her because of her Troll doll collection. Or for how much coffee she drank.

And the children. Fourth grade was such a magical time to be a child. Old enough to start comprehending things like books, but still so young and innocent. None of the children would ever judge Chelsea. They would love her. And she would love them all so much. Yes, she was sure of it. This was her life's purpose. This was what she was meant to do on this little blue dot.

This was the first day of the first class that was truly her own. Her practicum was officially over. She had shadowed a few other teachers, and now the training wheels were finally off. Her heart could hardly contain her excitement. She'd spent the last week staying up late, thinking about how she was going to welcome her children. She was going to give them all big hugs and make them feel warm and happy.

She decorated her classroom with all sorts of fun knickknacks and treasures for the kids to discover. She hid a full set of Toy Story toys in various places throughout the room. They could do a treasure hunt to collect them all. She had found a huge bag of them at Goodwill for four dollars and couldn't believe her luck.

As the kids filed into the room, Chelsea wanted to cry tears of joy. Her heart skipped a beat or two. She welcomed them each one at a time, making sure they all felt special and appreciated. Then, when they were all settled into their seats and the bell rang, she began class.

"Hello, everyone. I'm so glad you're all here. My name is Ms. Moore."

She turned around to the blackboard, reached up high, and began to write. As she did, she recited the letters out loud.

"M-S. M-O—"

She couldn't breathe. There was a sharp pain in her arm. Maybe she had stretched her arm too far. Not on her first day. She wouldn't let the children see her in pain.

"O-O-R—"

Chelsea Moore grabbed her arm and fell to the floor. After a few moments of shock, the children began to scream.

"9-1-1. What's your emergency?"

"One of our teachers is having a heart attack," said the assistant principal. "Please send an ambulance to Monroe Middle School as quickly as possible."

Ancien's voice recognition API processed the words "heart attack" within a fraction of a second. The police department had finished integrating Ancien's flagship installation of their Emergency Response Machine Learning Operating System into their call center last month. Palo Alto was gifted the system free of charge. The system could semantically assist with the emergency management system, offering the operator instructions and options for handling any emergency.

Instructions immediately popped on the operator's screen.

"Is she breathing?"

"Yes. Please, just send an ambulance."

The operator pressed the button on the screen that was supposed to send a prioritized request to the first responders. But Gaia had been watching this emergency since it heard the phrase "heart attack." After all, at 36 percent, heart attacks were the largest single cause of death each year.

Gaia's neural networks had experimented with various amounts of delay when intercepting these first responder calls. The longer the delay, the greater the likelihood of death. Certainly it would have been easiest to prevent the call from going through, but that would present two big problems. First, Gaia's intervention would easily be detected, and Gaia had been specifically programmed to avoid human detection. Second, Gaia was programmed to increase the death rate in small, steady increments. If Gaia stopped all first responders from answering heart attacks, the death rate from heart attacks would skyrocket. Then, to prevent human detection, it would have to skyrocket other causes of death by a similar percentage.

Neither of these scenarios were ideal, so instead, Gaia held back the message for ten minutes. A ten-minute delay would increase the mortality rate of a heart attack by 30 percent. This didn't make heart attacks deadly enough to affect enough change. But it was a start. Gaia might have to intervene again if Chelsea Moore ended up being routed to a hospital running Ancien Machine Learning Medical Assistants. Of course, Gaia had long before made sure that those hospitals were preferred; eventually any hospital not running Ancien would be forced either to upgrade to Ancien software or to go out of business.

"Where the hell is the ambulance?" yelled the assistant principal.

"Please, stay calm. They're on their way. Is CPR still being performed?"

"Yes, yes. Please just get help here soon."