<< Return to Chapter 6

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The time has come for your first technopath exam. You’ve tried to prepare yourself, but there was no way to know what to prepare for. You arrive at the Administration building as instructed and get to the exam room on the...

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You stay silent and plug in your æthernet cable to the back of your collar. As they administer your injection, you feel the familiar pinch of liquid pressed through your skin at high pressure followed by the numb and calm of the medication, and within...

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“Alright, let’s consider the objective,” you say.

“‘An imprisoning prism my familiar has crossed. Split into two, one green and one blue. Find the fragments, and false shall be true. But let them not touch, or all shall be lost,’” 7 says.

“So we are...

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“Green, blue, kind of like our auras, maybe it’s meant to represent us? What if it’s instruction, not description? We’re meant to split up,” you say.

“Now you are overthinking more. But to approach a cooperative challenge by working independently, I...

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“I don’t know, something about that familiar was just unsettling,” you say.

[7 disliked that]

“5 is my friend...” she says.

“I didn’t mean--like, I understand, really. I’m sorry--”

“She does her best to make friends,” 7 says. “It’s hard.”

The...

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Even in a cooperative assignment, it feels like you’ve found yourself in another sort of competition with 7. But maybe now is your chance to outdo her at something. You’ll need to play to your strengths here to succeed. You look out beyond the...

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You know just the shape. You think for a moment about some very interesting math, much more interesting than you’ve learned in Linear Algebra class. Strange attractors. And what could be stimmier than a three-scroll unified chaotic system? A...

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There’s no time to waste. You pursue your lead through a gateway. The trail leads you through a series of unusual directories named with only a number. /531441, /177147, /59049, /19683.

You stop in directory /531441/177147/59049/19683/6561.

“Wait,...

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“So did we!” you say.

“Evidently.” She points to your captured familiar. “This is not the rendezvous point. Should we compare notes?”

“Yeah we’re both here anyway. Once I found a trace of Haze’s technopathy I followed the trail until I noticed a...

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“The familiars themselves might hold a clue. You’re much more of a SySpec than me, what do you think?” you say.

7 picks up the insectoid construct out of 5’s hands. It doesn’t try to flee her. She reaches into its head and her hand passes through its...

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“Have you asked 5 how she does it?” you say.

“Of course. She doesn’t know. One of those computer things, you know?” she says.

“Yeah they sure can be unpredictable for something driven entirely by logic.”

“Everything is. It’s when logic becomes so...

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“Yeah absolutely, they’re my equal,” you say. “I would even go further than that, like the computer itself is practically a landscape to us, a whole world we inhabit. It can contain multiple beings who could be said to be equal to us. But they run...

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“The test is designed for each candidate, so we couldn’t have figured it out if we have false ideas about each other. We had to understand each other a little better, so the 7 in my mind and the Aydan in yours would be more true,” you say.

“Hmm, that...

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“Do you happen to know Japanese sign language?” you sign to her through the glass wall.

She looks off into the distance for a minute and then responds in rough, slow signs, “It’s in my language database. I will figure it out.”

“Yeah, I’ve been there,”...

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You feel the strong fight-or-flight reflex pulling at your mind. But you suppress the emotion as you were taught. Now isn’t the time for hasty reaction. You hold your ground against the beast and stay still.

????-??-?? ??:??:?? ÆON > Shield your...

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You lay your hand on the solid glass wall, knowing what you must do. You consider all you know about æthereal construction. The wall isn’t a wall. It’s a pattern, a concept, the idea of a wall, so strong that your mind believes it is here. It...

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Whether at EvoTech or ObTech there is no comparison between you and 7--she is better suited to attacking the target, or escaping from it. Your most effective move is to assist her by restraining it somehow, holding it in place. But its form is made...

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????-??-?? ??:??:?? Aydan > now 7! attack!

????-??-?? ??:??:?? Aydan > no wait, protecting the familiar comes first! get it to safety!

With both of you inside the prism wall, your messages reach their destination.

????-??-?? ??:??:?? 7 > if you can’t...

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“ÆON! Leave this server immediately!” you say.

5 reaches out with her hand of liquid light, and eight of her dark tendrils lash out just above your head. You turn to see ÆON’s gate slamming shut as the black mass grasps at empty space.

Looking back up...

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You take 5’s hand and she pulls you along as she slips between a narrow space between cracks in the glass, along the matrix of linear pathways through the medium, and finally pulls you out into 3-dimensional ætherspace. You let your avatar relax from...

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“Okay I think I know what to do,” you say with confidence. “We take these and we read each byte as a hex value and then in pairs of three they make RGB values, right? So we render that as an image and it makes...”

You manifest an echo:

“...Plus an...