Free The Cold Steel Mind by Niall Teasdale Page A

explaining it internally, we’ll ask them. Cleared for docking. Bay doors are open.’
    ‘Bringing her around,’ Shannon said. ‘Everyone get a seat and strap in.’
    12.8.524 FSC.
    A yellow message in Aneka’s morning diagnostics caught her attention. ‘Al, what does “Full storage defragmentation and categorisation not completed” mean?’
    There was a tiny pause. ‘I’ll shelve the sarcastic answer. The algorithms which optimise your long-term memory did not run to completion, which is odd, but not a serious problem unless it starts happening on a regular basis.’
    ‘Why wouldn’t it? Run all the way through, I mean.’
    ‘Well, it should always be able to run to completion. We should keep an eye on it. I’ll schedule a more extensive diagnostic run on your hard storage for tonight in case there are failing sectors. You were offline for over a millennium. Some of the data losses you incurred, the holes in your memory, could be due to physical faults which were not detected.’
    ‘Can they be fixed?’
    ‘Perhaps, but even if they can’t they can be marked as faulty and the system will avoid putting things there.’
    ‘Just so long as I don’t lose more.’
    ‘The memory integrity check came back clean. Nothing else is being lost.’
    ‘Good. I don’t want to discover I can’t remember my name again.’
    ~~~
    There was music playing on the Agroa Gar’s flight deck when Aneka walked in. She looked between Gillian and Ella, and grimaced. ‘Where the Hell… No, why the Hell are you playing Justin Bieber?’ She noticed Monkey perched on a seat at the sensor console nodding; he obviously was not impressed either.
    Gillian turned, frowning. ‘I rather liked it. We discovered a huge archive of material apparently taken from whatever the Internet was called back then.’
    ‘The Internet,’ Aneka supplied. ‘Sometimes the “World Wide Web,” or just the Web.’
    ‘Oh, well, it seems that they gathered vast amounts of material from it and stored it for research purposes.’
    ‘Well, I know they looked at it. That’s why I got a boob job done when they constructed this body. The idea that my body was reconfigured to suit the ideals on the Internet was not one of Al’s finer comments.’
    ‘How were they to know?’ Al asked.
    It was a good point, but not one she wanted to hear. Instead she walked over to the console. The interface was in Xinti, but there were both basic and complex search functions. Aneka typed, grinned, and then selected one of the returned tracks. Elvis Presley erupted into the opening bars of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ . ‘There you go, your favourite royal singer.’
    ‘This,’ Ella said, ‘was what “The King” sounded like?’
    ‘One of his rockier numbers. He did ballads, things with more blues to them.’ She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t a big fan.’
    ‘I can see why. Is there anything in here you did like?’
    Aneka typed and then tapped, and Disturbed’s ‘Down with the Sickness’began blasting out. ‘This is more my style.’
    Monkey was now standing behind them. ‘Wow, that’s… good. It’s more… I don’t know, it’s more raw than modern music.’
    Aneka chuckled. ‘Yeah, somehow I could see you at a Disturbed concert.’ Her fingers moved over the keys again. ‘Maybe they’ve stored some movies. I may be saved from those interminable sex comedies you lot like so much.’ The screen changed and Aneka found herself looking at a list of films.
    ‘Looks like they did,’ Gillian commented.
    Aneka nodded, her hands lifting away from the screen. It was displaying what she wanted, but she was almost sure she had not finished typing in the query.
    ~~~
    The chatter at lunchtime was almost exclusively about warp engines. Aneka ate what passed for ham sandwiches, though the meat had very little to do with ham, and let the voices pass over her. She had almost no clue what they were talking about. The basic concept of a warp drive she had mastered: the engines