Lightpaths Read Free Page A

debris—all of which Seiji clearly could not bear to throw away—there had also been three top-of-the-line LogiBoxes, each containing stacked arrays of microsupercomputers, massively parallel processed—and each worth high six-figure debt in the major world currency of one’s choice.
    “The Boxes were with Jiro when they found his body,” Seiji said. “Since his death was ruled an accident, the Balaam police made only perfunctory efforts at hacking into them. You and your friends can talk to machines better than anyone else I know, Laksh. See if you can’t get into them and find out if they might have something to do with why my brother died the way he did.”
    As a favor to her friend, Lakshmi had agreed to warehouse the physical effects and to try to hack into the LogiBoxes. To be truthful, though, her motivation in regard to the black columnar Boxes was not fully altruistic: she hoped she might be able to hack into them, transfer out all the information relevant to Seiji’s brother, then keep the Boxes for her own use. They would be quite a prize.
    But things hadn’t turned out that way. A week ago she and Lev Korchnoi had powered the boxes up and hooked them into the habitat’s network coordinating system, the Variform Autonomous Joint Reasoning Activity. Lakshmi’s own creation, the HOME had adopted it for coordinating all the machine intelligence activities associated with the functioning of the habitat. The coordinating system talked with everything, from the big expert AIs to the micromachines, the nanotech assemblers and mechanorganic cellular automata. But now she couldn’t run it —or at least a part of it.
    Slumping in her hoverchair, amid all its robot arms and actuators, she pondered. In the bright metal of an arm she saw herself reflected, a dark-skinned woman with wavy black hair, fortyish, her wasted body covered in the loose, flowing, earth-toned clothing that was her personal style.
    I’m really not up to this sort of puzzle-solving, she thought. But she had no choice. Somehow she’d caused the problem. It was her responsibility to work on solving it.
    The foreign system running on the Boxes had taken three days to go through some long, elaborate boot-up procedure. Lakshmi thought that was odd enough in itself—even wondered for a while if in fact the entire Box system might be trapped in some sort of infinite loop—but she decided to let it run and see if it straightened itself out. It had, with a vengeance. At the end of the long boot-up, Lakshmi discovered that the system-construct running in the ‘Boxes had established links with her net coordinator at all scales. Every time she tried to hack into whatever it was that was running on the ‘Boxes, she was confronted and confounded by a seemingly nonsensical blocking message: LAW WHERE PROHIBITED BY VOID.
    Otherwise, the construct running on the ‘Boxes hadn’t done much—though what it had done was more than enough. Now it seemed fairly quiescent, content merely to identify itself with the habitat’s coordinating system, sending heavily encrypted data-bursts back and forth along the laser connectors. That would probably have disturbed no one—except Lakshmi. She had designed the net coordinator as a sort of metapersonality. The habitat’s many systems and subsystems nominally functioned as semiautonomous psychoid processes within the superpsyche of the coordinator. Whatever was running on the ‘Boxes should be submitting to the coordinating system—not identifying with it.
    Her reverie was rudely interrupted when several of her workshop’s robotic arms—down to milli- and micro-waldoes—began to swing into motion of their own accord. Lakshmi watched in startlement as the arms began reaching into and grabbing up items from the clutter throughout her workshop, but particularly out of the pile of Jiro Yamaguchi’s personal effects, as if searching for something. This was too weird, she thought. She needed to talk to somebody