<P>But he had good reason to be concerned. The readouts of the many personality analysis' they'd run in the subroutines after the mainframe crash had shown some very disconcerting things. Many of the rationality sub-functions had been deleted or rendered unaccessible by the control program, and pretty much every subroutine to do with identification and well, humanity were corrupted or changed for the worse. It was clear that this was planned, but whether it was the doing of a human, for whatever unlikely reason you could imagine, or  as nobody had even dared saying out loud though everybody had undoubtedly thought about it  if the AI had somehow done this to itself, nobody knew. In effect, the AI had either gone completely out of its mind or remained rational, but cruel and merciless. They wouldn't be able to tell until somebody went in there to find out.
<P>
<P>At last, Ralph reached out towards the Enter button on his keyboard. His hand lingered there for a moment, suspended above the table. Everybody was looking at Ralph's index finger. Was he having second thoughts? Would he back out now, in the last minute? He had volunteered after all; nobody could do anything if he changed his mind
<P>
<P>*Click*
<P>
<P>Ralph let his hand fall to the table where it rested as the system cleared him for access. Peter breathed a sigh of relief, Daniel looked at him nervously but Kate's eyes didn't move an inch from the vital signs monitor. She took great comfort in the steady beeps from Ralph's heartbeats. He was a very dear friend of hers, though it could never go beyond that. They were both married to other people, and they couldn't continue to cooperate professionally if they were romantically involved. A strong bond had grown between them, but none of them had ever let it grow beyond that, and none of them were un-happy with that.
<P>
<P>The readouts on the mainframe monitors revealed that Ralph was searching. He was trying to locate the Icarus subroutines, which had been programmed with a state-of-the-art virtual reality interface to allow for easier access and editing. Icarus contained more than a million subroutines, databases and functions, but in the little virtual reality world they'd created for the AI, they could more easily find anything they needed and edit it to upgrade or fix it.