"The language has changed with the technology," Tamas pointed out. "The word holographic is Old Anglic, no, earlier than that. Late English, maybe. Definitely prespaceflight."
"Right," Shari said. "The very first holographs were still photos that showed holographic properties. The subjectўlet's say it's your Great Aunt Matildaўwould be photographed using laser light that bathed her from several directions. The laser beams, then, reflected back, would pass through a piece of film, which would record, not the light, as with a normal chemical process, but die interference patterns caused when you brought the separate laser beams together again. Today it's all done with pattern fields and force lenses, of course. Back then, the film was a square of chemically treated plastic. Later, when you shine a laser through the film with its interference patterns, pow! There you see, floating before you, the three-dimensional image of Aunt Matilda, once more in all her glory!"
"Okay. . ." Jaime said, uncertain. He couldn't see where Shari was going with this.
"The interesting thing about that process was the film. You look at it, and you see nothing like the original subject. Not like a traditional photographic negative, where you could see the subject's image in reverse."
"Right," Tamas said, nodding. "You see only smears and blurs and rings."
"Say you cut off one corner of the piece of film," Shari said. "Does the holographic image of Aunt Matilda suddenly lose a head or an arm? No! The entire image is still intact. . . maybe with a little less resolution, a little less crispness and clarity. So you cut some more off, you cut the film in half. Matilda is still there, all of her, but fuzzy, with detail lost.
"Do you see?" Shari continued. "In that one piece of film, information allowing reconstruction of the
BOLO RISING
47
entire image exists everywhere on the film's surface. You could snip the tiniest piece from one corner of the film, shine your laser through it, and still get the complete image of Aunt Matilda, though it might be too blurry and lacking in detail for you to see her very well."
"Except for the fact that I don't have a Great Aunt Matilda," Jaime told her, "I'm following you. But what does all of this have to do withў"
"With Bolo memory." She nodded. "I was just getting to that. Now I won't go into how psychotronic memory works. In fact, humans have used various systems over the years for the storage and transmission of data, and the actual physical process isn't important. But you can picture a Bolo's memory like that square of film with the holograph of Aunt Matilda. It is a whole, with the information uniformly dispersed across the entire memory field."
"Right!" Tamas said. "Chop a piece out of it, somehow, and the Bolo doesn't suddenly forget what it had for breakfast yesterday. No, it still remembers everything, though maybe the detail, the resolution, isn't quite what it was before. You cannot selectively destroy pieces of a Bolo's memory."
Jaime mulled this over for a moment. "Then how do you explain Hector's behavior? He acts like he has some kind of selective amnesia. He doesn't remember anything important.. . like who or what he is, or what happened on Cloud. I can't be sure, but sometimes I get the impression that he is remembering, but then just as quickly he's forgotten again. Whatever it was, it's gone."
"That's quite possible, you know," Alita put in. "It sounds like a data shunt."
"What's that?"
"She's right," Shari said.
She scratched absently beneath her left breast. "I
48
William H. Keith, Jr.
was thinking along those lines myself." She hesitated, as though trying to think how best to explain it. "Once Hector calls up a particular memory . . . let's say it's the result of one of his autodiagnostics."
"Yeah. That's a good one."
"Okay. He runs the diagnostic. He gets the result. All sorts of things are wrong."
"Yeah, starting with a big fat hole in his side."
"Right. The data is routed first to his storage memory, where it's incorporated into the whole, then routed up to his working memory, what you might call his conscious mind."
