The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [58]
Now that complex device is breaking down, "turning to snot inside his head" as one of the medical staff puts it. Illyan is losing track of time, and memories from years before pop into his head as if real and current. Since the breakdown of the chip is unstoppable and irreversible, Miles, who is now the 800-pound Imperial Auditor, orders the chip removed and autopsied.
The thing that killed Illyan's eidetic memory chip is a bioengineered apoptotic prokaryote or, as the scientist says, "A little bug that eats things." It barely qualifies as a life-form but it does eat, it manufactures an enzyme that will destroy the protein matrix in Illyan's chip, and it reproduces itself—up to a point—then self-destructs.
The prokaryote started as a legitimate medical product but was modified to be specific for Illyan's chip. By the molecular evidence it looks like Jacksonian, rather than Cetagandan, work. Miles investigates Imperial Security, from the top floor down to the basement.
He finds that the building is almost as tight as a spaceship, with air filters and cleaners capable of handling poison gases. Locked in the basement evidence room, Miles finds the prokaryote on the shelf, evidence left over from a Komarran terrorist cell broken up some time back—and two vials are missing from the box.
It looks like an inside job with evidence left in the computer system showing that Miles himself probably stole the missing vials.
As Miles is now in charge of the investigation and knows he didn't enter the evidence vault, he knows that the secure computer system was diddled. A technical team is set to freezing and analyzing that system to determine who diddled it, and that traces back to another person Miles trusts, Duv Galeni.
Miles determines who the real culprit is but proving it takes technology and psychology. The technology comes from a spray that fluoresces in the presence of the prokaryote.
In the novel Komarr, technology makes life possible on Komarr, a marginal world. There's atmosphere but it's not suitable for humans due to the low oxygen content and cold temperatures—the people live in sealed domes.
With hope for the future, the Komarrans long ago built the enormous soletta array of orbital mirrors to reflect more sunlight down on their chilled world. It's the collision damage to the soletta array that brings Miles to Komarr. A freighter has slammed edge-on into the array, destroying three of the seven hexagonally arranged mirrors. The central seventh mirror is dulled.
Miles, as a newly appointed Imperial Auditor, goes to Komarr to see what effects the soletta disaster will have on the project.
Though the soletta mirrors only increase the insolation by a percentage, it's a critical percentage to foster plant growth in the ecology outside the domes. Even inside the domes, extra lights need to be rigged for the dome's ornamental plants because of the disaster. No plants are purely ornamental on a closed, dome world; they provide much of the breathable oxygen.
Increasing the planetary oxygen percentage is part of Komarran's Terraforming project, as they use plant growth and even peat bogs to break the carbon from the excess carbon dioxide and sequester the carbon long-term.
Besides the soletta mirrors, the Terraforming project also warms Komarr with waste heat power plants. There's no need to conserve energy in the cities—all energy produces waste heat that warms the world.
The soletta accident was caused by a branch of the Komarran resistance which was formed around an N-space (wormhole interstellar drive) mathematician who thinks he's discovered a way to destabilize a wormhole and close it permanently.
Already, two of their people were killed in the soletta accident. Their large test prototype, a single, funnel-corkscrew