There was only one level of alert that provoked an audible alarm from Mike Bennett's email system, and that was only because he'd not yet found a way to disable it. The visible alert was, he considered, quite sufficient, and didn't make him jump and lose his train of thought.

It was always the same message too, carefully worded to give nothing away to anyone else who might be in his office at the time. 'Can I see you? Chris Johnson.' That message, that alert, all meant one thing only. He was needed in black section, right away. One of the implantees had an urgent problem.

#

"Dr Bennett," he was greeted by the guard on the front desk of black section. "Good to see you again, sir."

Mike nodded absently. All the lights were green - no current alert, no recent mission. Not a combat injury, then. Most likely one of the new implantees, and he couldn't even begin to guess which. They'd all been doing so well - more than half of them didn't even class as recent any more. He hated the thought of the obvious conclusion: rejection by their newest hope. That would be a sickening blow.

Johnson's assistant greeted him with a wave, and pointed him to the sideroom with no attempt at conversation. Mike tapped sharply on the door, and pushed it open without waiting for acknowledgement. It had to be desperately urgent, or Chris wouldn't have summoned him like that in the first place.

He almost didn't recognise the man on the bed, so sure had he been that it would be one of the new recruits. It took a deep breath for him to banish all thoughts of implant rejection treatment and start remembering everything he knew about the older models. Much older models, from before his time. This man's implant had been in for almost twenty years.

"What do we have?"

"His implant's pouring static."

Mike jumped - he hadn't seen Alouita standing silently in the corner, and the G-Force commander's tone was accusatory to say the least.

"You've had a probe on him?" he asked in some confusion. Johnson never went near the electronics, normally, and Alouita didn't even class as medical staff.

"I don't need a probe to tell you the problem's his implant."

"Jason, you're not helping." Johnson turned to him, one hand still on Mark's shoulder. "He's convulsing, and the standard drugs aren't helping. Relaxants work, but I've had to pump him so full of them he'll not be answering any questions. Sorry."

The standard anticonvulsant drugs worked on the brain, relaxants directly on the muscles, Mike knew. That would certainly fit with an implant problem.

"Is he conscious?"

"Yes. Just not able to communicate."

"I see." Mike pulled the cart of equipment which lived in this room towards him. He suspected he knew exactly what the problem was, now he'd had time to think about it. Mark had been having problems with his implant going out of tune even before he'd quit on them. That had been five months ago now, and five months of it slipping further and further could well have it in a far from optimal state. That, he could fix. Two probes in the back of the neck, return everything to the default settings for a start, have Chris give him something to flush the drugs out of his system, and then retune Mark's implant properly. He presumed Alouita was in here to make quite sure his former commander didn't run off again afterwards.

"I'll need him lying face down."

"Hmm. Side do? I don't like his breathing right now."

Drugged to the eyeballs and beyond - maybe Johnson was making sure, too. "Provided he's still and I've got clear access to his neck, side will do."

Chris nodded. "Jason, can you give me a hand here?"

The young man crossed to the bed, and the two of them efficiently rolled his patient into a much better position: lying on his side, wedges front and back to prevent him from rolling over.

Chris crouched down so that his head was level with Mark's. "Okay, Dr Bennett's going to retune your implant, and then we'll flush the drugs out and you can get some rest."

There was an incomprehensibly slurred response, to which Chris responded, "Don't worry about anything, Mark. Just lie still. Mike, he's all yours."

Mike would have preferred to do this without the Condor's eyes on him, but he knew Jason well enough to realise that protesting would be useless. In any case, he could insert tuning probes in his sleep, accusing eyes burning a hole in the back of his head notwithstanding. Implants went out of tune. It happened. It was hardly his fault if Mark Jarrald had decided to vanish for five months.

"Here we go, Mark." He eased the probes in, years of practice guiding them straight to the output ports on the chip. "Let's see what's going on in there."

The screen filled with jagged spikes, and he bit back a curse. This was a lousy time for an equipment failure. "Chris, I need someone to fetch the spare 'scope."

"No, you don't." There was an edge in Jason's voice that stopped both of them in their tracks. "That's exactly what I got from his implant. Retuning isn't going to do squat. That implant's trashed."

