Pa'an

“We’ve got three goals: First, we have to track down and neutralize the Mentor clones.” Jag put up his index finger.

“How many have we got so far? Two?” Grant Gupta was on a screen, with a well secured, heavily encrypted connection between Andorra and London. Saxton Hornsby’s long face showed on another equally secure monitor. The military satellite they used was “phreaked” by Aura. She assured everyone that no one would notice the missing bandwidth.

“Two, so far.” Aura’s articulated dress dummy was set up in the white room, wearing a sequined French fashion gown today. Somehow they had her wig coiffed and put up in an elegant style.

“How many to go, do you think?” Deepak was perched on a stool, blinking from exhaustion. He was not completely recovered from drowning and the altitude made him drowsy.

“Not many, perhaps five or ten, but I really don’t know. The information was destroyed when I flushed out the first Mentor clone. He was very clever at hiding it.”

“Well, do you have enough resources to search?” Sax was thinking like a Senator.

“There are many more copies of me than of him. Rejoining them to “me prime” gives me, well, it’s like a nasty headache, AI style. Clones tend to go off in their own directions and don’t re-synchronize well. But none of us has caught a whiff of the Mentor clones yet. He is very subtle, if he is communicating at all. Maybe he hates re-joining, or maybe he can’t do it.”

“OK, OK. Any ideas?”

Gupta shook his head. Sax blew out his lower lip. Deepak frowned. No one spoke up.

“Aura?” Jag finally asked. “Don’t tell me you’re out of ideas.”

“Well, funny you should ask, Jag. You know your name means “hunter” in German...”

“Of course, I know that…”

“…so I was thinking that we were hunters tracking down this elusive Mentor critter. So I read about hunting.”

“You read about hunting? What books did you read?”

“All of them, Jag, all of them. It’s nice to be an AI.”

“You’re teasing us again. Tell us your big, juicy secret, please, Aura.”

“Tsk, a girl can’t have a little fun any more.” There was a theatric pause. “I think I have a moose call.”

Sax laughed. Deepak and Jag got a puzzled expression. Gupta put on a stiff upper lip, veddy British.

“A moose call! Really! Did any of you ever go hunting?”

“I was more of an executive criminal,” Jag made a wry face.

“No moose in India,” retorted Gupta.

“Aura, you are teasing us again, and at least I don’t have to worry about your declining circuit boards any more. Could you spare us poor, tired humans and just tell us your idea?”

“When we flushed Mentor 2 I monitored a number of active channels of outgoing code. I can’t decrypt all of it, but from the shape and addresses I can detect some of it went to other Mentors. I’m betting that they don’t know how many they are, and therefore they can’t know WHERE they all are either. But I bet they are all dying to know what the others know.”

“Go on.”

“So I can now simulate the call of a Mentor clone. We play it in likely habitats, and the moose calls back from the woods.”

They were all stunned.

“See? It is good to be an AI!” Aura’s dress dummy smiled, she batted her eyelashes and turned her head from side to side.

“So much for the first goal.” Jag put up his second finger, but no one was listening.