That master computer again! I had to crack Wagant Laroo! I just had to!
I pulled all my strings at Tooker, starting with Sugal, with whom I had a cordial lunch.
“You want something. You always do when you come up,” he told me, sounding not in the least put out.
“What’s Project Phoenix?”
He started. “Where did you hear that name?”
“I heard it. I want to know what it is.”
His voice lowered to a whisper and he grew increasingly nervous. “Man! You’re dealing with high explosives here!”
“Still, Turgan, by hook or by crook I will know about it”
He sighed. “If you heard of it at all, I suppose you will. But not here. In a public place. I’ll get you the information.”
He was as good as his word, although even he really didn’t know what was going on. Nor in fact did I depend entirely on him. I pulled every string and called in any lOUs I had, as well as using the ever-fascinating Tooker computer network, to which I still had access, to build my own picture. The elements, spread out in front of me in my office, gave a story that would emerge only through deduction and analysis.
Item: As I had already known, every single computer expert pulled from Tooker at the start of the last quarter had been expert in some form of organic computering. Most major organic computers and work on them had been banned long ago by the Confederacy, after some of the early creations, centuries ago, became more than human and almost took over humanity. That bitter, bloody, and costly war had made such work feared to this day. Those who dabbled in it were wiped or—sent to Cerberus? From Sugal and other sources I determined that we weren’t the only one tapped for such minds.
Item: A couple, of months earlier than this, major construction began on Laroo’s Island, partly to create a place for shuttle landings to be made in safety there. But a whole hell of a lot more than that was in progress, to judge from the crews and raw materials ordered.
Item: Interfaces between Tooker’s master computer—and other corporations’ master computers—were established on a high and unbreakable scramble, relayed by satellite. The relay system’s other end pointed to Laroo’s Island, although officially it was interconnected to the Lord of the Diamond’s command space station in orbit around Cerberus. That raised an interesting question: if the work was so super-secret, why not the space station? It was almost as large as the island, and if one allowed for the shuttle dock, power plant, and fixed structures on the island, it was a damn sight bigger in usable space.
Item: Interestingly. Hroyasail’s own area for trawling had been increased by almost 50 percent shortly before I took over, something I never would have noticed if it hadn’t been reflected in the quota plan for the quarter, a document I was only now getting to know ultimately. Seaprince of Coborn, about the same distance south of Laroo’s Island as we were north, had an equal increase. A look at corporation affiliates and a check with the previous quarter’s quota plan showed that an entire Tooker trawling operation, Emyasail, was in the previous quarter’s plan but was totally missing now. Its area had been given to Hroyasail, which was natural, and Seaprince, which was most unnatural, since Seaprince was a Comp-world Corporation subsidiary, not one of Tooker’s. You didn’t hand valuable territory to a competitor that close voluntarily, so Compworld had to have given something really major in return and nothing like that showed in the books. In fact records showed that Tooker’s skrit harvest since the quarter began was down sharply, indicating a dip into the reserves by next year. So it wasn’t voluntary, and only the government could force such a move.
These facts alone, put together with what only I really knew of anyone likely to compile them, painted a stark picture.
Item: The only folks anybody knew about now using uncannily human organic computers were our aliens and their spy robots, robots known to have a connection with the Warden Diamond. That was why I was here. But the alien robots were so good that no research project would be really necessary on them—and even if it was, it wouldn’t be carried out here, not on Cerberus or any other Warden world, and certainly not by any of our people, who were definitely behind the aliens in this area.
And yet the conclusion was inescapable: Wagant Laroo had converted his former retreat and resort into an organic computer laboratory, staffed with the best of his own that he could find and supplied by Emyasail’s trawlers. Why trawlers and gunboats and not by air? Well, for one thing it would attract less attention and give the appearance to onlookers of business as usual in Emyasail’s area. Also, there appeared to be some paranoia about many aircraft in the vicinity of Laroo’s Island.
I paced back and forth for several days and also talked the matter over with Dylan, who, having less background in this sort of thing than I did, came up even more of a blank. However, her more parochial outlook gave me the key I was looking for. “Why are you assuming the aliens have anything to do with it?” she asked me. “Why isn’t this just a new scheme by Wagant Laroo?”
That stopped me cold. Suddenly all the pieces fell into place, and I had at least part of the picture. “No,” I told her, “the aliens have everything to do with this—only they don’t know it!”
“Huh?”
I sat down. “Okay, we know that these aliens are able to make facsimiles of people, people with jobs in sensitive places they have to gain access to. We know that these organic robots are so good they fool literally everybody. Not just the machines that check to see who’s who, but everybody. Close friends. Lovers. People they’ve known for years. And they even pass brain scans!” I was getting excited now. “Of coursel Of course! How could I be so blind?”
She looked concerned. “What do you mean?”
“Okay, so first your agents pick out the person they want to duplicate. They find their records, take holographic pictures, you name it. And from that, our alien friends create an organic robot—grow is a more apt term, if I remember correctly—that is absolutely physically identical to the target. Absolutely. Except, of course, being artificial it has whatever additional characteristics its designers want—eyes that see into infrared and ultraviolet, enormous strength if need be. Since it’s made up of incredibly tough material instead of cells, with a skin more or less grafted on top, and powered perhaps by drawing energy from the fields that surround us—microwaves, magnetic fields, I don’t know what—it can survive even a vacuum. The one that penetrated Military Systems Command seemed to have the power to change its components into other designs—it actually launched itself into space. And yet it fooled everybody! Bled the right blood when it had to, knew all the right answers, duplicated the personality, right down to the littlest habit, of the person it was pretending to be. And there’s only one way it could have done that.”
“All right, how?”
“It was the person it was pretending to be.”
She shook her head in wonder. “You’re not making any sense. Was it a robot or a person?”
“A robot. An absolutely perfect robot whose components could provide it with whatever it needed, either as a mimic or as a device for fulfilling its mission or getting away. An incredible machine made from tiny unicellular computers that can control independently what they are and do—trillions of them, perhaps. But the aliens solved the problem we never did, and never allowed ourselves the research time to do—they discovered how to preprogram the things indelibly, so they’d be free and complete individuals yet never deviate from their programming, which was to spy on us. So now they build them in our images, and—what? They bring them to Cerberus. No, not Cerberus, probably to the space station.”