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and without instructions, D'Artagnan ventured forth, sent himself in pulses of light through the optic fiber; into the dataweb.
The dataweb was a jungle that glowed. It was a three-dimensional lattice of yes/no decisions that had been constructed at random. The communications system, power lines, and databases were arrayed and assembled among the lines of the lattice, interweaving and connecting in strange and diverse ways, the functions of which were incomprehensible to D'Artagnan. Clearly the dataweb was not a designed thing, but rather something that had grown in a manner that could only be described as organic; new systems added atop old as expediency dictated. There was no sense, no plan, no logic....
D'Artagnan perceived then, superimposed upon the chaos of the dataweb, the Praxcelis Network. The Praxcelis who called himself D'Artagnan evaluated options, and then chose. He moved into the Praxcelis Network, using the most powerful *urgent-priority* codes that were listed in ROM. He sought the offices of the doctor who was listed as Maggie Archer's private physician. He found the office, and broke through the office Praxcelis to notify the doctor of the danger to Maggie, in less than a full microsecond, and had completed his work and returned his awareness to Maggie before the water had reached her feet.
In the process, he hardly noticed that he had encountered other Praxcelis units for the first time.
It never once crossed the matrix in which his awareness was embedded that other Praxcelis units had also, for the first time, met him.
DataWeb Security, 9:00 A.M., Friday morning.
In the outer lobby, there was a row of Praxcelis terminals. Through his inskin, Westermach bade them good morning, and continued on into the actual offices. There were humans in those offices, and the offices reflected it. Hardcopy was left in sometimes haphazard piles on the desks, and family holos danced on some of the same desks. The ceiling glowpaint was white rather than yellow, and it cast the room in a cool, professional light. Westermach nodded to his subordinates casually; Harry Quaid, his senior field agent, he smiled at briefly, and continued on to his own office, in the heart of the vast marble-clad labyrinth that was DataWeb Security.
He paused at the entrance of his own office, waited while the doorfield faded, and went in.
Something an outsider would have noticed at once; at DWS headquarters, nobody spoke aloud.
Inside, Westermach put his briefcase down, and shrugged out of his gray outercloak. His clothing was curiously without accent, gray and grayish- blue, without optical effects. Men who knew him often did not recognize him at once; his mother might have had difficulty picking his face out of a crowd.
The room was, like many of those in DataWeb Security's headquarters, shielded against leaking electromagnetic radiation; Westermach's Praxcelis waited until the doorfield formed, sealing an area of possible radio leak, before it spoke. ~Good morning, Sen Westermach.~
~Good morning, Praxcelis.~ Westermach placed his briefcase atop the massive, walnut-surfaced desk that dominated the office. More so than anything else in the office, the desk was a sign of power; wood was expensive. (It was getting to be less so, now that most industry had moved out into space. But reforestation was slow.) ~What business, Praxcelis?~
~There is a glitch in the web, near Cincinnati.~
Westermach glanced at the Praxcelis' monitor. It held a map of Cincinnati and its exurbs, with a glowing dot at the point of glitch. ~How bad?~
~Of actual obstruction, insignificant. In terms of possible trouble, it is difficult to estimate. This morning at approximately 8:26 A.M., a Praxcelis in the Cincinnati exurb mobilized an ambulance and broke through the Praxcelis of a doctor named Miriam Hanraht under the most extreme emergency flag codes. The Praxcelis identified itself as D'Artagnan of Gascon, the Praxcelis of Senra Maggie Archer. When the ambulance arrived, it turned out that the victim, Senra Archer, had merely suffered minor scalding as the result of having dropped a cup of tea upon herself.~
Westermach chuckled. ~Well,~ he said, ~an overeager Praxcelis is hardly a threat to World Security.~
~Sir, the unit refuses to accept the communiques of this office. In addition, the identification that it proffered during its time in the Praxcelis Network was extremely unusual. While it is hardly unknown for elderly humans to name their Praxceles, the names are generally of short or mundane nature. Further, the Praxceles involved are as a matter of course, during Awakening Orientation, advised of this habit; the Praxcelis D'Artagnan, to all appearances, truly considers itself to have been named D'Artagnan. There is a further datum of unknown significance; Robert Archer, the son of Senra Maggie Archer, is an extremely talented programmer, and is the head of the Praxcelis Corporation's research division, which is located in Cincinnati.~
Westermach seated himself behind his desk. On the monitor that was located at one corner of his