The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) Read Online Free Page A
Author: Daniel Keys Moran
lived the life of an ascetic – in a four-room suite at the end of an expansion corridor he had purchased. Trent lived in the Krishna end of town, and the Krishnas, accustomed to holy men who fasted and starved themselves, found it something to comment on – that one holy man could require so much space in which to renounce worldliness.
The outer two rooms were for guests – Trent had more guests than most pilgrims; going beyond that, one found a bedroom with suspiciously sybaritic bathing arrangements; and beyond that, presumably, the room in which Augustus Allen meditated. Presumably because, so far as any of the Krishnas knew, nobody except ’Sieur Allen had ever seen that room.
No one who knew Trent, rather than the pilgrim Augustus Allen, would have been surprised by the contents of that fourth room.
An emergency airlock, leading to the asteroid’s surface, stood mounted on one of the walls. But the emergency exit was not the interesting thing about the room –
Blazing along in a sphere called the Black Beast, floating in the center of the room, was nearly four percent of the processing power to be found off of Earth itself.
Two trillion massively parallel optical processors, each processor linked by light directly to over five thousand other processors, layered in with columns of RAM: two gigabytes of dedicated RAM to each processor, four sextabytes of liquid helium RTS, room temperature superconducting RAM. (The room-temperature superconductors were exactly that: room-temperature. They had never been designed to run at 335 degrees Celsius, the temperature the Black Beast would have reached without the veins of liquid helium that pulsed beneath its black polymer skin.)
The Beast stored information by raising electrons through the quantum shells of atoms; read data back in the photons emitted when the electrons crashed back to their base state.
The entire assemblage, built one molecule-thick layer at a time by an army of the most advanced nanotech assemblers available in the entire System, fit in a sphere four meters in diameter.
The Black Beast floated in the center of the room, liquid helium lines leading to and from it, a single heavily shielded power cable dropping away into the “floor.”
Tens of millions of kilometers away, in orbit about Earth, the Unification of Earth was busy putting the finishing touches to the Unity , a massive warship designed to spread the Unification to the rest of the System; and here, tucked away in the back of a four-room suite at Gandhi CityState, floated Trent’s answer to it, the Black Beast, which held within its dark skin the plans for the downfall of the Unification of Earth: Hosea 8:7 .
If Trent and the plans both survived.
IT IS LIKELY that only half a dozen of the most tightly coded Artificial Intelligences in the entire System could have followed each step of the sequence of events as they unfolded; perhaps no Player could have:
Trent flew through the raw stone of Corridor C, toward his quarters at the far end of the corridor. PKF Elite floated at the other end of the corridor, cutting through the emergency airlock; Trent flew into range for the radio packet link to the Black Beast, and the nerve net within his skull, designed and grown for the task of thinking like Trent, only much, much faster, came alive –
ORDERS OF ABSTRACTION:
The Crystal Wind of Earth’s InfoNet has been too fast for humans to navigate within, unaided, for nearly four decades. And as the hardware got faster and the software smarter, the problem has only grown worse. Increasingly clever approaches were used to address the problem – Images were programmed to deal with most of the grunt work of navigating the Net; tracesets freed humans from keyboards and pointing devices and the need to speak aloud; the first real Players, the greatest of the webdancers, subjected themselves to surgery, had InfoNet links implanted within their skulls, “in-skin,” to provide them with greater
The outer two rooms were for guests – Trent had more guests than most pilgrims; going beyond that, one found a bedroom with suspiciously sybaritic bathing arrangements; and beyond that, presumably, the room in which Augustus Allen meditated. Presumably because, so far as any of the Krishnas knew, nobody except ’Sieur Allen had ever seen that room.
No one who knew Trent, rather than the pilgrim Augustus Allen, would have been surprised by the contents of that fourth room.
An emergency airlock, leading to the asteroid’s surface, stood mounted on one of the walls. But the emergency exit was not the interesting thing about the room –
Blazing along in a sphere called the Black Beast, floating in the center of the room, was nearly four percent of the processing power to be found off of Earth itself.
Two trillion massively parallel optical processors, each processor linked by light directly to over five thousand other processors, layered in with columns of RAM: two gigabytes of dedicated RAM to each processor, four sextabytes of liquid helium RTS, room temperature superconducting RAM. (The room-temperature superconductors were exactly that: room-temperature. They had never been designed to run at 335 degrees Celsius, the temperature the Black Beast would have reached without the veins of liquid helium that pulsed beneath its black polymer skin.)
The Beast stored information by raising electrons through the quantum shells of atoms; read data back in the photons emitted when the electrons crashed back to their base state.
The entire assemblage, built one molecule-thick layer at a time by an army of the most advanced nanotech assemblers available in the entire System, fit in a sphere four meters in diameter.
The Black Beast floated in the center of the room, liquid helium lines leading to and from it, a single heavily shielded power cable dropping away into the “floor.”
Tens of millions of kilometers away, in orbit about Earth, the Unification of Earth was busy putting the finishing touches to the Unity , a massive warship designed to spread the Unification to the rest of the System; and here, tucked away in the back of a four-room suite at Gandhi CityState, floated Trent’s answer to it, the Black Beast, which held within its dark skin the plans for the downfall of the Unification of Earth: Hosea 8:7 .
If Trent and the plans both survived.
IT IS LIKELY that only half a dozen of the most tightly coded Artificial Intelligences in the entire System could have followed each step of the sequence of events as they unfolded; perhaps no Player could have:
Trent flew through the raw stone of Corridor C, toward his quarters at the far end of the corridor. PKF Elite floated at the other end of the corridor, cutting through the emergency airlock; Trent flew into range for the radio packet link to the Black Beast, and the nerve net within his skull, designed and grown for the task of thinking like Trent, only much, much faster, came alive –
ORDERS OF ABSTRACTION:
The Crystal Wind of Earth’s InfoNet has been too fast for humans to navigate within, unaided, for nearly four decades. And as the hardware got faster and the software smarter, the problem has only grown worse. Increasingly clever approaches were used to address the problem – Images were programmed to deal with most of the grunt work of navigating the Net; tracesets freed humans from keyboards and pointing devices and the need to speak aloud; the first real Players, the greatest of the webdancers, subjected themselves to surgery, had InfoNet links implanted within their skulls, “in-skin,” to provide them with greater
Readers choose
Cynthia Freeman
Sarah Addison Allen
Paul Watkins
Ylette Pearson
Brenda Novak
Yelena Black
Andrzej Sapkowsk
Eloisa James
Jarkko Sipila
Dani Marie