Are all constructs so illogical? said the Asshole Research Transport with the immense processing capability whose metaphorical hand I had had to hold because it had become emotionally compromised by a fictional media serial. Before I could say that, it added, Those are not the first two possibilities to consider.

I had no idea what it meant. “All right, what are the first two possibilities to consider?”

That it either happened, or it didn’t.

*   *   *

I had to get up and pace.

Ignoring me, ART continued, If it happened, did you cause it to happen, or did an outside influence use you to cause it to happen? If an outside influence caused it to happen, why? Who benefited from the incident?

ART seemed happy to have the problem laid out so clearly. I wasn’t sure I was. “I know I could have hacked my governor module.” I pointed at my head. “Hacking my governor module is why I’m here.”

If your ability to hack your governor module was what caused the incident, why was it not checked periodically and the current hack detected?

There would be no point in hacking the module if I couldn’t fool the standard diagnostics. But … The company was cheap and sloppy, but not stupid. I had been kept in a deployment center attached to corporate offices. So they hadn’t anticipated any potential danger.

ART said, You are correct that further research is called for before the incident can be understood fully. How do you plan to proceed?

I stopped pacing. It knew how I planned to proceed. Go to RaviHyral, look for information. There hadn’t been anything in the company’s knowledge base that I could access without getting caught, but the systems on RaviHyral itself might not be so well protected. And maybe if I saw the place again, it would spark something in my human neural tissue. (I wasn’t much looking forward to that part, if it happened.) I could tell ART was doing that thing again where it asked me questions it knew the answer to so it could trap me into admitting stuff that I didn’t want to admit. I decided to just skip to the end. “What do you mean?”

You will be identified as a SecUnit.

That stung a little. “I can pass as an augmented human.” Augmented humans are still considered humans. I don’t know if there are any augmented humans with enough implants to resemble a SecUnit. It seems unlikely a human would want that many implants, or would survive whatever catastrophic injury might make them necessary. But humans are weird. Whatever, I didn’t intend to let anyone see more than I absolutely had to.