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screen, Cardenas and Fourhorses quietly made their way back to the sitting area that faced the wide phototropic window. The social worker was beyond impressed. "That's the most realistic animal program I've ever seen! Where did you buy it?" "I didn't buy it. It's an outgrowth of some work I had to do a while ago, at GenDyne. Charliebo was a real dog. My dog. For a while, years ago, he was also my eyes. He died doing his job, but the essence of him got vacced and turned into an independent psychomorph. Don't ask me to explain the technology. Better box designers than I are still trying to figure it out. But organic or grammatic, he's still my dog. Now he's Katla's, too, even if he exists only as a morphological resonance haunting the deepest interstices of the Big Box." Fourhorses struggled to understand. "You said he could be her friend. That much I understand. But what did you mean when you said he could watch over her?" Cardenas's expression grew serious. "If the situation requires it, Charliebo can go fully tactile." Her jaw dropped. "No private gram can go tactile! That kind of technology is restricted to the military." He said nothing; simply gazed back at her. She exhaled sharply and nodded slowly. "Okay, I'm impressed." She glanced toward the girl, seated before the tunnel at the far end of the room. "You're sure it can't hurt her?" "Charliebo won't hurt anyone, or anything, that I'veokayed . She'll be fine. And even if she never needs to call on him for help, she'll feel a lot safer knowing that he's there. It's like the imaginary gun your father put under your pillow when you were a kid for you to use against the night monsters." "What?" "Never mind. I've got two days off. What are you doing for dinner tonight?" The look on her face revealed her surprise. Truth be told, he was a little stunned at the alacrity of the offer himself. It was a month later, as he was sitting in front of the active tunnel in his office downtown, scrolling Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html through the relevant background information on a case he and Hyaki had been assigned to investigate, when the declaration brazenly splashed itself across infovoid before him. REVENGE FOR THE MOCK! It startled him, and Angel Cardenas was not one to be easily startled. It sat there, glowing softly before his eyes, the letters floating in the darkness of the tunnel. His first reaction was that it was a joke, probably concocted by Hyaki or some of the boys in Records. But a quick trace failed to identify the sender or the source, and a deeper probe quickly lost itself in the nether mists and mysteries of the Big Box. One thing he was able to determine: irregardless of who had sent it, it had not originated within the Department. That did not preclude it being a gag perpetrated by a friend or colleague. Even so ... He made a record of it and the relevant back-trail, as far as he was able to trace it. Could it have originated with one of The Mock's subordinates? Most of them were incarcerated, awaiting trial or already serving time. But there was no guarantee that the sweep that had been carried out based on the detailed information supplied by Katla Mockerkin had caught absolutely everyone. There was the hostile gram, of course. The one that had sought the capture or elimination of The Mock's daughter. The one that had almost drowned him at the Mock's underwater command center in Southeast Texas. That mollysphere had been dismantled and dissected, providing a rich lode of infocrunch to law enforcement authorities in ten countries. Had the central molly spit out a last, vengeful command prior to being severed from its box and extracted? Retribution was not a quality that was usually attributed to inert boot grams. Suppose some last-minute, apostate permutation of The Mock's main molly had escaped detection, and from its base in Belize or Barbados or Botswana was contemplating vengeance against the federale responsible for the termination of its core activities? [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |