Chrysalis

46

Logan decided to hold off on the single malt.

“I’m sorry to trouble you,” Purchase said as he led Logan through the BioCertain cube farm. “But I couldn’t help keeping your concerns in mind as I checked the new drugs we’ve developed over the last year and a half.” He swallowed a little painfully. “Well, I finished the correlation. There was rather a lot of data, as you might imagine.” He drew a deep breath. “You have to understand, I worked briefly in Carewell research before being promoted to BioCertain. That gives me a unique perspective. It’s rare that Chrysalis allows that kind of… cross-pollination, as it were. Anyway, what I stumbled on, most unusually, affects both departments.”

Logan nodded with what he hoped was encouragement. I know: you’re in the doghouse. But just get to the anomaly, damn it.

“Carewell funds numerous field expeditions — gathering un-known plants, learning indigenous medical techniques, and so forth. We — I mean, they — are always searching for compounds from which to synthesize new medications. You know, aspirin originally discovered in willow bark, things like that. About eight months ago, Carewell sent a small research expedition to the Arctic. The year before, ground-penetrating radar at that location had revealed what appeared to be a Neanderthal gravesite. The two scientists Carewell sent had various tasks on the new expedition, but a primary one was to extract core samples that, hopefully, contained Neanderthal DNA. If it was indeed a mass grave, we might learn something useful from what killed them, if only prophylactically. Permafrost is an ideal preserver of microbes: frozen, lightless, starved of oxygen. Of course, the greatest likelihood was they died from starvation or in a territorial dispute, but we thought it worth—”

“Of course you did,” Logan interrupted. Twenty-one hours. Shit. “What did they find?”

“That’s where the, ah, anomaly begins. The senior member of the team, Dr. Randall Pike, sent back a single message, almost jubilant, about what they’d found. But that was the team’s only communication beyond the regular coded pings, and we don’t normally allow dispatches from the field. In any case, Dr. Pike met a tragic end — he fell into a crevasse on the final day of the expedition — and the other scientist returned with a number of ice cores and the unfortunate news that what Pike initially thought to be a breakthrough was actually just a set of mistaken readings. The ice cores were set aside in frozen storage — merely as a formality, since they contained nothing of value — and were destroyed in an accidental fire a month or two later, effectively ending the project. I mean, with the lead scientist dead, the samples valueless… it was one loss too many. Future field research at the site was canceled, and the other scientist was reassigned. But as I began to examine the correlations of our new drugs — per your request — an unindexed artifact appeared.”

“What?”

“A piece of data just hanging there, with no associated reference or index point.”

“And why is that important?”

“Because the system enforces referential integrity for all information. Orphaned data simply can’t exist — except on purpose.”

“You mean, as in hiding something?”

“I can’t think of any other possibility. Everything that takes place here is recorded, by” — his voice dropped — “well, you know, Arc X. There’s no way you can stop that… but if someone’s clever enough, they could damage a record so it wouldn’t show up in a normal search. It would just be floating out there in the ether. I would never have noticed it had I not undertaken such an unorthodox search.”

So Purchase was aware of the Helix, as well. Logan began to think that — even if they didn’t know its name — a lot of people at the Complex found it increasingly necessary in their everyday duties.

“Can you tell me more about this data artifact?” he asked.

“There was enough intact to make a partial reconstruction. It came from the ice cores that had been brought back from that Arctic expedition.”

“I thought they were all melted in the fire.”

“Supposedly they were. But nevertheless, the metadata indicated at least one section of core survived the fire. Not only that, but it had been moved to a different subdivision of Carewell.”

“What subdivision?”

Purchase swallowed again. “DNA Synthetics and PCR Repli-cation.”

Logan went abruptly still. He had a good imagination, and all of a sudden, it began to suggest a lot of unpleasant possibilities.

“Dr. Purchase,” he said, “do you have a name and photo of the other scientist who went on that failed expedition?”

“Yes, Wing Kaupei.” Purchase spoke to his Sentinel unit, and then a hologram appeared on the table between them. Logan recognized the woman — down to the mole centered on her long, slender throat.

“Send her entire dossier to my private account, please,” he told Purchase.

“Her tracking logs, as well? Everything?”

“I want to know if she likes her eggs sunny side up.”

There was a pause. “Done,” said the scientist after another brief consult with his Sentinel earpiece.

Jesus Christ. Purchase had just uncovered a nest of fire ants — and he knew it, too. What neither of them could guess yet was just how deep, or nasty, that nest was. “Thank you. Sorry I kept you waiting. I think I’d better inform Asperton.” And Logan began to rise.

“There’s something else,” Purchase said.

Logan sat down.

“While I was waiting for you just now, I went over my findings again. And… well, something must be going wrong with our data farm, because not only was I unable to input any new information, but a lot of unrelated dead data began to spew out. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Peyton must be having a fit, Logan thought. It seemed that their “freeze” had caused more damage to the Helix than even he’d expected.

“What do you mean — ‘dead’ data?” he asked.

“Useless stuff that the system deems need not be retained. Obsolete system logs, for example.”

Logan thought fast. The Helix, he knew, was a work in progress — they were improving it as they built it — and he’d been told it stored data from every node at the entire Center. It determined what to retain, whether you wanted something retained or not — look at the lengths Wing Kaupei had taken to redact data. So if the Helix kept everything — if it was as immutable as Asperton bragged — wouldn’t it keep everything that it deleted, too? Maybe a final, production version wouldn’t. But it seemed to Logan that if the Helix, abruptly halted in its busywork, was going temporarily haywire — it might start displaying all records, marked as deleted or not, until such time as it regained sanity and began filtering those out again?

“I realize you didn’t expect to see this dead data filling up your screen,” Logan said. “But once you determined what it was — were you able to make sense of it? Could you, say, follow a breadcrumb trail through it?”

Purchase took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. “I didn’t hire her, you know.”

So they’d come to it at last — the root of why Purchase was acting so twitchy. “What did you find, exactly?”

“Randall Pike’s personal log from the Arctic expedition. Along with a partial series of tests that took place… here, in PRC Replication.”

“May I have it, please?”

Purchase hesitated. “It’s about three gigs in all.”

Logan stood up again. “There’s a tablet in my quarters. Can you transfer it to that? Three gigabytes — I don’t think even Grace can read that fast.” And, without waiting for an answer, he thanked Purchase and left the office.

“Jeremy?” came the voice in his ear. “Just so you know: I can assimilate three gigabytes of data in less than a second.”

“Sorry, Grace,” he told his Voyager unit as he made his way back to the main concourse. “I meant reading aloud.”

“Aloud? As in a bedtime story?”

“Something like that.”