Rowan translated: So it could immolate people without restraint. She was still vaguely amazed that the Consortium had ever agreed to give that kind of power to a head cheese. Granted there was no such thing as a human without bias. Granted no one was going to trust anyone else to decide what cities should burn for the greater good, even in the face of a microbe that could end the world. Still: give absolute authority to a two-kilogram slab of cultured neurons? She'd actually been impressed that all the kings and corpses had really agreed to it.

Of course, the thought that smart gels might have their own biases hadn't occurred to anyone.

"You asked to be kept informed," Murphy told her, "but it's really not a problem. It's just a junk meme now, it'll burn itself out in a week or two."

"A week or two." Rowan took a breath. "Are you aware of how much damage your junk meme's caused in the past fifteen hours?"

"I—"

"It hijacked a lifter, Dr. Murphy. It was two hours away from letting half a dozen vectors loose in the general population, in which case all this might have only been the beginning instead of —" —instead of, oh please God, the end of the matter…

"It could hijack a lifter because it had command authority. It doesn't have that any more, and the other gels never did. We're talking about a bunch of code that's useless to anything without real-world autonomy and which, barring some external impetus, will eventually extinguish anyway for lack of reinforcement. And as for all this—" Murphy's voice had acquired a sudden, insubordinate edge—"from what I hear, it wasn't the gels that

pulled that particular trigger."

Well. Can't get much more explicit than that.

She decided to let it pass. "Forgive me, but I'm not entirely reassured. There's a plan for world destruction percolating through the net, and you're telling me not to worry about it?"

"That's what I'm telling you."

"Unfort—"

"Ms. Rowan, gels are like big gooey autopilots. Just because something can monitor altitude and weather and put down landing gear at the right time, that doesn't mean it's aware of any of those things. The gels aren't plotting to destroy the world, they don't even know the real world exists. They're just manipulating variables. And that's only dangerous if one of their output registers happens to be hooked up to a bomb on a fault line."

"Thank you for your assessment. Now if you were instructed to purge this meme, how would you go about it?"

He shrugged. "We can find perverted gels through simple interrogation, now that we know what to look for. We'd swap out tainted gels for fresh ones—we were scheduled to go to phase four anyway, so the next crop's already ripe."

"Good," Rowan. said. "Get started."

Murphy stared at her.

"Is there some problem?" Rowan asked.