Mirage (isaac asimov's robot mystery)

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  "Are you suggesting collusion between Phylaxis and-"

  "I'm not suggesting anything," Chassik said quickly. "But I have constituents who are quite uneasy about that robot and after witnessing its performance yesterday, I can't say I disagree with them. If there isn't collusion, there is gross incompetence. We can't have Phylaxis damaging our reputations. It was a Solarian firm that installed the RI."

  "I'll look into the matter, Ambassador. Is there anything else?"

  Chassik seemed thoughtful for a time. "Have you spoken to the Terran Authorities yet?"

  "No. I've requested updates on their investigation, but so far I've received nothing."

  "Hmm. When you do hear from them, would you let me know what they say?"

  "I'm sure you'll be informed at the same time-" Ariel began.

  "A favor, Ms. Burgess. In return, I'll share what I receive from them. It may be that aspects of this will be overlooked."

  "I see. I'll let you know, Ambassador. Thank you."

  "Oh, and one more matter. I'm officially informing you that the RI at Union Station is being removed by Solarian specialists."

  Ariel blinked. "Removed…? When?"

  "Work begins today."

  "But-I should have been informed."

  "I'm informing you now. You have been difficult to reach."

  "A Calvin Institute representative is required to be on site for-"

  "Ms. Burgess, this is Earth. They have no such regulation. The fact that your people were consulted when we installed it was a political courtesy. Now they want it out and they don't care. They need to get the station up and running and a replacement has already been chosen. All that needs to be done is the removal of the RI, which we have been requested-strongly requested-to do with all haste. If you have anyone from the Institute you can spare, send them around."

  "It doesn't matter that this is Earth-this is a Spacer regulation."

  "Time, Ms. Burgess, time." Chassik shook his head as if exasperated with her. "My people were contacted early this morning and the request was on my desk when I arrived. I understand their haste, even if I have reservations. The RI is defunct, totally collapsed, a useless mass of pathways. This is a simple physical extraction."

  "Has Phylaxis been contacted? Is Derec-Mr. Avery there?"

  "I don't know. Would his presence mollify you?"

  "I'm not sure." Ariel fought back her irritation. "I don't have anyone to spare. Please make sure they document the removal and forward a report to me."

  "I'll see to that, of course."

  "Thank you. "

  "Good day."

  Ariel stared at the blank screen, fuming over the breach in protocol. It was not just a matter of form, but a question of accountability. How could she know that everything was done properly without an inspection? She would have to trust them. She imagined that it was the same Solarian company that had installed it in the first place, which did little to assuage her apprehensions.

  Why the rush…? she wondered.

  After a time, Hofton interrupted again. "Ariel, Trina Korolin is calling. And I have those downloads for you." At a little past two, Ariel wanted to go back to her apartment. The pressure behind her eyes had mounted steadily over the last two hours till she could no longer deny it and her patience had frayed in equal measure.

  Trina Korolin seemed far too young and certainly lacked the experience for what she had volunteered to do, but if enthusiasm and commitment meant anything perhaps she could manage it. Ariel had put her in touch with Jonis Taprin and hoped for the best.

  After that, she had spent the rest of her time dealing with panicked Aurorans and at least five attorneys who threatened suits on behalf of Terrans who had been injured or simply frightened senseless at Union Station. They could not sue Aurora -the diplomatic arrangements between Spacer worlds and Earth made it virtually impossible-but they could bring suit against resident Spacers who owned businesses. For the most part, they were only threats designed to elicit out-of-court payments. Ariel told them to go ahead and file, that she thought it likely that, once it was brought to the attention of certain government departments what they were doing, they could lose their licenses rather than risk countersuits by Aurorans. The conversations turned ugly in a couple instances, with one attorney telling her bluntly that he intended to press the suit anyway if there was any chance of getting the damn Spacers off Earth.

