John Wright - The Phoenix Exultant

"That's nice, dear," said Daphne absently.

"The reader-heads that feed into the ring can be used in any combination, in multiple scan-functions, so that you do not need a separate thought-port for every combination of neuron actions in the subject. The heads are on a timer... Hullo. What's this ... ?"

Daphne looked up. "Find anything, dear?"

Phaethon shoved back his hood, blinking his eyesight clear of illusions so that he could see the cabin again. His gaze met hers. "When was the last time you used this unit?"

"Used it? I haven't even taken the tape off the reader-heads. No one has ever used it. Its a prototype."

"Atkins did not do something to it? Examine it for weapons, or activate it by remote control?"

Daphne sat up, eyes big. "Oh, dear heavens! The thing isn't really booby-trapped, is it?! I was just kidding when I said you should inspect it. You know, to give you something to do, so you wouldn't fret. Is there something wrong? There cannot be! I kept it in my pack the whole time!"

Phaethon said, "The line clock reads zero, as if the unit had never been used, but there is a separate clock, attached to the timer controlling the coordination of the reader-heads, which indicated that the heads cycled through 1 X 10 to the 28th power combinations about fourteen hours ago. That is about the number of combinations one would get if someone used the unit, and examined his own mind."

Daphne blinked. "Oh. That doesn't sound dangerous."

"But who did it?"

"No one. The thing was in my pack. Fourteen hours ago? I was sleeping on the ground with twelve pebbles sticking into my back. I. remember because I got to count them, over and over again. I'd show you the bruises, but, until you get around to admitting we are man and wife, I wouldn't want to do anything to shock Silver-Grey Victorian propriety. Are you really not going to use that noetic unit now? Do you really think I'm an agent of your spy-thriller villains? Just because the reader-heads are misaligned? That doesn't prove the thing is booby-trapped! Can't you just get it to read your brain without allowing it to change anything in your brain?"

"The reason why noetic machines are so complex, and the reason why the early Warlocks, back in the Fifth Era, could fool the readings, is that there is a continuous back-and-forth between the unit and the brain-information it reads. Any act of examination changes an object."

"I still don't understand. You mean that someone-for the sake of argument, let's say it was your bad guys-came up and used the machine while I was sleeping. That means they did what? Swore an oath? Testified in court? Made a contract? But in any case, it wasn't anything that damaged the unit, or that reprogrammed it to do you any harm."

"I said there was a continuous two-way energy flow between the subject and the noetic reading unit. Each one changes the other. I just said that ancient Warlocks learned how to hoax these readings. They did it by altering the machine during the reading process. If this machine was altered by the enemy, it could not have been for a good purpose."

"But can't you look at it and find out? Have it check itself for flaws? Order it to re-set to zero? Do one of those things you are always doing to our systems at home whenever you are ignoring Rhadamanthus and don't want to hear why what you are doing is going to make things worse?"

He blinked. "Like when?"

"What about the time you collapsed the east wing of the mansion, when we were staying in New Paris? Or what about the time you were trying to re-thread all the impellers in our confluence register, because you thought it would get more tension out of the drive? All you did was capsize us into the lava."

"I cannot believe you would bring that up again! That was caused by a flux in the current around us: and even Boreus Sophotech said later that that was an unexpected consequence of chaotic flows in the magnetic core! And I'm sorry about the wing collapsing, but I thought we could save power by running it through a nonlinear interrupt."

Daphne rolled her eyes and looked at the ceiling. "Men! You are so touchy. All I'm saying is, how did you right the mole boat again? How did you erect the mansion-fields? Just hit the damn reset button. Null everything back to the default."

Phaethon frowned. "That seems too easy. But there is no reason why that should not work..."

"And besides, you were monkeying with the east wing to show off, not because we needed to save any energy, and you know it."

"Fine! I cannot believe we are going through this old argument, when you might actually be a horrible puppet controlled by the Silent Ones."

"What a terrible thing to say about a person!"

He shook his finger at her. "I'm telling you, if this turns out to be a Silent One trick, and you killed that sweet Daphne-doll-the image of the woman I love-I'll destroy your whole damn civilization with no more hesitation than if I were wiping out a nest of cockroaches! You tell that to your masters! I was born to burn worlds!"

"Don't be silly, dear, you sound like a caveman. But I appreciate the sentiment; not every girl gets a maniac to slaughter people indiscriminately for her. So do you really think I'm sweet?"

"It's not funny. Well, perhaps it is a trifle funny, but it's really not entirely funny." He threw off the housecoat and stepped back over to his armor.

Daphne sat up. "Now what are you doing?"

"I can take a precaution. The thought-ports in my armor can act as an intermediary. The noetic-read energy cannot penetrate the admantium. I can just set up a buffer, like an air lock, something to quickly interrupt the circuit if the noetic reader does something untoward."

Black tentacles of nanomaterial fitted the armor around him. Then he straggled to put the housecoat back on. Then followed a few minutes while he spread nanomaterial across his upper helmet surfaces, growing contact-points to be routed through the thought-points in his shoulder boards. The carrier lines clustered like a drooping mass of hair across his head, and around his shoulders, spilling out of the front of the housecoat hood.

Then he spent several moments downloading routines out of the thought-shop. A point-to-point system, a format translator, security cycles, relative time adjustment groups, and so on...

Ironjoy, because of his clientele, had far more security programs than any other thought-shop Phaethon had seen. He sent out a search-tree to use and combine them all.

Then he discovered, of course, that, since his secretarial and seneschal programs had been erased out of his personal thoughtspace, he had to get architectural activators, routing judges, information condensers and decondensors, pattern assessors, step locks, hold-and-go priority switches ...

Some of this required additional hardware chips, processing beads, and so on, which he clipped to the various parts of the housecoat, and hung from the carrier strands. The wall behind the talking mirrors opened up into several construction cabinets, where Phaethon either made or found what more he needed.

Soon, it was hard to move his arms, because he now wore two housecoats (since the first had not had enough storage area of action circuits), and, practically a third coat itself, was the layer of additional materials he had been forced to add, wires and join-boxes, cooling disks and through-put forks, dangling from all eight sleeves.

He had opened one of the mirrors to allow him to run additional lines to contact points there, to get direct access to thought-shop routines. Every wire running to the mirror had a circuit-interrupt with a security assessment cell clipped to it.

"You look like a walking Yule tree," Daphne called from the cot.

"Just don't put a candle on my head." His voice was muffled, because the external speakers on his armor were obscured. He sighed. "I'm just glad the Silver-Greys aren't around to see this. Helion's ancient vow to make our technology serve Beauty."