Tides of Hysteria by Adam J. Smith

Author:Adam J. Smith [Smith, Adam J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

Annora

What was time now? Its only limit the speed of data transmission through the cables and through the air; through arrays perpetually switched on, even when switched off, in a city where very few switches were manual; where locks required only a digital key and where the cameras had no ‘off’ option. Thousands of years had passed in Annora’s time; after the first hundred years she had returned to the city and the lab in which her body resided encased in a bacterial slime, the conjugation of plasmids being dissected, carried and catalogued by the nano-network into a system that could barely calculate the data. The datapackets were collected at random and in their trillions, mismatched and like the world’s greatest puzzle, if the puzzle was the night sky by eye. Only when she fused with the supercomputer was any headway made with the information they had; packets joining together here and there in what might be one bit in a tera, or one bit in a kilo – only time and patience would tell.

The one hundred years that had passed for Annora was in reality only a couple months; returning to her body, she had expected to see it torn apart, as though piranhas had taken her for a meal; perhaps her spine would remain, dangling from the base of a decapitated head floating listlessly at the top of the soup. In actuality, she looked exactly as she remembered. A little thinner perhaps, kept alive through intravenous fluids giving her the nutrition she needed. The same camera that faced her kept Calix in view only for a third of his body, in an identical tank to her body’s left; not important enough to have his own dedicated camera. His body appeared more atrophied than hers, but then he’d had more mass to lose. She was glad she had him with her, looking as he should; his self-promoted image every bit as accurate as it should be, flaws and scars and all.

Her visit, all those ‘years’ ago, had been just seconds for the programmer overseeing the project at the time, and if there had been a blip in the processing power released to the process of decoding, he or she would not likely have noticed it before Annora corrected it. The supercomputer had two levels now: one that was building planets with the data it decoded – her level – and one where she left the door ajar for the briefest of flashes. Wide enough to keep them interested. Wide enough to keep her alive. Very early on, she had learned how to firewall her world – the authority had come knocking but she had told them to leave her alone. “You have what you want,” was the message she left for them. “Let Calix and I live what remains of our lives.”

If they’d tried to break her firewall again since then, they couldn’t have knocked very hard.

The last time she’d visited the lab was the last time she would ever visit the lab.

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