Jeanie and I had spent a couple of months training together in Beijing. Running sims, combined arms live fires with other agents...a bunch of other stuff designed to get me acclimated to experiencing a virtual life through a spark. My training was actually pretty short as I'd already had plenty of time with lower generation sparks.
It was March 28th 2211 when they moved me up to the station and bundled Jeanie off with a group of other nanobots. At that time they didn't push nanos through the wormhole in small packets. They were still wrestling with creating exotic matter and could only stabilize the wormhole for short periods...I'm talking micro seconds. It took alot of uncertain work to prop the hole open and quite a few packets of nanos were lost in the early days. Needless to say Jeanie made it through safe and sound.
You know about all that quantum stuff right? I mean how Jeanie and I communicated long distances through changing spin on up quarks and anti-up quarks...the same stuff that makes your computers run so damned fast nowadays....and how they poured the energy through the wormhole in massless photonic streams that could survive the information loss on the horizons? No? Well, I'll explain the communication part because that's important to understanding how things went on Nia, the photons you'll just have to trust me about.
Basically quarks are really small particles that have certain characteristics. Ever heard of a hadron collider? That's right, old news, they've been around since the 20th century. Well, the hadrons they were colliding were sub-atomic particles. The stuff that shot away from the hadrons when they smashed together were quarks and leptons. Remember the "certain characteristics" I mentioned? The up quark has a specific spin, the anti-up quark has an exact opposite spin. Always. If you've got a bonded up and anti-up pair they'll have exactly opposite spins. You can seperate them up to a certain distance and they'll maintain that bond. Throw some magnetometric energy at one of them and you change its spin. The other quark in the bonded pair will immediately also change so that it's spin is still opposite. The important thing is it's immediate....even if that means the information has to travel faster than light to make it happen.
So, you line up two series of up quarks in a nanobot floating in space and a set distance away on either side of that nanobot you've got two nanobots with two series of anti-ups. One series is bonded to its anti on either side. Flip the spins on specific quarks and you can IOIOIO you're happy ass off at faster than light speeds. Of course there's a bit of speed loss as the nanobots trigger the magnets but it's mostly made up for by the distance seperating the bots in the chain. A few million nanobots and me and Jeanie were suffering only a bit of lag.
Now the reason that chain is important to my story is the rogue agents. Ha! Don't look so surprised. I know the official line of bullshit the public has been fed but you have to have heard the rumors? Of course they were real! Not like the mega corps were going to admit it though. They might come off as less than perfect. Hold on. We're running way off track. I'll explain about the way the rogues cracked the chain later on in my story. Suffice to say there were times when the chain would go down due to the rogues. We called it "crashing the server".
Where was I when I started talking about quarks and stuff? Right, right. Jeanie was headed down the rabbit hole. I was in the intch hooked.... Intch. Sorry, there's some vernacular and acronyms we used. The intch was the place on the space station where we hooked up to our sparks. Integration Chamber...intch. So I was in the intch hooked up to Jeanie as her nano bundle drifted out to the wormhole. They'd pushed the bundle with a photon ram to avoid damaging any of the delicate electronics in some of the unarmored nanos and it was one hell of a slow ride. Luckily they'd built the station pretty close to the wormhole so it didn't take too long. Right before Jeanie went through the connection monitors cut our contact to protect the agents from psych damage in case the bundle got wrenched. Getting wrenched is what they called being in the wormhole when the exotic matter gave way and the wormhole horizons met. I think you need a pretty damned bent mind to understand just what happens if you're in there when it gives. One of the scientists on the station tried to explain it to me once and I just couldn't grasp it.
A few minutes later they announced the bundle had made it through and hooked us all back into our sparks. What a damned sight. Imagine you're lying on a dentist's chair on a station with a pair of wires hooked into your brain, but your eyes aren't seeing any of it. Instead you're staring at an alien world 87 thousand light years away. And you know that what you're seeing happened just micro seconds before....too short a time to even really register. I'm not the deepest man you'll ever meet but I'll be damned if that didn't cut right down to my soul. It was simply the most awe inspiring event I've ever experienced.
Jeanie's bundle started peeling away almost immediately. All those nanobots running off to whatever task they'd been programmed. It'd be another couple of hours before Jeanie hit dirtside so all the agents unplugged and took a break for a meal or a nap, depending on what time zone we came out of earthside.By the time they called us back in our sparks had already hit their bases. When I hooked back up Jeanie was in an Arkhe. The Arkhe was designed by the Syndicate based on tech information we'd stolen from the natives. It was weak as hell but it was what we had to work with at first. The project wasn't about to turn over the heavier bots to new agents. They saved those for the vets who had proven their ability to keep them safe. My first view of the Arkhe wasn't even real. Whenever Jeanie was in a base there wasn't any real room for a view of things. You've gotta remember personal space don't matter to a nanobot. My interface was streaming a model built on data instead of a real picture.
It wasn't until I gave Jeanie the command to deploy that I got to see what we had to work with....and it wasn't all that long until I got to see what we had to work against.
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