“So piss,” Boutin said. “I don’t mind. The crèche is self-cleaning, of course. And I’m sure your unitard can wick away the urine.”
“Not without talking to my BrainPal about it,” Jared said. Without communicating with the owner’s BrainPal, the nanobots in the unitard’s fabric only maintained basic defensive properties, like impact stiffening, designed to keep the owner safe through loss of consciousness or BrainPal trauma. Secondary capabilities, like the ability to drain away sweat and urine, were deemed nonessential.
“Ah,” Boutin said. “Well, here. Let me fix that.” Boutin went to an object on one of the lab tables and pressed on it. Suddenly the thick cotton batting in Jared’s skull lifted; his BrainPal functionality was back. Jared ignored his need to piss in a frantic attempt to try to contact Jane Sagan.
Boutin watched Jared with a small smile on his face. “It won’t work,” he said, after a minute of watching Jared’s inner exertions. “The antenna here is strong enough to cause wave interference for about ten meters. It works in the lab and that’s about it. Your friends are still jammed up. You can’t reach them. You can’t reach anyone.”
“You can’t jam BrainPals,” Jared said. BrainPals transmitted through a series of multiple, redundant and encrypted transmission streams, each communicating through a shifting pattern of frequencies, the pattern of which was generated through a onetime key created when one BrainPal contacted another. It was virtually impossible to block even one of these streams; blocking all would be unheard of.
Boutin walked over to the antenna and pressed it again; the cotton batting in Jared’s head returned. “You were saying?” Boutin said. Jared held back the urge to scream. After a minute Boutin turned the antenna back on. “Normally, you are right,” Boutin said. “I supervised the latest round of communication protocols in the BrainPal. I helped design them. And you’re entirely correct. You can’t jam the communication streams, not without using such a high-energy broadcasting source that you overwhelmed all possible transmissions, including your own.
“But I’m not jamming the BrainPals that way,” Boutin said. “Do you know what a ‘back door’ is? It’s an easy-access entrance that a programmer or designer leaves himself into a complex program or design, so he can get into the guts of what he’s working on without jumping through hoops. I had a back door into the BrainPal that only opens with my verification signal. The back door was designed to let me monitor BrainPal function on the prototypes for this last iteration, but it also allowed me to do some tweaking of the capabilities to factor out certain functions when I saw a glitch. One of the things I can do is turn off transmission capabilities. It’s not in the design, so someone who is not me wouldn’t know it was there.”
Boutin paused for a second and regarded Jared. “But you should have known about the back door,” he said. “Maybe you wouldn’t have thought to use it as a weapon—I didn’t until I got here—but if you’re me you should know this. What do you know? Really?”
“How do you know about me?” Jared asked, to derail Boutin. “You knew I was supposed to be you. How did you know?”
“That’s actually an interesting story,” Boutin said, taking Jared’s bait. “When we decided to make the back door a weapon, I made the code for the weapon like the code for the back door, because it was the simplest thing to do. That meant that it has the ability to check the function status of the BrainPals it affected. This turned out to be useful for a lot of reasons; not the least was letting us know how many soldiers we were dealing with at one time. It also gave us snapshots of the consciousness of the individual soldiers. This also is turning out to be useful.
“You were very recently at Covell Station, were you not?” Jared said nothing. “Oh, come now,” Boutin said, irritably. “I know you were there. Stop acting like you are giving away state secrets.”
“Yes,” Jared said. “I was at Covell.”
“Thank you,” Boutin said. “We know there are Colonial soldiers at Omagh and that they come into Covell Station; we’ve placed detection devices there that scan for the back door. But they never go off. Whatever soldiers you have there must have different BrainPal architecture.” Boutin glanced over to see Jared’s reaction to this; Jared gave none. Boutin continued. “However, you tripped our alarms because you have the BrainPal I designed. Later on I got the consciousness signature sent to me, and as you might imagine I was floored. I know the image of my own consciousness very well, since I use my own pattern for a lot of testing. I let the Obin know I was looking for you. We were collecting Special Forces soldiers anyway, so this was not difficult for them to do. In fact, they should have tried to collect you at Covell.”