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stumbled onto something that somebody thought important enough to pretend did not exist.
    Settling himself, Flinx ran through a series of thought commands designed to restore the syb while avoiding the elegant subset of alarms that had taken its place. When that failed, he exited the system, reentered, and repeated his search, replicating the tunneling sequence precisely. It made no difference. The sybfile never reappeared, and the camouflaged alarms reasserted themselves in its place. Bringing up the subject had shut down access to the information it contained, for how long he did not know. It might reappear in a matter of hours, or days, or not for months. It didn’t matter. He had none of those time periods to spare. His operational time frame was being ticked off by the soft snores of the woman sleeping on the floor behind him. If he was ever going to have the opportunity to access that particular sybfile again, it was now.
    But how? No matter what route he plumbed, no matter how artful his probing, every attempt led only to the cloaked clump of alarms that he dared not make contact with directly. And the AI continued to insist that the information he sought did not exist. Or at least, the relevant Shell search module so insisted. Could he appeal to the central AI itself? Would that set off any alerts, or would he simply be denied access? Behind him, Elena Carolles shifted in her sleep. Whatever he did, it would have to be done quickly.
    Over the past half dozen centuries, artificial intelligences had grown remarkably sophisticated. Like any other intelligence, they varied considerably in capacity, from tiny devices that monitored domestic needs to immense networks of intricately modulated electronic pulses that came close to mimicking the function of the human or thranx brain. Of necessity, a global shell ranked near the top of the intelligence pyramid in depth and functionality. Approaching it with logic and engineering skill had produced only frustration. Might there be another way?
    A truly advanced AI, like the Shell, was built to comprehend and cope with human emotions as a natural and expected consequence of the billions of queries it had to deal with daily. Like thoughts, these feelings were conveyed via the transducer circuitry packed into the headband resting on Flinx’s skull. When his talent was functioning optimally, he could read the emotions of others from a goodly distance.
    There had been a time in his recent past when he had “communicated” on an unknown level with another incredibly complex machine. That device had been of alien manufacture. He remembered very little of the encounter and still less of the inscrutable neuronic interchange that had taken place. However it had been accomplished, the mental reciprocation had saved his life and those of his companions of the moment. Whether an advanced human-fabricated AI was capable of similar cerebral intercourse or of generating anything akin to “emotions” was a question that had been much debated, particularly in light of thranx-aided design advances that had been made in the last hundred years. Some cyberneticists said yes, others were vehement in their denial, and still others were not certain one way or the other.
    One way to find out was to ask, and try to read behind the verbalizations that responded to his inquiry.
    “I really need that particular sybfile,” he murmured lucidly as he provided the relevant loci of the object in question.
    The Shell responded with a polite verbalization. “The informational object to which you refer does not exist.”
    He repeated the query several dozen times. By the thirtieth, he thought he might be sensing something beyond the rote response. What
was
that there, elusive among the sounds? Something in his mind. His thoughts were sharp, his talent svelte and penetrating as a blade. Resolutely, he ignored the pounding that had begun at the back of his head and the occasional flash of bright light that