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could scrape together of his personal history. Conceived in a laboratory he might have been, but he still had parents. The egg had belonged to a live woman named Ruud Anasage, the sperm to an unknown man, even if the ingredients had subsequently been stirred and shaken and diced and spliced by the well-meaning but wildly eclectic Meliorares. He wanted to know everything about them, especially the still unknown sperm donor—his father. And he wanted to know the specifics, insofar as they might be possible to know, of his own individual case and what the Meliorares had hoped to achieve by manipulating the innermost secrets of his fetal DNA. Possessing only hints, he sought certainty.
    He probed further, combining keywords from the reports with what he already knew. This was dangerous. If there were alarms posted on such information, cross-correlating might well trigger them.
    Tunneling deeper into the most detailed of the correspondence, he found himself searching actual original source material. That led him from the media siever that had compiled the report to central Commonwealth science repositories on Bali and in Mexico City. Newly emergent warnings were followed by implacable lockouts. Utilizing skills sharpened from months of working with the sophisticated system on board the
Teacher,
he bypassed them all. Disappointingly, much of the material he ultimately scanned was useless, or repetitive. So far, he was tempting grave danger for very little reward.
    One file was disarmingly demarcated “Meliorares, Eugenics, History.” It appeared to contain material already perused, but it remained sealed under the by now familiar heavy security. He fiddled, and tweaked, and wormed his way in. As expected, he found himself scanning well-known information, dry and indifferently transcribed. Public sybfiles and footnotes of equal content mentioning his birth mother’s name—nothing new, nothing revelatory. Among his hopes, boredom proposed to frustration: a terminal matrimony. Perhaps he really had seen everything there was to see about his personal history during his previous visit to Earth and to the science center on Bali.
    He drifted into a sybfile labeled “Relationships, Crossovers, Charts.” Cruising effortlessly, he gave a mental push. Nothing happened. The syb stayed shut even though its security overlay seemed unexceptional. But he could not get in. Then something very interesting happened.
    It went away.
    Sitting up straighter in the chair, he gaped at the screen. All the rest of the relevant information was there—unchanged, unaltered, freely available for his perusal. But the last sybfile had vanished. In its place, not unlike a masticating ruminant, it had left a pile of something behind, and moved on. To the inexperienced or unsophisticated, the new object looked just like the syb it had replaced. Flinx, however, knew exactly what it was: an alarm.
    A whole bunch of alarms.
    Very, very carefully, operating with the utmost delicacy of which he was capable, he directed the search unit to back off. The alarms remained in place, subtle in stature, undisturbed, their true nature artfully disguised. He had trod on something sensitive, and it had responded with a quiet growl. As he maneuvered around the lambent little land mine, playing the Shell like a finely tuned instrument, he examined the intricate knot of toxic tocsins with every scanning tool at his disposal. The appearance of the camouflaged alarms did not unsettle him half so much as the disappearance of the syb. Only when he felt more comfortable with what he was seeing, and in control, did he take the risk of querying the Shell AI directly as to what had happened. Its reply was instructive.
    “What sybfile?”
    The Shell’s memory was infallible. Therefore it was deliberately ignoring his query, or following instructions to avoid making a direct reply to the question, or an independent component of itself was overriding the nuclear command structure. He had