Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [14]
If this were total vacuum, time would have stopped. You could have traveled millions of parsecs and still find yourself caught in the same moment of time. Only, this isn’t quite a vacuum. Permeating the entire solar system is the solar wind. It slows the light down—not by much, but it’s enough to make the signal pattern change.
You cannot think. You are thoughts frozen in transit. But you will remember dreams of plasma, of the solar wind. They change you. They imprint your consciousness with memories of distant solar storms, intense magnetic fields of Jupiter’s mag netosphere, and the high megaamperes of the Io–Jupiter electrical discharge.
In the arithmetic of special relativity, this close to the speed of light, even a tiny change in speed translates into relativistic difference. You’re stretched in both space and time. You’re smeared across the electromagnetic spectrum. The older you is Doppler-shifted into red, the younger into blue. You feel the ages of yourself as colors.
You shall never be the same.
A noise is added to your most private, innermost structures.
A pink noise.
And then you are caught, received by something at the other end. A spaceship, camouflaged with a polaritonic cloak—a thin skin that catches light within itself by binding photons to the oscillation states of nano-lattices. The captured light flows all around the ship’s hull like fluid, leaving at the other end as if it passed through empty space, to make the ship invisible.
You flow, too—a thin overlay of consciousness, enveloping the hull and sliding off. But you don’t exit in the same direction. You are bounced sidewise, to another ship. You follow the nodes of a relay chain, allowed to think during the brief time of your polaritonic-coupled existence; you are scanned and queried in transit.
Then, your journey ends inside the self-aware, thinking skin of a magnificent magsail frigate. That’s when you find it’s barely begun.
4
“HELLO, BEAUTIFUL.”
Who? What? Nathi readjusted his perception. Where am I?
He was immersed in an odd space, bodiless—his mind’s eye simply hanging there like a dot. The space was filled with light, somehow centered on him and fading slowly in all directions, infinitely—he could not perceive an end.
“Welcome aboard the Dragon Guard ship DareAngel. Sorry, but we cannot tell you more.”
His mental focus swiveled around to face the voice. An image, vaguely like a cloud, magnified in front of him—now it was far away, now very close. The distance changed, although he could swear that the object didn’t leave the same spot in the three-dimensional perspective.
What the hell?
He must be in a virtual perception space of more than three dimensions. But even though he could think of such things in abstract terms mathematically, he could not visualize it. Having been a human once, his mind was stuck in three dimensions—at least, without some radical software “surgery.”
“My, what a gorgeous mind! Look, folks.”
Dozens of other images converged on him from all directions.
“Why, yes, indeed. But so… three-dimensional.”
“Hey, stop!” he shouted. The roiling clouds made him dizzy. “Who are you?”
The “clouds” stopped and stared—he couldn’t find a better word. Within, he couldn’t rest his eye on anything, as if some movement had been happening in the extracurricular dimensions—so fast it came across as instantaneous change, non-stop.
“We are the ship. The DareAngel. You are Nathi.”
There was a bare hint of question at the end.
“Alright. I see.” He was within the shared perception space of an annoying bunch of artificials. But what made it his perception space?
“Hey, that’s not nice. We all are equal here. And we are not a bunch. We are a ship. You must be seeing our crew interface partitions, one per member. Our personettes.”
“Okay. No offense.” So then, a plural artificial. Or is it artificial pluralist? Nathi recalled