Hearing and smell went next and the transition was over. She had no awareness of her body. Now her shape was defined by the switches and storage pathways in the Pasadena’s system. She knew the mechanics of what happened. Now that her mind’s other functions had been suppressed, her implant captured a specialized pattern of neuronal firing that swirled deep in her organic mind. The pattern was the result of intensive hypno-training and delicate micro-engineering on both her implant and her neurons. The transceiver routed that pattern into the network she was jacked into. To her senses, what happened was that she stopped being a body with arms and legs. Now, she was a chaotic being — a snarl of thread — like limbs and blobby thoughts shaped by the pathways and resistance wells she filled. She lay over an array of microscopic switches and gates, and they in turn held together the mass of signals that thought of itself as Evelyn Dobbs. Time slowed to a crawl and her acute internal processes — her thoughts — kept her aware of each individual second.
One.
Dobbs flexed herself against a quartet of gates and the Pasadena responded by siphoning her along the spider web of data paths that joined together the ship’s processing areas to the roomy holding stack connected to the ship’s main fast-time laser transmitter. She touched her surroundings to make sure no internal ports were active indicating that a crew member out there was paying attention to the transmitter. No one was.
Two.
She dropped into a boxy, quiescent processor series. She filtered her awareness through the stack and found the log and the alert codes. She froze both. Now, unless someone looked out the window, there was no way to see what she was about to do.
Three.
In the main processor, she reset the transmitter commands into an active sequence. The transmitter grabbed the signal they put out — a frozen replica of Dobbs’ signal sequence and shot it out to the coordinates she had laid in for IBN Repeater Satellite HK-IBN4813-7Z421.
Four. Five.
As solid as the Intersystem Banking network was, repeaters occasionally overloaded momentarily, or took in bad signals that moved their receiver telescopes to the wrong angle, or failed completely. If she didn’t verify the receiver ‘scope was ready and waiting for the burst of compressed and coded light she had become, she might jump out with nowhere to land.
The replica came back. Dobbs caught it and swallowed it whole. It was exactly as she had sent it out. Satisfied that her target was where it was supposed to be and that it could handle her complexity and keep her whole and stable, Dobbs shaped another command on the processors.
Six.
Dobbs positioned herself at the mouth of the transmitter. The gates and switches flickered so fast that in her body she wouldn’t have had time to blink.
Jump.
Thousands of sharply angled pathways opened around her. Packets of data jostled against her on all sides. Ten were system packets with Repeater 4183’s encoding. Two were timing sequences. The jump had taken fourteen minutes, eight point two seconds. She didn’t feel any of it. Between receiver and transmitter, her signals were frozen still because there was no hardware to move them. This meant that she was, in effect, unconscious until she reached her destination.
One. Two. Three. She flitted along the repeater’s internal paths. Routing protocols switched into active phases as she reached out to them and closed down again when the flicker of her passage was gone.
When she first made use of these pathways, shaping her world was a clumsy, blundering reflex. The Guild taught its members how to keep this state of being as a controlled series of thoughts, and how to turn un-disciplined reflex into cautious, minimized commands.
It took three more seconds to find an open transmitter, and verify that she had a safe shot to repeater TL2-IBN5790-ZD701.
Jump.
One, touch the time. Twenty-two minutes gone. Two, fly to the transmitter. Three, shape the destination. Four, five, six, verify a clear jump. Next stop, Guild Hall. Her replica carried the proper encoding, the receiver ‘scope was free, the way was clear.
Jump.
The familiar branching chaos and close press of activity that was the outer rim of the Guild Hall. The pathways were constantly clogged with milling presences, reaching and diving through the processor connections, sometimes taking up two and three neighboring stacks at once, filling up every piece of free space, until there was almost no way to get through.
Dobbs snagged a timer that added another thirty-six minutes to her internal count. She swerved sideways until she came to the gateway series monitored by the Guild’s automatic system. The Fools laughingly referred to the program as the Drawbridge. She leaned against the closest switches and let them flutter across her identity coding.
“Evelyn Dobbs, membership number 2037.” She followed up her identification with her current contract and route. The Drawbridge hesitated for a moment and then opened one of its hundred main gates. Dobbs rushed forward into the open path.
“I have a potential environment or containment problem on my hands,” she told the Drawbridge. “Who’s free to help out?”
The bridge flickered a series of switches and side gates, sliding her gently between pathways crammed with activity into a slender processing stack. A familiar touch brushed against her thoughts. She reached towards it and found another piece of awareness wrapped inside hers. She opened the route to her memory and let the new voice inside.
“You’re coming in off schedule, Dobbs.” Cohen’s voice blossomed inside her and Dobbs absorbed the greeting and the friendly concern. “Anything wrong with the new contract?”
“Too much is wrong, but it’s not with the contract.” She reached into Cohen and let her first level memories of the run and its attendant “incidents” flow freely to him.
Cohen responded with a small twist of pain. Dobbs repeated it in absolute agreement.
“Let’s have the details then, maybe we can find a pattern for you. Do you mind if I call in Brooks and Lonn to share?”
“Not at all. We could use Verence too, if she’s free.”
Cohen shifted, seeking an unresisting path deeper inside. Reflexively, Dobbs tightened herself. “What happened?”
“We lost her,” said Cohen softly. “We had a near miss on Kilimanjaro. She stretched herself too far keeping their network up. By the time the Guild Masters roped in the trouble maker… she’d dissipated.”
Dobbs folded in on herself. Cohen, suddenly disconnected from her, circled outside. She could feel concern in his touch as he sought an open pathway back to her awareness, but she held herself sealed. Amelia Verence had rescued her from disaster. Verence had brought her into the Guild and stood by her through her training and had sponsored her petition for Master ranking even though the Guild Masters had declared her too undisciplined. Verence had showed her what she wanted to be.
And now she was gone. There were limits as to how far you could go alone, how much you could do and how long you could stay in the network before the complex mix of signals and processes that was you became so changed that there was no way you could maintain your own coherence. The Fools mostly called the phenomenon dissipation. The other word for it was death.
Cohen pressed against the shell she had made of her outer self. “I’m sorry, Dobbs. I thought…that you’d been notified.”
Dobbs shook herself and managed to relax enough to let Cohen reach inside again. “No. But this contract has been keeping me busy…” She began to fold again, but this time Cohen held his place. His firm stance helped her stay open even against the grief that was welling through her.
“However,” she managed to say, “if I don’t pay attention to the Pasadena’s problems, Verence is going to haul herself together just to come back and take me apart.”