The ELI Event B007R5LTNS

position.
    Pettis snapped on his headset and nodded at Davies. “Any time you’re ready, Lieutenant.”

Twenty-Two
    Dr. Stephen A. Wheeler, eminent computer scientist, pioneering AI researcher, winner of many awards, recipient of multiple grants, and father of the world’s first and only electro-neurological, hybridized carbon-silicon, truly sentient machine, lay slumped across his desk, face down, snoring loudly, cheek mashed against his nose, mouth open, a small, bubbly dollop of drool dripping from his bottom lip onto an enormous greenbar printout.
    Returning home, Wheeler had pored over the printout well into the night. In addition to the obvious garbage data he and Kelly had found sandwiched into his poetry lesson, he had discovered in the memory dump some curiously recurring hexadecimal patterns. Three distinct series of hex pairs showed up repeatedly in E-L-One’s neural block. The central section of the printout, the part currently under his face, was littered with red circles where Wheeler had identified the sequences and translated them.
    The first sequence was 4E 41 44 43 4F 4D. This series appeared eighteen times in seven pages, far too often for sheer coincidence. Each hex pair, Wheeler knew, represented a letter or other character in base 16 and could be converted to a regular decimal number, and thus to a readable character. 4E, for example, was 4 times 16, or 64, plus E in hex, or 14 in decimal, yielding 64 + 14, or 78. The character at position 78 in the ASCII character chart is the letter N.
    In this way he quickly decoded the remaining hex numbers in the sequence. 41 was 65 in decimal, or the letter A; 44 was 68, or D; 43 was 67, or C; 4F, 79, O; and 4D, 77, M. “NADCOM.” Whatever it meant, it appeared much too often to be happenstance.
    The second series was 4D 44 41, which translated to “MDA.” Normally, this shorter sequence would have been hard to spot, but it jumped out at Wheeler because it occurred way, way too frequently—thirty-nine times in twelve pages—to dismiss it as random.
    The final recurring sequence was particularly troubling, and all too familiar. It was a sequence Wheeler had seen so often over the years he didn’t even have to decode it, 45 52 52 4F 52: “ERROR.” Wheeler had begun circling those as well, but stopped counting after fifty-four instances in just six pages of densely-packed mathematical code. No way was that a coincidence.
    Exhausted and starving, but too engrossed in the translation to stop and eat, Wheeler had sucked down two can sandwiches, as he liked to call them, in rapid succession shortly after eleven o’clock. Despite his efforts to keep working, ten minutes after that it was lights out, all aboard the Morpheus Express, Last Train to Droolsville. He did not hear the TV blaring in the apartment next door. He did not hear the rug rats screaming in the second-floor apartment above.
    He did not hear the man in the hallway approach his apartment.
    The tall, thin man stood in the shadows close to Wheeler’s door and produced from his tunic a small cylindrical object with a translucent crystalline dome at one end. He pointed the object at the door, thumbed a switch, and the thing glowed green at the end and hummed quietly for a few seconds. The lock clicked, and silently the man stepped into the room, where Wheeler snored peacefully, back to the door, atop the greenbar on the card table that served as his home office.
    The man surveyed the room, saw no threats, and crossed quickly to the table. He looked at Wheeler, satisfied he was genuinely asleep. Surprised to find someone in the dining area at this hour, the man stepped across the room and peered down the hallway. One bedroom on the right; he checked it immediately. Empty. Returning to the table, he bent over to examine the greenbar and its rash of red circles, and instantly saw the significance of the hexadecimal sequences. He slowly nodded to himself.
    The man straightened up to his full height and moved away from the table a few feet, back toward the door. Without hesitation, he drew a laser pistol—the one he had acquired from its previous owner, the unfortunate Trooper Valik—and pointed it at Wheeler’s back.
    Suddenly there was movement outside!
    Directly in front of him, opposite Wheeler, the scruffy bushes under the apartment window parted and a figure appeared. A man in some sort of one-piece garment stood there, clearly visible in the moonlight, looking right at him. The