The Long Run | Page 8

AI could do, control inanimate equipment with a thought, find in instants the answer to any question to which there was an answer��.
Trent said, "It makes things faster."
"So what's the point?" she asked. "So you can find data faster than anybody else in the world except an AI or another Player. Really, I just don't get it."
Trent turned his head slightly, found the serious green eyes looking directly into his own from five centimeters away. Waiting.
"The Crystal Wind is the greatest source of data the world has ever seen. Truth and data," he said quietly, "are not the same thing. Data lies in the Crystal Wind; Truth is a function of Realtime. And yet Truth arises from data. From data you can--extract--Truth."
With a grave countenance, the nine-year-old girl studied him for just a moment longer.
Trent stared back.
Finally the corners of her mouth twitched, and she fought it, then gave up and broke up giggling. She leaned back against the bole of the tree they were under, rested her head on Trent's shoulder. Finally the giggles stopped, and she said in a quiet, detached voice, "Honestly, you're the craziest thing I ever saw."
"Really?"
"It's okay," she said quickly. "I like you anyhow."
The gendarmes took the sunglasses containing his traceset contacts. They took the handheld that contained the traceset itself. They took his watch and the ruby stud from his left ear, his belt and his wallet and his shoes as well. They did not remove his socks and even though they ran a slowscan over him the slowscan started just above his ankles.
They missed the magpick taped to the sole of his right foot.
Lying on his back, Trent stared up at the ceiling of the holding cell. The glowpaint was old and cracked; he suspected it had originally been intended to glow the color of sunlight. Now it was closer to orange than yellow. In one corner of the cell the webbed cracks in the paint had actually cut off a ragged, meter-wide section of the paint from the current; that section of the paint was dead gray, the color of mushrooms in shade.
His hands were tingling; he tried moving them again. Better this time--he actually got his fingers to curl up to touch his palms. There are drugs that will buffer the human nervous system from the effects of sonics, and others that will aid in recovering more quickly.
Trent had not expected to get shot with sonic stunners tonight. He lay and waited for control of his body to return.
What the hell, he wondered, happened tonight?
He had plenty of time to think about it.
He had been in custody for four hours when they came to get him, one in goldtone riot armor and one in plainclothes.
Trent was barely able to walk.
He did not ask where they were taking him. Their path led them through the front waiting area and its associated babble, too many people in too small a space speaking in voices that were too loud.
Denice Castanaveras was seated in one of the glassite-walled cubicles. An angry, red-faced lady detective was saying something to her. The combination of soundproofing and outside noise was unbeatable; Trent could not even guess at what the lady gendarme was saying. Denice sat in a straight-backed chair, sat upright with such rigid self-control that her shoulders did not touch the back of the chair.
Trent looked toward her as the gendarmes led him into Mac Devlin's office. Her parents had been telepaths; amazingly, frighteningly powerful telepaths.
The girl did not even glance at him.
In a chair just outside of Mac Devlin's office, glaring at Trent, sat a stiff-faced man in a black and silver uniform.
Trent categorized the man immediately, with a cold chill.
PKF Elite.
Cyborg.
They would have taken him while he was still young; not past thirty-five. Taken to Spacebase One at L-5, Peaceforcer Heaven where the Peaceforcer Elite were created. Surgery that was impossible under the crushing 980 centimeters per second squared acceleration of Earth was just barely feasible when performed in the free fall of L-5. Peaceforcer genegineers and surgeons had taken him and changed him; injected him with transform viruses designed to strengthen his muscles, to speed his neural reactions by better than forty percent. Changed by the transform viruses, doubly changed by surgery and cyborging; his eyes were not real, nor his skin. He would see in infra-red and ultra-violet as easily as a normal human distinguished between blue and green. Beneath his right shoulder blade was a power source good for six months. A secondary nerve network laced itself through the first, fused itself to that which a human was born with; the network and all of the Elite hardware it controlled was controlled in turn by a combat computer implanted at the base of his skull. Carbon-ceramic filaments wound themselves through and