Read Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern for Free Online

Hardwired’s computer system was. The answer filled him with dread.
    “Gone,” responded the small man, his greasy light blond ponytail bounced about the back of his head as he did. Kiesling hated that nasty bit of horsehair almost as much as he hated the man’s ratty goatee, which always seemed to be shaved asymmetrically. “It’s all gone.”
    Forcing himself to take a deep breath to keep from tearing the tuft of hair out by its roots, Kiesling said as calmly as his building rage would allow, “What do you mean by “gone?” You’re talking about ten years of research…millions of man-hours. Can you recover it from the system?”
    Anderson shrank down into himself as his boss loomed over him, fists clenched and fuming. He licked his lips and looked around the room for someone, anyone to help. Finding himself alone in Kiesling’s sights, Anderson finally stuttered, “G-gone. As in “gone.” There’s nothing left. The system is blank…reformatted and gone. Just gone.”
    “If you say “gone” one more time, I’m going to have Mr. Doherty shoot you in the back of the head,” Kiesling nodded over to his now shocked-looking head of security. “Please, explain.”
    The terrified computer technician flipped his laptop around to reveal its screen, which seemed to show an ever-increasing line of numbers and letters scrolling down its face. “See here?” asked Anderson, “The system is showing a clean wipe of everything. Whatever Designate Cestus did while he was plugged into the system, it took down everything: active data, back-ups, programs…hell, he even took out the base operating system. Everything is go…deleted. But that isn’t the worst part.”
    With a headache of biblical proportions building just behind his brow, Kiesling clenched his eyes and waved for the tech to continue. “Go on.”
    “The server logs show a massive download of information occurred right before the system died. Zettabytes of data were copied. Everything was taken.”
    “Taken by whom?” quizzed the increasingly worried Kiesling.
    “Designate Cestus.”
    “That’s impossible,” interrupted Melissa to the man’s left, causing both Kiesling and Anderson to jump. “Cestus may have had the most advanced wetware we’ve ever integrated into a biological unit, but that amount of information is magnitudes beyond what he is capable of storing.”
    Everyone stared at the woman in amazement. A tiny grin tugged at Kiesling’s lips. It might be time to give Melissa a raise.
    “Well,” started Anderson, insecurity oozing from every pore of his body. “Normally, you’d be correct, Ms. Roslan: the base system Cestus had been operating with would have been unable to process, let alone store that amount of data. It would have fried every synapse in his brain and shut him down; maybe even killing him in the process.”
    Melissa looked down on the man, smirking.
    “However,” he continued, “With his upgrade last month, we gave him tens of millions of tiny computers to add to his network…”
    “Oh, my God,” realization hit the executive assistant’s face before anyone else realized what Anderson was saying,” The nano-drones…”
    “Exactly,” returned Anderson, shifting his attention from his boss to the only other person in the room who seemed to understand what he was saying. “All of those microscopic drones are tiny computers, all slaved to the one in the head of Designate Cestus. It’s possible they’re operating as a cloud-processing network—each nano-drone carrying and managing a small piece of the information and taking some of the lode off of his core-system. He may not even realize what he’s got—the download may have fried his governing AI…”
    “Which is what caused him to go rogue,” finished Ms. Roslan.
    “Precisely! With his AI gone, the original personality construct resumed control.”
    “Wait a minute,” Kiesling jumped in as he finally processed the information. “You mean our