What are you doing?corrine asked.

Eden, can you perceive the inside of this office?

It is difficult, Chief Parfitt. I see the silhouette of someone standing behind the blinds, that is all.

Thank you."what about hearing? can you hear what's being said in here?»

The question was met with mental silence.

Corrine was giving me a speculative look.

I backed away from the window. «There's a question I've wanted to ask you. I don't know if I'm being paranoid, or if I'm misunderstanding affinity, but I'd value your opinion on this.»

«Go on.»

«You told me that the children share their thoughts quite openly. So that set me to thinking, is it possible for the servitor chimps to develop a communal intelligence?»

«Is it . . . ?» Corrine trailed off in shock, then gave a nervous little laugh. «Are you serious?»

«Very. I was thinking of an insect hive mind. Individually the chimps are always subsentient, but what if all those minds are linked up by affinity and act in tandem? That's a lot of brain power, Corrine. Could it happen?»

She was still staring at me, thunderstruck. «I . . . I don't know. No. No, I'm sure that couldn't happen.» She was trying to sound forceful, as if her own conviction would make it certain. «Intelligence doesn't work like that. There are several marques of hypercube computers which have far more processing power than the human brain, yet they don't achieve sentience when you switch them on. You can run Turing AI programs in them, but that's basically just clever response software.»

«But these are living brains. Quantum wire processors can't have original thoughts, inspiration and intuition; but flesh and blood can. And it's only brain size which is the barrier to achieving full sentience. Doesn't affinity provide the chimps with a perfect method of breaking that barrier? And worse, a secret method.»

«Jesus.» She shook her head in consternation. «Harvey, I can't think of a rational argument to refute it, not straight off the top of my head. But I just can't bring myself to believe it. Let me go through it logically. If the chimps developed intelligence, then why not tell us?»

«Because we'd stop them.»

«You are paranoid. Why would we put a stop to it?»

«Because they are servitors. If we acknowledge their intelligence they stop working for us and start competing against us.»

«What's so terrible about that? And even if the current generation were to stop performing the habitat's manual labour, people like Penny would just design new ones incapable of reaching . . . Oh shit, you think they killed her.»

«She created them; a race born into slavery.»

«No. I said people like her. Penny didn't create them; Pacific Nugene has nothing to do with the servitors. Bringing them to Eden was all Wing-Tsit Chong's idea. It's the Soyana company which supplies JSKP with servitors, they clone the chimps up here, along with all the other affinity capable servitor creatures. Soyana and Chong are responsible for them living in servitude, not Penny.»