Containment by Christian Cantrell

Author:Christian Cantrell [Cantrell, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Science Fiction, Fiction, Space colonies, Venus (Planet) - Colonization, Outer space - Colonizatin
ISBN: 9780984550517
Publisher: Cantrell Media Company
Published: 2010-07-05T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Dead Air

Darien's workspace hadn't been active for the last 42 minutes and 22 seconds, and there was no status message. It was unusual for him not to be available during lunch. He usually brought his boxed meal into his office and ate in front of his workspace, reviewing water sample results, checking pressure readings, and going through the queue of messages that had invariably accumulated since closing his workspace last. Since the accident, he sometimes even took a moment to check up on Arik and see how he was feeling.

But Darien was offline today. Arik sent out a ping and waited for a response. Somewhere in V1, a notification was being rendered on the closest piece of conductive polymeth to his father's last known location, and Darien's personal tone was being emitted from the surface of the plastic to help him locate it.

Arik didn't ping people very often. He preferred asynchronous communication. For issues that weren't urgent, it made much more sense to leave a message that could be responded to whenever it was convenient, and when the recipient had the time to devote to a thorough and appropriate response. Arik, along with most of Gen V, considered pings to be borderline rude, though there were plenty of people in V1 who felt differently. Certain people (namely those who didn't have jobs that required them to focus for long periods of time, and were therefore unfamiliar with the concept and merits of prolonged concentration) thought nothing of not only sending out dozens of pings a day, but even sending multiple pings to the same person. These were the user accounts which, sooner or later, found their way on to almost everyone's ping blacklist.

One of the original programmers of the ping system thought it would be a good idea to return the 3D spatial coordinates of where a ping notification was rendered. It was probably done for debugging purposes, and thought benign enough that it wasn't worth removing. Since ping notifications were rendered as close to an individual's last known location as possible (which was updated every 10 milliseconds or so), someone eventually discovered that they could combine a ping's 3D coordinates with a set of schematics to figure out exactly where anyone was in V1 at any particular moment just by sending them a ping. And since almost all the inner walls in V1 were conductive polymeth, there was no place — literally no place — that a ping couldn't find you. Initially, the technique was too complicated for most people to figure out, but it was only a matter of time before the entire process was scripted and shared, and could be exploited by anyone, regardless of technical aptitude. After months of receiving daily complaints, the Technology Department finally took the time to remove the single line of offending code, thereby restoring a reasonable sense of privacy to V1.

Darien was an important enough man that he generally kept himself accessible, and even more so since Arik's accident. Even

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.