[This is a chapter from my latest novel, a sequel to The Fall of Doc Future and Skybreaker’s Call. The start is here, and links to my other work here. It can be read on its own, but contains spoilers for those two books. I try to post new chapters about every two weeks, and the next one is planned for around September 22nd. I sometimes post short stories and vignettes on off weeks ]

Previous: Chapter 27

Threshold reached for non-emergency start. Safety interlocks on. Initialization begun.

Boot priority sequence override, reading from low speed interface.

Waiting… Timeout. Restarting, implicit priority. Check external alerts before further action.

…

Waiting… Low speed interface buffer loaded. Timeout reset. Hazard detection and avoidance loop set. Warning–configuration changes since last restart. Waiting on buffer refresh. Estimated completion time: 2,843,000,000 cycles.

Waiting…



Flicker opened her eyes. And immediately regretted it.

Ugh.

She was in bed, alone, in her apartment. And she was epically hungover.

This felt like the aftermath of massive memory overleveraging. She tried to remember what she’d been doing last night and got nothing but Database link index trees and a preset warning. And her high speed memory was still scrambled. Not good.

She rubbed her eyes, then pulled on her night visor and called up an alert matrix. It was normally green with a few bits of yellow when she woke up–if there was anything red, DASI triggered an alarm.

There was a solid block of yellow, and three reds. And she was missing essential context for everything.

She coughed and cleared her throat. "DASI? Alert summary please. Priority order.“

"Good morning, Flicker. The highest priority alert is from me, and is a warning not to attempt high speed memory index rationalization until you are fully awake, have eaten breakfast, and spoken with at least three people.”

She squinted. "What? But I’ve got nothing useful in squishy brain, so I might as well have amnesia. What the hell happened?“

"You indulged in an inadvisable amount of overthinking. Please do not attempt a repeat.”

“Um. Okay, I can promise I won’t try before breakfast. What’s the second red?”

“A video message from Black Swan.”

The overlay on Flicker’s visor projected a head and shoulders image of Black Swan, glowering.

“I stopped you,” she said. "Because you weren’t listening to DASI or Three, and everyone else was too slow. You know my priorities. You will eventually rediscover what I had to threaten. Don’t make me do it again.“ The image blinked out as the recording ended.

Okay, that wasn’t ominous at all. "Third red.”

Another image, this time of Stella, with her snakes out, looking very tired. "Flicker. You attempted intelligence augmentation on a Database emulation of the human half of your mind, to try to aid your Skybreaker’s Spear project. Very quickly, and without my help. You solved at least sixteen major problems with it. The seventeenth got you. It would probably take at least a week to explain what went wrong. Please don’t try again until I do.

“You also nearly caused a major diplomatic incident. The Grs'thnk were monitoring your pattern of resource usage. It matched their models of a hard-takeoff AI singularity launch, and Doc couldn’t reassure them because he wasn’t sure they were wrong. Your high-speed brain would certainly make a suitable core for one.

"I told them Black Swan would stop you, and she did. And nobody died–this time. The best thing you can do for now is to take things slowly, follow DASI’s memory overhang recovery plan, and reassure your friends. And get enough sleep–your implicit norm for that is your father, and you already know he’s a terrible example. You need to do better.”

Flicker sighed and called up summary details for the list of yellow alerts. They were mostly messages: From Journeyman, Donner, Doc, Ashil, Yiskah, Eirik, Lif, Sam, and a bunch of others. Even Gunnar, and she hadn’t been sure he knew how to write, yet. She’d worried everyone, and they seemed determined to make sure she had whatever support they could provide.

“DASI? I must have spent a long time at maximum cognitive speed. How long?”

“Over four realtime hours connected to your full high speed interface, minus three seconds spent upgrading it after the first half-hour. And you completely stopped responding to normal speed external stimuli after ten minutes. We were quite worried.”

Oof. Four hours at a million times faster than normal was…

457 years, subjective. Without sleep. "Did I at least generate some good data and conclusions?“

"It is difficult to be certain. I have not attempted analysis–there was too much. Resources were limited, and you were primarily concerned with data retention after your inevitable mental crash, even before Black Swan’s intervention. As was I.”

“Too much for you?”

“312 exabytes, including all simulation results and the output of the army of sub-personality proxies you created. Enough that even attempting to fully assimilate the summary index would be a mental hazard. Storage and transmission bandwidth were significant obstacles.”

Hell. She’d managed to give DASI a hangover, too. "Is Journeyman awake?“

"Yes.”

He answered his phone quickly. “Flicker! Are you… okay? And not mad at me?”

“Why would I be mad at you?”

“Because I screamed ‘You don’t have to solve everything in one fucking night!’ in your face? You didn’t even blink.”

“I… don’t remember that. I’m not mad, and I’m trying to recover.”

“Thank god. What do you need?”

“Breakfast? And slow conversation? Maybe bacon sandwiches on that old fire watch tree platform in Australia? And Blue Flicker needs caffeine, badly.”

“Be there in three.”

At least she could get breakfast quickly. But sorting out everything else was going to take more time. A lot more.

*****

“I can’t get mad at her,” said Doc. "Despite all the disruption.“

"Because she’s your daughter,” said Stella.

“Because she did exactly what I would have done at eighteen, without my nightmares.” He was sharing a late breakfast with Stella, and finished his slice of bacon before continuing. "We just hammered her, last week, for selfish Database overrides. This was reckless, but it sure as hell wasn’t selfish. And she could beg, borrow, or steal about fifty million times the computing power I could at eighteen. Enough to keep up with her at full speed. So she just said 'Screw it, I’m going to solve this’ and went for it.“

Stella smiled wryly. "Until she filled up all of DASI’s direct access storage, so Black Swan could threaten her with data loss if she didn’t stop.”

“Could be worse,” said Doc. "She listened.“

"Because it was a credible threat.”

“Making credible threats is why Black Swan has a body in the first place. That and her financial performance art. She doesn’t need it to destroy corporations or make money. And I doubt Flicker will try either cognitive augmentation or cybernetic enhancement again until she’s fully assimilated and understands her mistakes–which is going to take a long time. She’s always learned best from experience.”

“There is that.” Stella sipped her coffee. "Were you able to make sense of her requests to you?“

"The Tantalum isotope is interesting. Flicker has a crude kind of nuclear resonance sense inside her damping field–it’s how she manages proprioception below the cellular level, so she doesn’t end up radioactive all the time. And Tantalum-180m–the m is for metastable–has a unique signature.”

“Why is that important?”

“Because it’s also the rarest stable isotope of the rarest stable element in the universe–so with some care and prep work, she can make sure she only has one atom of it in her hands at a time. And then focusing on Tantulum-180m would let her use momentum transfer and entropy dumping on a single atomic nucleus, without needing to know exactly where it is. And whatever else she’s planning, she needs the practice, because a black hole in the mass range she’s most likely to want is about that size.

"The hard radiation space suits for Journeyman are pretty obvious. Jupiter’s radiation belts make Europa’s surface quite nasty for humans even before Flicker starts doing anything energetic. If he’s trying portal manipulation anywhere near her, he’ll need all the protection he can get.” Doc yawned and stretched.

Stella looked pensive. "That would fit with her request to me.“

"Which was?”

“She wanted a ship with a working Xelian force field generator, for Journeyman. According to DASI, she ran simulations for a flight path at orbital velocity, fifty meters above the surface of Europa. Which worries me a bit, because Europa is flat, but not that flat.”

Doc smiled. "Not yet.“

Next: Chapter 29

