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Seignur Veeoni’s Private Laboratory


The beads were…wrong.

Upon first inspection, they were not actively malicious, but the devices of the Great Enemy were subtle. Even those that were not intelligent might yet hide their nature.

Still, they could not hide the fact that they were not…merely memory beads.

Seignur Veeoni leaned back in her chair and considered information that was not on the screen before her.

She herself wore two sets of memory beads.

One set had been made in this universe and recorded her process and her work.

The second set had been made in the Old Universe, and contained the detailed memories of her brother Yuri, who had been a revolutionary, fighting by stealth, and by engineering works as great, or greater, than those produced by the Enemy.

She wore that set of beads because of her work with the tile-and-rack systems. Those manufactured in the Old Universe had gone unstable as the half-life of the timonium that powered them expired. Yuri’s plan to repair the devices that had ridden the wave of the Migration into the new universe depended on new-made tiles and freshly configured racks.

Yuri had especially wanted to repair Tinsori Light, once called Catalinc Station. Yuri had built Catalinc Station, only to have it captured and subverted to the Enemy’s purpose.

It was, as he had told her during her training, not his greatest failure. That had been his inability to stop the Enemy and prevent the crystallization of an entire universe. Catalinc Station had been necessary for victory. To have it turned upon the forces of liberation, who had nothing with which to answer it—

Yuri’s memories were that the loss of Catalinc Station had guaranteed the loss of the war. His determination was not only to nullify it as a threat in the new universe, but to rehabilitate it.

To achieve that, he had established a research station perilously near the unsettled space occupied by Tinsori Light. Occasionally, he would send teams onto the Light, to attempt repairs. Dozens of lives had been lost in those attempts, all of them Yuri’s siblings, born for the purpose.

In addition to those single-minded research technicians, Yuri had caused another sibling to be born. That one, he taught himself, pushing her mind in a particular direction, supplementing his personal tutoring with long sessions in learning machines. He had given her his own memories, not so much nourishing her genius as forcing it. Whatever she wanted in order to advance the work was hers, unstinting. Were she to ask for anything else—but, there. She hadn’t known that there was anything else, except her work, in all the universe.

Yet, even as she designed the new racks, refined the tiles and developed their associations, Seignur Veeoni had doubted that Tinsori Light could be rehabilitated.

She had read the gleanings of the researchers. She had studied the condition of space around the Light, and the nature of the disturbances caused by what could only be a tear in the fabric of the universe. It had become quite clear to her that Tinsori Light had managed to maintain a connection to the Old Universe, and so long as that continued, it could not be reconfigured.

Then, a series of unexpected events had occurred.

The tear in the universe had been healed.

The space at Tinsori Light had stabilized.

The intelligence at the core of the Light had died…

…and her work at last was needed, not to rehabilitate, but to rebuild.

The first step toward rebuilding was to be certain that all the old systems were removed and destroyed.

Old systems, such as the beads from which the intelligence naming himself Jen Sin yos’Phelium had been serially reborn over the course of two hundred Standards.

Typically, such beads stored memories as data. They did not store personality, else every one of Yuri’s siblings would be Yuri. Memory beads were used to impart information upon particularly receptive minds.

When one was reborn, the rebirth unit directly downloaded the personality, the mind, from the shell being evacuated into the one awaiting an occupant.

She would have supposed that Tinsori Light’s system would have been the same, were it not for Jen Sin’s repeated insistence that the Light had done his murders via energy beam, which would have shut down the brain, killing the mind.

She would, she thought, need to see that rebirth unit. But, first…

Seignur Veeoni leaned to the screens, her fingers nimble on the keypad. Carefully, she examined a bead near the center of the net, finding it dense with data. That was as it should be, assuming this device had been patterned on typical memory beads. The center of the net would be data-rich, while the edges…

She shifted her examination to the edge, finding less density, and a glimmering of something…else. Increasing the sensitivity of her instrument, she moved along the edge of the net, bead by bead. Each held some data, which she was unwilling to risk, and also that suggestion of something other than a passive collector.

There!

She had found a bead that was very nearly empty. She isolated it under the scanner, set blocks so that its neighbors would not be disturbed by her work, and implemented the test suite.


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Framed