Details. He scrolled through the reports filed sometime in the early morning hours by his field techs.
Twenty-six of Union Station's robots had gone into complete positronic collapse-all those that had been present in the gallery when the shooting began. The rest seemed relatively unaffected, although complete diagnostics could not be finished due to the team's ejection from the site by Special Service.
A request for a tech to help an Acrisian with a domestic problem. One of her servors had evidently been given a conflicting command and sent it into a dilemma loop. She suspected one of the workers from D. C. urban maintenance had done it, though she could not prove it. She wanted her robot fixed and evidence to take to the local police when she filed a complaint.
Derec sighed. Robotic affidavits were not allowed in Terran courts; the police would, at best, take her report and then do nothing with it, humoring the Spacer. At worst, the robot would be confiscated as contraband. Positronic robots were allowed only in embassy areas and one or two other specially designated Spacer zones. How these people got humaniform positronic robots past customs baffled Derec. Nevertheless, he entered authorization to send a field tech to her residence, which was just outside the embassy district, on the coast. Acrisia's oceans nearly dwarfed Earth's, so it made sense to him that Acrisians would try to be near something homelike, but he still wished the Spacers would stick to their enclaves if they insisted on keeping robots.
He found a thank-you on his com from Agent Sathen for his help at the hospital, Sathen's personal com code appended. Derec filed that.
He was tempted to call more people in government to try to get past the Special Service restrictions, but the only one who might help would be Eliton's vice-senator-now Senator-Jonis Taprin, and Derec doubted he would be available yet, what with all the details Eliton's death must have dropped on him. Perhaps later, though he doubted it would do much good. Derec shuddered at the idea of untrained people teasing through the tatters of a positronic brain. He called his lawyer again, but the man was still in Chicago Sector.
He went to Rana's console and sat down.
Her screens displayed the bizarre patterns she had shown him the night before. He sat down and leaned on the console, tracing the mazelike coils. They still seemed familiar, though he could not identify them or recall the context. Rana was right -they ought to have had solid endpoints, clear resolutions, but they simply faded out like the paths of excited quarks on a particle analysis chart. The equivalent in human brains would be the degenerative pattern of a memory disorder or cognitive disfunction…
Derec sat up stiffly. No, there was a closer resemblance. He stared at the patterns now, almost unwilling to admit what he saw. He moved to another screen and accessed the specifications on Bogard. After sifting through a number of levels, he found what he wanted.
"Damn," he hissed.
" 'Morning," Rana said, stumbling into the room. She carried a cup of coffee.
"Take a look at this," Derec said, scooting back from the console to give her room.
Rana leaned toward the screen with Bogard's specs. She frowned. "What-?"
"Those are the pathway tracks for the temporal buffers we built into Bogard."
Rana looked back at the RI display on her own screens, then again at these patterns. "Damn."
"I thought those trails looked familiar," Derec said enthusiastically. He stood and clapped his hands. "I was exhausted last night-that's why I couldn't see it."
"They aren't identical."
Derec looked at the Bogard screen. The pathways that showed the track of positronic activity from one part of Bogard's system into another did not coil so tightly nor fade out in quite the same way. Instead, the loops and tangles doubled back on themselves a couple of times, then traced direct paths out of the main positronic matrix, through a clear demarcation point, ending sharply with the exit of the track.
"No," Derec conceded, "but the similarities are too great to deny."
Rana sat down. "But Bogard's a prototype. None of these specs are in any other database than our own."
Derec rose from his seat and shrugged. "Parallel research?"
"On whose part? The Union Station RI is a standard positronic brain, installed by the good people of the Calvin Institute. Part of the agreement for it was that it would be a conservative, basic model. And even if they knew about our upgrades, they'd think it was heresy and would have nothing to do with it." Rana glanced at her screen. "Besides, they aren't identical. Bogard's pathways don't just fade like this, they end. They have a destination and a gateway to it."
"Because they feed into a symbiotic system riding alongside the main one. There's only one place for the trace to go. There's access back and forth across the boundary, sure, but the way the trace is generated-"
"-is pretty much the same. Which means that-what? Three Law violations in a standard positronic brain are being shunted-where? Outside the system?"
Derec paced briefly. "Possibly, but I doubt it. If that were the case, then the RI shouldn't have collapsed. My guess is this is a sensory diversion."
"Sensory…"
"The RI was playing a game."
"Which implies a malfunction," Rana said.
"Yes, but where? What if it thought the game was real?"
"How? That would mean that its entire sensory net"
"Was subverted. Its ability to perceive reality had been altered, so that something else became the operative reality. When it came back online it must have realized what had happened."
"But not while it was playing the game?"
Derec shrugged. "Evidently not."
Rana frowned. "Look, we built Bogard to shunt memory like this. The only way for a standard positronic brain to exhibit this is for an external system to be grafted onto it. That would show up as interference in major operational areas."
"That should be easy enough to find," Derec said.
"But I haven't found any."
"Did you look?"
Rana paused. "No, not specifically. But it would be obvious, even as badly jumbled as this is."
"Maybe. Maybe only if we look at it the right way. You've been trying to figure out what's been happening to the RI brain given the assumption that it's an unmodified unit and therefore self-contained. Not to mention something this radical-I mean, think about it. At a crucial moment, the entire RI absented itself from what was happening in the terminal to playa game. That much of a modification-that much interference-it would have to be enormous and it would have to be something…"
"What?"
"It would have to be something laid in over time, otherwise it would trigger alarms, cause shutdowns. Minor crises would be the rule…"
"So it might not be so obvious."
"No, but it would still be big just to get around the normal self-correcting routines," Derec explained. "Did we get its operational records for the past-oh, how long has it been online? A year?"
"Almost two. We did, but I'm not inclined to trust them."
"Why not?"
Rana gestured at the screen. "Nothing we've seen here is as it should be."
"Good point. But that's only if you rely on the RI's own report."
"I don't think I'd trust a report made by Terrans."
"You're Terran," Derec pointed out.
"An accident of birth." Rana waved a hand dismissively. "I claim special circumstances."
Derec laughed. "Bring it up anyway," he said.
He went to the com and tapped in the code for Union Station. After going through a short maze of addresses, he finally connected with Tathis Kedder.
"Mr. Avery," Kedder said, bemused. "I didn't expect to hear from you again after-well, after."
"I take a personal pride in my work," Derec said." Just because I'm told it's no longer my business, that doesn't mean I stop worrying about it."
Kedder smiled, nodding. "I know what you mean. How can I help you?"
"Just your recollections. Do you remember any instances of inexplicable interruptions in service from the RI? Or periods when it seemed sluggish or… uncooperative?"