Regenesis

“Here,” Jordan had said, and pointed to the same area Grant had indicated, down in the secondaries–but then he’d linked it to a second item. Kyle had programming from back in the first days of the azi participation in the War–a routine about defending what his Contract‑holder set him to defend. That was fine, Ari thought, but to an alpha that defendwent metaphysical real fast, and they didn’t do that kind of thing; that had stood out, to her eyes. She found that kind of generality in the programming at four other points she could see, things they didn’t dowith alphas or even betas nowadays, because things hadgone wrong. She had those circled on her own copy, and Justin and Grant both had tagged them as inappropriate from the start. Old‑style programming. Old as the azi in question.

Kyle being, himself an Alpha Supervisor by the military’s make‑do procedures of the day, had considerably reworked his own programming by the time Defense sent him back to Reseune as a spy…that clearly had happened.

Prang had said, regarding the initials on the file, “IC. Carnath, maybe.”

“Huh,” Jordan snorted. “That’s Charles. Ivan Charles, not Carnath.”

“Him,” Prang had said, and when Ari asked who Ivan Charles was. Prang said simply, “He worked on the military sets.”

But Jordan had said, “Emory Senior used to take his crappy work and just shove it through. It made money. They were turning out azi by the hundreds, same type, same geneset. You could have a whole damn company the officers couldn’t tell apart, no attempt to do a sociology set on the unit, you just shoved them out the door and they went out to some godforsaken operation and died by the hundreds; and then they’d patch up the survivors out there on the lines and send them back to the War. Emory Senior had some damned idiot staff writing broad‑based tape back during the War. Defense wanted to control everything, every damned subclause and dot, a routine to do this, a routine to do that–the client wanted certain things, they got them.”

Ari had been a little offended at that assessment. Then she realized Emory Senior, in that context, meant OlgaEmory.

Way, way back, then.

“Certificates weren’t specific either,” Prang had said. “The higher‑end operators handled both the betas and the alphas, and there wasn’t any certification in the sense we use now.”

“We’re not teaching a damned history lesson,” Jordan had said. “Kyle’s alpha. He got a crap initial set. They all did.”

“He was supposed to serve in headquarters,” Prang had said, “no nearer the front than Alpha Station.”

“His military record is nowhere in file and we don’t know where the hell he was,” Jordan had said. “We weren’t around for Olga’s goings‑on. We assume what we have to assume. But we’re notassuming when we say he’s kill‑capable. The axe code didn’t take, did it? That means, alpha or not, he came back to us with it, and nobody could have installed it on him in ReseuneSec unless the axe code worked. But somebodydid it. That meant he was near the lines, and myguess is he got crap‑work patched in to shape him up to work in a combat zone. Sure, Defense swore they didn’t ever do that. But they swore to a lot of things that were a flat lie.”

“Why,” Ari had asked–and she hadn’t wanted to interrupt the train of thought, but it was an important question, “why, if he got back to Reseune in ‘62, why didn’t the first Ari ever look at him? Why didn’t she catch it?”

Prang had said. “I checked the timeline. Your predecessor had resigned the directorship to take up the Council seat. Ya

“Giraud was a damned fool,” Jordan had said. “Ari had gotten Defense to turn over every alpha they had and most of them were over in technical. But this one–this special one–I’m betting he was handling azi line troops, and if he was, it’s a damn certainty he got beta tape and got shoved out thereto patch them up, because they didn’t ever ship betas back to some nice safe hospital ship. We never sent out any alphas suited for combat. So what else do you think they did, to get alphas that could take the hammering, on the lines? Beta tape. Next most applicable, and they had a pile of it.”

It had been hours. Hours of Prang and Jordan arguing, and then Justin arguing with Jordan, “You don’t have to touch the tertiary sets at all. If he’s self‑modified, they’re irrelevant.”

“What are we suggesting?” Jordan had snapped. “Go straight after the deep sets?”

“I’m saying it’s linked back to that secondary you named, and at least…”

“Oh, let’s just do deep sets and go for an early lunch.”

Justin hadn’t flared. He’d said, as calm as Grant, “One sharp stress and a calm‑down.”

“You’ll kill him. That thing in tertiary will have a trap on it like you haven’t seen. And remember he’s built off it for decades. It’s got all sorts of embellishments hung on it.”

“We do have him supported,” Ivanov said.

The talk had gone way deep into medical jargon at that point, and Ari had just sat with her chin on her fist, fascinated, and listened to four of the best there’d ever been going at it line by line–Prang was clearly outclassed; Grant and Paul got into it, and Justin stuck to his argument that they needed to do a preliminary fix in the secondaries.

Then she said, after listening to all of it, and flipping back through the lines of programming, the originallines of programming, that Kyle had started with. “The self‑defense ethic. That’s where.”

Jordan had given her a sharp, hard look.

“Support it,” she’d said, “don’t attack it. That’s part of his original deep set.”

“Who said attack it?” Jordan had said peevishly.

She said, “We support the deep set, right where this beta tape’s taken hold. We say an enemy’s gotten inside his defenses, and we know it’s beta, and he has to find this enemy for us. So he’ll identify that tape and shove it outside his safe perimeter. If you’re right, he’s wired everything off that start–so he’s the safest one to unwire it. Isn’t he? He trusts Hicks. If we get Hicks to say he has to get ID on the beta section, can’t he do it? Convince him it doesn’t belong. And then we tell him to erase the intruder–so he just starts taking out the secondary level, unwiring the combat ethic the block relies on. Doesn’t he? Everythingthe military’s done is going to be based on the tape they put in. They aren’t us. They can’t workon secondary, and the tape they know best is the tape they put in.”

It had at least gotten their attention, and made a silence, and made Jordan frown at her.

“Maybe,” Jordan had said. “Dangerous as hell.”

“She’s got a point,” Justin had said.

“She’s been studying fucking Emory.”

“You know I have,” she’d said calmly. “For more than half my life.”

Prang had just kept her mouth shut, but Paul had said, echoing Justin, “She has a point. Avoiding fighting it out down on tertiary would be safer, because tertiary may be a lower charge, but it’s just that much wider. Whatever they did creating that block just spreads out into territory he knows and we can’t map. And maybe, if he can ID the tape, we’ve got it on file. Maybe they didn’t risk anything they’d written or modded and it will turn out to be Reseune tape.”

Jordan hadn’t said anything about it for the rest of the session, not until the next meeting, when he’d said, “All right, Ari Junior, Justin, Grant. Elaborate. How are you preventing a breakdown if we go into this operation with the happy theory they didn’t write their own beta routine–and maybe didn’t even write their own block?”

“We ask Dr. Ivanov to keep the physiology stable,” Ari said. “Just keep shooting him full of the same feel‑good juice the compliance ethic, which we’re triggering, naturally manufactures; and we just let Hicks argue him into erasing the beta tape.”