Mark Tiedemann - Chimera

"You didn't adopt him?"

"A police officer? Where would I find the time? No, sponsoring was about the best I could do. It was actually Brun who told me about the missing UPDs. "

"UPDs?" Ariel asked.

"Untreatable Physiological Dysfunction. Children with disorders that can only be watched. Often they can't even stop their pain. Those were the ones I found out were going missing the most."

"That doesn't make sense," Ariel said. "What use-? Oh."

Wenithal glanced at her. "Research, spare parts, other things I never cared to think about."

"You 're sure they were being shipped offplanet?" Coren asked.

"That's where the trail went cold. We traced them to four or five labs. They all funneled the 'material' through a single lab that I could never really prove was involved."

"Let me guess," Coren said. "Nova levis?"

"Very good. You must've been a decent cop. "

"I still am. Who was running the operation?"

"Very corporate. But I could never prove it. I know it, but I can't take it to court."

"Imbitek," Ariel said.

Wenithal shrugged.

"How did that tie in with the kidnapping that brought you into it?" Coren asked.

"That was the most perverse component. The boy that was kidnapped was just a normal boy. It didn't make sense in light of what I had found out about these…these… flesh mills. So I took a closer look at my concerned parents and found that they had had two previous children. One had died shortly after birth, the other…the records had been manipulated. The claimed death was not a death. They relegated it to one of these orphanages. There was a connection." Wenithal frowned at Coren. "Do you even want to know? You work for Rega Looms, how much do you know about him?"

"I-"

The door chimed.

Wenithal groped for his pistol.

"Take it easy," Coren said quietly, easing his own weapon out. He looked at Ariel and gestured for her to move to the far side of the room. Coren moved quickly to the wall alongside the door. He nodded to Wenithal, who brought his pistol into his lap.

"Enter."

Coren tensed as the door slid open. Light from the balcony outside spilled across the carpet, outlining a shadow. Wenithal raised the pistol.

Coren stepped away from the wall, aiming at head height.

A sharp hiss and a muffled "Shit!" came from the person standing in Wenithal's entryway.

The light in the room brightened, revealing a woman in dark clothes with a heavy pack slung over her left shoulder. She gaped at Coren, stunned.

"Jeta Fromm," Coren said. "I've been looking allover for you. "

The lab datum has been compromised, Derec, " Thales announced.

Derec looked up from the screen and blinked. "What?"

"The lab datum has been compromised," the RI repeated. "I have detected nine gates placed at various locations within the system that are diverting information to an external source. "

"What about you?"

"I have already detected and blocked an attempt to establish a gate in the immediate array. Judging from the other gates, this will not be a problem; they are sophisticated but limited. However, the longer I block implementation, the more likely other measures will be taken. "

"In other words, they're not just giving up and going away."

"Essentially, yes."

Derec went to the end of the blind and looked across the lab. Only one tech was on duty, this late in the third shift. Derec returned to his chair and rubbed his eyes. He had been at it since arriving, nearly eighteen hours now. The excavation was proceeding more slowly than he had expected due to a series of defensive modifications someone had added to the DW-12. It took Rana several hours to tease through them with Thales' help. Once they understood that bypassing them would not corrupt the matrix any further, everything went smoothly, but making sure ate up a lot of time.

"How soon?" Derec asked.

"Regarding what?"

"The excavation. When do we start getting useful data?"

"I have isolated the constellation of memory nodes we need, and I am beginning a chronological assignment. Another hour."

"I want your findings copied directly to Ariel's datum."

"That precaution is already in place."

"Are you able to trace the gates to their external source?"

"The risk of detection is high. I suggest completing the task at hand first before attempting any further action. "

Derec reached for the cup of cold coffee on the workbench. He needed sleep. He had sent Rana to her apartment hours ago.

He felt the passing of time acutely. Ariel had not commed in over five hours. Sipha Palen estimated she could keep the deaths out of the news nets for another day, two days at most, before someone figured out that she was hiding something. Or-and Derec thought this more likely-someone who already knew would sell the information. In either case, this needed to be done quickly.

"I would like to talk to you about another matter, Derec," Thales said.

"Hm? What, Thales?"

"I have taken advantage of the access here to larger memory buffers to set up my examination of Bogard's positronic matrix. I have run six attempts at reestablishing a functional template. "

I forgot all about that, Derec thought uneasily. "I didn't know you'd done that."

"It has not interfered with the performance of any other task," Thales said. "As we do not know if another opportunity may occur, I thought it best to use this one."

"That's fine, Thales. Um…six attempts? I gather none of them have been successful?"

"In achieving a stable matrix, no. However, I believe I have achieved something positive. I now know that we cannot do more in simulation. The convolutions in the error log indicate the presence of a reifying condition. "

"I'm not sure I understand. "

"Basically, there is a command error which repeatedly instructs the matrix to disassemble at the same point. I could not be sure of this before because I was forced to continually reconfigure the parameters to accommodate the lack of memory. Now that this is no longer a problem, I see that the breakdown occurs at the same point each time."

Derec leaned forward, curiosity cutting through weariness. "Can you identify that point?"

"That is the difficulty. It seems to be in the checksum routine that oversees the data interface with the physical plant."

"Seems to be?"

"It is possible the error precedes that point, which is why I am unwilling to be more confident. But in each case the breakdown occurs at the place where the program attempts to command the actual body. There is no body, of course, and I am studying the options to construct one in simulation, but I am not convinced this can be solved that way. I am of the opinion that the error is tied to the violation that caused the initial collapse. It may be that what I am seeing is not an error at all but an irreconcilable dilemma. In either case, the error effectively orders a new collapse each time. Available memory is not the problem. The matrix itself is self-destructive. "

"That doesn't make any sense, Thales. That would suggest intent on some level. There isn't enough coherence for that to be the case."

"Under normal circumstances, I would agree with that assessment. However, Bogard was unusual in several respects and its termination was singularly traumatic."

"All right. The next question, obviously, is what do you propose we do about it?"

"It is possible that the error can be resolved by loading a partially reestablished matrix into a blank positronic brain and tracing the final connections through to see if the error persists."

"Treat it like a hardware problem, you mean. "

"Essentially, Derec."

Derec smiled. "And where do you propose we obtain a blank positronic brain?"