again.
He’d always been afraid of those power sources under the Temple. He’d thought he wanted nothing more than to discover the truth about them. Now he realized the reality might be even worse than he’d allowed himself to imagine.
The Archangels will return, he thought. What the hell does that mean? Were those lunatics crazy enough to put a batch of “Archangels” into cryo under there? Were they actually willing to trust the cryo systems to keep them going that long? And even if they were, could the systems stand up for that many years?
So far as he knew, no one had ever used the cryo suspension systems for a period greater than thirty or forty years. Theoretically, they were supposed to be good for up to a century and a half. But nine centuries?
But maybe that’s not what it is after all. Maybe it is an AI. It could be that they didn’t trust an AI to run continuously but were willing to let it come up periodically. Only if that’s the case, why wait a thousand years before it makes its first check? Unless the “Vision of Schueler” is lying and whatever it is has actually been popping up for a look every fifty or sixty years, I suppose. Except that it’s pretty evident the vicarate’s been departing from the image of the Church laid down in the Holy Writ for at least two or three hundred y ears, so if there’s an AI down there that’s supposed to be making midcourse adjustments, why’s it kept its mouth shut? Unless it’s broken, and that doesn’t seem likely, given how many of the Temple’s other systems still seem to be up and running. I can’t imagine they’d’ve built the place without making certain something as critical as a monitoring AI would be the last thing to go down, not the first!
He grimaced, then froze as another thought struck him.
I’m the only PICA Commodore Pei and the others had access to, an icy mental voice said. But what if I’m not the only PICA that came to Safehold after all? What if that’s what’s down there? The only reason I’m capable of long-term operation is because Doctor Proctor hacked my basic software. It’s possible they could have brought along-hell, even built after they got here, despite Langhorne’s anti-technology lunacy!-a PICA or two of their own. And if they didn’t have Proctor’s fine touch on the software, their PICAs could be limited to the “legal” ten days of autonomous operation before their personalities and memories automatically dump. So maybe, if that’s the case, it would make sense for them to only spin up once every thousand years or so. They get up, spend a day or two looking around, and if everything’s humming along, they go back into shutdown immediately. For that matter, they could have multiple PICAs stashed down there in the cellar. One of them wakes up and looks around, and if there’s a problem, he’s got reinforcements he can call up. Hell, for that matter if they did have more than one PICA down there and it was keyed to the same person, could he bootstrap himself back and forth between them to get around the ten-day limit?!
He didn’t know the answer to his own question. Under the Federation’s restrictions on Personality Integrated Cybernetic Avatars, each PICA had been unique to the human being who owned it. It had been physically impossible for anyone else to operate it, and just as it had been illegal for a PICA to operate for more than ten days in autonomous mode, it had been illegal for an individual even to operate , far less own, more than a single PICA, except under strenuously controlled circumstances which usually had to do with high-risk industrial processes or something similar. So far as he was aware, no one had ever attempted to simply shuttle someone’s memories and personality back and forth between a pair of identical PICAs keyed to the same owner/operator. He had no idea how the software’s built-in restrictions would react to that, but it was certainly possible it would represent a lower- risk solution than Proctor’s hack of his own software. Assuming one had access to multiple PICAs, of course.
And didn’t that lead to an interesting speculation?
“Owl?”
“Yes, Lieutenant Commander Alban?” the distant AI replied.
“Could we use the fabrication unit in the cave to build another PICA?”
“That question requires refinement, Lieutenant Commander Alban.”
“What?” Merlin blinked at the unexpected response. “What sort of ‘refinement’? List the difficulties.”
“Theoretically, the fabrication unit could construct a PICA,” the AI said. “It would deplete certain critical elements below the minimum inventory level specified in my core programming, which would require human override authorization. In addition, however, it would require data not available to me.”
“What sort of data are we talking about?”
“I do not have detailed schematics or design data on PICAs.”
“You don’t?” Merlin’s eyebrows rose in surprise.
“No, Lieutenant Commander Alban,” Owl replied, and Merlin reminded himself not to swear when the AI stopped there, obviously satisfied with its response.
“Why not?” he asked after a moment.
“Because it was never entered into my database.”
Merlin began reciting the names of the Federation’s presidents to himself. Obviously it had never been entered into Owl’s database. Of course, that wasn’t the “why” he’d had in mind when he posed the question!
“ Why was it never entered into your database?” he asked finally. “And if you don’t have a definitive answer, speculate.”
“I do not have a definitive answer, Lieutenant Commander Alban. However, I would speculate that it was never entered because the construction of PICAs was a highly specialized enterprise attended by a great many legal restrictions and security regulations and procedures. It would not be something that would be found in a general database. Certainly it would not be part of a tactical computer’s database, nor, apparently, part of the library database downloaded from Romulus.”
“Damn. That does make sense,” Merlin muttered.
Owl, predictably, made no reply.
Merlin grimaced, but he was actually just as happy to be left to his thoughts for the moment.
The possibility of building additional PICAs had never occurred to him before. On the other hand, if he could, and if the additional PICAs’ software duplicated his own, he could create clones of himself, which would be hugely helpful. Not only would it allow him to be in more than one place simultaneously, it would give him the advantage of redundancy if one of him inadvertently did something to which some high-tech watchdog system might take exception.
And if Wylsynn’s right about something “returning” in a thousand years, I may just need all the reinforcements I can get, he thought grimly. This is the year 895, but they’ve numbered their “Years of God” from the end of “Shan-wei’s Rebellion,” from the time the Church of God turned into the Church of God Awaiting. The Day of Creation was seventy years- Standard Years, not Safeholdian ones-before that. And that makes this year 979 since the Creation. Which means we’ve got twenty years, give or take, before whatever’s going to happen happens .
Twenty years might sound like a lot, but not when it was all the time they had to break not simply the Church of God Awaiting’s political supremacy but also its stranglehold on Safehold’s religious and technological life. They’d been working on it for five years already, and all they’d really managed so far was to stave off defeat. Well, they’d begun gnawing away at the Proscriptions of Jwo-jeng-slowly and very, very cautiously-but they certainly hadn’t found a way to take the war to the Church and the Group of Four on the mainland! And even if they managed that, simply defeating the Group of Four militarily wasn’t going to miraculously undo ten centuries’ belief in the Holy Writ and the Archangels. That fight was going to take far longer… and it was likely to involve even more bloodshed than the current conflict.
Perhaps still worse, if there was something-“Archangel,” AI, or PICA-waiting to “wake up” under the Temple, he had to assume any technological advancement beyond the simple steam engines which still hadn’t attracted the bombardment system’s attention to the Castaway Islands was going to be noticed by its sensors and reported to the Temple. At which point it was entirely possible the wake-up’s schedule might be rather drastically revised.
“Owl, could analysis of this PICA give you the data you’d require to build additional ones?”
“Probability of success would approach unity assuming a complete analysis of software and hardware,” the AI replied.
“And would such an analysis constitute a risk to this PICA’s continued operation?”
“Preliminary analysis indicates a sixty-five to seventy percent probability it would be rendered permanently inoperable,” Owl said calmly.
“Why?”
“Most probable cause would be failure of the unit’s software. There is a significant probability that the