"Let's not jump to conclusions," Mike responded automatically, but inwardly he was forced to admit that Jason might be right. Even Wade's implant, abused by ungentle Spectran probes and untuned for a period of years rather than months, hadn't been outputting rubbish like this. He was absolutely sure that a plain retune wasn't going to fix it. It might help, though. If he could take the edge off, it had to be a good thing.

"Mark, I'm going to adjust your implant now, try to get rid of some of this static for you." He left the secondary probe in place, transmitting to the 'scope screen, and eased the primary one up to the control port he hoped would damp the output. "Here we go."

He'd barely touched it when Chris Johnson barked, "Stop!"

Mike did just that, years of working with together meaning there was no need for discussion or explanation. He backed the probe off just far away to break contact, and waited to find out what was going on.

"Steady there, Mark." Chris had a hand on the young man's pulse, his eyes fixed on the monitor, and Mike belatedly realised just how ragged Mark's breathing had become. "Did that hurt?"

"What kind of damn stupid question -" Jason began, but Mike needed no more demonstration that this wasn't going to work, and he certainly wasn't going to stand around and be told his job by a paramedic, even if that paramedic did command G-Force.

"Pulling out now. I'm going to need to see the chip properly, Chris, and without hurting him. You'd best get the anaesthetist here. I have no idea how long this is going to take me to fix."

There was something wrong with his implant. Jason had felt it. Jason knew he wasn't imagining it.

Mark had never been so relieved to hear anything in his life. Implants were electronic. Electronics could be fixed. It wasn't MS. It wasn't a psychological problem. It was a real, measurable, electronic fault.

If he hadn't been so drugged he could barely blink, he would have sobbed with relief. It was going to be fine. Mike Bennett would fix it. Oh, it would take him a while to come back from this. Mark was under no illusions as to just how far his fitness level had fallen over the last five months. Over the last few weeks it had plummeted, as the muscle spasms worsened, became more frequent, got to the point where he couldn't pretend they were anything other than convulsions. But that was over now. Electronics didn't need time to heal. When he woke up from the operation, he'd be horribly unfit, and he'd be as miserable as he always was from general anaesthetic, but he'd be basically fine.

At least the Condor had gone back to his real job, rather than breathing down his neck in the operating theatre. Mike was grateful for that as he stood back and waited for Chris Johnson to open Mark up, to give full access to the chip on his spine. Mike himself wasn't a doctor, not that sort of doctor, anyway, despite the title - he'd been recruited to work on the ISO cerebonic implant program based on his research on AI nanotechnology. He'd never expected to be putting these things in people. And this one wasn't even his. Mark's implant was an elderly Russian model, its designer no longer alive. He'd retuned it many times, studied the diagrams of its circuitry intensively, tried to make sense of why Mark had such a different response to the people he'd implanted himself. He'd never got to the bottom of it. And he'd never even seen the implant for real.

"He's all yours, Mike," Johnson said, and he stepped forward to see what he was faced with.

Surgeons always did this so tidily. There was a perfect slit in the skin, held open above and below the area in question. Visible inside was the white bone of the young man's spine with the half-inch golden square of the implant embedded in it. From the start it didn't look good. He'd known Mark had been very young when he'd been implanted, but the deformation of the surface of the vertebra around the chip brought it home to him. From the looks of it, when the procedure had been carried out, the bone had been not much larger than the chip being attached to it.

"Okay," he said purely for the record, since he and Chris had already discussed the procedure. "I'm going to start by testing all the connections directly, not going via the output ports. Switching to magnified view." He pulled in the high-definition camera, positioned it carefully an inch above the implant, eased his hands into the micro-manipulation gloves, and went to work. Other neurosurgeons used magnifier glasses for similar operations, but Mike had always found them heavy and uncomfortable. He much preferred to work with the view on the screen.

Speed was relative with anything this complex, but he quite quickly determined that there was nothing wrong with the connection to the second implant, or indeed with the signals coming from it. That was something, at least. He continued to work his way methodically round the multitude of tiny wires coming out of the primary chip and diving into bone long since completely healed around them. To his relief, he continued to get completely normal results. Trying to fix a broken wire inside the vertebra would have been near impossible.

The last set was different. This contained the connections which controlled physical movement, when the implant was active, by raw stimulation of the nerves, far faster than the usual electrochemical reactions. And right now, two of the channels were responding normally, three were completely dead, and the remainder were spitting the same vicious static he'd picked up from the sensor ports. So, it was at least consistent and reproducible. But, by itself, insufficient information. He'd really, really hoped for a visible break in a wire, perhaps short-circuiting a couple of others. What he had was perfect input, perfect connections. The fault was internal.

