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Christina lies on the bed for another few minutes before getting up and slipping on her jumpsuit. She stands and starts toward the kitchen, lead by the savory smell of boiling Dotres Root. She meets William in the hall, returning with a bowl of the mouth-watering soup.
"Christina, I don’t think you should be up and about at the moment." William skids to a halt, almost spilling the soup.
"And what would you know about it? You were introduced to the process only two or three days ago." Christina retorts, gleefully taking the soup from William.
"So I don’t know much about the merge process, I do know that after anything strenuous it’s a good idea to rest."
"And I did, for a full hour," Christina slips past William, balancing the soup perfectly, into the kitchen area.
William turns and follows Christina back into the kitchen. He watches her as she eats her soup and smiles idly.
"What’re you smiling at?" Christina inquires, a slight look of forced confusion on her face, causing a rather comical expression.
Suppressing a laugh, William answers, "Oh, nothing, nothing at all."
"You know, we should probably head toward Vectra Prime." Christina quickly washes her bowl, tossing it on the drying rack as she returns to the table.
"Why?"
"Well, oh wait! We forgot to tell you! We received an subether message on the last series of jumps. It offered us a job."
"What’s the job consist of?" William tosses his bowl toward the sink, causing the bowl to bounce off the sink lip and into the water.
"Why’d you do that?" Perplexity wanders aimlessly across Christina’s face.
"I’d never tried that before. Just thought I would."
"Ok, fine. Anyway the message didn’t say what the job was but it did quote a price."
"And, what price?" William urges gently.
Rolling her eyes she responds, "More than we know how to say out loud. Well we guess we could say, three point eight four times ten to the twenty third power."
"Wow," William’s comment comes out more as a whistle than a word. "Lay in a course, full speed to the left!"
"Left?"
"Yea, why not?"
"You should have some rest, we’ll go lay in the course."
"But I’m not tired."
"True, you’re not tired, you’re exhausted. Go get some rest or we’ll force you to."
"Ok, ok," William leaves the kitchen toward his room.
"We’re going to check on you after we plot the course, you’d better be in bed." Christina calls after William.
William turns slightly and waves, and disappears into his quarters. Christina heads up to the bridge where she requests launch clearance in about thirty minutes, and starts the computer planning out a course for Vectra Prime. After making sure everything is in order, she heads back down toward William’s room. She slows her pace and moves quietly up to the door. Listening intently and not hearing anything she opens the door and sees a deeply sleeping William lying, still dressed, on his bed. Smiling slightly, she carefully shifts William into a more comfortable looking position, and pulls one of his blankets over his body, unsettling a optic chip lodged in the sheets. Curiously picking up the chip, she wonders why William would sleep with computer parts.
"Goodnight, Will, we told you were more tired than you thought." Christina leaves William to his sleep.
Christina returns to the bridge, idly twirling the chip between her fingers as she sits down. She leans back and examines the chip as if she might be able to read the data off it by sight, before slipping it into the optic reader. She pauses over the activate switch, wondering momentarily is she was invading William’s privacy, before toggling the control. The screen flickers slightly and goes out. Christina raps on the monitor casing for a few seconds as the monitor flickers back on.
"We have to get a new screen," Christina thinks idly as she accesses William’s chip.
The data on the chip consists of old ship reports and cargo transfer receipts. Christina is about to toss the chip into the archives when a oddly labeled file passes the screen. Scrolling back to it she opens the transfer report that has an improperly formatted label and a poem opens on the screen. Quickly skimming the poem, Christina guesses it was written by William, and is about her. Returning to the file list, she randomly opens up another ship report and finds a letter written to her from William, but never sent. Realizing that this chip was designed to look like a standard backup chip, she quickly removes it from the reader, replaces the chip’s protective cover and pockets it. She checks the computer’s course and verified launch clearance before lifting off and leaving the small planet behind, before turning in herself.
Christina returns to her usual schedule within a week, waking before William, turning in for the night after William. If anything, she seems to be more active. William, noticing a slight shortage of datachips, discovers Christina has stored close to three terraquads worth of chips into her quarters, one of her walls looking almost like a computer core module.
"Christina, whatever are you doing?" William asks when he sees her bringing another armful of chips into her quarters.
"We’re designing a serum to aid in some other ailments associated with the merging process. The data you gathered when we remerged is amazing."
"I didn’t gather three terraquads worth though!"
"Actually we’re using nine terraquads, our ship uses the chips inefficiently."
"How in the universe do you get nine terraquads of data from less than 73 megaquads?"
"Easy, we’ve been running additional scans ourselves, and pulling all the research that we had hidden across the Grid. You’d be surprised how much of the research people are listening to on their computers without even realizing it."
"Hu? I don’t understand."
"Ok, we’ll give you an example. Listen..." A beautiful song fills the room.
"I think I’m still missing the picture, how is this research for the merge process?"
"Here is the last two bits of each wave form." Christina brings up a series of ragged lines with sections in red.
"Uh huh."
"Now we extract those bits and gather them up, placing them in the predetermined order, and we have a report on Arcamedies’ second merge." Christina demonstrates as she explains.
"Oh! I get it a complex data encryption system! Why hasn’t anyone else thought of that?"
