Hardwired

[Fairchild]

Chapter 04: Sunrise

The Scimitar landed on the sands of Crete. They were in the largest city of the planet, Cayambe. She left the ship on the pad for it to be taken to one of the large hangars, sliding her cred-chip in front of a reader. Her balance was slim, but not slim enough not to afford a vacation on the Corsair homeland.

"So, explain to me what we're doing here. And this time in plain English." She felt like she knew the answer to this question, but she wanted to be sure she understood him correctly. To be honest, she trusted him enough to tell her how not to let him into her private memories, but not enough to not look through them in case she messed up the privileges.

She knew how her brain stored her memories. There were two storages, referred to by the Professor as "wet" and "hard". "Wet" was her natural memories, stored safely in the neural connections of the brain, coming with all the positives and negatives of her meat body. Hard storage was the video and audio feeds from Vergil as well as something that the Professor called "blobs". Blobs were strings of raw neural data that could not be modified or examined in any way other than reliving the entire experience.

She knew the reason they came here. Wet storage was inherently unreliable and hard storage was inherently unwieldy. There was nearly unlimited storage space in the human brain, or so he thought, but the data was compressed in a very lossy way. Hard storage was, on the other hand, perfect in terms of information but storage-intensive. There was a practical limit to how much data could fit inside one Q-coherence chip storage and even despite advanced quantum compression algorithms the chip under Pincoya's skin could not keep more than about two weeks worth of continuous video, audio and blobs from the Vergil archiving software.

The Professor wanted to analyse how neural data is compressed and compare it with how blobs are structured to eventually create a universal protocol that would allow for storing wet-like memories in hard storage. He called this protocol "Constellation". She knew he had already worked a bit on something similar, the technology that allowed her to project video transmissions straight from her Vergil, but it was far from perfect. Eventually, he said, the Constellation should be able to project full-on memories and create new ones.

"Jack in, run the program labeled as beale, point it at the external disk and go about your day. I'll just be watching."

She did as he said, still feeling his presence somewhere between her ears. The program signified that it was running. Beale mind-map was a sophisticated software coded all the way on Atka by Ageira and Wisp cooperation, capable of monitoring neural signals nearly everywhere in the brain. Along with the hard feed the Professor would be able to eventually have enough material to correlate neural signals with certain memories and from that understand the wet compression needed to develop Constellation protocol.

First thing she felt as he started the software was the familiar warmth of Cretan sunrise, coupled with the gentle wind ruining her combed hairstyle.

"Everything is green, as far as I can tell. We're good. Let's move."

She smiled, confirmed and in five minutes, lost herself in the small streets, alleys and avenues of Cayambe.