  Her responses grew sharper and sharper until she finally told Hofton to stop putting the calls through. She could no longer concentrate on her job. Her attention was divided.

  "Ariel," Hofton's voice came over the intercom, "I have recordings of the incident, as you requested. Two for now, a third one has been promised."

  "I'll view them at my apartment later. Thank you, Hofton."

  She stared into space, letting her thoughts collide randomly.

  There had been gaps in the exchanges with Agent Sathen and Gale Chassik. She kept turning over in her mind what else they might have left out. Sathen had pointedly said nothing about the two agents who had come to see him after Mia's admission to the hospital. Chassik's implication of wrongdoing against Derec infuriated her. He had danced over the fact that it was a Solarian firm that had installed the RI at Union Station and that if any collusion were involved it would be between that company and the conspirators. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that both Sathen and Chassik had made deliberate omissions, and in the case of Sathen, at least, unwilling omissions.

  Ariel had never gotten used to the standard practice reticence diplomatic service entailed. Not being told things because it was "not your area " or was not part of her "need to know" irritated her to the point of fury, but she had come to accept it. This was different, though she could not quite define how. There was a distinction between covering one's butt as a matter of routine and covering up. She could sense the change even when it defied specification.

  Perhaps her insight came only from the fact that Mia Daventri was hiding out in her apartment. It seemed curious that Special Service could pronounce her dead without a single tissue sample.

  She stabbed the intercom.

  "Hofton, I'm going home. Unless war breaks out before tomorrow morning, handle it."

  "As you command," Hofton intoned with mock gravity.

  "Don't be impertinent."

  "Never."

  In spite of her headache, Ariel smiled. She gathered up the disks of all the downloads Hofton had gotten for her and slipped them into her pocket.

  She stepped into the lobby and raised her hand to gesture good-bye to her staff.

  "Ariel," Hofton said, looking up from his desk, "you might want to take this call."

  "I might?"

  "I think so. It's Derec Avery from the Phylaxis Group."

  Thirteen

  Derec waited restlessly in the small Phylaxis Group reception lounge.

  The room contained comfortable chairs, a bar, a subetheric, a viewer on which could be displayed promotional or educational material-a pleasant environment in which clients could become better acquainted with Phylaxis, its work, and positronics. Derec remembered the party held here when they had received their license. His truncated staff and Senator Eliton and a few of his own aides had toasted the future, the gamble they were taking, the hope that things would change. It had been the only time anyone had actually used the room.

  A bell chimed and Derec pressed the button on the receptionist's desk to open the door.

  Ariel stepped inside and stopped. She glanced around, then looked at him. Derec began to smile. She wore a better-than-average Terran one-piece the color of clay and a dark blue jacket. She was thinner than the last time he had seen her, eyes wearier, the lines around her mouth a little deeper, tighter. Except for the slightly exaggerated contours of her chin-length black hair-closer to Spacer style than Terran-she might pass for an Earther.

  "I'm here," she said.

  "Thank you. I wasn't sure you'd come."

&n
bsp; "I'm still not sure it's worth my time. You said you have something to show me?"

  Derec felt his brief pleasure fade. Better, he realized, to get directly to business.

  "Who from the Calvin Institute supervised the installation of Union Station's RI? It wasn't you."

  She frowned. "Directly? No. I'm the commerce liaison here, not a project manager. But I looked in on it." She shrugged. "Why?"

  "Who did the inspection? I mean, specifically."

  "Bys Randic. She rotated back to Aurora last year, though. Is it important?"

  "Could be. Was there anything unique about it? The brain itself, that is."

  Ariel sighed deeply. "I didn't come here to be interrogated. You told me you found something wrong with the RI. Did you?"

  "Oh, yes. But-"

  "Show me."

  Derec started to protest, but stopped himself and waved her toward the door behind him. Clearly nothing had changed in the years since the last time they had spoken together in the same room. At least this time Ariel was not shouting and redfaced. Not yet, anyway.

