Mark Tiedemann - Chimera

Coren sighed dramatically. "Contract says someone has to be on duty-"

"There was! We left the sub here. He didn't know Oril anyway, no loss."

"The sub. I didn't see any sub listed-"

The foreman looked pained for a second. "Farom was out, he's been having trouble with his kid. He's already past his allotment for personal time and sick days-any more and he gets written up. We paid the sub out of our own pocket to come in for him so Farom wouldn't get the reprimand."

"I need the sub's name."

"I'm telling you, Farom's a good worker-"

"The sub's name." Coren leaned closer and softened his voice. "If I can keep this off the record I will-it'll save me a lot of trouble. I don't need the extra datawork. I just have to verify that you didn't leave your shift unattended. Word is that management has some losses to explain to shareholders. You know how that is. Now there was a glitch in the logs for the time you were all toasting Oril's good health. If it was operator error, then we can correct it on our end and leave you alone." Coren reached out then and grabbed hold of the foreman's coverall. "But you pull that kind of shit again, I'll have your ass in front of management and the Guild conciliators. Understand?"

"Yuri Pocivil," the foreman said quickly. "He's normally Second Shift at the Number Four yard. He had personal time."

"How did you come to call him?"

"We used him before."

"Covering for Farom?"

The foreman swallowed. "As a matter of fact, yeah."

Coren released him. "Yuri Pocivil. I'm going to have a talk with him. He explains the glitch to my satisfaction, you won't see me again. "

"We've never had any problems with him before."

"Happens when you step out of contract. Go back to work."

Shaken, the foreman almost bowed as he backed away. He'd recovered his composure by the time he reached the entrance. He gave Coren a last look-to which Coren returned a reassuring nod-then disappeared inside the warehouse. Yuri Pocivil had failed to report to work that day and his apartment was vacant. Coren was not surprised, but he was disappointed. It would have been simpler had he found him. Pocivil was a more direct line to whoever was running the operation.

He made his way to the station, mulling over his next move. The routing had been modified in Baltimor. That, at least, was convenient to his next stop.

Derec Avery watched the screens with mild interest. The central view was a complex collection of concentric, overlapping rings. Where some of the lines crossed, pockets formed containing patternless amalgams of small shapes, like froth or dried, cracked mud, or a cloud of midges. The right-hand screen showed a similar view but without the pockets. The left showed only chaos.

As he watched, the rings on the central screen expanded and shrank minutely, as if jockeying for position in a crowded container, occasionally sending waves through one or more of the broken pockets. One pocket suddenly dissolved, quickly forming its own node and growing a set of rings. On the opposite side another pocket, this one filled with what appeared to be different-sized pebbles, wavered on the brink of dissolution. The pocket changed shape, narrowing, nearly splitting in two, then reinflating. Abruptly, it solidified, the pebbles merging to form a smooth surface. Then the wall burst and pebbles spilled across the orderly waves of circles, rupturing them, forming new pockets of disorder, and within seconds the screen lost all sign of pattern.

"Disappointing," said a calm, genderless alto voice.

"What happened, Thales?" Derec asked, though he already knew.

"I lost a primary anchor in the matrix," replied his office's Resident Intelligence. "When it went, it caused a cascade."

"Did you know it was a primary anchor?"

"No. That is, of course, the problem. I have to assign anchor points without knowing how they relate to the entire matrix. Some are unimportant and stable, others are primary and stable, but a few are primary and corrupted. When they go, they corrupt the entire system."

"Maybe you'll get lucky next time, Thales."

The positronic intelligence did not reply. Thales had long since catalogued most of what it called Derec's "sympathy concessions": meaningless phrases used to soothe hurt feelings or disappointments that, according to Thales, seemed important to people not for what they contained-because they contained nothing useful-but for the fact that they were said. For the moment, it appeared Thales did not consider a response necessary.

The chaos filling the screen in front of Derec, so far resist ant to Thales' attempts at restoring pattern and function, showed all that remained of Derec's ambition: the flexibility of a human mind expressed in a positronic matrix. He had always wanted to build a robotic intelligence that could cope with trauma-with failure-and recover from the brink of collapse. He had hoped to build a robot that would work through Three Law violations and retain a coherent structure, preserving memory and identity in the face of the unacceptable.

He had failed.

The physical fragments of what had been the robot Bogard filled a crate, awaiting shipment…somewhere. The positronic remnants of Bogard's mind filled a buffer in Thales' generously large, though currently abbreviated, memory. Bogard's collapse had resulted from the death of Bok Golner-a death for which Bogard had felt responsible, indeed had inadvertently caused. Golner had been a killer, an anti-robot fanatic, and had been about to kill Derec when Bogard came to his creator's rescue. But none of that mattered in the absolutist structure of a positronic brain which prohibited the taking of a human life, intentions notwithstanding. Thales believed the key to Bogard's failure could be pulled from those shards. But after nearly a year, they had proved indecipherable. Thales continued to express optimism; Derec was not as sanguine.

"Perhaps," the RI said, "I should make a copy of each stage so that I can reset one step back rather than do the entire construct over. Of course, that would require a larger memory buffer than the one to which I now have access."

"Oh, well," Derec said, standing. "Sorry."

"I understand, Derec. No need to apologize."

Perversely, Derec felt a pang of guilt. That lack of memory had been a problem throughout Thales' attempts to reorder Bogard's matrix. Thales simply did not have enough in its present configuration. Derec counted them both lucky to have as much as they did. Of course, any less might begin impairing Thales' normal functions.

"I can try to make another request…" he said.

"If you think it will help."

No, he thought, but it might make me feel better to try…

Derec reached to the screen of chaos and touched an icon. The screen went blank.

"Do you wish me to continue, Derec?" Thales asked.

"Sure. I'm…I have some other things to tend to."

"Of course."

Derec drifted into his living room. Against one long wall a subetheric showed two political candidates soundlessly debating. He frowned, recognizing one of them: Rega Looms. For a moment, Derec felt confused, then remembered that Looms was running for a senate seat in the upcoming election. He had declared in opposition to Jonis Taprin, who had replaced Clar Eliton the previous year in a recall election. Taprin ran now on a revised, anti-robot platform, a complete about-face from his position not fourteen months earlier when, as Eliton's vice senator, he had supported what had become known as "Concessionism" and a gradual reintroduction of positronics on Earth.

In retrospect, Derec did not know how much he had ever believed it could be done. In Earth's long history of social change, fickle politics, and policy-by-trend, the ban on positronics had lasted the longest and tenaciously resisted reform. Hard to believe, on a world where once the newest and brightest and best technologies had been created and dispensed and embraced with almost childlike passion for novelty.