"I'm going to need to take a look inside the chip," he announced. "How's he doing?"

"Fine so far," the anaesthetist told him. Mike had worked with Andy Wilson many times before. He knew that 'fine' only meant 'fine for an implantee' and that, to keep him under, Mark would be under a dose of anaesthetic which would make a normal human very sick indeed. He had to get on with it.

"Good," he said, selecting the tool he'd need to lever open a chip which had been sealed for almost twenty years. He'd really hoped he'd never have to do this, never had before. He mentally crossed his fingers, zoomed right in on the recess on the seam of the chip, and carefully inserted the flat end of the probe. He shifted it backwards and forwards a few times, making absolutely sure that it was solidly positioned, and then very gently began to lever on the cover.

It was reluctant to move, and after a couple of minutes Mike backed off, removing his hands from the control gloves and flexing them.

"Problem?" Chris asked unnecessarily.

"The lid should be hinged, but I can't shift it, and I'm worried about doing damage if something slips."

"Hmm." Chris squinted at the screen. "The bone's a mess, but it looks to be superficial - is it just me, or is the chip not flat?"

Mike took a second look at the top surface, then shifted the light source around. "You're right. I guess it was deformed when he was still growing - I thought it was just the light, but look at it. This corner's definitely twisted. I really don't want to have to cut my way in. Metal fragments could make things much worse."

He backed the camera off, moved the whole thing closer to Mark's head, then brought it in close, angled to see the edge of the chip. "There we go. I'll unscrew the hinges and try lifting it straight up."

"Hinges and screws?" Chris frowned. "That's horrible."

"Blame Comrade Vladinov, rest his soul. You'll remember the two clips on the models we put in? The old Russian ones are hinged at the back, slightly sprung at the front to make sure the lid didn't shift once it was put in. And this one's jammed good."

Five minutes of painstaking work later and the tray at his side held seven minute screws. The last was much stiffer than the others, and Mike forced himself to breathe slowly and calmly, keeping every movement slow, not applying too much force. He really didn't want to shear the head off - that could leave him with no option but to drill it out, which would produce metal fragments just the same as cutting would. Quarter of a turn at a time, take the pressure off what he suspected was the world's smallest Phillips-head screwdriver, then do the same again. The threads weren't that long. He must be nearly there.

Finally, the tiny screw came loose and he saw the cover shift as it came out, the holes no longer lining up. Getting this thing back on wasn't going to be easy - but he'd worry about that later. For now, he needed the cover off. He deposited the screw alongside its friends in the tray, and replaced the screwdriver with the larger flat probe before going back to levering the cover upwards.

This was much easier. The cover shifted immediately, and it took him only a few seconds to lever it loose. He picked it up carefully and laid it down on the tray with the screws, replaced the lever-tool with a minute needle-nosed probe more suited to the microelectronics inside the chip, and only then did he take a good look at the task facing him.

This was worse than his worst nightmare. Suddenly the tray of sterile microelectronic components at his side was entirely useless. He wasn't aware that he'd sworn out loud until Chris asked, "Mike?"

"Come take a look at this."

"I'm a doctor, not an electronic..." Chris's voice died as Mike zoomed in close to the area of the implant that was concerning him, up near the hinge that had given him so much trouble. "I didn't know his implant had neural integration inside it?"

"It shouldn't have," Mike told him. "On the specs I have, it was sealed before implantation. This just went beyond my knowledge. That's nerve tissue in there, right?"

"Yes, and it's live." Chris swallowed. "And it looks to me like it's made its own connections. What's really worrying me is that this might be his main neural pathway. What if this is why he's never had the same sharp distinction between using and not-using the chip that the others have? Because everything goes through it all the time?"

"I'm thinking that too. I guess in that case it would be real bad to disrupt it?"

"If his autonomic reflexes go through there? It could kill him instantly. We need to run some neurological tests to see what's going on - and even best case scenario, we need to discuss it with Mark. Can I take a look? Andy, watch him like a hawk."

