Mirage

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  Mia frowned. “These people, whoever they are, exhibited tremendous skill as marksmen. One shot, one wound. That’s consistent with the idea that they’re ex-military, trained by a man who was very good at killing, which Bok Golner apparently was. As far as I can determine, they never wasted a second shot on anyone. Bogard can’t find the shot--the shot, mind you--that killed Senator Eliton, and according to the recordings he was hit only once. Are you sure you saw three wounds?”

  “Absolutely. One here--” Ariel touched her left shoulder “--here--” her sternum “--and here.” Her right side just below the ribs. She shook her head. “It was Eliton, though...”

  “Uh-huh. The same way maybe that the skeleton you saw was me?”

  Ariel blew out a breath. “Let’s go through this again. Bogard, walk me through the whole scenario. Jennie, make more coffee.” She looked wryly at Mia. “I’m going to pay for this at work later.”

  Dawn was minutes away. The horizon was already lightening. Ariel stared at it, seeing it and not seeing it, her mind filled with the details of trajectories and impacts and target possibilities and invitation lists and all the minutiae of a disaster. The subetheric was on, the volume low, ignored, while she tried to let calm of some sort settle through her mind. Mia dozed on the sofa.

  Too much information, she had told Derec, was information composed mostly of noise, meaningless and irrelevant. Now she wondered if there could be too much worthwhile data. Nothing they had developed in the last few hours could be dismissed as irrelevant.

  Taking out Ambassador Humadros and her immediate staff, Senator Eliton and his aides, and as many other important delegates as possible had at first been an obvious goal of the assault. But now Ariel was not so sure. Ambassador Chassik had escape uninjured, though two of his staff had not. Killing Setaris’s aides seemed pointless, as neither of them, nor Setaris, were to have any significant role at the conference. Nor did killing Eliton’s security team make much sense, as they really knew nothing.

  The weapons had been handmade. Ancient machines--only museum samples of the originals remained--but someone had gone to the trouble of building new ones. Nothing much had been said about them so far on any of the newsnets. Old, obsolete perhaps, but terribly effective, obscenely so given that the projectiles could potentially go through a body and injure someone else behind the target. Because of the angle and other factors, that had not happened this time, but Mia had pointed out that if nine of these weapons existed, there was every reason to believe that there were many more of them, somewhere.

  Mia had tracked the names of the six unknown bodies in the morgue through civic records, using Ariel’s authority to access the files. Factory workers, an office clerk, two unemployed and on civic assistance. The only thing she had found that bound them together was their affiliation with OSMA--Order of the Supremacy of Man Again, otherwise known as Managins. Mia thought there could be something else in their backgrounds, but it would take time to get at it. Mia could only assume that these were the six assassins who had not escaped, and three of them should not be dead. They had been in Service custody. One of them had been Lemus Milmor.

  The invitee lists troubled Ariel the most. If a copy had gotten out, it could only have done so from a few sources. Eliton had had a copy, but so had Setaris and, presumably, Chassik. Special Service had a list since Bogard had it. The list had been finalized only ten days earlier. Time for a leak, certainly, but it would still have had to be a leak from one of those sources. Anyone else? Had any of the industrialists present possessed a copy? There was no way to tell. Somehow the Managins had gotten it and a team of assassins had been assigned targets. Was there anything about the target list that could give a hint? Perhaps, but Ariel was exhausted, and she had embassy work to do today.

  But she could not sleep. Her head buzzed with too many details.

  She glanced at the subetheric and started to see Jonis on the screen. She grabbed the remote and turned up the sound.

  “--into it as thoroughly as humanly possible,” he was saying, “but so far I’m told we have no leads.”

  “What about the captured gunmen?” a reporter out of the picture asked. “Has their interrogation produced any tangible results?”

  Jonis looked embarrassed. “Frankly, we won’t get anything from them. Apparently, they were inadvertently killed while in the process of being apprehended and arrested.”

  “Killed? By whom? Special Service agents?”

  “No, not exactly. I, uh, haven’t been given the full details, it’s all very classified at the moment, but the, uh, robot assigned to Senator Eliton’s security detail may have had something to do with it.”

  “You mean the same robot that failed to protect Senator Eliton and later exploded, killing the last surviving member of his security team?”

