The full horror of what he had overheard hadn’t penetrated fully. He was conscious of it, but in a detached way, as if he were watching somebody else thinking it. A defense mechanism in his mind was delaying the impact somehow, almost as if it knew that he couldn’t afford the distraction of dwelling on it right now. But even that realization made his despair worse. Distraction from what? What else was there for him to do that he needed to focus undivided attention on?
He pictured Vanessa again, in the VR suit—probably testing it. What could go under a hotel-room door? she had asked Michelle. That was how they had killed Jack Anastole in the hotel—with some kind of specially modified killer mec directed from another room. And they were going to do the same thing with Eric tonight in his hotel. There was time to warn him yet, if only Kevin could find a way. . . .
So would they have somebody installed in another room in the resort at Barrow’s Pass? Or maybe they had developed a relay that could be operated remotely, like Taki’s. Kevin thought of the killer mec being there right now in Eric’s suitcase and Eric not even knowing, and somehow he virtually shuddered. . . .
No, that was unlikely he decided. The Microbotics mecs were still pretty crude, non-DNC types—the body suit was evidence enough of that. Although, given the kind of equipment that was sure to be available at a place like Microbotics, they would still have more-than-adequate capabilities when it came to communications. . . .
Wait a minute, Kevin told himself. Back up, back up. Like a man fallen overboard from a boat waving frantically before he went under, something in Kevin’s already-fading train of thought was trying to get his attention. He tried to think back. . . . Why was it so difficult to track strings of thoughts and associations back in the reverse direction?
It was something to do with Eric’s suitcase—suitcase in the car—maybe a mec in the suitcase. . . . So what was the significance of that? Mec in the suitcase, in the car. . . .
Mec in the car! Eric was using the Jaguar. Kevin had hidden two mecs in it—Tigger and Mr. Toad. If he couldn’t get to the phone, maybe he could use one of the mecs in the car to warn Eric. But how could he, if he had already established that his communication with mecs wasn’t working either? The answer was surely right there, if only he could find a way. . . .
He knew the hardware and software of Neurodyne’s in-house system well enough to be aware how improbable this kind of failure mode was. The software channel drivers were modularized; for all of them to fail together was inconceivable. The only place where a malfunction could disable all channels simultaneously would be at the level above that where they all interfaced with the device control supervisor.
An anticipatory excitement bubbled up suddenly from somewhere in Kevin’s subconscious, as even before he had fully followed the line through, an instinct told him that here was the solution.
The fault had to be in the device control supervisor. Specifically, that meant in the regular Neurodyne supervisor that handled the codes that all Neurodyne mecs operated on, because that was the supervisor they had been using. They had used the regular Neurodyne supervisor because the mecs they had sent into Garsten’s office and the remaining ones in the van were regular Neurodyne production or research models. And, indeed, the others that Kevin had tried to activate in the lab where he was were all regular Neurodyne patterns too. But Toad and Tigger were special “battlemec” types that Kevin and Taki had modified, which used different codes and required a different version of the device control supervisor program. And Kevin kept a copy of that supervisor in the general Neurodyne system! He had put it there so that he could operate his own mecs in the firm’s labs.
Maybe there was a way! If he could switch that version of the supervisor in place of the regular one that wasn’t functioning, then maybe he would be able to access any of his own mecs that he could get a link to, even if he was shut off from the firm’s. Praying that he wasn’t building himself up with false hopes, he called down the Control menu and activated sysconf.