Scogil! She was filled with outrage again and was half tempted to use one of the Eggs to plot an astrological chart of her own future. But with an iron will she shrugged off this temptation toward the irrational. To be afflicted by superstitious impulse was the price one paid for being condemned to the use of cheap wetware that had mindlessly evolved in an ancient ocean! Anon they would learn how to scoop out the wetware and replace it with quantronics that weren’t limited by robotic laws laid in by the environmental demands on fish.
But—back to the real problem she had been given, upgrading the fam of Scogil’s protoge. Her main task was to construct a single-purpose module—one that enhanced the kid’s mathematical intuition. Almost routine. That he was still a child young enough to make use of such flexible structures would greatly simplify her work—a fam modification to be utilized by an adult brain necessitated a very different (and difficult) design philosophy more akin to building an expert computer program activated by primitive organic triggers. Still, it wouldn’t be easy.
Her secondary task, not usually feasible with Faraway designs, was to implement an undetectable persona shift that would prime the boy to traitorous behavior at key trigger points in his life. Because of Faraway’s notorious “safe-walls” design philosophy, she was here allowed to operate under an “if possible” clause. But given the electronic failings of this particular uncertified design, she thought she might be able to... The unused hooks that had stymied a whole team of Faraway engineers weren’t the big challenge, though they opened up unexpected avenues of attack. Hel-marian Crafters routinely fabricated quantum-state devices that were only theoretical dreams to other engineers; the Neuhadran foundries were adequate to build whatever weave she needed. Linking into die hooks was a piece of fancy footwork she could do—but bypassing the walls...
The starship cabin wasn’t large enough for her and her mnemonifier. She tried working with her heels on top of her “mnemy,” and then with her toes peeking around, and then with the damn machine strapped to the ceiling—but nothing was comfortable. Thank Space for zero-g! No adequate solution presented itself until she implemented a scheme to worm their stellar coordinates out of the Second Watchman. She didn’t succeed, alas, because he didn’t know—the ship’s officers used unshared partial-keys to navigate—but she did find out that his cabin was larger than hers.
Immediately she conned the Second Watchman into exchanging cabins, a deal she paid for by looking at the holos of his family and teasing stories out of his mouth that he’d always wanted to tell but lacked an audience. She also stroked the stubble on his head and ran her finger down the ridge of his nose. But, sadly, in the endgame her brilliant strategy failed. The finale saw her stowing her mnemonifier out in die corridor while the Second Watchman stayed in his cabin and held her in his arms. He whispered poetry into her ears in between nibbling at them. She kept thinking about her bulky mnemonifier.
I'm not very good at predicting, she told herself ruefully. A Second Watchman didn’t fit very well into any psychohistorical equation she knew... now, if she’d had to deal with ten thousand men like him, all at the same time, it would have been a snap!
Thus Nemia had to postpone her work on the persona modification until she arrived at Neuhadra. Beucalin briefed her in his office while her attention was fixated on the landscape beyond the Institute’s lofty windows—there were green fields and endless stretches of forest that had taken over the hills as far as eye could see into the morning mists. Nearby she could see shellback hickory and mountain oak and hardy tramontanes from Zeta Tigones. And wind that blew clouds across the sky! She hadn’t been here since she was a small child. More than once she asked Beucalin to repeat himself.
“You’ll have plenty to do before tackling Scogil. Wait until you hear from me before you try to contact him,” he was saying. “I’ll have to soften up Scogil with bad news about how I can’t help him. Let him stew for a gaggle of watches before you serendipitously arrive as his savior. Play innocent. A couple of hints, maybe. Don’t offer him anything. Let him pry out of you—very slowly—what you can do for his scheme.”
While she waited she again took up her ideas for Eron Osa’s persona-change package—the still-unsolved side of her assignment. She couldn’t fix the final parameters. She’d have to meet this child first. She always worked with traits that were already there—otherwise it was hopeless—tweaking this, damping that, exaggerating, redirecting. It took a lot of observation. And all changes had to be compatible with the hardware and wetware constraints. For now all she had to work with were the known hardware weaknesses.
No two fam’s architectures were exactly the same. Faraway designs, for instance, emphasized security. Cloun-the-Stubbom had conquered a good bite of the Galaxy with a Crafter-devised mentality-altering machine based upon the very same tuned probe that, in its modem incarnation, transduced information between fam and wetware. Cloun’s weapon of conquest had been devastating. The survivors had been impressed. Since then a great deal of thought had gone
into protecting personality integrity. The first Faraway fams had been nothing more than devices that detected and countered tuned probe attacks and concentrated on monitoring the emotional feedback loops—neural and chemical— among cortex, hypothalamus, locus ceruleus, pituitary, amygdala, etc.
The original Faraway designs had had their limitations. If the fam was removed, by guile or force or neglect, the organic brain again became defenseless against alteration; the absent fam could then be replaced, but the personality changes induced in its absence would remain. Modem designs, like the one that this Eron Osa child wore, kept a stack of persona parameters that it tagged when it detected decoupling and, upon recoupling, set about reversing any changes made during the separation. Faraway, whose hegemony had been the chief victim of Cloun-the-Stubbom, soon became, and remained, particularly good at implementing defensive protocols in fam design—the famous “safe-walls.”
The problem-solving aids, the data stores, the search engines, die graphics engines, the monitoring agents, and sophisticated internal regulation of emotion all came later—but in Faraway designs these “features” remained subservient to the goal of security. Under certain circumstances, that in itself was a weakness. When Beucalin called and gave her the all-clear that Scogil had been set up, she had already postulated more than sixtyne ways to attack Eron Osa’s brain, all with a high probability of success. First, of course, she had to test-drive his fam before she could finalize the surgery. That fam, having been a child’s constant companion for almost a decade now, was already well outside of its original specs.
15
ARRANGED MARRIAGE, 14,791 GE
Don't expect your parents to do everything, but let them go about doing what they do well.
—Ancient Helmarian saying
It was important that Scogil be led to believe that he had picked her for his team and never to find out that she had been assigned to him as a watchdog. Only Grandfa really trusted him. She certainly didn’t!
Her spies had been following him for several watches before she was able to pick the opportunity to accidentally-on-purpose run into him. He had flown into the city from the Glatim estate, moving around at a frantic pace, his agenda impossible to predict. Then—thank Chemistry for hunger—he finally decided to eat at a quiet but well-attended rooftop garden. The moment she knew, she was on her way. En route, her spies narrowcasted a floor plan with a red circle denoting his table.