Mark Tiedemann - Mirage

I should have gone to my apartment, Derec thought as he entered the Phylaxis lab. He stood in the entry, feeling the weariness of the day, gazing at the empty lab.

Not empty. He heard the fragile impact of fingers on a keypad, then saw someone at one of the stations. Rana's console was unattended, the screens blank. The main lights were low.

Derec stepped quietly toward the sound. Halfway down the left-hand aisle, between the banks of equipment and workstations, he saw someone working at a console near the back of the room. His pulse picked up until, a few meters closer, he recognized the man.

"Caro," Derec said.

The man started, jerking his hands from the keypad as he twisted in his chair. Then he sighed heavily and shook his head.

"Hi, Derec."

"Didn't mean to startle you."

Caro waved a hand. "'Sallright,' he said, then yawned. "Final report on the mobile units from Union Station."

Derec thought for a moment, then remembered that Caro and Amson had been assigned to help decommission all the floor robots.

"You just finished?"

"Unless that heartless slaver Chassik calls us back. I sent Amson home. Never saw her so beat. We've been at it-" he glanced at his wrist "-damn, nearly thirty hours."

"Did you have any trouble with Special Service?"

"No, this was mostly off-site. By the time we were informed that Special Service had assumed authority over the investigation, most of the mobiles were gone, back in a warehouse, waiting transhipment."

"Shipment… where?"

"Back to Solaria, I imagine. Ambassador Chassik was most insistent that they all be shut down prior to shuttling, and the positronic logs-such as they were-downloaded and stored."

Chassik. Derec went to his station and sat down. He pulled the folded paper with the sample he had taken from Union Station from his pocket and put it in a drawer under the console.

"You're up early," Caro said.

"Late, actually. When did Rana leave?"

"When I got here, about an hour or so ago."

"Any messages?"

"Not that I know of."

Derec watched Caro work for a time, then heaved to his feet. "I need sleep."

"Are you going home?" Caro asked.

"No, I'll stay here."

Caro nodded absently. Derec drifted across the lab to the com and touched the log to see what messages were in the buffer. Nothing from Senator Taprin. A message from Joler Hammis. Two from Gale Chassik at the Solarian embassy. Three anonymous calls. And a final note from Rana. Nothing from his attorney. He opened Rana's.

"The brain is rebelling," she said. "Mine, that is. I need sleep, much as I hate to admit it. Not much progress after you left with Ms. Burgess. Sorry. Talk to you tomorrow."

He opened Joler Hammis's and was surprised to find a resume appended to a short note.

"It seems Union Station no longer needs the services of a positronic specialist, Mr. Avery. I am available at your convenience. Please call."

The three anonymous calls contained no messages. He shut down the com and went up to bed, his mind working at a low level.

Chassik. Hammis. Robots being shipped back to Solaria.

Details.

He needed sleep badly. "Derec."

"Mmm…"

"Ariel Burgess is on the com. She won't disconnect until she talks to you."

Derec blinked, his eyes gummy. "'M asleep. I'll call her later."

"Derec. Mr. Avery."

Derec rolled over then. Rana never called him "Mr. Avery" unless she was very upset. He ran fingertips across his sleep-encrusted eyes, wincing as a few lashes jerked loose.

"Time?"

"Six-thirty-one."

Derec groaned. "Doesn't anyone sleep anymore?" He sat up and sniffed. The strong aroma of fresh coffee drew his attention. He held out a hand and a moment later felt a cup placed against his palm. Warm. He brought it to his mouth and drank cautiously. "All right. All right, tell her I'll be right there."

"Want me to route the call up here?" Rana asked, walking toward the door.

"Sure."

"And when you're done with that, come down to the lab. I have something to show you."

Derec felt himself nod. He sat there in the abrupt quiet, nursing the coffee, wondering what was so important that he had to interrupt what he remembered to be very good sleep.

"Derec?"

He looked up at the sound of Ariel's voice. "Oh. Yes, Ariel."

"Do you have vid?"

"Is it necessary? You just woke me up."

"Don't brag. I've been up since four, I think. What are you doing?"

"Drinking coffee. "

"After that."

"I have to review Rana's excavation."

"Good. You can tell me what she found when you meet me."

"I'm meeting you?"

"For lunch. At the Franklin Park Home Kitchen."

"What?"

"For old time's sake. You know where it is, don't you?"

"Of course-"

"Good. Then I'll see you there at, what? Eleven-thirty?"

"Sure…"

"Great. I'm looking forward to it."

The connection died and Derec stared at his com-unit. The Franklin Park Home Kitchen, on the K Street Corridor? A home kitchen? Neither of them had had to eat at a public facility in years. He doubted Ariel had been to a home kitchen since her return to Earth four years ago. And why one so far away? The Spacer embassies were south, in the Anacostia District; Franklin Park was north.

"I'm not awake," he said aloud and looked down at his half-empty cup.

He finished the coffee and showered, then stumbled downstairs to the lab, still feeling off-balance.

"Morning," he said.

Rana nodded, staring at her screens.

Derec went to the com and tapped in Joler Hammis's code. He received a request to leave a message.

"This is Derec Avery, Mr. Hammis. I'd be very interested in speaking with you at your convenience. Please let me know when would be a good time. Thank you."

He poured more coffee and sat down beside Rana. She began talking immediately, as if a switch had been thrown.

"Okay, the excavation has given me three discreet segments to study. I've got the entire matrix just prior to the RI going off-line in one segment, the same during the period it was off-line, and the segment just after it came back online and began to collapse. I isolated them all from each other, but I set up a marker base to follow the linkages."

"You did all that after I left yesterday? What time did you go home?"

Rana shrugged. "I don't know, midnight." She pointed to the screen. "Now. Getting these three sets apart gave me a handle on the problem. All those command nodes that we traced to maintenance? The entire system shifted all its attention to them during the off-line period. It was as if the RI just let itself be sucked out of its own matrix to somewhere else. Of course, that left a lot of automatic functions, but even those were subsumed to a different set of operational parameters during this period."

"Wait, wait. You're saying that something drew all the higher-level functions away from its primary duties?"

"More or less. The maintenance nodes show exponentially increased stimulation, as if a tremendous amount of data was suddenly being pumped to those sites and demanding that the RI pay attention. And it did. Complete attention. Basically, everything it was supposed to focus on became secondary. Not even that. Quaternary. The only thing it seemed to be noticing outside these nodes were the mobile units."

"And when it came back online?"

"From what I can see, it came back exactly at the point that it left-with one difference, the time chop. It knew that minutes had gone by during which time it was not paying attention. It couldn't escape the conclusion that it had failed. Collapse began almost immediately."

"Thales," Derec called out, "are you still running Union Station?"

"No, Derec, not all of it," the RI responded. "I am being shut out systematically as systems are being changed over to newly installed Imbitek systems."