Realtime | Page 9

rapt attention, as Cinderella unfolded.
It was on a Friday morning, late in March, that Maggie burned herself.
She was making a pot of tea for breakfast, and, pouring the boiling
water into the cup, managed to splash some of the scalding water onto
her hand. She jerked and cried out at the contact, and knocked the cup
of tea off of the counter....
...at Maggie Archer's first outcry, D'Artagnan flared into full awareness.
He froze the story models that he had been running, and analyzed the
situation.
While water was still in mid-air, falling towards the ground,
D'Artagnan sent his first emergency notice into the dataweb. Before the
water had traveled another centimeter downwards, D'Artagnan had
evaluated the situation and the possible dangers that might diverge
from this point in time; given Her Majesty's medical history, the
possibility of stroke could not be discounted in case of extreme shock.
D'Artagnan accessed and routed emergency ambulance care towards
Maggie's exurban two-story home, on the outskirts of Cincinnati. There
was more that needed to be done, that could not be done from here....
For the first time since his construction, 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