Mark Tiedemann - Mirage

Task completed, the unit moved away. Derec waited at the edge of the cluster and listened while Jeffries issued instructions. One by one and in pairs the people left to carry out their assigned tasks until only Derec remained. She looked at him, one eyebrow cocked dubiously.

"And?"

"I'm Derec Avery, from the Phylaxis Group."

"Those your people out there herding the braindeads away?"

"Yes."

"Good. About time. I only have two people on staff who know anything about traumatized tinheads, and right now they're busy with the RI… which is where I need you, if that's what you're wondering."

"The Resident Intelligence…?"

"Resident Idiot, you mean." She snorted derisively, then gestured for him to follow. "Come on. Avery? You're supposed to be the expert on positronics?"

"One of-"

"Fine. Come with me."

Jeffries, despite being a good head shorter, walked away fast enough to make Derec struggle to keep up. He glanced over at the huddle around the diplomats and representatives. Ambulances stood open, receiving bodybags and injured. Blood slicked a large area. A dozen or so people were gathered off to one side, the quality of their clothes announcing their importance. A few seemed nervous and several were deathly pale, but none looked hurt.

Derec and Jeffries came to the far end of the platform, descended the steps shoved against it, and the supervisor led the way through an innocuous door labeled PRIVATE. A few meters within they mounted a narrow stair leading up.

"I was worried that you might bring some more robots," Jeffries said. "We're having trouble enough with the mere presence of them right now."

"We don't have any," Derec replied. She gave him a look. "Besides the Spacer districts, the embassies, and here, they are illegal on Earth."

Jeffries nodded. "Hm. Do you have any idea what happened here?"

"I saw the replay on subetheric on the way over."

"Probably edited."

"How many-I mean, who?"

"Estimates are that eighteen people died in the shooting, but we have at least thirty wounded, maybe a hundred dead or injured in the panic-trampled, kicked, that sort of thing," Jeffries explained. "All those you saw down there, that's what happened to them, except for a half dozen or so that got hit by stray blaster fire from the security teams on the platform. The Auroran ambassador is dead, along with half her staff, plus the Aurorans from the embassy here." She stopped at the top of the steps and looked at him. "Senator Eliton, too."

Derec opened his mouth to say something. But then he saw a brief glimmer of pain in Jeffries' eyes, a glimpse of what lay beyond the brusque jobber she had shown him till then, and closed his mouth. He made himself nod. Jeffries' walls came up again, and she continued up the stairs to an unmarked door.

On the other side was a broad office pressed against a strip of window that overlooked the gallery. Desks, consoles, and people formed a loose maze between the window and a wall of monitors that stretched the length of the room.

"From here," Jeffries said, "we watch the RI run Union Station. Normally, anyway. Today we watched it go out to play while people died."

Everyone in the room stopped to look at Jeffries, then at Derec. He felt the bitterness in her voice, saw it reflected in all the staff faces. No robots were present, only people trying to cope.

"Would you explain that to me?"

"Kedder," Jeffries said.

Two people sat before the sprawling main interface console in the center of the room. One of them, a tall, slim man with short reddish hair, stood and cleared his throat.

"I, uh-"

"Kedder, this is the man from Phylaxis," Jeffries went on. "He's here to show us how to talk to our robots."

Derec went to the console and extended his hand. "Derec Avery."

"Tathis Kedder."

"I have floor work to do," Jeffries announced. "You need me, find me."

With that, she pivoted on her toes and left the room.

Derec waited several seconds. People returned to what they had been doing. "All right, what happened?" he asked Kedder quietly.

"Well…" Kedder gazed down at the console as if trying to remember what to do with it.

The other man at the board started tapping keys deftly. The row of screens at the top of the console cleared to milky white, then new images winked into place.

Kedder cleared his throat and pointed. "These are the, uh, primary monitor views leading up to the arrival of Senator Eliton."

"What the RI saw?" Derec asked.

"Uh-huh."

Robots moved quickly among the prep people who established the boundaries for spectators and ushered the public into their assigned areas. Quickly, the space filled. Then the first wave of dignitaries arrived. Derec checked the elapsed time: the sequence moved at roughly twice normal speed. The platform became crowded, security robots followed humans around, guaranteeing free access from the main entrance to the platform, accompanying more dignitaries in, herding the throngs of people. Eliton's entourage came in, and Derec's throat tightened at the sight of Bogard. So it had been here.

But what went wrong? he wondered.

"Now," Kedder said, "let's slow it back down to normal speed. Watch the audience."

The swift efficiency of the free-floating staff and security abruptly shifted to a more human pace. Derec looked from screen to screen, each displaying a different view across the gallery. The crowds bobbed and shuffled as if adrift on water. Then something changed. Derec blinked and leaned closer. It had looked as if a section of the recording had been cut out, one moment spliced to another across the gap left by the missing segment. A subtle jump, heads jerking slightly, and then-

"See?" Kedder asked.

"I'm not -I saw something, but"

"Look," the other operator said sharply. The images backed up, across the gap, and then ran forward again. He rose out of his chair and touched a screen. "Watch this person."

As Derec watched, the gap came, and the person vanished.

"What the-"

"It gets better," Kedder said. "Or worse, depending… watch this screen."

Kedder indicated the middle view which showed the arched tunnel. After several seconds, a crowd of people emerged, marching, boots flashing, black uniforms bulging with armor and adorned by insignia Derec did not recognize.

The other screens changed then. They showed a combination of corridors and alphanumerics. The main gallery was gone, replaced by what appeared to be a military complex. Uniformed figures hurried past, numbers shifted.

"From this point," Kedder said, "we got nothing through the RI that related in any way to what we could see happening down on the floor. While people-while the attack happened, this was all the RI showed. We couldn't get it to reset, we couldn't get it to tell us what was happening. It wasn't responding to any command. Nothing."

"And now?" Derec asked.

"Now it seems to be in positronic collapse."

"All the security-"

"It ran the whole thing. For several minutes before the attack, it was issuing directions for security teams to respond to small crises that we later learned never happened. When the shooting started, most of the security was outside the gallery and all the exits were sealed. We couldn't get the manual overrides to work until it was allover. No data came in, nothing went out, it was as if the entire station had been isolated from all other external systems."

"Which may be just as well," Kedder's coworker said. "If it was having a breakdown, it might have carried over to externals. We might still be waiting for medical and police support."

"But I saw the assault on subetheric."

"Whatever this problem is," Kedder said, "it didn't affect the media nodes the newsnet people brought in that stayed unlinked to the RI. They weren't supposed to do that-everything was supposed to be channeled through the RI for security reasons-but a few always slip unregulated eyes in. Anyway, independent data fed out unimpeded. Only the RI was… diverted."