Memory b-10

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Avakli had a detailed holovid map of the chip's internal architecture, which he began to display. Miles was relieved. He'd been a little afraid they were going to tell him ImpSec Medical had lost the owner's manual in the intervening thirty-five years, but they appeared to have quite a lot of data. The chip itself was an immensely complex sandwich of organic and inorganic molecular layers about five by seven centimeters broad and half a centimeter thick, which rested in a vertical position between the two lobes of Illyan's brain. The number of neurological connections that ran from it made a jump-pilot's control headset look like a child's toy. The greatest complexity seemed to be in the information retrieval net, rather than the protein-based data storage, though both were not only fiendishly ornate, but largely unmapped—it had been an autolearning-style system which had assembled itself in a highly non-linear fashion after the chip had been installed.

  "So is the . . . damage or deterioration we're seeing confined to the organic or the inorganic parts? Or both?" Miles asked Avakli.

  "Organic," said Avakli. "Almost certainly."

  Avakli was one of those scientists who never placed an unhedged bet, Miles realized.

  "Unfortunately," Avakli went on, "it was never originally designed to be downloaded. There is no single equivalent of a data-port to connect to; just these thousands and thousands of neuronic leads going into and out of the thing all over its surface."

  In view of the chip's history as Emperor Ezar's ultra-secure data dump, this made sense. Miles would not have been surprised to learn the thing had been customized to be especially nondownloadable.

  "Now … I was under the impression the thing worked in parallel with Illyan's original cerebral memory. It doesn't actually replace it, does it?"

  "That is correct, my lord. The neurological input is only split from the sensory nerves, not shunted aside altogether. The subjects apparently have dual memories of all their experiences. This appears to have been the major contributing factor to the high incidence of iatrogenic schizophrenia they later developed. A sort of inherent design defect, not of the chip so much as of the human brain."

  Ruibal cleared his throat in polite theoretical, or perhaps theological, disagreement.

  Illyan must have been a born spy. To hold more than one reality balanced in your mind until proof arrived, without going mad from the suspense, was surely the mark of a great investigator.

  Avakli then went into a highly technical discussion of three projected ideas for extracting some kind of data download from the chip. They all sounded makeshift and uncertain of result; Avakli himself, describing them, didn't sound too happy or enthusiastic. Most of them seemed to involve long hours of delicate micro-neurosurgery. Ruibal winced a lot.

  "So," Miles interrupted this at length, "what happens if you take the chip out?"

  "To use layman's terminology," said Avakli, "it goes into shock and dies. It's evidently supposed to do so, apparently to prevent, um, theft."

  Right. Miles pictured Illyan mugged by chip-spies, his head hacked open, left for dead . . . someone else had anticipated that picture too. They'd been a paranoid lot, in Ezar's generation.

  "It was never designed to be removed intact from its organic electrical support matrix," Avakli continued. "The chance of any coherent data retrieval is vastly reduced, anyway."

  "And if it's not taken out?"

  "The protein chain arrays show no signs of slowing in their dissociation."

  "Or, in scientists' language, the chip is turning to snot inside Illyan's head. One of you bright boys apparently used just that phrase in his hearing, by the way."

  One of Avakli s assistants had the grace to look guilty.

  "Admiral Avakli, what are your top theories as to what is causing the chip to break down?"

  Avakli s brows narrowed. "In order of probability—senescence, that is, old age, triggering an autodestruction, or some sort of chemical or biological attack. I'd have to have it apart to prove the second hypothesis."

  "So . . . there is no question of removing the chip, repairing it, and reinstalling it."

  "I hardly think so."

  "And you can't repair it in situ without knowing the cause, which you can't determine without removing it for internal examination. Which would destroy it."

  Avakli's lips compressed in dry acknowledgment of the inherent circularity of the problem. "Repair is out of the question, I'm afraid. I've been concentrating on trying to evolve a practical downloading scheme."

  "As it happens," Miles went on, "you misunderstood my initial question. What happens to Illyan if the chip is removed?"

  Avakli gestured back to Ruibal, a toss-the-hot-ball spasm.

