This book was initially an Audible Original Production.

Philip was in the middle of configuring his test system when the alarm on his watch buzzed.  He canceled the alarm without bothering to look.  He knew it was a reminder to visit Mark Bernham.  Mark's comments the previous evening had piqued Philip's curiosity to the point where he'd had trouble getting to sleep, with ever-expanding scenarios chasing each other in circles in his imagination.

With characteristic discipline, Philip finished the configs before carefully stowing all his tools.  Rushing and cutting corners caused accidents, and an accident when dealing with the energies involved in this project could be catastrophic.

With everything finally in its place, he headed for Mark's lab.

Mark looked up as Philip entered and said, "Ah, welcome back to the land of the fully clothed.  Hold on, let me grab the file."  Philip was slightly surprised to see Mark haul out a manila folder stuffed with papers.  Of course, he himself made extensive use of paper, but that was because of the impossibility of using any kind of electronic notetaker in his lab.

Mark, seeing the direction of his gaze, said, "Old school.  Until I can get funding for a virtual desk, this is the only way I can spread things out and look at them."

Mark spent a few moments placing documents on his lab desk, then pointed at one.  "This is the backplane for the little beast.  Totally nonstandard, and I bet it was designed by an AI.  This was created as a one-off, not intended to use standardized or interchangeable components.  Interesting thing..."  He flipped to a second image.  "This is built as a two-piece unit, almost like Lego blocks.  The fly 'body' is an add-on to the processing unit.  It literally snaps on."

He pointed to several other images.  "The whole thing uses components from several companies, hardwired in.  You can see the manufacturer labels.  Most of them are pretty standard items, which is why they were used.  But not this one.  It's the JCN chip.  I had to deconstruct it to figure it out.  It appears to be a single-chip neuromorphic AI module, but with some really weird tweaks."