Children of Scarabaeus by Sara Creasy

ago, shortly after the planet was seeded. A good place to start.”
    “Wait—the BRATs came online ten months ago, and Winnie’s team is firing up the ag-teck in only a few months. Your code boosted the biocyph that much?” Usually it took a decade or more to terraform an alien world to the point where it was suitable for colonization and farming. Longer, surely, for more complex worlds like Prisca.
    “I won’t toot my own horn, but”—he did anyway—“my code is proving revolutionary.”
    “And the evolution on Prisca is stable?”
    “My sim projections show excellent results.” He gave a small shrug, as though Edie could not possibly understand the extent of his work. Which was more or less true. Studying his innovations had been part of her training, but she hadn’t studied his work on this project. She did, however, find his overconfidence worrisome. Boosters of any kind were bad news.
    “I didn’t ask about your sims ,” she muttered. “So where do the children fit in?”
    “Well, we get the usual errors, of course. The ground crew downloads data directly from the BRATs. From that raw data we create error logs.”
    He flashed up a series of logs from the previous day, too quickly for Edie to see much, but one thing was clear.
    “These are just from one day? That’s a helluva lot of errors.” And that didn’t bode well for Prisca.
    “Not really,” Caleb said evasively. “Normally the biocyph would self-correct, but this ecosystem is evolving so fast that many of the errors have to be fixed manually using sim extrapolations. Not something you or even I could handle. But the children have a unique way of working together to interface with a supercomplex datastream. They don’t understand the biology. They’re just trained to pop those glitches back into place.”
    Caleb returned to the other lab. Edie was interested in analyzing how the children handled the error logs, but apparently level-two clearance wasn’t sufficient for that. Instead she was stuck with data that was ten months out of date and really didn’t tell her anything. As she filed through it, her gaze wandered around the lab. Racks of biocyph modules lined the bulkheads. She knew from the CCU seal on each unit that this was stock biocyph, not yet primed. It was almost too much to believe—each module was worth more than she could earn in a lifetime, and there were dozens of them.
    She had to check for herself. Casually, she got up from her console and wandered over to the nearest rack. The other tecks were too engrossed in their work to notice her. She pressed her fingertips to the port on one module and heard the tuneless buzz of stock biocyph, just as she’d guessed. What the Fringe worlds wouldn’t give for these resources! They relied on preprogrammed biocyph handouts from the Crib, because only the Crib had the templates to construct stock biocyph like this. It could be turned into ag-teck or med-teck or environmental jigglers, even used to repair BRAT seeds.
    Could she steal the modules for the Fringe? Her mind spun in a new direction. If she had free access to the modules, what could she create? The possibilities seemed limitless and the temptation to meddle was overwhelming. Could she use the cryptoglyph from Scarabaeus to program the biocyph? Right under the Crib’s nose…
    But she didn’t have free access to the modules. She could do nothing with them during work hours because other tecks would always be around. And if she used her crew key to enter the lab outside her shift, the entry would be logged as a security breach and she’d be found out immediately.
    One of the cyphertecks gave her a suspicious look. Fortunately she’d already drawn her hand away from the port. She moved back to her console and pretended to be engrossed in Caleb’s useless data.
     
    When Edie was summoned to the conference room on Deck A that afternoon, foremost on her mind was confronting Natesa about the children. Righteous