Mark Tiedemann - Mirage

"And all the security com…?"

"Was being routed through the RI."

Derec stared at the two technicians. "This is impossible."

Kedder looked embarrassed; the other man shrugged.

"What is this it was experiencing?" Derec asked, waving at the screens. "Looks like a simulation."

"A game," the other man said. "Old strategy stuff. It has a number of them in its accessory buffers. Running all the facilities doesn't take up enough of its capacity, so it plays games. It has a terrific chess approach." He pointed to the screen. "This one is called Coup."

"How did it overwhelm the positronic pathways?"

"Beats me, gato."

Kedder frowned at his partner, then said, "Oh, I'm sorry. Mr. Avery, this is Joler Hammis."

Derec nodded briefly.

"Sorry for being rude," Hammis said. "It's been that kind of a day."

"Forget it. So you're running everything manually now?"

"Partly," Hammis said. "We've got a hard programmed back-up helping. It took time to bypass all the systems the RI has-had-direct control of. A few things are run by imbedded hardware and none of that seemed affected at all. There are still functions we can't operate now, like traffic control. All shuttle service has been suspended for the time being, but we have to get that back on-line soon-"

"All right, we can take care of that much," Derec said. "Are the external comlines for the RI open?"

"No, but it's not a problem," Kedder said uncertainly. "Right now it's in no condition to send or receive-"

"Doesn't matter. Is there a place I can work? And patch me into that com system."

While Kedder and Hammis set up a station for him, Derec ran the images back and forth on the screens. It made no sense. It looked almost as though an invasive program had taken over the Resident Intelligence's entire sensory network and fed it false input. But the virtue of positronic RIs made such an invasion impossible. Unlike standard, nonsentient computer systems, positronic brains were not solely dependent on simple digital data input to set priorities. Rather, positronic brains used pre-established, unamendable priorities-the Three Laws, among others-to determine the value of sensory input. They depended on reality as a basis for judgment, reality as perceived through direct sense experience, vetted by hardwired expectations. Data, like that which computer and datum systems used and which told them how to interpret reality, was used only as a secondary reference, without the ability to interfere with the sense-priority nature of the positronic matrix. In this way, the positronic brain was occasionally superior to the human brain-it could not hallucinate, could not delude itself by referencing its own store of experience in isolation from base reality or privileging its experience to supersede its predetermined priorities. In short, a positronic brain could not be subverted. If conflicting information bombarded it to the point where its sense-priority makeup became compromised, collapse occurred. It simply failed.

But this…

"Here, Mr. Avery," Kedder said.

"Derec, please." He looked over the console they had cleared for him. "Good. What I'm going to do is link to the RI at Phylaxis and start load-sharing. Then I'm going to dump the memory buffers of the station RI into our systems so we can start analyzing what happened."

Kedder frowned, glancing over his shoulder. "You can replace our RI with your own?"

"Sort of. It's a temporary arrangement and not nearly as efficient, but it should get all your systems back up and running."

"Well, I suppose that's all right."

Derec hesitated. "Why wouldn't it be?"

"Just that… well, a lot of people blame the RI for what happened-a lot of people here. I'm just not sure how they'd feel about going back to one-"

"Look. As I understand it, you need one to operate efficiently. You can't run the station without one."

"Mainly flight control"

"Fine. Then let me get this set up. Switching to a hard program system will be a lot easier with an RI in place facilitating the changes. Either way, this is necessary."

"I see that, Mr. -uh, Derec. I don't have a problem with it but-"

"Let me worry about the backlash. I'm used to it."

Kedder nodded.

"By the way," Drec said, "what did the robots on the floor do when the shooting started?"

"I don't know. Wandered around, got knocked down by the mob. Nothing useful. See, they're all tied directly to the RI. More efficient to coordinate the entire robotic staff through a central unit-"

"So when the RI started losing touch-"

"It affected the mobile units."

"But their own programming should've kicked them out of the RI's matrix, let them function independently."

Kedder shook his head, a sour expression on his face. "No, they were all deadswitch linked to the RI. Management wanted to be able to shut down all of them from one location. It was easier to simply slave them all to the RI rather than bypass the Three Laws with one single command."

"Slaved through… that would've required patching their sensory modules through the RI sensory net."

"Exactly."

Derec sighed heavily. "In the name of fear and efficiency." He shook himself. "All right, one problem at a time. Have I got direct access to your board from here?"

"Yes. Here and here…"

Derec let Kedder guide him through the basic arrangement until he understood how the systems were integrated, then made a call to Group.

"Rana, this is Derec. We need Thales to sub for the RI here. Let me feed you the parameters."

"Excuse me," Kedder said and walked away to another console.

"Union Station?" Rana asked.

"Yes."

"What a mess. Who's dead?"

"All the wrong people. Humadros and Eliton especially. "

"Oh, hell."

"Spoken with true precision," Derec said sarcastically. "I want a memory dump set up, too-we need to download the RI for study. Something really nasty happened here and I don't understand how it was doable. We have a subverted RI."

"It didn't collapse?"

"Not till it came back to reality and saw what had happened."

"If Eliton's dead-"

"I haven't seen Bogard yet. I don't know what happened. One crisis at a time for now."

"All right. I'm setting up the patches now. Give me the transfer codes."

Derec worked steadily, absorbed in the details of the construct for several minutes. When he leaned back to stretch, he noticed people watching him, several wearing expressions of disapproval. He looked away, out the windows to the floor below.

Out in the gallery, maintenance units were cleaning up the blood, police techs were gathering evidence, and medical techs were collecting samples. Ambulances still crowded the platform, but most of the bodies had been taken away.

On the opposite side of the gallery, he saw a large robot emerge from one of the service accesses, carrying a woman in its arms, which had unfolded like a sling around her; it was followed by two transport drones laden with more bodies. Derec stood and went to the window.

"Bogard…" he whispered.

Ariel Burgess gazed at the tri-D image projected above her desk, a vague dread displacing the concern she knew she should feel. The robot hovering in the field lacked an arm and both legs, and its head had been crushed as if a huge foot had stomped down on it as it lay on the ground. Various symbols covered its scuffed, dark blue body, most of them indecipherable yet threatening. The one Ariel did recognize shone bright white in the center of the robot's upper torso, a lemniscate crossed by an arrow at an upward angle: the sign of the Managins. The unit had been attacked by members of the Order for the Supremacy of Man Again.

"I'm not familiar with this model," Ariel said.

"We just began importing them last month," the man across from her said. "Porter model DP-8."