"Erroneous data - significant results," she whispered.
"What?"
But she ignored Bickel to turn and look at the overhead screen where Flattery was revealed calmly monitoring the big board. Something Flattery had said came now into her mind as though it had been amplified to full volume:
"There's nothing concerning ourselves about which we can be truly objective except our physical responses - the reflections of behavior. We exist in a forest of illusion where the very concept of consciousness merges with illusion. "
She turned to look at Bickel where he worked, seeing the stretch of his muscles under the vacsuit fabric as he bent to finish the assembly. And she thought: To be conscious, you must surmount illusion. Bickel saw that where I didn't.
A moment of illumination filled her mind and she saw the man at his work as more than flesh and sinew and nerves - more than the physical chemistry with blanks to be filled in. Bickel was both a minuscule and vulnerable creature, but beyond that, he contained powers that could stretch across any universe. Something of this momentary understanding struck her as almost religious... holy. She savored it, realizing this was a private and personal thing she could never completely communicate to another creature.
Bickel finished the final tie of the G-20 assembly, stood up, and rubbed the small of his back. His hands trembled as he relaxed after the fierce concentration of the work he had just completed.
"Let's give it a run," he said. "Prue, you monitor the diagnostic board." He gestured to the panel of dials and gauges waiting like so many glistening eyes at his left. "I'll give each net of the roulette cycles a one-fifth-second burst from the shot generator." He moved around to the right of the piled blocks of the test setup, stepping over the leads with elaborate care. He flipped the row of switches to start the source program through the inputs.
"Mark," he said.
"Mark," she said as her dial needles snapped over to register the pulse.
"Give me the mean synapse threshold, mean endbulb threshold, and action time on each net." Bickel depressed three switches simultaneously. "Interchange activated."
He waited, feeling the suspense grow, a tightness in his stomach.
"Interchange now showing entrance pulse," she said.
"Net one," he said, introducing the timed burst from the shot generator.
"There's a jam-up at the fifth-layer nodes," she said. She concentrated on the gauges for the fifth layer as though her thoughts could activate them, but they remained at zero. "No impulses are getting through," she said.
"I'll try sweeping the roulette cycles," Bickel said. He twisted a dial.
"Nothing," she said.
Bickel kicked off his row of switches, moved the jacks to the left. "Here, let's try a trigonometrically oscillating potential in the loops. Give me the new readings for each layer of the nets. Mark one."
"You're getting a nonlinear reaction across all the nets now," she said. "It's close to zero linearity."
"That can't be!" Bickel said. "These things are still open circuits no matter what we call them." He depressed another switch. "Read the other nets."
Prudence suppressed a sense of frustration, swept her gaze across the dials.
"Nonlinear," she said.
Bickel stepped back, glared at the input panel. "This is nuts! What we have here is essentially a transducer. The outputs should match!"
Again, Prudence read her dials. "Your products are still zero."
"Any heat?" Bickel asked.
"Nothing significant," she said.
Bickel pursed his lips, thinking. "Somehow, we've produced a unitary orthogonal system for each net and the total assembly," he said. "And that's a contradiction. It could mean we have more than one system in each of these separate nets."
"You have an unknown that's swallowing energy," Prudence said, her excitement kindling. "Isn't that our definition of -"
"It isn't conscious," Bickel said. "Whatever the unknown system is, it can't be conscious... not yet. This setup is too simple, doesn't have enough source data..."
"Then it's some error in the hookup," Prudence said.
Bickel's shoulders sagged. He took a deep, tired breath. "Yeah. Has to be."
"Where's your record of assembly and circuit tests?" Prudence asked.
"I isolated an auxiliary storage tank," Bickel said. He gestured vaguely to his left. "It's the red-flagged one. Everything's in there... including all this." He waved at the diagnostic panel.
"You get something to eat and take a rest break," she said. "I'll start tracing circuits."
"We got a jam-up on the direct test," Bickel said. "It wasn't an open-circuit reaction. And the net-interchange test produces zero at the output without flagging the point of loss. The thing's a goddamn sponge!"
"It'll be some simple error," she said. "Wake Tim and send him in while you're at it. He's had more than his four hours off."
"I am tired," Bickel admitted. He thought back, asking himself how long it had been since he had rested. Three full watches anyway.
I let myself get too tired, he thought. I know better. This is exacting work. Going too long without a break is the surest way to make mistakes.
"It'll be some simple thing," he said, but he knew as he said it that this was wrong. Sleep. He needed sleep.
Bickel headed toward quarters, pawing at the problem in his mind, rolling it over. The setup produced a contradictory reaction. Nothing simple was going to produce that complex a contradiction.
Behind him, Prudence activated the readouts at the red-flagged portion of the panel, started getting the feel of the setup. Sometimes with these computer problems, she knew, you could move intuitively into the area of difficulty, save yourself hours of hunting. Certain parts of a setup would feel wrong.
Presently, Timberlake joined her, yawning. "Bick told me. Trouble."
"Odd trouble."
"So I gathered." He cleared his throat. "Exactly what happened?"
She told him about the tests, the jam-up at the fifth-layer nodes and the subsequent disagreement between input and output.
"Zero linearity?" he asked.
"Almost."
"And no heat?"
"Nothing showed on the sensors."