Avakli had a detailed holovid map of the chip's internal architecture, which he began to display. Miles was relieved. He'd been a little afraid they were going to tell him ImpSec Medical had lost the owner's manual in the intervening thirty-five years, but they appeared to have quite a lot of data. The chip itself was an immensely complex sandwich of organic and inorganic molecular layers about five by seven centimeters broad and half a centimeter thick, which rested in a vertical position between the two lobes of Illyan's brain. The number of neurological connections that ran from it made a jump-pilot's control headset look like a child's toy. The greatest complexity seemed to be in the information retrieval net, rather than the protein-based data storage, though both were not only fiendishly ornate, but largely unmapped—it had been an autolearning-style system which had assembled itself in a highly non-linear fashion after the chip had been installed.

"So is the . . . damage or deterioration we're seeing confined to the organic or the inorganic parts? Or both?" Miles asked Avakli.

"Organic," said Avakli. "Almost certainly."

Avakli was one of those scientists who never placed an unhedged bet, Miles realized.

"Unfortunately," Avakli went on, "it was never originally designed to be downloaded. There is no single equivalent of a data-port to connect to; just these thousands and thousands of neuronic leads going into and out of the thing all over its surface."

In view of the chip's history as Emperor Ezar's ultra-secure data dump, this made sense. Miles would not have been surprised to learn the thing had been customized to be especially nondownloadable.

"Now . . . I was under the impression the thing worked in parallel with Illyan's original cerebral memory. It doesn't actually replace it, does it?"

"That is correct, my lord. The neurological input is only split from the sensory nerves, not shunted aside altogether. The subjects apparently have dual memories of all their experiences. This appears to have been the major contributing factor to the high incidence of iatrogenic schizophrenia they later developed. A sort of inherent design defect, not of the chip so much as of the human brain."

Ruibal cleared his throat in polite theoretical, or perhaps theological, disagreement.

Illyan must have been a born spy. To hold more than one reality balanced in your mind until proof arrived, without going mad from the suspense, was surely the mark of a great investigator.

Avakli then went into a highly technical discussion of three projected ideas for extracting some kind of data download from the chip. They all sounded makeshift and uncertain of result; Avakli himself, describing them, didn't sound too happy or enthusiastic. Most of them seemed to involve long hours of delicate micro-neurosurgery. Ruibal winced a lot.

"So," Miles interrupted this at length, "what happens if you take the chip out?"

"To use layman's terminology," said Avakli, "it goes into shock and dies. It's evidently supposed to do so, apparently to prevent, um, theft."