Victor and Roger looked around for another diver, but saw no one. Usually the data was passed via the net, but in places with no wi-fi coverage it could be used in direct broadcast mode, such as they were doing here. The protocol included settings for simulating a user's natural voice, or near enough.
With vox, you thought a message to your neural interface, and it was broadcast as data packets, to be received and converted to speech directly into the other person's auditory nerve. It was in open-channel vox of course, the synthetic voice messaging system which had replaced texting from the early part of the century. , said a woman's voice in Victor's head, startling him. Which ultimately lead to humanity's conquest of the stars. Tetra could create designer waves, making it the surfing capitol of the world. But history would remember Tetracropolis for something else entirely: Victor's Littoral Gravimetric Phased Array. There was nothing else like it in the world. In the international game of architecture, the Tetra had been Brunei's three-trillion-dollar answer to the extravagance of proud, but aging, Dubai. In 2059, ten years after groundbreaking and with another ten to go before completion, it had already become the cultural and commercial hub of the Eastern world. It was pyramidal, a mile across at the base and nearly as tall, made of liquid-metal glass and nanostruct pylons, big enough to hold a small country within its immense volume. You could see it from space, glittering on the northern coast of Brunei: the massive arcology they called The Tetracropolis. Then in 2050 a junior engineer at Topologix named Victor Timbancaya thought of an unusual use for the technology.Īll he needed was a half-billion dollars and some beach-front property on which to try it out. While the gravitator was far too heavy, inefficient, and expensive to serve as a means of propulsion, it did find specialized applications in industry and defense. Spun the other way, it made them that much lighter.
Spun one way, objects above the device became 20% heavier. In 2045, a small tech company named Topologix developed the gravitator, a spinning superconducting disk that could slightly alter the local gravitational force. But that didn't matter to Victor, because for him, these attacks were personal. Skillful, persistent monkey-wrenching had forced the shutdown of the entire array for days at a time, and the Sultan didn't like his toy being offline. Swimming at a depth of twenty meters off the coast of Brunei, Victor Timbancaya and Roger Murphy swept their flashlights over module D5, looking for signs of sabotage. I'll have to redo that part if I ever decide to submit this story for publication. But I wrote that bit in the last couple hours of the challenge, and finished in the final minutes, so I was writing to save my life. The climax is somewhat broken, because my depiction of the physical phenomenon I chose as my Big Threat isn't exactly realistic. While my effort was pretty rough I finished it in 72 hours, while my friend never managed to finish, so I won by default. The only rule was that it had to include that sort of wetsuit, though we could jazz it up a little with tech. One of us (I forget who) proposed to make it a challenge: We'd each take a stab at a story and see whose was best. I showed it to a writer friend of mine, saying it looked like something from a science fiction story. One day in 2009 I happened upon a picture of a mermaid-style wetsuit from Otter Bay Suits (now defunct, I think).
0 kommentar(er)
