The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order Read Online Free PDF Page A

and they would have made the job
impossible.
    “It
could have been impossible anyway. That wasn’t a big bomb, they never are, there’s
only so much space you can spare inside a torso, even if you only expect your
kaze to be able to function for a few hours, but it was high brisance, I mean high .
No particular reason why it shouldn’t have reduced his id tag and credentials
to particles so small even we couldn’t find them, never mind the embedded chips
themselves.
    “But
Frik’s secretary knows more than she thinks she knows.” In full spate the tech’s
tone became less hostile; or perhaps simply less brittle. “Ask her the right
questions, and you find out that after she did her” — Lane sneered the words as
if they were beneath contempt — “‘routine verification’ on this kaze, he didn’t
put his id tag back around his neck. He didn’t clip his communications
credentials back onto his breast pocket, which is so normal around here we don’t
even notice it anymore, hell, I’m doing it myself” — she glanced down at the DA
card clipped to her labsuit — “you’re the only one who gets away without doing
it. But he didn’t do that.
    “He
shoved them both into his thigh pocket, the right one, according to Frik’s
secretary. Which is not the kind of thing you do if you’re trying to plant
evidence when you blow yourself up, because the bomb is still going to reduce
everything to smears and scrap. But it is the kind of thing you do if
you’re new at this and you know you’re going to die and acting normal in secure
areas isn’t second nature. So his id tag and credentials were just that much
farther away from the centre of the blast.
    “I
found part of one of the chips.”
    Hashi
blinked his interest and approval without interrupting.
    “You
know how we do this kind of search.” As soon as she finished her first nic, she
lit a second. “Vacuum-seal the room and go over it with a resonating laser. Map
the resonance and generate a computer simulation, which helps narrow the
search. When we chart the expansion vectors, we can tell where the kaze’s
residue is most likely to be. Those areas we study one micron at a time with
fluorochromatography. When you’re operating on that scale, even a small part of
a SOD-CMOS chip emits like a star.”
    He did
indeed know all this; but he let Lane talk. She was distracting him nicely.
    “As I
say, I got one. Two, actually, but one was driven into the floor so hard it
crumbled when I tried to extract it. Even I can’t work with that kind of
molecular powder. So there’s just one.
    “I don’t
know much about it yet. We can assume its data is still intact, that’s exactly
what this kind of chip is good for, but I haven’t found a way to extract it
yet. SOD-CMOS chips add state when power is applied to the source and drain.
They read back by reversing the current. But to do that you have to have
a source and drain. This particular piece of chip doesn’t include those
conveniences.”
    Another
nic.
    “But I
can tell you one thing about it. It’s ours.”
    Fascinated
as much by her manner as by her explanation, Hashi asked, “How do you know?”
    “By its
particular production quality. Legally, nobody but us is allowed to make them,
that’s part of the datacore law. Of course, we don’t actually manufacture them
ourselves, the law simply gives us the power to license their manufacture, but
we’ve only granted one license, Anodyne Systems” — she didn’t need to mention
that Anodyne Systems was a wholly owned subsidiary of the UMC — “and they
supply us exclusively. In fact, everybody in Anodyne Systems actually works for
us. The whole company is really just a fiction, a way for the UMC to keep a
hand in what we’re doing, and for us to get SOD-CMOS chips without having to
find room for an entire production plant in our budget.
    “There’s
only one way to make a SOD-CMOS chip. On paper, they should all be identical,
no matter who