Metal Fatigue Read Online Free PDF

regardless. Barney was already dreading the report she would have to file later that morning with Margaret Chappel, head of RSD.
    "You know what I think?"
    Roads was leaning up against the car, deep in his own thoughts. "That you'll be glad to catch this bastard and get back on day shift?"
    "No. That we're in over our heads, and getting deeper by the second."
    Roads looked up at her. "You mean Raoul?"
    "Yes."
    "Well, I can understand that. Unfortunately, if we want Morrow's help — "
    "But do we?" Barney broke in. "I think he's hiding something."
    "And I agree."
    "Can we trust him, then?"
    "What Keith said about himself was true, Barney. He's a modern version of the old junkyard men, collecting gadgets for the rainy day that may never come. Hence his position on the Most-Most Wanted list: the distributors in R&R don't know what he is, but they know what he's got, and they'd love to get their hands on it." Roads shrugged. "No-one's managed to get close because he'll fight when he has to."
    Barney absorbed that in silence, until the question that nagged at her most finally broke free:
    "That trick with the hologram ... is Morrow really dead?"
    "He sure is." Roads's gaze wandered as he replied. "His mind was transferred to a neural net just before the War, shortly before his body died of a motor neurone disease. Now he fits into a crate about half the size of an ordinary coffin, and weighs twice as much."
    "Doesn't that make him vulnerable?"
    "Only if someone knows where that crate is — and he makes sure no-one does. It could be on the other side of the city, for all it matters."
    "How?"
    "Because he can use communication links to transmit data, just like a computer. All he needs is the right hardware and he can 'be' wherever he likes."
    It was this that bothered Barney most of all. "You talk like he's a machine, and yet he reckons he's human. Surely he can't have it both ways?"
    "Unfortunately, he can." Roads looked sympathetic. "He explained how he works, once, but I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense."
    "Try me."
    "Serious?"
    "Why not? You said you would back at the bar."
    He shrugged. "All right then. Have you ever heard of something called 'syncritical path analysis'?"
    "No."
    "How about the Boss Voice theory?"
    "Never," Barney said.
    "Well, neither had I until Keith explained them to me." He smiled. "It helps if you imagine the brain to be a collection of many parts working in concert rather than a coherent whole; more like the organs in a body or the species of an ecosystem than the components of a machine. Some parts keep you breathing, others monitor your use of language or memory recall; there might be thousands of individual parts in your head, each evolved to perform a particular function, and they all interact: a portion of one will play a role in the function of another, and vice versa. With me so far?"
    Barney nodded. "I think so." She had taken a term of basic psychology back in high school, and the general principle rang a bell. "The whole thing is moving, right? Even when we're asleep?"
    "As I understand it, yes. Everything in the brain is cyclic and chaotic. You have oscillations that appear regular, but arise purely by chance; if the parts — the pattern generators — were rearranged in even a slightly different way, the end result would be quite different. So the closest you get to stillness is when you meditate and reveal the standing wave, the holding pattern, beneath the mess. But the sum of this 'mess', not the holding pattern, is what we call consciousness; if you add all the processes together, in other words, what you get is 'I', the Boss Voice in our heads."
    Roads glanced at Barney to confirm she was still keeping up. She nodded, although less certainly than before.
    He went on: "Researchers back in Morrow's day apparently knew how the brain uses chaos to encode and transmit information along neurons; that's how they built the implants used in berserkers. Decoding the parts of the brain and the