Regenesis

And, be it noted, in Gia

Well, they tried. In Callie’s place, they needed someone with the security training necessary to back up sera’s bodyguard, the ability to order CITs assertively, at need, and–a talent more regularly employed–the voiceto command respect from Wing One’s ReseuneSec officers. Callie BC certainly didn’t have the voice. She politely and tentatively suggested rather than ordered. She’d been one of the Carnath household, well qualified in supply; but she hated having to face interpersonal problems. Or deal with CIT emotions.

The household really, desperately neededan alpha like Seely, in Florian’s own view. They needed one, like Seely, that had the capability to act decisively against anyone, even a born‑man who claimed supervisor authority. Thatstrength wasn’t easily come by. The original Seely had been Denys Nye’s majordomo…and there was actually a seventeen‑year‑old azi of that exact geneset‑psychset combination available for training, ideal for the job, in Florian’s own opinion–if sera would possibly take a direct hand and request him. But–sera had said, a logical leap that confused him, first that there was already a Seely‑type being born fairly soon, and secondly she could never abide meeting a Seely‑type in the halls.

True, there was that particular individual in the birthlabs, to be paired with another Abban: that was a problem they well understood. But now that the issue had come up, sera declared she wouldn’t have AS‑10 assigned on the planet, let alone in her household.

Well, it was clearly a decision, one there was certainly no disputing. And absent Seely AS‑10, all other alphas of Contractable age were already committed to specific programs from infancy. There were a very few others, older, some of those quite concentrated in their own specialty, none of them socialized for a household.

So they were down to three household candidates notquite as good, one a beta, the other two gammas, the highest classification they could find that weren’t designated elsewhere–not optimum, but satisfactory, in their estimation. They’d have to mesh smoothly with Gia

That put it down to the solitary beta, who was at the top end of beta, but under‑socialized for the job.

It was frustrating. They were both up to their elbows in lists of tapes studied and certifications given, which sera could have read at a glance. But sera was either in deepstudy or, lately, on her computer, and on a motion‑sensitive trigger, so neither of them thought it good to ask sera about it.

There were other experts they could ask: they sat in Wing One, in the heart of ReseuneLabs, where such sources abounded. But that meant exposing the makeup of sera’s potential staff to people outside, which they were more than reluctant to do. The manuals of Contracted azi, containing the alterations made in that specific mindset over a lifetime–those were closely guarded, property of that azi and his Supervisor and not available in Library. But for anybody with a Base access above Three–and they were using a small subset of Base One–they could just walk though any unContracted’s manual there was.

Scary, already, in their way of thinking. They hadn’t known how accessible the unContracteds’ manuals were to people in Wing One and Admin. They were supposed to find new people who were safe. They found instead that the ones they already had hadn’t been as safe as they hoped. Somebody had been sloppy. And they ought to report that to sera–when she was herself again.

But that wouldn’t happen until they had the household ru

And that brought it down to five paired beta genesets in the security track. And finding out whether Denys or Giraud had ordered any special features in lower‑level, unassigned security was, again, in Florian’s estimation, something sera really needed to do, with her expertise. The best they could do was search the database they could reach for all interventions in the training, any decision that indicated a deviation from that geneset’s initial program.

They learned a bit, doing it. They learned more than they’d pla

Well, at least the available betas weren’t long on social training. And they were beta‑smart, meaning they’d take tape fast, and literally, if they had to.

They ran their search from the security office inside sera’s apartment, in premises where the first Florian and the first Catlin had been the authority, in an apartment where the first Ari had lived. Two of the wall screens were the weather and the airport schedule–the Ya

A bank of other screens, constantly shifting the view, monitored the riverside, the private boat dock and the big wharves where shipments arrived in the town adjunct to Reseune. Cameras swept the town streets, with its usual traffic of azi and CITs on their own business, a bus, some few runabouts whizzing about to the hazard of pedestrians. Another set of cameras swept the broad fields and pens down in AG, where crops were burgeoning out of winter earth and pigs and chickens lived in long, safe sheds, protected, like all the town and labs, by the ring of tall precip towers that kept the world at bay.

Another screen, to the left of the view of the town, was occupied with the parsing of lines of code, the beta psychset they were currently investigating.

Three screens, on the side console, kept an electronic eye on sera’s friend Sam Whitely, at work on the construction site adjacent to–but not yet accessing–Wing One. Sam’s azi, Pavel, had a camera clipped to his collar and rarely left Sam for more than a brief errand. That afforded them a good constant view of Sam, who was not the sort to get into trouble in the first place.

The cameras gave them a view of everything and everyone they had to protect…a split screen kept an eye on Justin Warrick and his companion Grant ALX‑972, in their small office over in Education, where they were spending the day–it was where they were supposed to be on Thursdays.

They didn’t, however, have one to track Warrick senior–who was on no one’s trusted list, and who was the reason they didn’t want to present the files they were working on to Justin Warrick for review.

JordanWarrick. Therewas the problem that disturbed the whole house–and one reason they were anxious to improve sera’s general security. They weren’t a completely conjoined problem, Justin and Jordan. Jordan and Justin hadn’t met face to face since a notable argument some days ago. Jordan had mostly staved in his own apartment since, and had he attempted to crack a restricted level, the whole of Reseune would have twitched.

As it was, ReseuneSec just logged every keystroke, every request Jordan Warrick made of Library, and passed the collected information on. What the elder Warrick asked to access today were all generally published files two years old, so they raised no alarms. The actual content was for some specialist in Hicks’s office–ReseuneSec–to read, because they involved genetic expression, and for that maybe even ReseuneSec would have to ask one of the scientists.