Her attire was unusual for anyone on a potentially hazardous assignment. While he wore a standard HomCom blacksuit, she wore JD service boots and what from the waist up was a maroon jumpsuit uniform. But instead of trousers, she wore culottes. For a suit designed to seal against NNBC attack, there seemed to be a lot of exposed skin.
Nice skin too. The luluesque legs. Fred tried not to stare.
Inspector Costa got right down to business, swiping her left hand at him. “Here’s the warrant, from Division Three Circuit.”
The warrant passed from the Justice Department’s mentar, Libby, through Fred’s palm array and cap subem to all the concerned agencies riding piggyback on him: the Applied People mentar, Nicholas; the nameless HomCom mentar; the Bell Systems mentar; the Chicago prosecutor’s office mentar; various UD and nonaligned human and mentar rights watchdog agencies; and—the only mentar with Fred’s best interest in mind—the BB of R’s Marcus. Inspector Costa, no doubt, was likewise burdened by her own officious peanut gallery.
Warrant acknowledged and confirmed. You may proceed, said the Bell System mentar, Ringer, who controlled the facility.
Fred placed his hand against the vault’s palmplate. A pressure barrier blocking entry to the tunnel powered down, opening the way for them. The four tank carts preceded them through the tunnel, then Costa, then Fred. Still wondering about her suit, Fred tried and failed to catch the glint of some tough but sheer material that might be covering her legs. From behind, he was impressed again by her body’s curvy, generous form. A bit heavier in the hips than a lulu, perhaps, and a tad taller, but she might pass for a sister on the fringe of the germline. In his long life, Fred had familiarized himself with the bodies of most cloned women. It wasn’t difficult—when you undressed one of them, you pretty much undressed all of her sisters. Only the arrangement of moles, pimples, and freckles set them apart. That was probably the enduring lure of free-range women like Costa. They were each of them unique, a mystery, a surprise. Not that he’d ever gotten intimate with a hink. The very idea was unsavory.
Fred sighed.
“Bored already, Londenstane?” Costa said, glancing back at him. “You should have joined the hunt earlier. I’ve already taken into custody twenty-five full backups and mirrors.”
Fred was astonished. “So many?”
“Yes, I think it’s a record. It’s certainly my record. It just shows you how rich and paranoid this Starke woman was. She must have spent millions securing her mentar. We started with Cabinet’s licensed paste units, on-planet and off. Then the licensed loopvaults. Then the unlicensed units, the linked datacubes, crystal chips, and thousands of peerless ghosts. Starke employed all known means of storing artificial sentience, and a few I’d only read about. I’m not at liberty to go into too much detail, but we’ve dug up an entire emu ranch in British Columbia this morning to seize one of them. Owner had no idea what was buried under her browse pen. We’ve destroyed a science labplat orbiting Mars. We’ve lassoed an asteroid.
“And every time we close in on an active unit, before we can take it into custody, it scrambles its own brains beyond retrieval. I don’t know what this mentar is trying to hide, but it won’t let us near it.
“That, by the way, is how we know to look for the next one. A mentar will not destroy its last backup. You can count on that. Mentars are incapable of committing suicide. That’s an area where we humans still surpass them. So, if a unit soufflés itself, you can bet there’s another backup out there somewhere.”
They entered the cavernous switching facility. Spokes of electronic hardware radiated from a central control bay. Costa’s four carts stopped and waited for her. She told the lead cart to drop its load of scouts. The cart lowered a shovel-shaped nozzle to the floor. A valve shot open and thousands of carbon-fiber marbles spilled out in all directions, making a roaring din as they bounced on the concrete. The marbles rolled and uncurled into cockroach-sized mechs that bristled with sensory probes, digging arms, and cutting tools. They skittered everywhere in the vault, crawling behind consoles and cowlings, squeezing into ducts, slithering up walls and along cables. Everywhere, even inside Fred’s clothing. He knew better than to try to move, and they quickly vetted him and departed. Their whispery touch against his skin was unnerving.
Marcus, he glotted, private BB of R comm! Now!
Go ahead, the mentar said, circumventing the chain of comm to exclude all non-brotherhood eavesdroppers.
Was the frisking really necessary? The scouts were subem controlled, and the subem was slaved to the Homeland Command’s Nameless mentar. It’s not like I’d be harboring Cabinet on my person.
Sorry, Commander, Marcus replied, but Nameless One declines to offer an explanation.
Then log it and file a grievance.
After a slight human-emulating pause, Marcus asked, Are you sure you want to do that?
Fred sighed again. Nameless One was his supervisor for this gig, and russes weren’t known to be complainers.
A new voice spoke. Is there something the matter? It was Nicholas, Fred’s Applied People employer.
No, Nick, he said. Everything’s peachy.
In that case, isn’t there work to do, Commander?
Fred and the inspector walked along a row of equipment to the central switching control bay at the center of the facility, which was protected by its own pressure barrier. Fred disabled the barrier with a wave of his hand. An army of scouts scurried inside to continue the search. While Fred and Costa waited for them, Fred climbed onto a cable bracket and surveyed the fat bundles of fiber-optic trunk cable suspended from raised ductwork and fanning out to tunnel heads in the distant walls. Each tunnel head was crowned with the name of an adjoining hub city in large mosaic letters: ST. LOUIS, INDIANAPOLIS, DES MOINES, TORONTO, etc., more than two dozen in all. Some of the mosaics were centuries old and marked tunnels hewn to accommodate the copper wires of the continent’s first national telegraph network.
When the mechs cleared the control bay, Fred and Costa entered it. Although the mechs had crawled over and under every square centimeter, Fred did his own inspection, both visually and with the scanning gear in his cap visor. Nothing seemed to have been tampered with. He checked every palmplate he saw—all seals were intact.
Finally Fred checked the hub itself at the very center of the bay. All the kilometers of cable and complicated equipment fed this, the central switching unit, the heart of which was an argon-filled cassette small enough to fit into a pocket. It was a superluminary processor, a computer with no chips or wires. Its circuits were a latticework of spun light.
FRED FOLLOWED COSTA and her carts to each of the tunnel heads surrounding the vault. He swiped the barriers down, and she poured hundreds of liters of scouts into each of them. Hesitantly, aware of their invisible audience, Fred said, “Why would a mentar object to passing through probate?”
“Beats the hell out of me.”
“I mean,” he persisted, “the JD doesn’t alter them or anything, right? You just hold them off-line for a few hours or days while the estate passes from the deceased to the heirs.”