She swung the door open, propped it with one foot, and shone her flashlight into the room.
Paydirt! The room was completely empty-just bare plascrete walls, ceiling, and floor. But on that floor, painted in jet-black lines that glittered as if the paint had been mixed with tiny shards of crushed glass, was a circle containing a pentagram. Carla recognized it at once from the diagram on the memory chip. It was the hermetic circle used in conjuring the spirit.
She shot a ten-second take from the doorway, just to make sure she captured it on film. Then she turned and headed back for the room with the power source. This was too good a shot to pass up. She had to have some light. In a matter of minutes, she had powdered up the fuel cell. A steady hum filled the air, and the lights overhead flickered to life.
Hurrying back to the room with the hermetic circle on the floor, Carla did a wide-angle take of the entire room, then walked a slow, graceful circle, panning the painted floor from all angles. Then she dragged in a chair, climbed on top of it, and did an overhead shot.
“Perfect,” she whispered to herself, pleased with her find. “Now let’s see what other goodies the researchers left behind.”
The first door she opened led to a storeroom that was crammed with magical fetishes and thaumaturgical supplies in neatly labeled containers. These didn’t add anything to Carla’s knowledge of the story, but the clutter of unusual items would be a great visual. She could get Wayne to superimpose a shot of herself over them later, introducing what she’d found in the lab.
The second door led to a board room whose walls were lined with erasable white message boards. All had been wiped clean. But at the center of the room was a long table with inset datapads. These were nearly buried by piles of hardcopy. The entire surface of the table was covered with papers, many of them wrinkled as if they’d been crumpled up into a bail and then smoothed flat again. Waste baskets lay empty on the floor, as if their contents had been dumped onto the table. Much of the hardcopy looked like garbage; there were paper food wrappers and even a few rats’ nests of paper that had already gone through a document-shredding machine.
Carla rubbed her hands together, delighted with her find. It was obvious what had happened. Faced with the loss of their computerized files, the researchers had made a desperate search through their waste baskets, hoping to salvage some of the data on their research projects. They'd had half of yesterday and all of today to do the job, and by now had either found what they were looking for or had at last given up. But they hadn’t bothered to clean up after themselves. And there was just a chance that a dedicated snoop could find enough for a story in what they’d left behind.
Carla pulled up a chair, sat down, and started going through the hardcopy printout.
An hour and a half later, she gave up her search. She’d skimmed all of the intact papers and found nothing. The shredded documents could have been pieced together with a computer matching program, but that would require hours of scanning time and equipment she didn’t have. Her earlier optimism had faded. She realized now that Mitsuhama wouldn’t be sloppy. The corporation wouldn’t have stopped at merely shredding incriminating documents. Anything good would probably be ash by now.
Carla leaned back in the chair, stretching. She’d been through every scrap of paper in this room, but still had the nagging feeling she’d overlooked something. Getting up from the table, she walked back to the room that held the work stations. She paused, lost in thought, in front of the one where Farazad had sat. Compulsively, she tugged open the drawers once more, even though she already knew that they were empty. As she opened the last drawer, her eye fell on the magnetic clip that was stuck to the bottom of the metal drawer. It was a child’s coy, a Mighty Mites face that smiled when Carla touched it. Beside it was a torn piece of hardcopy.
Carla leaned closer. The scrap of paper hadn’t moved when her hand brushed against it. it wasn’t just a tiny scrap-instead it was the corner of a larger piece of paper that had slid inside the crack where the back and bottom of the drawer met. Only the corner of it could be seen. Carla tried to move it with a finger. but found it was stuck. Instead she yanked out the drawer, turned it over, and pulled the hardcopy from it.
She let out a long, slow whistle as she read the crumpled paper she held in her hands. It was a memo, dated eight days ago-three days before Farazad Samji’s death. It was addressed to the lab’s director, Ambrose Wilks, and was signed with a wavering scrawl by the wage mage himself.
To: Director Wilks
Re: Lucifer Deck” (Farohad) Project
As per your direct instructions, I have summoned and bound the farohad. Despite my formal protests to the board of directors, and against the dictates of my conscience and religion, I have performed the tests you have required.
If anything, the results of these tests prove that the farohad is unsuitable for the project you propose. It is true that the light effects the farohad produces can enter the Matrix, although the extreme measures we go through to tap this energy seems to border on torture. By all indications, it would seem that, as suspected, magical entities cannot stand the pure technology construct of the Matrix.
While I can force the farohad to allow me to tap its energies, and through trial and error we have been able to transfer that concentration of light into the Matrix, I am unable to control it once the energy is in the Matrix. Please note this because it explains why we cannot control the effects in the Matrix. The speed at which the light moves is beyond our capacities and the capabilities of the best deckers we have. The spirit’s lack of cooperation makes training the farohad impossible. Our best brains alone cannot match the speed and short-lived usefulness of these bursts of pure light.
By its very nature, a creature composed of light must flow-it must remain in an active state. The farohad cannot “sit around” and wait for instructions. Nor can it remain within the Matrix for more than a nanosecond or two, at most. As a living spirit, it would completely lose its integrity if we tap too much of its elemental power, especially using so many technological systems. At any moment, the creature could dissolve and disappear.
It is thus impossible for the farohad to perform the function you wish it to. In theory, it should simulate the functions of a Matrix gopher program-one with unlimited access to data. It could bypass any intrusion countermeasures, seek out a keyword, reconfigure a portion of its body to exactly duplicate the data that contains this keyword, and return again to a computer to write that copied data on an optical memory chip or datastore. In theory. Obviously, in hindsight, this does not and cannot work. We did not foresee the inherent difficulties in forcing a magical creature into a pure technological construct. Even when we have tapped its energies, we have absolutely no control over the light. It will erase a memory chip or datastore instead of penetrating and copying the information. Without the human mind to understand the technology, we have set loose something, again in theory, that can destroy the Matrix.
I cannot in good conscience continue to subject the farohad to this torture, only to prove what we already know-magical entities cannot exist in the Matrix and that light travels faster than the human mind. I believe that with the data we have learned we may be able to use the farohad’s energy in the Matrix to create knowbots that function in a similar way-knowbots at least would be fully under our command. And from what I understand, our Software Division is very interested in what we have learned. If you approve this, I would be able to release the farohad. I cannot permit the farohad to die in captivity. I intend that it should he free-free to return to the paradise that is its natural habitat.