Jared said nothing. Boutin smiled. "Enough, anyway," he said. "I can tell you have some of my same interests. I saw how you perked up when I talked about the Consu. But maybe we should start with the simple things. Like: What is your name? I find it disconcerting to talk to my sort-of clone without having something to call you."

"Jared Dirac," Jared said.

"Ah," Boutin said. "Yes, the Special Forces naming protocol. Random first name, notable scientist last name. I did some work with the Special Forces at one time—indirectly, since you people don't like non-Special Forces getting in your way. What is that name you call us?"

"Realborn," Jared said.

"Right," Boutin said. "You like keeping yourself apart from the realborn. Anyway, the naming protocol of the Special Forces always amused me. The pool of last names is actually pretty limited: A couple hundred or so, and mostly classical European scientists. Not to mention the first names! Jared. Brad. Cynthia. John. Jane." The names came out as a good-natured sneer. "Hardly a non-Western name among them, and for no good reason, since Special Forces aren't recruited from Earth like the rest of the CDF. You could have been called Yusef al-Biruni and it would have been all the same to you. The set of names Special Forces uses implicitly says something about the point of view of the people who created them, and created you. Don't you think?"

"I like my name, Charles," Jared said.

"Touche," Boutin said. "But I got my name through family tradition, where yours was just mixed and matched. Not that there's anything wrong with 'Dirac' Named for Paul Dirac, no doubt. Ever heard of the 'Dirac sea'?"

"No," Jared said.

"Dirac proposed that what vacuum really was, was a vast sea of negative energy," Boutin said. "And that's a lovely image. Some physicists at the time thought it was an inelegant hypothesis, and maybe it was. But it was poetic, and they didn't appreciate that aspect. But that's physicists for you. Not exactly brimming over with poetry. The Obin are excellent physicists, and not one of them has any more poetry than a chicken. They definitely wouldn't appreciate the Dirac sea. How are you feeling?"

"Constrained," Jared said. "And I need to piss."

"So piss," Boutin said. "I don't mind. The creche 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."

"They tried to kill me at Covell," Jared said.

"Sorry," Boutin said. "Even the Obin can get a little excited in the thick of things. But you can take comfort in knowing that after that point they were told to scan first, shoot second."

"Thanks," Jared said. "That meant a lot to my squad mate today, when they shot him in the head."

"Sarcasm!" Boutin said. "That's more than most of your kind can manage. You got that from me. Like I said, they can get excitable. As well as telling them to look for you, I also told the Obin they could expect an attack here, because if one of you was running around with my consciousness, it was only a matter of time before you found your way here. You probably wouldn't risk a full-scale attack, but you'd probably try something sneaky, like you did. We were listening for this sort of attack, and we were listening for you. As soon as we had you on the ground, we threw the switch to disable the BrainPals."