The Chronicles of Misty

In the ancient literature, they called it hyperspace. Lacking the conceptual tools for discussing the means for spatial displacement which didn’t require actually crossing the space, they came up with a word which missed the point, but was still popularly used. The technical explanations were not his specialty, but he was aware enough to be able to say something about the process of cutting across vast physical distances between star systems in modern travel. The mathematics made it seem like grabbing hold of some anchor point and sliding space around until you had brought your destination to you. The process of grabbing that anchor point and moving space took time, and they referred to as stepping into hyperspace.

Without that means of spatial displacement, there would be no particular need for him to travel. That is, there would really be no place for him to go. Humanity had long ago stumbled upon that technology, and immediately sent probes to places they had only dreamed. At first, they had to send them out, and then bring them back. Information traveled at the speed of light, and this business of stepping aside from space was immeasurably quicker for unmanned machines. Send enough probes into enough distant places, and when they came back, they would have data which hinted at worlds which, as statistical probabilities had long told them, were almost like Earth. Given the vast number of stars, it was inevitable they found quite a few habitable worlds. It was human nature to want to explore these Terran planets first hand, with hopes of colonizing.

It took some years before anyone realized how to pass humans through that experience. First, the machines had to scale down the process of hooking up to those imaginary anchor points. All the previous speculation couldn’t guess what it did to the mind of humans, and even now they still weren’t exactly sure. The people came back from the initial attempts in all manner of different psychoses. Some were fetal, some permanently unintelligible with irregular noises and gestures which no computer could diagram into consistent patterns. Some were afraid of everything, but the worst were those unafraid of anything. The range was limited only by the limited number of failed attempts. Eventually the scientists simply slowed the process until some invisible threshold was crossed, and folks were able to adjust.

Then the search and classification began in earnest, followed quickly by colonization, and again followed quickly by the wars. For all their brilliance, humans could not tame that instinct, could not breed it out, reason it out, research it out – it was a permanent feature. Oddly, it was the technological advances of war which made colonization easier. They found a way to pass some weapon strikes across the anchoring process without coming out of hyperspace. With weapons came the ability to transmit data, since what’s the point of striking if you can’t aim the weapon? They discovered it meant adding another variable to the mathematical algorithms, because an anchor point wasn’t actually in any one place. As long as the anchor point was validly constructed, so to speak, something could be released from it anywhere in space. It took some doing to figure out a way to calibrate the multiple points of exit, and correlate them with known places for targeting, then receive the feedback, but it all made colonization that much easier and more efficient, since any anchor point could examine any place.

Eventually someone with power or influence got sick of the fighting and convinced others to feel the same way. Then there were truces and pieces of peace, but there was never any really great peace without first an exhausting war across most of human space. This last war was particularly widespread, and many colonies lost contact with each other. Centralizing control would wax and wane with the winds of fashion, but centralized communications seemed always fundamentally essential. So after massive galaxy-wide wars like the last one, the academics who had been waiting for things to calm down would send out their researchers to survey what had changed among the known human systems. When, as was in this case, they stumbled across a colony long forgotten, they were all the more eager.

Dr. Plimick was just such an eager researcher. His specialty was currently referred to as Interstellar Anthropology. Only half-way through his expected life span, he was already a member of several academic boards and associations, and on staff with three different government agencies. They had recently gotten in contact with a world which seemed to have missed the last three wars, which meant even Plimick’s grandfather was not alive when this one went out of contact. So it was Dr. Plimick was watching the few instruments he could understand on the ship’s command console, indicating the predicted cyclical timing of anchoring, swapping space around, and then releasing the anchor in hailing distance from the recent find. His education and experience indicated caution was essential in their approach to this lost world.

Chapter 2: Research

He stared into the darkened ceiling.

The concept of bureaucratic efficiency had been an oxymoron since the creation of bureaucrats. His request for a separate space to simply sit and think quietly was almost unheard of in that day and time, so the agency ignored it. Instead, he got a ship like all the others. It was therefore necessary to set the control for sleep mode, darkening the only living space in the ship, while he let his mind wander. Simply closing the eyes didn’t do it. He wasn’t sure why, but it always worked that way. He would never have considered using the escape pod, as the ship itself was confining enough. Still, this was far better than hitching a ride with a freighter or military transport.

