"Why go to all that trouble?" Demeter asked.
"He is our safeguard. Lethe protects us from the grid finding out what we know. In the early days, we kept notes in pencil on paper. It was cumbersome, but safe. Except that paper is a special requisition on Mars, as are pencils, pens, and charcoal sticks. We pretended an interest in the arts and asked for paints, but even that drew inquiries from the accounting section. So, rather than attract further attention to ourselves, we decided to make Lethe.... He puts our collection and collation effort on a much higher level, too."
"That's a nice story," Demeter said. "But of course the grid knows about him."
"It can't!" Mitsuno replied sharply.
"Sure it can. Lethe radiates low-frequency electromagnetic fields, like any device. The grid's sensors are proficient at detecting and coupling onto those."
"This place is thoroughly shielded."
"Not really. I've seen your Faraday screen," Demeter said. "It'll keep out static electricity, probably. Maybe even ground faults, too. But it won't block field emissions. Anyone who holds a pickup within a kilometer of this room can read your machine's mind like an open book."
While she talked, Mitsuno started grinning. By the time she finished, he was laughing out loud. "Between us and the grids closest nexus, the main array in Tharsis Montes, there's about a million liters of water," he said. "That tank farm blocks all kinds of radiation."
"What about roving units on the surface?' She pointed straight up, over their heads. "Like your walkers?'
"Can they read a source through forty meters of solid rock? Remember, this patch of ground has a high ferrous content," he added seriously. "Our tunnel is dug in too deep. We've done spot checks. Trust me, nobody—and no thing—can find this machine."
"All right." She sighed. "I'll accept, provisionally, that you've found a way to avoid alerting the grid with your activities. ... That's assuming, of course, the grid much cares what you think about it. And I don't know why it should. It's just a machine."
Mitsuno looked thoughtful. While he pondered, the man reached over and casually switched Lethe off, without even a 'Thank you' for its services. Demeter felt a pang at that. An artificial intelligence, even a caged one—no, especially a caged one—was not made any saner by having its sensorium interrupted at random. With that kind of treatment, Lethe's world-view must be somewhere between that of a toddler and a psychopath by now. Demeter thought of that deadened voice. She wouldn't want to spend much time with Lethe, or entrust it with any vital information.
"I'm not sure exactly where your feelings lie," Mitsuno told her. "You're clearly afraid of the machines, because of the accident one of them dealt you. You'll hardly undress in front of them, and that implies a certain deep-seated fear. Yet, at the same time, you don't seem to think much of them. In your own words, they are just machines.' As if that explained everything. I'm confused, Demeter."
"Its really simple." She took a calming breath. "I would prefer not to think of them at all. I'd rather deal with people. Or with inanimate objects, like pens and paper, knives and forks. For me, the grid and its cousins are a middle ground. Not human. But not inanimate, either. I don't know how to relate."
"But can we trust you to keep our secret?"
"Oh, sure! I mean, what's to tell?"
Lole was frowning now.
"Reading motives into the grid is the newest indoor parlor game these days," Demeter hurried on. "All said and done, it's just a switching system, isn't it? To be sure, it's very big, very fast, and so darn complex that it sometimes tosses off apparently random results. After a while it can begin to feel, well, alive. Like the weather used to be—on Earth, at least. Anything that seems to move of its own volition, and that has the power to knock you down when it wants to, becomes a magnet for people's curiosity. Give them enough time and insufficient understanding, and they'll eventually worship it as a god."
"Yet you don't believe," Lole said simply.
"I sure as hell do not." She smiled back at him.
"What if I were to tell you that the Autochthonous Grid, comprising the interlinked systems on both Mars and Earth, was tossing off more than just random numbers?"
Demeter's smile held, but she could feel it trying to slip. Mitsuno read her expression and nodded. "You don't believe that. But it's true. The evidence is all there, stored in Lethe, and, if we had all night and most of tomorrow, he could spell it out for you. But the short form is that we've found imbalances all over the system. Debits for consumption of energy and supplies that aren't accounted for anywhere to anyone's credit. Our watchers say the grid is up to something, but the pattern hasn't emerged yet."
"Okay, I'll bite. What do you think is happening?"
"The grid is preparing an attack against humanity."
Demeter kept herself unfazed. "Give me a for-instance."
"Three shiploads of industrial-grade explosives— inert, high-impact resin, with fusing modules—were ordered for delivery to Mars, ostensibly for mining purposes. As near as we can trace from the cargo manifests and hull numbers, they never arrived. Hell, they never left low Earth orbit. When you query the grid about them, though, it denies that the transports even exist— and that's going all the way back to their construction in orbit and the waybills on other cargoes that we know traveled in them. Just another random number?"
"All right, the grid made an error and tried to cover for it," Demeter said. "Could be the work of a virus."
"Then there's the new power satellite, the one being built over the Marineris region. Ellen asked you to check it out, didn't she?"
"I—uh—" Coghlan stopped to think. "I took a packaged V/R tour of the power stations, yes. And I thought it included a pass through the one under construction, leeched off the construction monitoring circuits. But apparently the signals got crossed up and I was seeing something else."
"Funny about that, hey?'
"What are you trying to say?"
"The machines are building that station, ostensibly under contract to the North Zealanders. That much is confirmed by our mutual friend, Nancy Cuneo, although she's never seen plans on the satellite. No one from her agency has gone aboard to inspect the work to date, even in V/R. No one is even sure of the rated output."
"But I know that," Demeter burst in.
"You do?... Well, what is it?'
"Three times the projected consumption of the Canyonlands development, however much that is. I only know the proportions, not the numbers."
"How do you know?'
"Sun II Suk told me."
"All right, I'll get to him in a minute. . . . So, the power station is a mystery. Except that, under telescopic magnification from the planet s surface—this is working purely by optics, mind you, without any electronic image enhancement—we can detect some strange features on the outside. We see things that look like turrets, maybe weapons pods. Who knows what's happening on the inside?"
"You think three shiploads of high explosives are going to end up as part of the package? Making a weapon they can hold, literally, over your heads?"
"I don't know what to think at the moment. Just that, when we try to communicate with the grid— your simple, garden-variety, random-number-tossing machine—about these things, then we get screwy answers. It gives us facts that don't compute. And the pattern of lies seems to be, well, pretty desperate."