Chapter 171 Coincidence

• "And who are you supposed to be?"
• The red-haired man ran his fingers through his long hair and frowned. Every inquiry said that the Daedalus Foundation went out of business three centuries ago, having liquidated all their holdings and assets—and yet, one of their products had been used to create the body of Harman Halveg. It might just have been possible that some items kept in storage had been rediscovered, but the records said all such biological assets had been accounted for as being used up or destroyed. Now that the bio sample had arrived from Tycho Deep, Ernst-Karl could determine the facts for himself.
• It had been Jakob's idea to use another of Hartmann's old machines to do the analysis, with a one-way hard link to the Mini-Colossus so it could read the original data files but not alter them in any way, or worse, delete them. By current standards these precautions slowed down the task, but that might also be due to the specs of the devices themselves. Both men had accepted this as a fait accompli to insure the integrity of Hartmann's original research which had to contain the answers they sought. Being restricted to these ancient devices, a task that would take only a couple hours at any other time, would now take six or seven.