Soulminder Read Online Free PDF Page A

mattered a lot more than either consideration.
    The project took nearly an hour to complete. Repeating the operation on the duplicate computer files was considerably easier, taking less than a quarter of that time, and when he was done he sat back in his chair in vaguely guilty satisfaction. Barnswell could now have the data, and if he misused it he, and not Soulminder, would be the one to suffer most.
    Or so Sommer hoped. At the very least, the individuals who’d let him take their soul-traces would be unaffected—
    He paused in mid-thought as something suddenly occurred to him. Something so obvious that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before.
    For a long moment he just sat there, gazing off into space, feeling an old fire he thought he’d lost forever begin to burn again within him. Leaning forward, he attacked the computer keyboard.
    A minute was all it took to hit the first wall. Muttering under his breath, he scooped up the phone and punched for Sands’s cell.
    She answered on the third ring. “Hello?”
    “Listen, do you remember where the data on the Mullner trace recognition pattern is stored?” Sommer asked.
    “Uh … try a file called FITTER.CV,” she suggested. “Or something like that—I’m sure FITTER is part of it. What do you want it for?”
    “I think it’s time we took another shot at that approach,” he told her, struggling to keep his voice calm.
    “What, you mean tailoring the trap to the individual soul? I thought we proved way back when that even a supercomputer wouldn’t be fast enough to record the Mullner trace and configure the trap fields in the time available.”
    “Right,” Sommer agreed, “ if we wait until the moment of death to take the reading. What if we instead take the initial trace beforehand, like I did last night.”
    There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “I don’t know,” Sands said at last, slowly. “It’s not exactly the way we wanted Soulminder to work—you plug your average accident victim into the Mullner and you’re likely to kill him right there and then. You saw what it did to you.”
    “So find a way to modify the Mullner,” Sommer ground out, beginning to be annoyed at Sands’s attitude. “Make it gentler but still able to take the entire trace. At least it’s something to try.”
    “I agree,” Sands said. “I’ll see what I can do when I get back. Meanwhile, you might call Dr. Samuels and see if he can scare us up a guinea pig. Best bet is probably someone who’s reasonably healthy right now but needs some risky surgery.”
    “Uh … right,” Sommer managed, thrown off-balance a bit by her abrupt switch to his side of the argument. “I’ll do that. See you later.”
    “’Bye.”
    They worked late into the night, Sommer on the computer software and Sands on the trap itself, until a throbbing headache forced Sommer to call it quits. Sands remained behind, and when he arrived the next morning there was a note from her telling him that, as of five-thirty a.m., the hardware modifications to the trap were complete. The note wished him luck with the software, and suggested he not expect her in too early.
    Sommer got to work, but before he did so he took a moment to check the flag he’d planted in the Mullner-trace computer files.
    The files had indeed been copied, just after he’d left the evening before.
    Not unexpected, though it still hurt that Sands would go behind his back and against his wishes like that. But, oddly enough, even such duplicity was unable to dampen the growing enthusiasm within him, the gut-level sense that this time they were indeed on the right track. With any luck, Barnswell’s money would take them far enough along that track that they would never again have to deal with him or his kind.
    It took four more days to finish the software modifications, and another two after that to complete their limited repertoire of simulation tests. At that point, there was nothing to do but wait