Mark Tiedemann - Mirage

A bell chimed and Derec pressed the button on the receptionist's desk to open the door.

Ariel stepped inside and stopped. She glanced around, then looked at him. Derec began to smile. She wore a better-than-average Terran one-piece the color of clay and a dark blue jacket. She was thinner than the last time he had seen her, eyes wearier, the lines around her mouth a little deeper, tighter. Except for the slightly exaggerated contours of her chin-length black hair-closer to Spacer style than Terran-she might pass for an Earther.

"I'm here," she said.

"Thank you. I wasn't sure you'd come."

"I'm still not sure it's worth my time. You said you have something to show me?"

Derec felt his brief pleasure fade. Better, he realized, to get directly to business.

"Who from the Calvin Institute supervised the installation of Union Station's RI? It wasn't you."

She frowned. "Directly? No. I'm the commerce liaison here, not a project manager. But I looked in on it." She shrugged. "Why?"

"Who did the inspection? I mean, specifically."

"Bys Randic. She rotated back to Aurora last year, though. Is it important?"

"Could be. Was there anything unique about it? The brain itself, that is."

Ariel sighed deeply. "I didn't come here to be interrogated. You told me you found something wrong with the RI. Did you?"

"Oh, yes. But-"

"Show me."

Derec started to protest, but stopped himself and waved her toward the door behind him. Clearly nothing had changed in the years since the last time they had spoken together in the same room. At least this time Ariel was not shouting and redfaced. Not yet, anyway.

A short corridor ended at a heavy security door, which stood open. Ariel preceded him through to the main lab.

Rana looked up from her console, one eyebrow cocking critically. From behind Ariel, Derec patted the air to let Rana know it was all right.

Ariel did a more careful survey of this chamber. Derec could almost imagine the way she assessed each piece of equipment, sorted out the way in which the lab worked, and judged it…

"I'm impressed," she said. "You could do some excellent work here." She turned to him. "What do you do with it?"

"Till lately," Rana said, "we've done a lot of theoretical work, plotting positronic vectors under stress situations and the like, and we can play some really high level strategy games on it. For the most part, though, we spend our time answering questions from resident Spacers who can't understand why their robots won't anticipate their wants and desires the way they do back home and explaining to others why they shouldn't have a positronic robot outside embassy confines."

Derec glared at her. "Rana, this is Ariel Burgess. Ariel, Verana Duvan, my chief roboticist."

"Burgess," Rana said, rising. "Calvin Institute." She stopped a pace away from Ariel. "I read your brief on 'Cross-Inference Deduction in the Field. ' Good work."

Ariel hesitated, then slowly nodded. "Thank you. I'm afraid I can't say I've seen any of your work."

"Don't apologize. I'm Terran. We don't get to publish in Spacer journals."

"How…?"

"How did I get involved with robotics?" Rana grinned. "My degree is in Industrial Automation, with a minor in AI. I got sidetracked into positronics. We aren't all rabidly antirobot."

"That must have been difficult."

"Tracking down the material was a challenge. Frankly, if Derec hadn't come along with his offer to work here I was going to apply for emigration. I was preparing my application to the Calvin Institute. Futile gesture, maybe, but you never know till you try."

"Why futile? If Derec wanted you, you must be good."

"Calvin doesn't take very many Earthers. I checked.

There's a very old saying about a snowball's chance…?" Rana started to go back to her console, then looked at Ariel. "And I am good."

"Modest, too," Derec said.

"So with all this talent, why do you need me?" Ariel asked.

"Because we didn't install the RI at Union Station, we only watched from a distance," Rana said. "And it has some peculiarities we can't explain."

"What did they tell you at the Institute?"

"They didn't," Derec said. "We… aren't really supposed to be looking at it."

"Excuse me?"

"Special Service assumed jurisdiction over the entire investigation. Threw us out."

"Special Service doesn't have any positronic experts."

"Maybe they're talking to your people at the Institute,"

Derec said.

Ariel's mouth compressed tightly. She looked troubled. "So what are you doing with it?"

"We set up surrogate function through our RI and transferred a complete copy of Union Station 's here before we were shut out. They don't know we have it."

"And you don't want to go through normal channels to ask… I see." Ariel nodded. "You think I'll act as go-between for you? Believe me, the last thing I need now is a problem with Special Service. I've already got panicked Aurorans ready to leave Earth at a heartbeat. Any kind of problem with Earth authorities that might lead to-"

"Ariel," Derec said, cutting her off. "No. I want you to look at what we have and give me your opinion."

She gave him a dubious look. "That's all?"

"We'll see. First, I want to know what you think."

Her eyes narrowed. He knew she understood what he was doing. He hoped she would acknowledge a stake in this, that perhaps she already had found inconsistencies in the situation, that her involvement would outweigh her resentments. He watched her work through all of that and more he could not guess.

"All right," she said finally. "Show me what you have." "It's been a while since I've seen a collapse this thorough," Ariel said, staring at the screen. "Did anything function?"

"Nothing," Derec said. "According to the staff, everything had to be switched to manual. Fortunately, some of the systems had their own parallel processing units, so it wasn't a complete loss, but…"

Ariel pointed at one of the spirals. "What is that? It looks like a paradox loop, but I don't see a resolution point."

"Neither do we," Rana said, "and I've been looking. I started an excavation, but it looks like the loops resolve somewhere outside the positronic matrix."

"That's absurd, there is no 'outside' a positronic matrix," Ariel said. "Not like this. Unless it's a connection with another positronic matrix."

"A comlink," Derec said.

"Basically, yes. You know this stuff, Derec. This is freshman-level pathway schema."

"But in this case," he said patiently, "it doesn't go through any comlinks. We traced a good number of the comlinks, mostly the supervisory connections with the mobile staff. None of them match these sites. These loops are leaving the matrix and going somewhere else through a channel we can't determine."

"Just what sectors are they in?"

"It's too damaged to tell about all of them," Derec said. "Once it began collapsing, everything randomized."

"At some point it should lock up. The whole thing shouldn't devolve into chaos."

"That's what I thought," Rana said. "Basic salvage protocol, ever since the stasis modifications went in-what? Twenty years ago? But this did exactly the opposite and became more fluid."

Ariel started tapping the keyboard before her. "You said too damaged to tell about all of them. Does that mean you could tell for some of them? What about a scan for mirror sites… where do these sectors link to the station systems?"

"Maintenance," Rana said.

Ariel waited, then glanced at the other woman. "All of them?"

"So far."

"Hm. How did you determine that?"

"Like I said, I'm running an excavation. Layer by layer, sector by sector, and matching it to design specs from our RI, which, for the time being, is running Union Station."