"He's all yours." Mike stepped back from the operating table, still considering the chip. The rest of it didn't look to be in too bad a shape - but that quadrant was a disaster, the tell-tale signs of burnt-out connections just visible through the threads of nerve tissue. That, he could fix - that was pretty much what he'd been expecting once he knew the fault was internal. He hadn't anticipated living tissue inside the chip itself. He was an electronics expert, not a doctor. And what he wanted now, more than anything, was time to do research, and a second opinion. He knew he could have neither. The designer of the chip was dead, and they couldn't leave Mark like this. Doing nothing was not an option.

"Mark? Mark, can you hear me?"

He could, but it was like fighting through treacle to answer. He couldn't make his mouth form the sounds, couldn't do anything except grunt incoherently. Chris, something's wrong - I need you to figure it out! I was supposed to wake up fine!

"We've had a few issues - you're still drugged, and I've closed you up temporarily. Don't worry." Chris's voice was calm and reassuring, and the first edge of his panic faded. "Mike needs to discuss a few things with you before he can proceed - do you feel up to me cutting back on the drugs for a while?"

His instinct was to nod, but his body simply didn't cooperate. He was forced to wrap all of his concentration around the muscles of his lips and tongue, and even then what came out didn't sound much like 'yes'. Oh, man. He didn't like the sound of this one bit.

#

"We believe that a large number of your neurological connections aren't taking their normal path down your spinal cord."

Mark raised his eyebrows - it was easier than fighting the drugs enough to speak, and Bennett continued, obviously reluctantly.

"There are self-made neural connections inside the implant itself - as well as a lot of internal damage. Neurological tests show that many of your motor functions are using them."

This time Mark did sigh, aching and trying desperately to stay relaxed and still, in the hopes that he could avoid going back into spasm for as long as possible. "Cut to the chase, Mike," was what he'd have liked to say. He barely managed the first syllable.

"I can mend your implant, but only if we remove the ad-hoc connections first. We've done tests and all the old pathways are intact. What we propose is that we operate and Chris removes the excess neural tissue, while I disable all the malfunctioning parts of the implant. Once your body's accustomed itself to functioning without the implant, I can go back in and replace the damaged circuits."

"I th-" Mark stopped, still struggling with the remnants of the relaxant, and rephrased with as few words as possible. "Won't I reject? Too old."

"To be implanted, yes. But everything I'll need to replace is internal to the implant. Your immune system won't know it's changed."

"Nerves - how did they get there?"

"Whoever implanted you originally didn't make enough allowances for growth. The case buckled and split round one of the anchor points. It obviously happened a long, long time ago, probably when you were five or six and growing fast. It's stable now. I'm not even going to try to repair it."

"How long?"

Mike's answer of 'a couple of hours' didn't answer the question he'd meant to ask, and Mark sighed in frustration before trying to rephrase the question. It wasn't needed - Chris had clearly understood his frustrated, abbreviated slurring.

"I can't see it taking long to get you back on your feet - a few days, maybe. Once we've got some normal reflexes I think it would be safe to repair the implant. Provided you promise me you'll get fit again without relying on it."

"I can manage that." Speech was getting easier, but at the same time the muscles in his legs were starting to twitch uncomfortably. Mark grimaced and bent over to rub at his right calf - not that it helped, he'd learnt that all too well over the past few months - and Chris held up a syringe.

"If you're happy with what we're going to do, I suggest I give you something to help you sleep now, and we'll operate first thing in the morning. There's no point waiting around."

"What's the risk?"

"We just plain don't know." Chris's face was earnest, open. The face of a man he'd trusted absolutely, until he'd told him he was fine five months earlier. "But it's the only option we have, I'm afraid. You can't stay like this."

Mark replied by groaning and closing his eyes. Controlling the spasms in his legs was getting harder by the minute. Chris was right. The drugs were too strong to be practical, and he couldn't cope without them for more than a few minutes at a time. A few days to get back on his feet was nothing. He'd worked his way back to fitness before.

"Do it." He paused, locking everything in a technique he'd perfected to hide yet another muscle spasm. "And I could use some more relaxants."

"I know. Don't worry, Mark. We'll fix you."

You said that this morning, a tiny voice said inside him. Mark pushed it down hard, waiting for the prick of the needle and the relief that the drugs would bring. Chris and Mike were the very best at what they did. They'd made mistakes before, but now they knew what was going on. This time they would put things right for him.