Pink Noise by Leonid Korogodski

Author:Leonid Korogodski
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780984360826
Publisher: Silverberry Press
Published: 2011-09-02T16:55:10+00:00

NAOMI RODE A STORM OF HER OWN CREATION, ASTRIDE a current of hundreds of megaamperes, singing. Jacked into the ship’s awareness, her own body given over into the DareAngel’s care and her senses switched over to experience the “body” of the ship, she felt the thrill of a plasma river washing over the screen of the magnetic fields, the ecstasy of channeling a raging stream of energy that roared inside her, through her.

Outsiders—from civilians to Fleet officers from outside the Dragon Guard—asked her sometimes who had it worse in battle, they or their ships. Some of them thought that it was cruel to subject a self-aware being to a much higher risk of losing at least part of their mind. The others said, at least the ships had higher chances of survival, as long as one of their crew comes out of the fight alive. But all of them were answered by silence. In the Dragon Guard, they never thought about it in those terms, both crews and ships alike. Instead, they never settled on who had it best, the crew experiencing the ships’ bodies or the ships experiencing their crew’s. But how do you put that to an outsider?

Obvious, the DareAngel said. You have it best, this time at least.

The DareAngel had a point. This ride was the roughest they had gone through—and the most exciting. Jacked into their ship’s brain-grid, she felt the strain of computational demands as something stretching, pulling on the DareAngel’s “skin.” The other ships down the line had trouble staying on the tail. Some time ago, their columns’ envelopes reconnected, leaving ion currents running side by side, aligned with the magnetic field. Now a short-range repulsive force was added to the long-range attractive force between the parallel electric currents, keeping them apart—yet turning around each other, twisting in an ever tighter braid.

Their two columns turned into a double helix.

The DareAngel’s navigation fields suddenly jumped in disarray. Naomi smelled the danger level rise like a sharp sting of leather burning.

Shit. “All ships, wizard attack alert.” They would hear her, if their communication channels held. “Experiencing minor noise from wizard interdiction here. Over.”

Answers came, but weak and almost unintelligible at times, disrupted by the ion currents’ hum as well as by the enemy. Naomi readjusted their control scheme, shifting the load emphasis away from the ship’s binary intelligence to their human crew, their brains directly plugged into the ship’s grid. The incredible complexity of navigation through this maelstrom of plasma, mixed with challenges of networking defense, flared up with all the richness of the ship–crew shared perception.

Time to dance.

She now had a body in her virtual perception, every movement linked to flight controls, with vision used for targeting, smell standing for the tactical sense, touch for managing redistribution of resources—the crew’s consciousness virtualized, contributing their share of brainpower. A single human consciousness could not react much faster than once every hundred milliseconds. When overclocked, a parahuman mind was at least ten times faster on the conscious level, but much faster yet in pure faps.

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