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Pavel Kohller is not having a great night. Pavel Kohller is tired, Pavel Kohller is stressed, Pavel Kohller has the nasty feeling that, despite his best efforts, things are about to get worse. Clever man, he is dead right about that but for now he should think himself lucky that he does not yet have the faintest idea just how bad things are going to get. For now, Pavel Kohller is working flat out trying to save the situation. He has managed to salvage, and send on, enough data for Britain’s best selling daily scandal rag to run a good few pages on the death of Solomon Brown. But, while that is all fine and dandy in the short term, he is just about to find a much bigger mess. By now, a couple of hours before morning, his brain is running on pure caffeine. He has pieced together most of what has been going on in the last few hours and it has left him with a very uneasy feeling indeed. In fact, if it was not for the knowledge that copies of all his logs would have automatically been transferred on to the storage devices run by everybody’s favourite scandal rag, he would, at this very instant, be deleting the lot. To make matters worse he has just received a text informing him that a car is on its way to take him to his employer’s office. Pavel Kohller suspects that he might need to come up with something pretty special in order to save what is left of his career. It would not help his frame of mind to know that, in fact, he needs to come up with something special indeed in order to save his life. Fear, however can be a very good motivator and Pavel Kohller has just had a bit of a revelation. He thinks he has just worked out what has been going on, and the good news is; he is right. As he sits in front of a screen in his lab, amongst the debris of the near disaster that befell him, he can feel his heart begin to beat faster. He calls up the logs for the last few days and whispers a little prayer. The system is not completely rebuilt yet, actually it is being held together with gaffer-tape and hope, one sneeze in the wrong direction might crash the whole lot. If it goes down again he knows it is going to take hours to boot it back up. For once luck is with Pavel Kohller, the system holds up and he gains access to the logs. The biomechanical nano transmitter was implanted into Solomon Brown roughly a week before his death. For the first couple of days after that there was not a great deal of data coming through. The little device was busy extending its tendrils through its victim’s brain so it could latch on to neurons and catch on to synapses, allowing it to snoop into all the relevant areas of his senses. Over the days, as it should, the amount of information sent and received increased steadily. Around day five, it reached the point where a perfect record of everything the subject saw and heard and said could be reproduced with complete accuracy. So far so good, but then something strange had happened. Pavel Kohller, if he was a better contortionist, would be kicking himself where it hurts most. It is so obvious, and he has been so stupid, and, for a clever man, that is annoying. As soon as the biomechanical nano transmitter was sending the optimum quality of sound and vision from Solomon Brown the flow of data should have levelled off, but it did not. Here, look here and here, all through days five, six and seven the flow increased. Pavel Kohller had assumed this was just a glitch. The extra data appeared to be nonsense and he had been so busy making sure everything was ready for the big break up, he had decided to deal with it later. Now follow this reasoning; supposing there was a glitch with the biomechanical nano transmitter, this was the first time he had tried one on a human being after all. Also lets face it, Solomon Brown’s little bug had been fitted in a real hurry. You do not want a bare-knuckle boxing champion coming round while you are drilling a hole in his skull. But, suppose that the glitch was not a simple case of the device sending back junk. Maybe the data was good data but the equipment built to receive it had not been set up to handle this kind of information. Once the fiendish little contraption was sending the right amount of data back from the areas of Solomon Brown’s brain controlling speech and vision and hearing, it was supposed to stop converting the grey matter into nano wires and just concentrate on transmitting the pay-dirt. But what if it had malfunctioned at this point and just gone on colonising area after area of the magician’s brain? Some of this data could be much more than just junk. Suppose, just suppose, that some of this stuff relates to touch, smell, emotion, thought and whatever else goes to make up a consciousness. That is why the level of information received had just gone on building and building, right up until that last surge, at the moment when Solomon Brown had died. The man’s whole personality was being recorded. Pavel Kohller goes cold for a moment. How much data, he wonders, would it take to record a soul at the moment of death? He starts tapping furiously at his keyboard. Well the answer to that question is clear; a soul, it seems, would be a small thing. A lot of the data in that final surge does really seem to be junk. Pavel Kohller tries to stay calm. Pavel Kohller tries to think rationally, but this is made difficult by the uneasy awareness that his employer will be very keen to have that final distillation from the mind of the dying man. Even without knowing of Sir Connor Lord’s professional interest in souls, Pavel Kohller knows that this will be the case. The semi-batty boffin suppresses a sob; it has been a wretched night and he feels that he is owed a slice of luck. Well, that is a debatable thought to say the least, but whether or not he is actually owed his slice of luck, the good news for him is that now he gets it. It only takes a few minutes tinkering for him to find a small but coherent string of data that slipped through all the nonsense at the last moment, almost as the system crashed. He traces the path it took, weaving and bobbing, ducking and sliding through his system, until he has located its current hideaway beyond any doubt. Pavel Kohller has found the soul of Solomon Brown. The soul of Solomon Brown was and is stored on a hard drive in server C003, and here Pavel Kohller’s brief flirtation with fortune dies like tentative smile in the face of unmoving rejection. Server C003 cannot be accessed. Server C003 does not register as part of the equipment that Pavel Kohller has managed to resurrect and when Pavel Kohller goes, screwdriver in hand, to the rack where server C003 should be, he finds that it is no longer there. Pavel Kohller, for what seems an age, stands mesmerised by the vacant space where the server should be. He boggles, he goggles, he looks away and back at least three times, trying to make it reappear by effort of will. But the rack remains as empty as a supermodel’s smile. Such a small gap, the same shape as, and only slightly larger than a laptop, yet it could well cost him everything. He is calculating his chances of solving of this situation by simply doing a runner, when the entry buzzer buzzes. Oh dear, the car has arrived to take him to see his boss. With an impulse born of desperation, he grabs a case containing his latest prototype as he leaves. Good move, for although he does not know it, he might have just saved his life.
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