The Spartacus File

Chapter Three

A single window near the top of NeuroTalents LLC building showed a light long past closing. Behind that window five men and three women were holding an urgent meeting, called hastily that afternoon. All of these people were unhappy. Half were angry, and the other half were more than a little frightened.

“You're sure it was our doing?” the man at the head of the table asked, glaring at one of the young executives.

The executive replied unhappily, “We're still investigating, sir, but it does look that way. Yesterday the subject in question, Lester Polnovick, had an appointment for an ordinary pre-programmed imprinting to learn accounting, personnel management, and computer skills. This wasn't a corporate contract; he'd saved up for it himself, to improve his employment prospects. He showed up on time, and was handled according to normal procedure, but our records indicate that instead of the package he had requested, he received an optimization imprinting. One that had nothing to do with the skills he had wanted.”

“How did that happen?” the man at the head of the table demanded. “Don't we have technicians watching for this sort of thing? My lord, what are we paying them for?”

“Well, uh… well, yes, sir, we do. They saw that there was an optimization in progress, but the technicians don't necessarily know what a particular client is in for. That's all supposed to be taken care of by the computer; when the contracts are drawn up the computer is told what's wanted, and from then on it's all up to the machines.”

“Nobody checked? After all, we don't do a lot of optimizations.”

“Nobody checked. The computer said it was following the contract, and the technicians believed it.”

“All right, then, was the contract drawn up correctly?”

“Yes sir, it was, and the right information was fed into the computer at that time. We have a hardcopy record, with print-out time and date, and it was correct.”

“So it was changed? What this man was supposed to get changed somewhere along the line?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, then, why did the computer make the change? Who told it to?”

“That's not my department, sir.” The executive looked with relief at the woman who sat across the table from him. She cleared her throat nervously.

“Mr. Yamashiro,” she said, “it appears to have been a hardware failure. A bad disk sector, compounded by a previously-unknown bug in the error-handling code.”

The chairman glared. “How could that happen?”

“Uh… poor maintenance, apparently.” She looked embarrassed.

Yamashiro stared at her for a moment, then demanded, “Who's responsible for that?”

“We don't know yet.”

Yamashiro snapped, “Find out.” Then he sighed. “All right, what's the damage? What exactly happened? What did this bad disk do?”

“Well, sir, when the client came in for his appointment, he was scheduled for a pre-programmed imprinting in small business accounting and management. The computer lost a variable, and defaulted to an optimization program.” She paused for breath.

“Go on,” Yamashiro told her. “What sort of optimization?”

“Well, that's the tricky part,” the woman said. She glanced at her notes. “The switch appears to have bypassed three entire levels of security-if I may say so, sir, whoever put together the unified software should be fired and blacklisted, because that shouldn't have been possible. The error-handling code apparently assumes that any lost variable should be assigned the maximum available value-I suppose the idea was to go for maximum flexibility, but the effect is to bypass limits and safeguards. That's bad programming.”

Yamashiro nodded. “We bought it from the lowest bidder,” he said. “Sometimes you get what you pay for.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go on,” the chairman said. “What happened?”

The woman nodded and continued, “The computer accessed highly classified files, material we developed jointly with… with a certain client.” She looked up. “You will recall that transaction two years ago?”

Yamashiro nodded. “You mean the black-budget government work. I don't think you need to be coy; we're all grown-ups here tonight.”

“Yes.” She continued, “The computer examined only these classified files as its available options, and finally chose the Godzilla File as the best fit for this particular subject.”

“The Godzilla File,” Yamashiro said. His fingers tapped the table.

“Yes, sir.”

“There's something in there called the Godzilla File?”

“Yes, sir.”

After a second of angry silence, Yamashiro demanded, “Who the hell gave it a stupid name like that?”

“Well, sir, the names are generally chosen to reflect the nature of the file. For example, the Ninja File programs the recipient as an assassin, the Houdini File…”

Yamashiro interrupted, “I don't need the whole list. All right, they've all got cutesy names. So what, exactly, is this Godzilla File?”

“Demolitions and other related skills, primarily-intended for sabotage and terrorism overseas, I suppose. It's mostly concerned with the destruction of urban areas. The title refers to the old-time movie monster, for obvious reasons. And it's a compulsory patterning-the recipient feels a need to use his new skills.”

Mr. Yamashiro said, with acid in his voice, “You're telling me that this client was imprinted with the urge to stomp on buildings.”

“Basically, yes.” She nodded, then added, “We were lucky in this instance.”

“Lucky?” Yamashiro stared. “We're liable for nineteen deaths and hundreds of injuries and billions in property damage! How the hell can you consider our situation to be lucky?”

The woman flinched. “Well, sir, he was taken down before he did more damage-it could have been far worse if he had been, say, a pilot rather than a crane operator. Also… well, the method used with these files is a wetware flash. This involves the file being fed into the client's brain very rapidly. Optimization is a complex process, and we've discovered that slower methods can sometimes result in psychological damage from conflicts between the old and new patterns. A flash is so fast such conflicts don't have time to develop.”

“Yes?” Yamashiro demanded. “So?”

“Well, sir, ordinarily, before receiving a wetware flash, the client is prepared by a medical technician, with medication and hypnosis. If this preparation is not made, the client can have very noticeable adverse reactions-migraine headaches, nausea, minor memory loss-as the brain readjusts to its new patterns. These can disguise the immediate changes to some extent. More importantly, without the preparation, the skills tend to become available a piece at a time, rather than all at once; compulsions and abilities may remain in the brain as untriggered potential for extended periods before they're accessed. Without the preparation, it may take months or even years before the skills become fully available, and some are lost entirely. We're very fortunate there was no significant delay in Polnovick's case.”

Yamashiro stared at her. “Do you mean to tell me that you consider it lucky that this man went berserk in only a day, instead of years?”

“Yes, sir,” the woman said, holding her head up. “This client was unusually fit physically, and apparently had very few old habit patterns that conflicted with the Godzilla File. He seems to have achieved fairly complete access to the imprinted file within twenty-four hours. Because of this very brief delay, we've been able to piece together what happened. Much of the pertinent information came from short-term data storage, which is kept only twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Now that we have these clues, we'll be able to go over the long-term records and see if this has happened before.”

The chairman nodded. “All right, I see-we were lucky. So what's being done to see that this doesn't happen again?”

“Our technicians are completely overhauling the whole system.”

Yamashiro frowned. “That's not good enough. The system messed up once, it can mess up again. I want those files, the dangerous ones, taken out of the system and locked away in the company vault.”

There was a long silence around the table. The Assistant Executive Director, who had not previously spoken, rolled a pencil between her palms. “That might not be possible,” she said.

“Why not?”

“These files are, technically, not the property of NeuroTalents LLC. They belong jointly to our parent corporation and that client Ms. Valakos mentioned, and we have to be ready to provide immediate access to these files at any time. It's in our contract.”

“What contract?”

“Sir, our contract with that client.”

Yamashiro considered that unhappily for a moment, then yielded. “All right, then. Find some way to make sure there aren't any more accidents. And find everyone that's been imprinted with one of those files. And don't let anyone else find out about any of this!”

Yamashiro rose gracefully and left the room, leaving his subordinates to handle the details themselves.