His lack of adventurous spirit was a major factor in his choice of career and his elevated status. His intellect was quite ordinary, but it was sufficient to use the spooler system. His one advantage was what he called intuition. By any other name, it was simply the mental trick of leaping across logical steps, even stepping outside the path somewhat. At any rate, the process was not entirely logical, but the results were sufficiently useful to give him an edge. He wasn’t sure he could teach anyone else how to do it, but that was for the neuromedicine guys, and he wasn’t one of them.

As with many things, neuromedicine research had chased a great many false leads before settling into a fairly mature path of progress. As soon as it became possible to make cyborgs by mating computer hardware directly to the neural system, it was performed on a large number of volunteers. Everyone wanted the advantage of improved memory handling and abstract number crunching. But of course, as soon as any hardware was surgically implanted, it was already obsolete. By the time any lab could produce a working prototype, someone else had already discovered a better way to interact with the nervous system.

Then the research chased a rolling upgrade by making the linking hardware modular, but even that became obsolete all too quickly. So they had on the one hand a bunch of test subjects either stuck with unsupported hardware, or undergoing a string of repetitive surgeries. Medical science, for all its advancements, never could find a way to poke artificial holes in people without causing problems of one kind or another. The tissue eventually broke down and refused to heal any more. That, along all the times when the process of welding man and machine itself went wrong, made for even greater complications.

Adding wireless technology created a really huge mess, and was still the number one problem some two centuries later. Make the receiver chip too sensitive and people couldn’t easily shut off the mass of background noise from proliferating environmental signals. Automated filtering and range, or other attenuations, never quite worked. And what any good lab could do with the best intentions, a criminal lab could pervert with evil intent. So the entire human problem with addictions moved to this new wireless receiver neural implant technology, and each improvement only gave the dope dealers a new way to addict their victims. It became possible to stream into the mind an entire virtual existence, and the market in prerecorded fantasy worlds was still the largest economic engine in the galaxy. Connoisseurs could discuss the fine-grained differences between the engines which competed in blending reality with fantasy, so you could be blissfully lost even while normally productive.

It made it also too easy to turn people into the most horrific killing machines. Rather early in the game, some decent worlds became almost uninhabitable from the resulting warfare. It confused things for Dr. Plimick’s research, because of the constant shifting alliances and battlefields, markets, and all the other manifestations of mass human madness. For all its good, the cyborg sciences very nearly ended the entire human race more than once. They were currently in a fairly stable and boring cycle, and he greatly preferred that sort of boredom over the alternative.

By the time he was born, Dr. Plimick was in a fairly safe environment. The huge amount of human knowledge which made up the minimum these days required at least some computer assistance, so the spooling system came into use. It was simply a very minimal, very weak wireless receptor which allowed a fairly conservative and routine transfer of factual knowledge into the brain. It did so with a minimum of disturbance to the psyche, and by its very limitations prevented anyone hijacking his mind, though it could hardly help him verify what he was being fed. Verification still depended on the ancient ways of academia, something which thankfully never died out.

But it was often entirely too objective and factual, and seldom gave meaning to all the mass of data. The very safety of the system for learning also made it essentially lifeless. He would have been the same as any other anthropologist that way except for a salutary accident. During a localized power outage which hit in mid-stream of a spool, he found his brain went right on as if the data was still being fed. Having no actual input, there was something which kept processing – not exactly synthesizing and extrapolating, but pulling sense from some outside source, but which turned out to be actually inside. Most importantly, it added coloration, a value and a sense of demand which mere spooling data didn’t have. He had no words to explain it, so he kept this whole thing to himself. Instead, he tested it carefully, and found it worked best when he was away from other people, and in quiet, low-light settings. While such an environment didn’t always bring the process maximally, it was the best shot he had at it.

About the only time he could reasonably do that in the hurried, high efficiency culture around him was during those times when most people were forced to use the pocket spoolers. One day, he simply didn’t turn it on, but held it in the usual place so no one would notice he was not spooling, but doing something else with his brain time. Eventually, he would go to a spooling booth and simply keep the transmitter just outside the range of his receiver implant. It was this stepping outside, so very carefully, the mainstream habits of his academic world which gave him the edge over the rest. Given all were accelerated by spooling to the point only a rare few could distinguish themselves, he was an anomaly, but not a threat. When others wasted their time with entertainment spooling, he was doing that other thing, which is how he found himself in competitive standing for one of the survey missions.