She touched one of the smaller pods. Another red light blinked on, but the characters beside it only read; Mudd, J. L. and a string of numbers. The other small sarcophagus yielded Finney, D.S.D. and more numerals. It took her long moments to work up the courage to touch the largest pod, but when she flicked it lightly with her finger, nothing happened. She waited until her hand was trembling a little less, then touched it and held the contact.

"Ms. Pirofsky?"

She squealed and jumped back. The voice was right in her head.

"I'm sorry—I didn't mean to frighten you. It's me. Sellars." His voice was rough, as though he were in great pain, but it sounded like him. Olga took a stagger-step, then sat down on the carpet.

"I thought you were in a coma. You did frighten me. It is like the mummy's tomb in here. I almost jumped out of my skin."

"I really am sorry. But I must speak to you and I'm afraid it can't wait."

"What is this place? What are these things?"

Sellars waited a moment before answering. "The largest of those devices is the true home of Felix Jongleur. The man who owns J Corporation, the man who built the Grail network."

"Home. . . ?"

"His body is nearly dead, and has been for years. There are many, many machines connected to that life-support pod—it extends down nearly ten meters into the floor of the room."

"He's . . . right there. . . ?" She looked at the pod, amazed and disturbed. "He can't leave it?"

"No, he can't leave it." Sellars cleared his throat. "I have to talk to you Ms. Pirofsky."

"Olga, please. Yes, I know I have to get out of here. But I haven't found anything yet—anything about the voices. . . ."

"I have."

It took a moment to sink in. "You have? What?"

"This is difficult, Ms. . . . Olga. Please, prepare yourself, I am afraid that it will be . . . shocking to you."

It was hard to think of anything stranger than what she had already experienced. "Just tell me."

"You had a baby."

This was the last thing she had expected to hear. "Yes. He died. He was born dead." It was quite amazing how the pain could still come so quickly, so powerfully. "I never saw him."

Sellars hesitated again. When he spoke, it was almost in a rush. "You never saw him because he didn't die. He didn't die, Olga. They lied to you."

"What?" There were no tears, only a dull anger. How could anyone say such a cruel, ridiculous thing? "What are you talking about?"

"Your child was a rare mutation—a telepath. He was . . . is . . . a child that would never have lived under normal circumstances. The raw power of his mind was so great that despite many preparations, a doctor in the delivery room actually died of a stroke while performing the cesarean. Two nurses had seizures, too, but there were several on hand and one of them managed to deliver a huge dose of sedative to the child."

"This is craziness! How could such a thing happen and I would not know about it?"

"You were already sedated—you had been told it would be a very difficult birth, a breech, do you remember? That's because there had already been evidence that the child was abnormal. Don't you remember all the tests? Surely you must have thought there was something unusual about it. The doctors and nurses were all specialists. Highly-paid specialists."

Olga wanted to curl up and put her fingers in her ears. Her baby was dead. For over thirty years she had struggled with it, learned to live with it. "I don't understand anything you are saying."

"The man in that pod—Felix Jongleur. He had been looking for a child with just the potential of your baby. He and his associates had connections in dozens of hospitals all over Europe, owned many of them outright. You did not choose that hospital yourself, did you?"

"We . . . we were referred. By a doctor—but he was a kind man!"

"Perhaps. Perhaps he didn't understand what he was doing. But the fact is, you and your baby were delivered into the hands of people who only wanted your child—your son. After testing gave some idea of what they had found, Jongleur's specialists had already begun sedating him in the womb. They were as ready for his arrival as they could be, but even so, he nearly died from the trauma of birth—too much mental energy, a kind of hyperactivity that would have killed him in minutes. At least one person present at the birth did die. But as I said, they were largely ready. He was put into a cryogenic unit and his temperature lowered drastically. They put him into something like suspended animation."

Now the tears did come. Memories came with them—the nights she had sat awake in bed with Aleksandr sleeping beside her, convinced there was something wrong with her baby because what was inside her simply did not feel right. The other times when she would have sworn she could sense it . . . thinking inside her, the strange sensation of a little alien thing living inside her belly. But she had told herself the feelings were nothing that other mothers did not also experience and the doctors had agreed with her.

"How could you know all this?" she demanded. "How could you know? Why did you wait until now to tell me? You are making this up—this is some crazy game, it's your conspiracy, your crazy conspiracy!"

"No, Olga," he said sadly. "I didn't tell you because I didn't know. Until now, I had no idea how the Grail network's operating system worked, since it did not seem to function within any of the rules for even the most sophisticated neural networks. But. . . ."

"My baby!" Olga leaped up and staggered to the pod at the top of the pyramidal arrangement. The word Cryogenic had faded but it was burned in her mind. "Is he here? Is he in here?" She scratched uselessly at the plastic. "Where is he?"

"He is not there, Olga." Sellars sounded as though he too was fighting tears. "He is not in the building. He is not even on Earth."

Her legs buckled. She sagged and fell to the ground, thumping her forehead against the carpet. "What are you saying?" she moaned. "I don't understand."

"Please, Olga. Please. I'm so sorry. But I have to tell you everything. We have very little time."

"Time? I have thought for most of my life that my baby was dead, now you tell me I have no time? Why? What are you doing?"

"Please. Just listen." Sellars took a deep, shaky breath. "Jongleur and his technicians built the Grail system around your child. His problem . . . his gift, whatever you call it, the hypermutation that would otherwise have killed him long before he came to term—and perhaps would have killed you, too—made him ideal for the Grail's purposes. With all their work to prepare a world where they could spend eternity, they still could not create a virtual environment responsive and realistic enough, not with the best information technologies of the day. What good would it have been to them to make themselves immortal if they did not have a suitable place to spend that immortality? So Jongleur and his scientists created a massively parallel processor constructed of human brains—fetal brains, mostly—and relied on your son's native abilities to make connections between those brains that no machinery could make, to dominate and shape them into the operating system for their network.

"But there were problems from the very beginning. The human brain is not a computer. It needs to do human things to grow. If it doesn't learn, it doesn't physically develop. Your son was a one-in-a-billion oddity, Olga, but he was still a Human child. In order to develop this incredibly powerful resource, the Grail engineers and scientists discovered that they had to teach it—had to let it come into contact with other human minds, learn to communicate, even to reason after a fashion, or it would be useless to them.

"Paradoxically, the Grail people only exposed him to human ideas in order to make him the most efficient machine possible. They had no interest in his true humanity. And in the end, that is what killed them." There was a certain grim satisfaction in his voice.