"Working memory. That's different from the holographic memory you were talking about?"
"It is holographic. It's also part of the Bolo's overall memory system. But it is different, yes, a subset of the Bolo's memory, where it deals with the here and now, where it makes plans and interacts with its environment and does all the other things that an intelligent and self-aware creature does when it thinks. My guess is that the information passing from storage memory to working memory is being intercepted, somehow."
"Physically intercepted, you mean," Wal said. "You're saying there's some kmd of clucker device buried inside Hector? Something that monitors the data coming through to his working memory and maybe reshuffles it?"
"Has to be," Alita said. "They wouldn't have been able to reprogram him from scratch."
"Why not?" Wal wanted to know.
"Clucker programming languages and protocols aren't the same as ours, obviously," Tamas pointed out. "Their machines can't possibly talk to our machines, unless they use some sort of a go-between, a translator."
"They must have learned something about how our
BOLD RISING
49
computers work," Jaime said, "or they couldn't have programmed the translator."
"There was the Empyrion," Wal reminded them. "She had computers, including psychotronic stuff. And she had people who knew how to program them."
Empyrion was one of die transports that had brought the original colonists to Cloud, two hundred T-years before. Refitted as an exploration vessel, the ship had been engaged in a long-range survey of local space, an outlying region of the galaxy's Western Arm ... what Terran astronomers once had called the Sagittarian Arm from its location in the night skies of old Earth. Almost fifty T-standard years before, Empyrion's captain had reported picking up some odd E-M transmissions emanating from the direction of the Galactic Core and announced his intention of finding the source. Those transmissions were indecipherable but almost certainly a product of intelligence; contact with a hitherto unknown species was anticipated with some excitement.
But Empyrion had vanished, never to be heard from again. And the Masters, when they appeared, had entered Cloudan space from the direction of the Galactic Core.
"I think we can make a good guess about how this, this clucker device was placed inside Hector," Jaime said.
"The hole in his side," Alita said. "We still don't know how the enemy burned that into him, do we?"
"Their meteor strike took out the whole damned city," Wal pointed out. "Melting through a meter or so of duralloy wouldn't be a problem for them. Hector s battle screens would have been tougher to crack."
"They had Empyrion's battle screens as a model," Tamas pointed out. "They probably used a phase-shift cycler to get through the screens, then something like a fusion torch to melt through the armor. The question
50
William H. Keith, Jr.
is what they put inside Hector, to scramble his circuits." "We could go inside and find out," Jaime said. "Eh?" Wal looked puzzled, "What's that?" "I said we could go inside. Through the crater. It's big enough for someone my size to pass easily." "Interesting thought. Then what?" "We find out what they did to him, and fix it." "It won't be that easy," Alita told him. "It's possible that there could still be spare parts on board. Ever since the Mark XXIX, Bolos have included an internal logistics/maintenance capability. But the cluckers might've stripped him of his spares. And even if they didn't, we don't have contra-gravity cranes or fusion forges, no duralloy slab rollers, no casting molds." She held up her hands, turning diem palm-up, then palm-down. "We have nothing at all but these."
"And this," Jaiine said, pointing to his head. "Hands and brains. That's all humans have ever had, really, all the way back to the Ice Age that spawned us. All the rest are incidentals."
"If we can find the mechanism that's affected Hector's operation," Shari said, "we should be able to initiate a reboot. Bring him back on line ... all the way."
"Also, there's one tool we do have access to," Wal pointed out. "It. If ever there was a time . . ."
"Yeah," Jaime said, nodding slowly. It was never named aloud, just in case.
"Won't help with reprogiamming Bolos," Alita added, "but it'll sure take care of any surprises the cluckers have planted inside him."
