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go, Helice would go with him. Somebody had to make the business judgments. Minerva wouldn’t let him go alone, Stefan had already said as much.
    The validity of the find was becoming more convincing every day. Earth-side mSaps—tightly under control—confirmed the optical cube data Helice had salvaged. At irregular points in time and locale, Minerva sensors detected quantum particles that mirrored the proper quantum orientation. Shunning ordinary matter, they were devilishly hard to register. But the mSaps reasoned— with the nonchalance of machine sapience—that beyond the horizon of our universe lay another. It was incredible. And she wanted to see it for herself—wanted it with a fierce hunger that had slowly crept upon her during the three-day descent on the space elevator. She didn’t know who Stefan was considering for the junket, but she had to make her pitch now— now that she had him alone.
    They power-walked through the savant warehouse, packed with technicians tending the savants and tabulators that in turn tended Minerva’s data tide. Every tender aspired to administer to the mSaps, but that privilege fell only to the savvies, those who could, for example, solve complex equations on the back of a napkin, or even without a pencil at all. Like Helice herself.
    Here in the warehouse, young scientists on the make had only a few months to prove themselves. Failing in the Company, they might find a menial job—but most would opt for the dole, the guaranteed BSL, the Basic Standard of Living. Just shoot me, Helice thought, if I ever sit drooling in front of a Deep Vision screen.
    The savant warehouse led to the central warrens, where the work cubes formed a vast lattice. Stefan broke into a jog and Helice followed. The occupants barely took note of the owners passing by, intent on their data entry quotas. This was where the data cycle began, where the information strands wound onto the skeins of the nonquantum tronics forming the broad base of the computing pyramid that embodied Minerva’s collective knowledge. This scene was repeated at similar company nests at Generics, EoSap, ChinaKor, and TidalSphere.
    And now Helice Maki was at the top of that pyramid. She took a moment to savor this, but the taste ran thin. The region next door towered in her imagination, casting a long shadow on the day.
    She glanced at Stefan, “Still got a fix on the emissions? Three locales, right?”
    After the destruction of the Appian II, every Minerva installation in commercial space had joined in the search for anomalous particles. They’d found them in three other locations, across several parsecs of space, now that Minerva knew what to look for, and how to look, using a next-generation program of the one Luc Diers had inadvertently set in motion.
    “One locale,” Stefan answered. “Two of them dried up.”
    Helice knew about the shifting coordinates. “That just reinforces my thesis. It’s not merely a quantum reality. If it was, the readings would be constant. So it’s a universe of greater than Planck length.”
    “Right, it’s bigger than that, but smaller than our universe. And it’s not always in the same place.” He banked around a corner and sprinted up a stairway, his face starting to redden.
    On the first landing, Stefan bent over, hands on knees. He shook his head. “Damn, but I’d like to believe all this, Helice.”
    “I know you would.” He’d been a worried man since the day she’d met him. She’d heard that he used to be a driving force, but these days he was afraid of risks, looking for proof before making decisions. This was not the man to lead Minerva, or manage the real estate next door.
    He puffed, catching his breath. “Hell. What makes you so cocksure?”
    “No guarantees,” Helice said, “but try thinking of it this way. How come we live in a perfect universe? Ever think of that, how we just happen to live in a space-time where things are stable and tend to support life? We just