  A short corridor ended at a heavy security door, which stood open. Ariel preceded him through to the main lab.

  Rana looked up from her console, one eyebrow cocking critically. From behind Ariel, Derec patted the air to let Rana know it was all right.

  Ariel did a more careful survey of this chamber. Derec could almost imagine the way she assessed each piece of equipment, sorted out the way in which the lab worked, and judged it…

  "I'm impressed," she said. "You could do some excellent work here." She turned to him. "What do you do with it?"

  "Till lately," Rana said, "we've done a lot of theoretical work, plotting positronic vectors under stress situations and the like, and we can play some really high level strategy games on it. For the most part, though, we spend our time answering questions from resident Spacers who can't understand why their robots won't anticipate their wants and desires the way they do back home and explaining to others why they shouldn't have a positronic robot outside embassy confines."

  Derec glared at her. "Rana, this is Ariel Burgess. Ariel, Verana Duvan, my chief roboticist."

  "Burgess," Rana said, rising. "Calvin Institute." She stopped a pace away from Ariel. "I read your brief on 'Cross-Inference Deduction in the Field. ' Good work."

  Ariel hesitated, then slowly nodded. "Thank you. I'm afraid I can't say I've seen any of your work."

  "Don't apologize. I'm Terran. We don't get to publish in Spacer journals."

  "How…?"

  "How did I get involved with robotics?" Rana grinned. "My degree is in Industrial Automation, with a minor in AI. I got sidetracked into positronics. We aren't all rabidly antirobot."

  "That must have been difficult."

  "Tracking down the material was a challenge. Frankly, if Derec hadn't come along with his offer to work here I was going to apply for emigration. I was preparing my application to the Calvin Institute. Futile gesture, maybe, but you never know till you try."

  "Why futile? If Derec wanted you, you must be good."

  "Calvin doesn't take very many Earthers. I checked.

  There's a very old saying about a snowball's chance…?" Rana started to go back to her console, then looked at Ariel. "And I am good."

  "Modest, too," Derec said.

  "So with all this talent, why do you need me?" Ariel asked.

  "Because we didn't install the RI at Union Station, we only watched from a distance," Rana said. "And it has some peculiarities we can't explain."

  "What did they tell you at the Institute?"

  "They didn't," Derec said. "We… aren't really supposed to be looking at it."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Special Service assumed jurisdiction over the entire investigation. Threw us out."

  "Special Service doesn't have any positronic experts."

  "Maybe they're talking to your people at the Institute,"

  Derec said.

  Ariel's mouth compressed tightly. She looked troubled. "So what are you doing with it?"

  "We set up surrogate function through our RI and transferred a complete copy of Union Station 's here before we were shut out. They don't know we have it."

  "And you don't want to go through normal channels to ask… I see." Ariel nodded. "You think I'll act as go-between for you? Believe me, the last thing I need now is a problem with Special Service. I've already got panicked Aurorans ready to leave Earth at a heartbeat. Any kind of problem with Earth authorities that might lead to-"

  "Ariel," Derec said, cutting her off. "No. I want you to look at what we have and give me your opinion."

  She gave him a dubious look. "That's all?"

  "We'll see. First, I want to know what you think."

  Her eyes narrowed. He knew she understood what he was doing. He hoped she would acknowledge a stake in this, that perhaps she already had found inconsistencies in the situation, that her involvement would outweigh her resentments. He watched her work through all of that and more he could not guess.

  "All right," she said finally. "Show me what you have." "It's been a while since I've seen a collapse this thorough," Ariel said, staring at the screen. "Did anything function?"

  "Nothing," Derec said. "According to the staff, everything had to be switched to manual. Fortunately, some of the systems had their own parallel processing units, so it wasn't a complete loss, but…"

  Ariel pointed at one of the spirals. "What is that? It looks like a paradox loop, but I don't see a resolution point."

