The Octagonal Raven Read Online Free

Elysa.”
    Kharl nodded. “I know. There’s no Elysa Mujaz-Kitab in the system. She’s not even in the family’s system. And no variations…even distant ones. I had Gerrat check.”
    “Great…”
    “In fact…no one like her exists,” Kharl said.
    “She wasn’t…VR projection. You’re not saying…she’s a duoclone?”
    He smiled slowly. “You’re still interested after what she did to you?”
    “Have to admit it wasn’t boring.” I tried to laugh and ended up coughing. The coughs hurt, more than a bad Gate translation, a lot more. “Do I…have…any lungs…left?”
    “They’re fine, or they will be, if a little sore and stressed.”
    “What about Elysa, if that’s even her name?”
    “She didn’t behave like a full-imprint clone, either mono or duo, and I would have known if she were. I’d bet she’s genetically human. She’s just not in the system. She’s probably someone who wanted to get to meet you.”
    “So…you’re betting she’s a multiclone, raised from exobirth to adulthood?”
    “Hardly that. While she could have been gene-switched, and backaltered, the simpler explanation is just that she’s from off-planet where the databases aren’t as complete.”
    I frowned. The resources required for either genetic option were not inconsiderable. Nor the time in a full-sized exowomb, if she’d opted for backaltering. I couldn’t have afforded it, even if I’d dipped into my inherited holdings. And interstellar travel, by individuals not on Federal Service contract, was almost as expensive. But she had said she was from a colony planet, and she could have been traveling under the Federal Service.
    “You aren’t that unpopular, Daryn.”
    “I suppose you’re right. My royalties aren’t high enough for that.” I kept my voice low, not whispering, just low.
    “You don’t know what this sort of thing can do. Remember that. It could be some sort of off-shoot from the treatment of the pre-select plague. You weren’t here, but you had to have gotten the treatment when you returned. Some people ended up with allergies similar to this. There were some odd side effects.”
    “So I get blindsided years later?”
    “It happens. At least we’re all alive. Not that the Dynae and some of that ilk seem to approve in the techniques that made it possible.”
    I gave the smallest of headshakes. Even in my more strident edart commentaries, I hadn’t even bothered with the semisecret society and its members’ strident opposition to preselection and nanitic augmentation. They belonged to the long and honorable human tradition that had spawned the Luddites, the flat-earthers, various bible-thumping faithies, the scientographers, and the back-earthies, not to mention all the other forms of the true believers that had parasitized human society over the millennia.
    “How anyone…” I murmured.
    “The human mind remains a fractal,” Kharl observed. “Even down to the leptonic level, and to the levels of the sub-leptonic strings below.”
    “The mind is not the brain,” I reminded him. “And…that’s a good image. Irrelevant…but good.”
    “That’s my point. Nothing’s relevant. What happened to you shouldn’t have.”
    “Do you have any idea what triggered this…attack…seizure?”
    “In general terms…”
    I waited.
    “You reacted to something, perhaps someone’s altered floral fragrance…or something…who knows? Your system created a galvanic allergic reaction—the equivalent of thousands of bee stings or insect bites.”
    “What…?”
    “I don’t know. Whatever it was created such havoc that all that’s left are assorted nanites and nanite fragments and carbon compounds. We’ve got nanites everywhere these days. It could be anything. Once you’re more stable, we’ll set up a nanitic system that will protect you from anything like this happening again.”
    Even without my internal nanites, I could tell Kharl wasn’t telling the whole truth, again, but I let it