Tapping In, Part 2

As soon as Slaiton was out the door, the Secmaster whipped it closed and turned to Satasha. “Okay, seriously. What the hell is going on?”

Satasha had seem him panicked before. This was like that, but with something else. Confusion, maybe? Or maybe anger. She could never get that one straight. “Just like I told you. Hellard running Raid sim from his terminal. Emergent AI with some sort of split personality thing going on. What else do you want to hear?”

“A solution to all this, for starters! Or maybe just a hint!” the Secmaster shouted. “And maybe somebody to explain how I have gotten this over my head! How do you handle this?” Okay, this was definitely new. He was never this scrambled even in panic mode. Interesting.

“Same as any other problem, boss,” Satasha said. “One step at a time.” She returned to tapping through Hellard's arcane interfaces. There must be some way to differentiate the data streams, dense as they were. Her guess was that the Raid bandwidth was dominating the terminal channel, but – oh, wait, were they still trying to contact Hellard? Slaiton hadn't been clear on that.

“Are we still trying to contact Hellard?” Satasha asked.

“Sure, why not?” the Secmaster replied. “Not like we could make this situation worse by finding out what he knows. Or at least what he's doing.”

“Good. There's our next step, then. And I think I know how to manage it this time.”