  "Neither do we," Rana said, "and I've been looking. I started an excavation, but it looks like the loops resolve somewhere outside the positronic matrix."

  "That's absurd, there is no 'outside' a positronic matrix," Ariel said. "Not like this. Unless it's a connection with another positronic matrix."

  "A comlink," Derec said.

  "Basically, yes. You know this stuff, Derec. This is freshman-level pathway schema."

  "But in this case," he said patiently, "it doesn't go through any comlinks. We traced a good number of the comlinks, mostly the supervisory connections with the mobile staff. None of them match these sites. These loops are leaving the matrix and going somewhere else through a channel we can't determine."

  "Just what sectors are they in?"

  "It's too damaged to tell about all of them," Derec said. "Once it began collapsing, everything randomized."

  "At some point it should lock up. The whole thing shouldn't devolve into chaos."

  "That's what I thought," Rana said. "Basic salvage protocol, ever since the stasis modifications went in-what? Twenty years ago? But this did exactly the opposite and became more fluid."

  Ariel started tapping the keyboard before her. "You said too damaged to tell about all of them. Does that mean you could tell for some of them? What about a scan for mirror sites… where do these sectors link to the station systems?"

  "Maintenance," Rana said.

  Ariel waited, then glanced at the other woman. "All of them?"

  "So far."

  "Hm. How did you determine that?"

  "Like I said, I'm running an excavation. Layer by layer, sector by sector, and matching it to design specs from our RI, which, for the time being, is running Union Station."

  Ariel blinked at her. "I admire your ambition."

  Rana shrugged. "No option. But…" She waved at the screen.

  "Maintenance…" Ariel mused. "What about the reference template? Did you check it?"

  "Can't find it," Rana said. "Everything is so random-"

  Ariel leaned forward and worked the keyboard. She entered a few more commands, then sat back. Two of the peripheral screens began to display new patterns.

  Rana stared. "How did-?" she began, but Derec gave her a minute shake of the head.

  "Every positronic brain has a reference template," Ariel said quietly, more to herself than to them. "A basic pattern of behavior and attributes against which the working brain can refer…" She frowned. "
I don't understand this. They're randomized, too." She tapped more commands. The screens changed.

  Ariel touched one of the screens. "This comline isn't right. It's one-to-one, no buffer to shield the matrix. Same with this one. What kind of accessory systems were installed on this?"

  "Don't know," Derec said.

  She scowled at him impatiently. "What do you mean, you don't know? Didn't you do an on-site inspection?"

  "We didn't get a chance to before we were taken off the job and barred from the site."

  "What about before this? Are you telling me you only looked at the system during the install and not since?"

  "We went back in once, a few months after the installation. After that it was supposed to be on an as-needed basis and we never received a call. Now that we need to get in there, we're blocked."

  "That's ridiculous. Who issued that order?"

  "It came from the director's office of Special Service," Derec replied. "Their authorization was legal."

  "But Phylaxis-"

  "We were removed, Ariel. Period."

  She stared at the screens before her, but Derec was sure she saw nothing on them. She absently scratched her chin once.

  "I see. And you think I-we-had something to do with that?"

  "The thought had occurred to me," Derec said drily.

  Ariel nodded slowly, still looking at the screens. "You said no one knows you have this copy?"

  "No one has shown up yet to take it away from us." That elicited a grin.

  "Do you have any theories about what this is?" She pointed at the screen.

  "The staff told me that just before the assault, the RI took itself off-line to play a game. It was completely unaware of what was happening in the gallery until it came back online and witnessed the aftermath."

  "And that's when the collapse began."

  "Exactly," Derec said. "Now, the paradox loops and the mirror sites suggest that something was physically attached to the RI network. When I asked about problems with the RI before this, I was told that a few glitches had occurred, but they were minor and they'd been told that 'adjustment errors' were to be expected, to contact the Calvin Institute about them before contacting us. Most were dismissed."