John C Wright Golden Age 03 The Golden Transcendence

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currents and raise storms just like your father does; that is what killed
Helion Prime. So we're caught by a super-dense current. It may be carrying us,
helpless, to the surface, just where the enemy wants to go, if they are aboard
and if they want to escape the Golden Oecumene. If the enemy cannot escape,
they wait a few days until the fuel runs out, and kill us both, so, at least,
our side doesn't have the ship. The current that caught us cannot be natural:
it breaks the hull, but it somehow is more careful, more evenly balanced, that
you expected; and at the same time, it puts on just enough pressure, no more,
no less, to neutralize the hull magnetics we need to use to maneuver."
He said, "But there is no evidence of anything reed through the thought ports
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I jammed open. How did their ship transmit any crew-mind information aboard
the Phoenix?'
She said, "That I do not know. Maybe the ghost-particle machine acted like a
Trojan horse, and was receiving information from an outside source."
"Through the hull...?"
'Your drive ports are open. Besides, you were using it just now to send and
receive neutrino bursts. If it can receive information from inside, it can
receive it from outside. And probably send as well. Just because your closed
hull stops some of the particles the ghost array puts out the particles you
detected does not necessarily mean there were not other groups of signals you
did not detect. The Nothing Sophotech probably did actually receive Ao
Varmatyr's dying broadcast, and knows everything he found out about the ship,
your plans, and you."
"I don't really mind if the Nothing knows everything we said and did. Our
strategy, in fact, relies on total honesty. But I wonder why it did not take
over the ship's mind. One would think it would welcome the higher
thought-speeds, if for no other reason. Maybe the conscience redactor has
given it some specious reason to fear the ship mind.
"Are you sure it's not in there?" Daphne asked. "Our read-out here could be an
illusion. Run a line check."
He tapped the mirror with a fingertip, gave a command. "Well, there is
something strange here. According to this, you won the argument, and I
apologized. Something must be manipulating the data. Best two out of three?"
"Very funny. You don't think the Nothing is aboard, do you?"
"I think it would have initiated conversation with us."
"Why? All it has to do is wait until you open your armor to scratch your nose
or get a nonsimulated kiss, and zap, it sends an information beam through your
skull and into the inside-crown thought ports."
"But if a Sophotech was transmitted into our ship, where did it come from?
It's not as if transmissions can travel so very far through the dense solar
plasma. The enemy ship must have been nearby, practically alongside. But we
did not detect a foreign ship. It has to be a starship, not just a spaceship.
Why didn't we see her?"
When she did not respond, he glanced at her. She was sitting in her throne,
staring upward, a blank, thoughtful look on her face.
"Well?" he said. "If the Nothing Sophotech is actually out there, why did we
not see the foreign starship?"
She spoke in a slow and dreamy voice: "Because the Silent Oecumene starship
is very, very small." "What? Why do you say that?" She raised her finger
slowly and pointed. "Because it is here."
At first Phaethon was not certain what he was seeing.
Across the deck, tall pressure curtains and overmind formation poles rose
vertically toward the dome. At first, it seemed as if something had distorted
the second balcony. The wall was puckered. The reaction boxes were crowded
oddly toward each other and the angles of the cubes were no longer right
angles. The poles were warped in the middles, bending toward each other, left
and right, no longer parallel.
Then the distortion moved. The vertical rods to the right straightened, like
harpstrings plucked, now released. But the straight rods to the left were
bending, their midsections crowding toward a moving point. It looked as if the
whole scene had been painted on an elastic sheet, and the elastic were
puckering toward a small moving point, or as if a distorted sheet of convex
glass were moving between Phaethon and the far wall.... Or as if... "There
is a black hole here on the bridge with us," said Phaethon. 'The singularity [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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