"Thank you, gentlemen," Miles said when introductions were complete. He sat; they sat, except for Ruibal, who was apparently elected spokes-goat.
"Where would you like me to begin, my Lord Auditor?" Ruibal asked Miles.
"Um . . . the beginning?"
Obediently, Ruibal began to rattle off a long list of neurological tests, illustrated with holovids of the data and results.
"Excuse me," said Miles after a few minutes of this. "I did not phrase myself well. You can skip all the negative data. Go directly to the positive results."
There was a short silence, then Ruibal said, "In summation, I did not find evidence of organic neurological damage. The physiological and psychological stress levels, which are quite dangerously high, I judge to be an effect rather than a cause of the biocybernetic breakdown."
"Do you agree with that assessment?" Miles asked Avakli, who nodded, though with a little judicious lip-pursing to indicate the ever-present possibility of human error. Avakli and Ruibal exchanged a nod, and Avakli took Ruibal's place at the holovid projector.
Avakli had a detailed holovid map of the chip's internal architecture, which he began to display. Miles was relieved. He'd been a little afraid they were going to tell him ImpSec Medical had lost the owner's manual in the intervening thirty-five years, but they appeared to have quite a lot of data. The chip itself was an immensely complex sandwich of organic and inorganic molecular layers about five by seven centimeters broad and half a centimeter thick, which rested in a vertical position between the two lobes of Illyan's brain. The number of neurological connections that ran from it made a jump-pilot's control headset look like a child's toy. The greatest complexity seemed to be in the information retrieval net, rather than the protein-based data storage, though both were not only fiendishly ornate, but largely unmapped—it had been an autolearning-style system which had assembled itself in a highly non-linear fashion after the chip had been installed.
"So is the . . . damage or deterioration we're seeing confined to the organic or the inorganic parts? Or both?" Miles asked Avakli.
"Organic," said Avakli. "Almost certainly."
Avakli was one of those scientists who never placed an unhedged bet, Miles realized.
"Unfortunately," Avakli went on, "it was never originally designed to be downloaded. There is no single equivalent of a data-port to connect to; just these thousands and thousands of neuronic leads going into and out of the thing all over its surface."
In view of the chip's history as Emperor Ezar's ultra-secure data dump, this made sense. Miles would not have been surprised to learn the thing had been customized to be especially nondownloadable.
"Now … I was under the impression the thing worked in parallel with Illyan's original cerebral memory. It doesn't actually replace it, does it?"
"That is correct, my lord. The neurological input is only split from the sensory nerves, not shunted aside altogether. The subjects apparently have dual memories of all their experiences. This appears to have been the major contributing factor to the high incidence of iatrogenic schizophrenia they later developed. A sort of inherent design defect, not of the chip so much as of the human brain."
Ruibal cleared his throat in polite theoretical, or perhaps theological, disagreement.
Illyan must have been a born spy. To hold more than one reality balanced in your mind until proof arrived, without going mad from the suspense, was surely the mark of a great investigator.
Avakli then went into a highly technical discussion of three projected ideas for extracting some kind of data download from the chip. They all sounded makeshift and uncertain of result; Avakli himself, describing them, didn't sound too happy or enthusiastic. Most of them seemed to involve long hours of delicate micro-neurosurgery. Ruibal winced a lot.
"So," Miles interrupted this at length, "what happens if you take the chip out?"
"To use layman's terminology," said Avakli, "it goes into shock and dies. It's evidently supposed to do so, apparently to prevent, um, theft."
Right. Miles pictured Illyan mugged by chip-spies, his head hacked open, left for dead . . . someone else had anticipated that picture too. They'd been a paranoid lot, in Ezar's generation.
"It was never designed to be removed intact from its organic electrical support matrix," Avakli continued. "The chance of any coherent data retrieval is vastly reduced, anyway."
"And if it's not taken out?"
"The protein chain arrays show no signs of slowing in their dissociation."
"Or, in scientists' language, the chip is turning to snot inside Illyan's head. One of you bright boys apparently used just that phrase in his hearing, by the way."
One of Avakli s assistants had the grace to look guilty.
"Admiral Avakli, what are your top theories as to what is causing the chip to break down?"
Avakli s brows narrowed. "In order of probability—senescence, that is, old age, triggering an autodestruction, or some sort of chemical or biological attack. I'd have to have it apart to prove the second hypothesis."
"So . . . there is no question of removing the chip, repairing it, and reinstalling it."
"I hardly think so."
"And you can't repair it in situ without knowing the cause, which you can't determine without removing it for internal examination. Which would destroy it."
Avakli's lips compressed in dry acknowledgment of the inherent circularity of the problem. "Repair is out of the question, I'm afraid. I've been concentrating on trying to evolve a practical downloading scheme."
"As it happens," Miles went on, "you misunderstood my initial question. What happens to Illyan if the chip is removed?"
Avakli gestured back to Ruibal, a toss-the-hot-ball spasm.
"We can't predict with certainty," said Ruibal.
"Can you guess with reasonable odds? Does he, for example, instantly go back to being twenty-seven years old again?"
"No, I don't think so. A plain removal, with no attempt to save the chip, would in fact be a reasonably simple operation. But the brain is a complex thing. We don't know, for example, to what extent it has rerouted its own internal functions around the artifact in thirty-five years. And then there's the psychological element. Whatever he's done to his personality that has allowed him to work with it and stay sane will be unbalanced."
"Like . . . taking away a crutch, and discovering your legs have atrophied?"
"Perhaps."
"So how much cognitive damage are we talking about? A little? A lot?"
Ruibal shrugged helplessly.
"Have any aging galactic experts in this obsolete technology been located yet?" Miles asked.
"Not yet," said Ruibal. "That may take several months."
"By which time," said Miles grimly, "if I understand this, the chip will be jelly and Illyan will be either permanently insane or dead of exhaustion."
"Ah," said Ruibal.
"That about sums it up, my lord," said Avakli.
"Then why haven't we yanked the damned thing?"
"Our orders, my lord," noted Avakli, "were to save the chip, or as much of the chip's data as could be retrieved."
Miles rubbed his lips. "Why?" he said at length.
Avakli's brows rose. "I would presume, because the data is vital to ImpSec and the Imperium."
"Is it?" Miles leaned forward, staring into the brightly colored, biocybernetic nightmare chip-map hanging before his eyes above the table's central vid plate. "The chip was never installed to make Illyan into a superman. It was just a toy for Emperor Ezar, who fancied owning a vid recorder with legs. I admit, it's been handy for Illyan. Gives him a nice aura of infallibility that scares hell out of people, but that's a crock and he knows it even if they don't.