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Wyman's right. Maybe I am past it.'
'So what do you want to do about Marshall Tate?'
Beverley's answer was to push Toby away and break into a run. 'Bugger Marshall
Tate!' she yelled over her shoulder. 'Bugger Doc Wyman! Bugger the Kronos!
Bugger every damned thing!' She accelerated when she heard Toby pounding after
her. She did not want him to see the tears of despair and frustration that
were streaming down her cheeks.
Beverley was a fighter. But it was difficult being a fighter when you were
pitted against an enemy of unfathomable ruth-lessness who wrote his own rules.
3
Under the electron microscope the motor neurons looked like a dense forest
filling the projection screen in Nano Systems' memory analysis laboratory.
Carl realized that something was wrong the moment Dr Pilleau slipped the
opened Kronos under the machine's viewing head.
'Holy shit!'
'Our initial reaction precisely,' said Mace Pilleau phlegmatic-ally, nodding
to Leon Dexter. 'That's the Kronos that came out of the combine harvester.
We've not done any sampling analysis but we think we have a motor neuron count
of 20 to 25 per cent instead of the 10 per cent that the chip had when it was
made.'
Carl fumbled for the controls on his breast pocket voice recorder and pressed
the record button. This was something he would have to get transcribed and not
wait for one of Mace Pilleau's plodding reports. The implications were too
horrendous for him to contemplate but the stark evidence was before him on the
screen. At least a quarter of the motor neurons were mature, completely
formed. No Kronos ever produced had such
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an incredibly high count of working motor neurons. The vast majority had less
than 1 per cent correctly formed. Such chips were classified as Class C on
analysis and had their outer case etched accordingly. They were used in
personal computers and pocket databases such as dictionaries and translators.
Class A Kronos microprocessors, which accounted for less than one in every
hundred chips produced, had 10 per cent of their cells correctly formed which
gave them the full one gigabyte or more of working memory. Nearly all Nano
Systems' research effort was currently directed towards doubling the memory
capacity of the Kronos. The need for even higher standards of purity in the
cultivation labs and the slowness of the TVR chamber technique was making the
two gigabyte super Kronos, the Zeus, a seemingly impossible goal.
'So what would you say the RAM capacity of that chip is?' Carl asked, not
taking his eyes off the screen.
'Two and a half gig plus,' said Leon equably.
'What!' Carl spun around to face the young software engineer. 'For Christ's
sake, why has it taken you so long to find out something so bloody basic as
that?'
Dr Pilleau saw the makings of a row and stepped in quickly. 'Simple. Because
we were looking at the damage to the chip caused by the trojan. Not the
repairs it carried out before it died.'
'If it died,' Leon interjected.
This was too much for Carl. He resorted to rarely-used expletives. 'Repairs!
What the hell are you trying to tell me?'
'We're not frying to tell you anything,' said Dr Pilleau testily. 'As you
already know, the so-called trojan appears to be a digitalized DNA. If we had
the time and facilities to carry out proper sequencing, we might discover what
manner of life it represents. As it is, we don't know. We can only make
unsatisfactory wild guesses.'
'Appears?' Carl mimicked. 'Wild guesses? These are not the sort of words we're
used to hearing from you, Mace\'
'I'm not used to being confronted with this sort of problem, Mr Olivera. I
don't know what it is we've got here and nor does Leon. We do know that it may
have attempted to produce a
molecular template using residual enzymes in the chip. What we're both agreed
on is that that Kronos has undergone a significant change, a
two-and-a-half-fold increase in the number of its working motor neurons. Now
that could only be accomplished from within the chip itself after
manufacture.'
'But this is crazy!' Carl almost shouted. 'You're telling me that that goddamn
Kronos,' he jabbed his finger at the screen, 'has managed to do to itself what
we've been spending millions trying to do in TVR chambers?'
Leon broke the silence that followed Carl's outburst. 'I want to show you
something, Mr Olivera. We could use a TVR chamber but this is quicker.'
He sat at the electron microscope's control keyboard and increased the
magnification. The neurons swelled to the size of small tree trunks on the
projection screen. He checked a coordinate reference that had been scribbled
on the desktop and entered it on the keyboard. The picture on the screen
blurred and froze on a different close-up of the nerves.
'There's a pair we located an hour ago,' said Leon, using a mouse pointer to
indicate two complete nerves in the centre foreground. 'The one on the left is
one of ours, the structure is typical of the cells grown in this plant. The
one on the right is a repaired or regenerated cell. You can see that the
bonding is totally different if you look carefully.'
Carl agreed that he could see the difference. 'Have you checked the memory
address of the new cell?'
'Oh, yes. So far we've taken a random sample of about a hundred of the new
cells. None of their addresses match the addresses of the cells that were
mapped as working when the chip was made. They weren't working then, but they
are now.'
'We're both agreed on that,' Dr Pilleau observed.
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Carl tried to sort out his thoughts. 'The whole thing's too preposterous for
words,' he protested. 'Cells that can rejuvenate themselves?'
'I didn't say or imply that,' said Dr Pilleau mildly. 'Rejuvenate means renew.
Those repaired motor neurons weren't properly-formed cells in the first place.
And I certainly never said that they repaired themselves.'
Carl managed a bleak smile. This was more like Mace Pilleau. 'Okay then,
doctor. Tell me what did repair them?'
'Specialist nano-machines produced from the genome of the trojan's DNA.'
'Using what for matter?'
'There are plenty of impurities in the Kronos's nutrient fluid to provide the
materials to build a nano-machine, Mr Olivera,' Dr Pilleau replied evenly. 'We
haven't achieved 100 per cent purity yet.'
'I see. So these hypothetical nano-machines go crawling around inside one of
our Kronos chips, fixing dud memory cells using nutrient impurities as a
bonding agent?'
'That's putting it crudely, but yes.'
'Can I butt in here, Mace?' asked Leon.
'Be my guest,' was the doctor's uninterested reply.
'It's like this, Mr Olivera,' said Leon easily. 'As you know, a theory is a
hypothesis that is conjured up by loonies like me to explain observations. For
a theory to survive or die, it is put into a torture chamber and fed on facts
until it is either poisoned or flourishes. Right now the theory that there
were or are nano-machines in that chip that repaired those cells is the only
one we've got.'
'Miss Laine has a chip substitution theory,' Carl pointed out.
'A theory that now falls down on logical analysis in the light of what we're
learning, Mr Olivera,' said Dr Pilleau drily.
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