"Look at this log of her accesses in the last week," Sarvik said, indicating one of the screens on the console beside the desk in his office next to the main lab area—a pointless gesture, since nobody was watching. "Twenty-seven of them are to files written in extended-base hypercode. And they were open for long periods. She's supposed to be an animal behavior specialist. What kind of animal behavior specialist understands extended-base hypercode? I tell you, she's been put in here to do some digging for somebody. Either those mammal brains upstairs who con shares by pretending to run this place, or some other organization outside that's probably just as big. For a start, obviously, we have to find out which."
Nobody had said that Leradil wasn't a spy or that Sarvik shouldn't find out. Borijans made everything sound contentious through habit. A calmer voice from a speaker grille in the top center of the console panel answered Sarvik's high-tension sputterings. At the same time a view of a campus complex appeared on the large central screen, with a superimposed image of a diploma.
"I got into the Gweths University records system as you said, and her degree checks out." The picture disappeared and was replaced in rapid succession by a shot of a suborbital dartliner in flight, a view of a hotel lobby, a restaurant menu, and a catalog from a fashion store. "But airline archives and credit receipts for the years '34 through '37 show inconsistencies for the time that she says she spent in Yordisland"—the screen showed a map of a former, shortlived Turlean political agglutination—"when it was still part of Chearce, before the Seven-Coasts League broke up. I think she's covering up something there—very likely a part of her background that she doesn't want to advertise in Replimaticon. That says to me that she's from somewhere outside." The visual accompaniment ended with a red query mark that grew to fill the screen, then began spinning and shrinking into the center, where it vanished.
Sarvik's principal assistant—and one that he could always rely on to be trustworthy, unlike Borijans—was the latest and most advanced of his artificial intelligences: GENIUS (GENeral Intelligence Universal Simulation) 5. Sarvik had intended the acronym sarcastically when he had coined it, but artificial intelligence had not yet progressed to the stage of deviousness that characterized the natural product, and GENIUS 5 accepted its name unquestioningly—in fact, almost proudly—as meaning exactly what it said.
GENIUS added, "I thought of checking the airline data and credit transactions myself. It took eight minutes flat. A cinch. I don't know how you meat brains ever managed on your own at all." A caricature of a Borijan head wearing a dumb expression appeared on the screen to underline the point.
Sarvik's epaulets bristled. "Watch you don't get too big for your boxes, or I might start pulling plugs," he squawked. "It's only because of the clear superiority of biology that you are able to experience any mindlike processes at all."
"Clear superiority, huh?"
"I'd have thought it patently obvious."
"Oh, is that so?" The faces of Pezamin Greel and Marduk Alifrenz appeared side by side on the screen, retrieved from Replimaticon's personnel records. They were the directors who knew the complete story behind Sarvik's research. "In that case, why is it that you and your two friends upstairs that you don't want the others to know about are working so hard on transferring yourselves into obviously superior nonbiological hosts? It seems a funny way to want to go if you don't call it improvement." GENIUS drew a series of representations of progressively more advanced life-forms, starting with a single cell and going on through a fish, a reptile, a bird, a Borijan, a primitive computing complex, and a schematic of Turle's planetary net. It ended with another query mark, enclosed in a circle and underscored by the caption then what? "Surely you didn't imagine that you were the end of the line, did you?"
"We've been through all that," Sarvik said. "The advantages are purely physical, but I don't suppose that a heap of glass wafers could be expected to understand that." The word "ratty" appeared on GENIUS's doodling screen, cycling through a sequence of styles and colors. Sarvik sniffed, unimpressed. "What do you know of the billion-year evolutionary heritage that we possess? I assure you that what you think is thinking constitutes nothing more than incidental activity at the dimmest fringes of consciousness."
"If you're saying I can't think anything, then how can I think that I think? If I do think that I think, then what you've just said doesn't stand." contradiction! flashed jubilantly on the screen. "When you can compute products of twenty-digit numbers in nanoseconds, you might know something. Sometimes I wonder if biological systems could ever become fully conscious at all. DNA was just nature's way of making machines."
Sarvik got up and noticed that a pot of some kind of hanging leaves with pointy-petaled, off-white blossoms from the departmental secretary's ever-expanding horticultural collection had invaded his office again, finding a place on the top of the document cabinet, where it blocked the line of sight from the desk to one end of his wall planner. He moved the pot and saw behind it the reminder to himself of his appointment with Dr. Queezt that morning, which had slipped his mind. "For something that makes such a fuss about nanoseconds, the amount of time that you waste bickering over trivia is incomprehensible," he muttered irritably as he carried the offending plant back out into the lab. "Could we stop emulating the superficialities of cognizant processes and get back to the matter at hand? We need to find out more about this Driss woman. My instinct tells me that she's up to something big." He set the pot down on the control cubicle of the holo-encoder, nudging it precariously between a riot of yellow spears and a tangle of green tracery spouting stars of bright red velvet.
GENIUS's voice followed him to the grille in the display panel of the multi-D graphic analyzer. "Questionable: the wisdom of being guided by this thing you call instinct. Where are your facts?"
"You'll just have to accept it as indicative of the superiority of naturally evolved minds," Sarvik said.
"And you might take it as indicative of the superiority of precisely engineered minds that you're supposed to meet Dr. Queezt at Pygal Central Hospital in twenty minutes," GENIUS retorted.
"Thank you, I am aware of that," Sarvik snarled, furious at himself for letting the machine get a point up on him needlessly.
"You don't seem to be doing much about it," GENIUS remarked. Sarvik stumped back into the office to get his coat from the rack there. The words retention impaired (chuckle) greeted him from the screen. "Just imagine needing half the morning and moving yourself physically across the city in order to exchange sound waves," GENIUS taunted while Sarvik was putting on his coat and securing his office. "I could have it done in less time than you take to forget a phone number. Admit it. The next stop's the fossils department."
"Maybe, but if so, it's still a while away yet," Sarvik said. "Meanwhile, there are some more checks on Leradil Driss that I want you to make." He gave GENIUS the details while putting papers and a few other items he wanted to take with him into his briefcase. Then, with a flourish that evoked a warm feeling of malevolent satisfaction, he entered the Interactive Disable code to turn off the speech/vision interface and leave GENIUS undistracted to concentrate on tracing network routings and cracking data protection protocols. After checking over the office one last time, he locked the door and set the security trips and marched briskly from the lab to go out into the city of Pygal.