  "We can't predict with certainty," said Ruibal.

  "Can you guess with reasonable odds? Does he, for example, instantly go back to being twenty-seven years old again?"

  "No, I don't think so. A plain removal, with no attempt to save the chip, would in fact be a reasonably simple operation. But the brain is a complex thing. We don't know, for example, to what extent it has rerouted its own internal functions around the artifact in thirty-five years. And then there's the psychological element. Whatever he's done to his personality that has allowed him to work with it and stay sane will be unbalanced."

  "Like . . . taking away a crutch, and discovering your legs have atrophied?"

  "Perhaps."

  "So how much cognitive damage are we talking about? A little? A lot?"

  Ruibal shrugged helplessly.

  "Have any aging galactic experts in this obsolete technology been located yet?" Miles asked.

  "Not yet," said Ruibal. "That may take several months."

  "By which time," said Miles grimly, "if I understand this, the chip will be jelly and Illyan will be either permanently insane or dead of exhaustion."

  "Ah," said Ruibal.

  "That about sums it up, my lord," said Avakli.

  "Then why haven't we yanked the damned thing?"

  "Our orders, my lord," noted Avakli, "were to save the chip, or as much of the chip's data as could be retrieved."

  Miles rubbed his lips. "Why?" he said at length.

  Avakli's brows rose. "I would presume, because the data is vital to ImpSec and the Imperium."

  "Is it?" Miles leaned forward, staring into the brightly colored, biocybernetic nightmare chip-map hanging before his eyes above the table's central vid plate. "The chip was never installed to make Illyan into a superman. It was just a toy for Emperor Ezar, who fancied owning a vid recorder with legs. I admit, it's been handy for Illyan. Gives him a nice aura of infallibility that scares hell out of people, but that's a crock and he knows it even if they don't.

  "The chip has nothing to do with running ImpSec, really. He was promoted to the job because he was standing at my father's right hand the day Vordarian's forces murdered his predecessor, and my father liked and trusted him. There was no time for a talent search, in the middle of a raging civil war. Of all the qualities that made Illyan the best chief in ImpSec s history . . . the chip is surely the most trivial." His voice had fallen to nearly a whisper. Avakli and Ruibal were leaning forward to hear him. He cleared his throat, and sat up.

  "There are only four categories of information on that chip," Miles went on. "Old and obsolete. Current, which is all backed up in reality—Illyan has always had to function with the ever-present assumption that he could drop or be dropped dead at any time, and Haroche or somebody would have to take over in midstream. Then there's trash data, personal stuff of no use to anyone except Illyan. Maybe not even to Illyan. Thirty-five years of showers, meals, changing clothes, filling out forms. Not too damned many sex acts, I'm afraid. Lots of bad novels and holovid dramas, all in there, verbatim. A thousand times more of that than anything else. And, somewhere in all the billions of images, maybe a dozen hot secrets that no one else knows. Or perhaps even ought to know."

  "What do you wish us to do, my Lord Auditor?" asked Ruibal, into the silence that stretched after this soliloquy
.

  You wanted authority. Now you've got it, boy. Miles sighed. "I want to talk with one more man. In the meanwhile . . . assemble everything you need for the surgical removal of the chip. Equipment, to be sure, but mostly, the man. I want the best pair of hands you can get, in ImpSec or out of it."

  "When should we start, my lord?" asked Ruibal.

  "I'd like you to be finished in two hours." Miles rapped the table, and rose. "Thank you, gentlemen. Dismissed."

  Miles called Gregor on a secured comconsole right from the clinic level.

  "So have you found what you wanted?" Gregor asked.

  "I didn't want any of this. But I've made progress. I'm pretty sure it won't be a surprise to you to learn the problem's not in Illyan's brain, it's in the damned chip. It's doing uncontrolled data dumps. About every five minutes it floods his mind with a new set of crystal-sharp memories from random times in the past. The effect is … hideous. Cause unknown, they can't fix it, removal will destroy the data still on it. Leaving it in will destroy Illyan. You see where this is heading."

