With my last big secret unveiled we decided to leave cyberspace, and surfacing I immediately was hit by a wave of exhaustion.

In retrospect, it is obvious where it came from, but at that moment I was surprised by it. I sometimes was active for several days at once in cyberspace, so not even a single hour should be barely noticeable for me.

Nonetheless, while my sluggish thoughts puzzled about my condition, Ben was more enraptured by Glory.

“You know, that is actually a good way to keep meetings secret. I’ll have to look deeper into it.”

His words took a moment to penetrate my mind, and my first answer was an undignified: “Huh?”

He took that as an invitation to continue.

“I don’t think we need something as high-powered as your board here, and it will be a bit of a chore to get enough diadems, but that is a very useful idea.”

Meanwhile, I had realized what he was talking about and managed to wrench my head back into the present.

“Oh, yes, that it is. Of course, the power of your… system is dependent on how many people you will need it for. And you have to be careful to keep it offline from the matrix. But a bigger server would be useful for VR anyway.”

He looked at me quizically.

“Why do we need VR? When my men are working they should not waste time playing.”

Urgh, did he just change the topic? No, I think he just made the wrong conclusion.

“No playing. VR is a training tool, you can have your guard station in VR, and not to forget, time goes four times as fast with the diadem than in the real world. You could finish four times the paperwork in the same amount of time.”

He rubbed his chin while humming to himself.

“You might be right there. But at the moment I am not quite as flush as I want to be. I can’t afford to put several hundred million into a computer system. Not to mention the time to set it up.”

My only excuse is that I was pretty beat at that moment, but I should have realized that his estimates were off, by orders of magnitude.

Heck, I could have set up a medium-sized server for him for around 50k. A big server or a small beowulf would set him back 100-200k. And the setup… did he seriously expect to have such a system and Warden not in it? We could as well let her set up the system dynamically. She would arrange it to her preferences anyway.

Even if nothing like that were available, I had just told him that he could have the 3.7 trillion ITB that I liberated from the council. He could afford several hundred million dollars for that.

But at that moment I just looked at him and shrugged.

“If you change your mind say the word, I will help you.”

After I shut down Glory properly, I returned to the arm, while we talked about mostly inconsequential things, but my mind was too mushy to troubleshoot it, and so, after maybe a quarter of an hour later, I gave up in disgust.

Ben immediately became concerned.

“Is something wrong?”

“No… yes… I don’t know. I am somehow completely wiped. I can’t concentrate on this right now. Maybe I should… “

With a sudden idea, I checked out my diagnostics, expecting to find some evidence of being sick. Instead, it all showed green.

No fever, no apparent infections, the immune system was no more active than usual.

“That is… I would have bet on me getting a bug or something, but nothing… that is strange.”

“Why would you expect to be sick?”

“Because I am so beat. I don’t know where that comes from. And that… worries me.”

“So you have a bad day? That is all?”

“I don’t have bad days. I am a Pure. The only reasons why we get worn out to this extent are if we are sick or beyond the point of exhaustion. Yes, the night was less than restful, and the party yesterday was straining, but not enough to this debilitated. We weren’t in cyberspace for even a single hour. So something is wrong.

But my implants tell me that there is nothing. My blood sugar is adequate, my calory reserve is full, I have no infection, my immune system is working normally, no strained muscles, my brain chemistry is… tired but otherwise normal.

And that worries me.”

He looked at me with concern but also interest, while he replied:

“And it couldn’t be that you had other exhausting activities today?”

“I give you that it was physically straining, but again, not to that extent.”

He chuckled.

“Interesting that you immediately jump to that part, but that was not what I was talking about. Tell me, before today, did you ever tell somebody about your childhood? Or reveal your secrets? Get this riled up?

These things… they do cost you. They cost you the capability to cope for a while. They cost you your willpower. And most of all, they cost you energy. Letting go of old pain, old secrets, it exhausts you.

Just because it is not physical work doesn’t mean it is not work nonetheless, and you worked hard today, mentally, emotionally. You are just… exhausted. That is all.”

I was not convinced. Again, in hindsight, I know he was right, but I blame it on the mush inside my head, I could not see it at that moment. That meant that I was still wracking my mind to think about a way to look into what was wrong with me. I just did not let it on.

“You think? Maybe I should call Doc Schaeffer… but… argh, I can’t think.”

He reached over to softly caress my cheek.

“Or maybe you should look into it tomorrow when you have slept if you still feel the need for it.”

I leaned into his hand, strangely comforted by this simple gesture.

“Maybe you’re right. I… it’s just that I don’t… I have no clue what is going on, and it… I… I know that I can find it out… I know it. But… I… I can’t think how. Everything is… so… dull. My thoughts are so slow, so… I can’t concentrate…”

“A clear sign that you are past your ability right now. So, how about you go to bed?”

I had another random thought.

“Uh, my bed is much smaller than yours. I don’t know if you fit in it.”

He laughed softly, while he kept caressing my face.

“It is nice that you actually worry about that. But you are in no condition for any of that right now.

You need to rest, and as comfortable as we may be with each other, you are not used to sleeping in the same bed as somebody else. So you will sleep in your bed alone, and I will do so in mine. For tonight at least.

And I am sure that you can get a bigger bed if it really is too small.”

At that moment he totally made sense to me. Oh, sure, a bigger bed was not that hard to get. Even the standard household fabber we had could make one. But somehow I believed him when he put all the blame on me being exhausted.

Things got pretty fuzzy for me after that though. Somehow, I managed to get to my bed anyway, and low and behold, Ben was right.

The next morning I felt much better, after nearly seven hours of sleep that is. Considering that four hours are my normal I had to be pretty out of it to need sleep that bad.

Naturally, it occurred to me then, that I had better options to look into my health status than my implants.

Don’t get me wrong, they are fine on the road, but they lacked a certain finesse. I should have used the medical scanner instead, or if that were still not conclusive I could even have gone ahead and adapted a BOU for it.

Not that it seemed necessary but I was a bit miffed for missing such obvious options.

After breakfast, consisting of real eggs and bacon with some bread and copious amounts of coffee, I returned to Mark’s new arm.

The mislinked pin was only the tip of the iceberg, and after another hour, I decided that it was a useless endeavor trying to make this thing work and put that thing through the foundry to revert to its raw materials.

Instead, I dove into the logs of the industrial fabber to find out if it had a bug or if it had gotten the wrong plans.

It turned out to be the second option pretty fast. The logical next step, going over the plans themselves showed me that the schematics in the cluster were correct.

So now I had to find out how the files had become corrupted on the way from the cluster to the fabber.

That turned out to be a substantially more involved exercise, and it took me nearly two hours to audit every single piece of electronics in the chain.

In the end, it was a badly fixed bullet hole nicking one of the optical cables connecting the fabber to the main computer of the complex. It was just enough damage to scramble part of the schematics just so that it would not work.

It was not quite so easy to fix, and I had to design a specialized cabling bot to rig the new cable, but during that time I had already sent the plans for the arm to the fabber, this time directly from the cluster via Q-link.

And another morning was finished before I knew it.