"Sure. Long as you don't mind having one of us reckless freewill types endangering your priorities."

He let it pass. "Something nasty showed up on one of their germ sweeps; their onboard shut them down and sent a shitload of alarms off to potential vectors. Those are pretty much shut down too, as far as I can tell. The secondaries are falling even as we speak. I'll track the alarms, you find out what you can about the bug."

"Right."

He tapped commands. The cubby display dimmed down to a nice, undistracting wash of low-contrast gray; bright primary spilled in over his optical inlays. Maelstrom. He was going into Maelstrom. All the NMDA, the carefully-dosed psychotropics, the eighteen percent of his occipital cortex rewired for optimum pattern-recognition—all next to useless in there. What good does a measly 200% reflex acceleration do against creatures living fast enough to speciate every ten seconds?

Not much, maybe. But he liked the challenge.

He called up a real-time schematic of the local metabase: a 128node radius centered on Cincinnati General's onboard server. The display rendered logical distances, not real ones: one extra server in the chain could put a system next door farther away than one in Budapest.

A series of tiny flares ignited around the display, color-coded by age. Cinci Gen sulked in the middle, so red it was almost infra, an ancient epicenter over ten minutes old. Farther out, more recent inflammations of orange and yellow: pharms, other hospitals, crematoria that had taken deliveries from Cinci within some critical timeframe. Farther still, bright white stars speckled the surface of an expanding sphere: the secondary and tertiary vectors, businesses and labs and corporations and people who'd had recent contact with businesses and labs and corporations and people who'd—

CinciGen's onboard had sent contagion warnings to all its friends in Maelstrom. Each friend had bred the warning and passed it on, a fission of sirens. None of these agents were human. Humans had had no role in the process at all so far. That was the whole point. Humans wouldn't have been fast enough to cut off a thousand facilities by lunchtime.

Humans had stopped complaining about such extreme measures right after the '38 enceph pandemic.

Jovellanos conferenced in. "False alarm."

"What?"

An image superimposed itself lower-right on his visual field:

XXX FREE HARDCORE XXX BoNDAGE SI22

THOUS NDS OF HOT S MS BDSM NECRO WATERSporTS PEDOsNUFF

XXX mu34.03 11 TO ENTER XXX

"That's what sent up the alarm," Jovellanos told him. "Screen grab from the hospital's pathfinder."

"Details."

"The pathfinder takes swabs from the ventilation filters and cultures them for nasties. This particular culture plate went from zip to thirty-percent coverage in two seconds. Which is impossible, of course, even for hospital paths."

But the system hadn't known that. Some bannerbug had dumped its load into visual memory and the pathfinder had just been doing its job, looking for dark blotches on light backgrounds. Who could blame it for being illiterate?