  “Uh, yes, that robot. It may have exerted excessive force in the apprehension of the, uh, suspects. It’s being looked into.”

  Ariel glanced over at Mia and saw her friend staring fixedly at the screen, her entire body rigid with attention.

  “This doesn’t say very much of Senator Eliton’s interests in promoting the reintroduction of robots on Earth,” the reporter said.

  “That may be premature,” Jonis said. Still, he looked as if he agreed with the assessment. “We’ll have to wait for all the facts and assessments before making a final judgement. I don’t want to say anything to belittle Clar’s--Senator Eliton’s--beliefs.”

  “Of course. If I may ask--”

  “That’s enough for now. I have to get to my committee.”

  “But Senator--”

  Ariel turned the subetheric off.

  “Shit,” she muttered,

  ”Amen,“ Mia said.

  Ariel made herself stand. She had to call someone. By the time she reached her comline, she decided that it should be Derec.

  _

  SEVENTEEN

  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.”

  “But you were doing it all?”

  “For twelve hours, twenty-three minutes, Derec.”

  “While you maintained full oversight of Union Station, did you run a diagnostic of satellite systems?”

  “Yes, Derec. I needed to know what I had to work with. Standard procedure in a new environment.”

  “Of course. Did you find anything unusual?”

  “Several systems were of a type of imbedded technology with which I am unfamiliar. Nothing out of my capacity to interpret and operate, only new configurations.”

  “What about... Rana, is there a list of those maintenance nodes?”

  “Sure.” She touched contacts. A list appeared on her screen.

  “What about these sites, Thales?” Derec asked.

  “There was nothing at those sites, Derec. “

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “I mean that I found no corresponding systems of any sort answering my diagnostic interrogatory at those sites.”

  “But the Union Station RI showed them to be active.”

  “I cannot account for the discrepancy, Derec. I acknowledge the data from the RI, but my own diagnostic and analysis showed nothing at those sites. It is possible that those sites suffered damage or were programmed to operate only at predetermined times or were programmed to shut down at a predetermined time.”

  “How much access do you still have to Union Station?”

  “I have been excluded from sixty-two percent of the systems,” Thales stated.

  “Can you still monitor those sites?”

  “Three of them are still within my sphere.”

  “Watch them. I want to know if any activ
ity occurs at all at those sites. The method of exclusion--can you work around it?”

  “Do you mean can I bypass it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can, Derec, but it is against--”

  “Never mind that. This is a priority. Humans may be in danger as a consequence of those sites resuming some operation. I want you to circumvent the exclusions if possible without alerting anyone outside Phylaxis and keep a monitor on them. Understood?”

  “I understand, Derec. “

  “Continue, Thales.”

  “Nothing there?” Rana said. She waved a hand at the screens displaying the shattered remnants of the RI. “That’s a lot of damage for nothing.”

  “Those sites were shut down,” Derec said. “I’d love to know how they did that without leaving a physical trace, though. Something should be there, even if it’s only an I/O port. Which reminds me, I got in there last night.”

  “Where? Union Station?”

  “Back in the service sections, yes. I found something...” He went to his own console and retrieved the paper with the sample. “I need this analyzed,” he said, opening it. “This was all through the circuitry in one of the maintenance nodes. It’s hard and brittle. I hope there’s enough here.”

  “I’ll set Thales up on an analysis,” Rana said, peering at the flakes suspiciously.

  Derec glanced at the screens. “A positronic brain is joined to its realtime perception in a one-to-one relationship. It has to be that way or interpretive errors creep in and there’s a kind of subjective drift.”

  “But robots interpret things all the time.”

  “True, but they have their core template to use as a standard. If you look at how they interpret you’ll see that they’re damnably literal. There was a classic case once of a newly uncrated robot completely disbelieving that humans had built it. The only evidence it could see were the humans supervising it and clearly they couldn’t build one, so it must have been a lie. The Three Laws prevented it from doing other than its duty to protect and obey them, but only within certain limits, and it came to believe that robots were created by another machine.”

  “I thought that was apocryphal.”

  “Maybe. I’ve heard it said that the core template came directly out of that incident. But apocryphal or not, it illustrates the point. Positronic robots rely on the concrete to function. If they didn’t, they could easily develop neuroses based on abstract concepts of humans they don’t even know coming to harm.”