  Gregor nodded. "Removal."

  "It seems indicated. It should have been . . . well, if not done already, at least proposed and prepared for. The problem is, Illyan's in no condition to consent to the operation."

  "I see."

  "They also don't know what the effects of removing it will be. Full recovery, partial recovery, personality changes, cognitive changes—they're rolling dice down here. What I'm saying is, you still may not get your chief of Imperial Security back."

  "I see."

  "Now. Is there anything you want saved off that chip that I don't know about?"

  Gregor sighed. "Your father is perhaps the only other person who would be able to answer that question. And in the over fifteen years since I reached my majority, he hasn't seen fit to confide any to me. The old secrets appear to be keeping themselves."

  "Illyan is your man now. Do you consent to pulling the chip, my liege?"

  "D'you advise it, my Auditor?"

  Miles blew out his breath. "Yes."

  Gregor chewed on his lower lip for a moment; then his face set. "Then let the dead bury their dead. Let the past go. Do it."

  "Yes, Sire."

  Miles cut the com.

  This time Miles was admitted to Haroche's/Illyan's office without delay or a murmur of protest. Haroche, studying something on his comconsole display, waved him to a chair. Miles pulled it wrong-way-around and sat astride it, his arms across its back.

  "Well, my Lord Auditor," said Haroche, turning off his vid. "I trust you found the cooperation of my subordinates to be fully satisfactory."

  Illyan did irony better, but you had to give Haroche credit for trying. "Yes, thank you."

  "I admit"—Haroche gestured to the comconsole—"I misestimated you. I'd seen you flitting in and out of here for years, and I was aware you were covert ops. But I was not always fully aware of which covert ops, or how many. No wonder you were Illyan's pet." His gaze, on Miles's decorated tunic, was now more calculating than disbelieving.

  "Reading my record, were you?" Miles refused to flinch in front of Haroche.

  "Scanning the synopses, and some of Illyan's annotations. A full study would take a week. My time is at a premium at the moment."

  "Yes. I've just talked with Gregor." Miles inhaled. "We've concluded that the chip has to be removed."

  Haroche sighed. "I'd hoped that could be avoided. It seems so permanent. And so crippling."

  "Not nearly as crippling as what's going on right now. Incidentally, Illyan definitely should have had someone familiar by him from the start, for his comfort. It seems to make a tremendous difference in his level of combativeness. He could possibly have avoided most of the sedation. And the humiliating restraints. Not to mention the wear and tear on the corpsmen."

  "Much earlier, I still wasn't sure what we were dealing with."

  "Mm. But it was wrong to leave him alone in agony."

  "I … admit, I had not gone down to the clinic to inspect in person. The first day was bad enough."

  Understandable, if cowardly. "Ivan and I were able to do a lot, just by being there. I've thought of another person who could do even more. I think Lady Alys Vorpatril should sit with him until the surgery is prepared."

  Haroche frowned, his forehead wrinkling. "You and Lieutenant Vorpatril are, or at least were, oath-sworn military personnel. She's a civilian, and barred by her gender from most oaths."

  "But hardly a nonperson, for all of that. If I must, I will order her admittance on my authority as Auditor, but I wanted to give you a chance to mend your mistake. If nothing else, you should be alive to the fact that as Gregor's Baba and closest senior female relative, she will be in charge of all the social arrangements for the Emperor's wedding. You may still be acting head of ImpSec at that time. How this fits into your security . . . challenges, should be obvious. The Empress Laisa may make new arrangements once she's installed, but in the meantime, Lady Alys is the old guard, in charge of the transition. It's Vor custom.

  "The military, in an admirable effort to promote merit before blood, spends a lot of time pretending that Vor is not real. The high Vor, whose safety and good behavior are going to be your particular charge as long as you sit behind that desk, spend at least as much energy pretending Vor is real."

  Haroche's brows rose. "So which are right?"