"That’s the problem. Some of our reports have been overwritten by others attempts or successful encodings of their own. That’s why we have only nine terraquads instead of the close to four hundred we had originally."
"Four hundred terraquads! What did you record about the merges?"
"Everything, we have brainmaps of each individual before, during and after each and every merge. Some individuals had their neural, physical, and phycidelic functions constantly monitored. That takes up about a gigaquad a hour."
"Is any of it helping?" Will takes a peek at Christina’s datalibrary.
"Course not, well not yet, we need about another fifteen terra before we can start using any of the data. Of course we don’t mean the constant brain data, although that may prove useful." Christina starts plugging the newly collected chips into her homebuilt multiplexor.
"At this rate we’ll have to stop for more chips. Hey, why haven’t you used this chip yet? You starting to pull our old backups for your little project?" William notices the chip Christina had left lying on her dresser.
Christina turns and realizes with a slight horror that that is William’s chip, she had found in his room, "Well, we um, well..."
"It’s ok, just remember to log which backups you’re decommissioning." William tossed the chip toward Christina before heading back to whatever he was doing.
"Close one, we’re going to have to remember to hide that chip," Christina slips the chip into her jumpsuit and returns to her project, but only for a second before she calls, "Hey Will? When are we arriving at Vectra Prime?"
"About three hours to the system, another hour or so to actually reach the correct planet, why?" Comes an almost muffled reply.
"Just wanted the higher bandwidth of a direct link to a planetary repeater."
"Uh, we have just one problem with that." Will reappears at the doorway.
"And what’s that?" Christina motions William on in, "You can enter my quarters. You don’t have to stand in the hall."
"Sorry, the problem is that Vectra Prime is surrounded by an nebula, they don’t have a repeater like most planets. They use a series of buoys spread throughout the nebula to communicate with the rest of the universe. We’ll probably be doubling, if not tripling, their bandwidth if we allow them to use our comm system."
"But won’t our comm system be dropped when we enter the nebula?"
"Of course not, our communication is through the subether. No nebula under there."
"We’d forgotten."
"Obviously. Well, I’ve got to get back to my repairs."
"Want any help?"
"No, you just stay and work on your database. Remember to research some sort of high capacity data storage devices that we can purchase when we reach Vectra. I don’t really want to run out of chips... Thinking on that a moment, could I have one of those for some of my data?"
"Sure, here you go." Christina tosses one of the new blank chips toward William who catches it effortlessly.
"Thanks," William nods and leaves Christina to her database.
William guides the ship to the small planet without problems, immediately receiving landing clearance because of the particularly small amount of traffic. Out of one of the portholes, William notices, as he’s getting ready to disembark, a group of people starting to gather around the ship.
"Christina? Take a peek out the porthole, would you?" William calls down the main corridor.
"Just a second," Christina chimes from her room, apparently still working with her database. "Oh, my, a welcoming party! Will wait for us, we want to meet the party!"
A few seconds later Christina appears on the bridge tying her hair back loosely.
"Ready?" William ponders watching Christina.
"Lets go," Christina nods, leading the way to the hatch.
Christina opens the hatch, and looks out at the thirty-some people gathered around the main hatch, all of them are tall, at least for humans, most with black hair, a few with other dark colors. One of them sticks out of the crowd slightly, a stout man of about thirty-two, wearing a gray suit with a blood red sash. The sash itself has three markings Christina can’t place, a couple people around him look abnormally strong, probably bodyguards of the stout man, if he’s important. Everyone has cheerful smiles on their faces, hopefully a sign of good will. Christina smiles back in return and steps off the ship onto the strangely soft landing pad. William follows closely behind, stumbling as he steps onto the pad, thankful of Christina’s presence as she grabs his hand to help steady him. To his surprise she doesn’t let go after he regains his footing.
The man with the sash moves forward, the crowd parting to let him through, toward Christina and William. "Hello, welcome to Vectra City, the place where the entire planet is a city, I’m the mayor of this section of the city," booms the man with the sash, offering his hand.
"Well thank you, we’re pleased to be here," Christina smiles at the mayor taking his hand and giving it a firm shake.
"Same goes for me," William gives the mayor’s hand a fair shake.
"Would you care to tell us of you’re purpose here, not many visitors come around this place, because of the nebula." The mayor’s gaze shifts from Christina to William and back to Christina, apparently unable to decide who’s in charge.
"Well, someone called us offering a job of some sort..." William begins.
"So you’re the people Tristian called! Someone go find Tristian." The mayor interrupts William. "Come, follow me," The mayor sets off toward one of the exits to the spaceport.
Christina turns to look at William, and only receiving a shrug in response, moves to follow the mayor’s quickly retreating form. William follows Christina’s lead, after making sure the ship is locked up.
The streets are made of the same semi-solid substance as the landing pad. The buildings immediately around the spaceport are a bit squat, however they increase in height as the party moves away from the port.
"Shouldn’t be too hard to find the spaceport again," William whispers to Christina.
"We’ve never had a problem finding the ship again anyway, Will," Christina whispers back, closing the discussion.
After a couple minutes walking the mayor climbs a series of steps to a series of beautifully carved double doors, which he passes through, glancing back to make sure Christina and William are still behind him.