  Miles shrugged. "My mother would call it the clash of two competing fantasies. But whatever your personal opinion of the merits and defects of the Vor system—and I have a few thoughts of my own about it that I wouldn't necessarily spout on the floor of the Council of Counts—it's the system we are both oath-sworn to uphold. The Vor really are the sinews of the Imperium. If you don't like it, you can emigrate, but if you stay, this is the only game in town."

  "So how did Illyan get along so well with you all? He was no more Vor than I."

  "Actually, I think he rather enjoyed the spectacle. I don't know what he thought when he was younger, but by the time I really came to know him, in the last ten years or so … I think he'd come to feel that the Imperium was a creation he helped to maintain. He seemed to have a vested interest in it. An almost Cetagandan attitude, in a weird way; more of an artist to his medium than a servant to his master. Illyan played Gregor's servant with great panache, but I don't think I've ever met a less servile human being."

  "Ah." Haroche's eyes were alert, as he took this in. His fingers drummed once on the black glass, a downright Illyan-esque gesture. The man was actually listening, by God. And learning? A heartening thought.

  Haroche's lips compressed with decision, and he tapped out a code on his comconsole. Lady Alys's secretary appeared; after a few murmured words of greeting and explanation, Alys's own face formed over the vid plate. She frowned at Haroche.

  "Milady." He nodded shortly to her. His hand gesture might be interpreted either as a modified analysts salute, or a man tugging his forelock; the nuance was nicely vague. "I've reconsidered your request for admittance to the ImpSec clinic. Chief Illyan may be facing surgery shortly. I'd take it as a personal favor if you would be willing to come down here and stay with him for a while beforehand. Familiar faces seem to help him to, um, stay calm with fewer drugs."

  Alys straightened. "I told you that yesterday!"

  "Yes, milady," said Haroche meekly. "You were right. May I send a car to your residence for you? And how soon?"

  "For this," Alys stated, "I can be ready in fifteen minutes."

  Miles wondered if Haroche appreciated what an awesome statement this was. It could take a high Vor lady fifteen hours to get ready to go places, sometimes.

  "Thank you, milady. I think this could be a great help."

  "Thank you, General." She hesitated. "And thank Lord Vorkosigan too." She cut the com.

  "Huh," said Haroche; his mouth twitched lopsidedly. "She is sharp."

  "In certain areas within her personal expertise, one of the sharpest."

  "One wonders
how Lord Ivan … ah, well. How was that, my Lord Auditor?"

  Extraordinary. "A noble apology. She had to accept. You won't be sorry."

  "As hard as it may be for you to grasp, considering the history of your attitude to most of your commanding officers"—Haroche tapped his comconsole—just which files had he been reading?—"I do want to do a good job. Do your duty is not enough. The lower ranks are filled with men who merely do their duty, and no more. I know I'm not a suave man—never have been—"

  "Neither was Illyan's predecessor Captain Negri, I've heard," Miles offered.

  Haroche smiled bleakly. "I didn't ask for this emergency. I will likely never be as smooth and polished as Illyan. But I mean to do as good a job."

  Miles nodded. "Thank you, General."

  Miles returned to the clinic level to relieve Ivan. Miles found him still sitting next to Illyan, though as far back in his chair as he would go, smiling in a pained way; one boot tapped softly on the floor in a nervous pattern.

  Ivan rose hastily, and came to the door when he saw Miles leaning there watching. "Thank God. It's about time you got back," he muttered.

  "How's it been going?"

  "What d'you think? I can see why they sedated him, even without his trying to tear their heads off. Just so they didn't have listen to hour after hour of this. Miles, this is a nightmare."

  "Yes. I know." He sighed. "I have some help on the way for this part, though. I've asked your mother to come in and sit with him."

  "Oh," said Ivan. "Good idea. Better her than me, anyway."

  Miles's mouth twisted. "You're not afraid it'll be too hard on her?"

  "Oh. Um. Hell, she's tough."

  "Tougher than you?"

  "She'll be good at this," Ivan promised somewhat desperately.

  "Take a break, Ivan."

  "Yeah." Ivan didn't wait for a second invitation, but scooted past him.

  "And Ivan?"

  Ivan paused, suspiciously. "Yeah?"

  "Thanks."