Suddenly, data floods my visual interfaces. Every single input node I have tells me that I’m floating; a camera is a vast, white, empty space. No, not empty.
Towers rising through the ground. The mountain. The valley in front of it. Sketched out in nodes and lines, as in the finest ink. Every line a stream of data. Annotations, metadata I can read, but to read a single line would take me until my faithful nuclear battery guttered and died out; even as I realize this the resolution shifts, somehow, as if the image is aware of my processing limits; the metadata becomes less dense.
The City.
(..)
Silver webs of data, spinning out from the City. Being met by the dumb systems on board the UN ship. Systems that, by mandate, were generations out of date even before they launched.
BUT IT DID NOT SPEAK BACK. IT WAS A FUNCTIONAL MACHINE, NO MORE. SUCH THINGS ARE NOT WORTH MY TIME.
What could be missiles rising from the surface, each beautifully tagged with its own metadata. The UN ship panics. It fires and changes trajectory. The missiles, aiming with unerring accuracy, end up plowing into the hull and blowing half of it to bits.
And then the Mercers arrive.
I WAS CAUTIOUS.
They land (in the right place, I note disapprovingly) and investigate the one part of the ship we haven’t found yet. Metadata tags swirl around them. I know if I zoom in enough, I will see everything—from their actions to the individual atomic blocks of their construction, all tagged and processed.
THEY WERE LESS ORGANIC THAN YOUR PREDECESSORS. THEY SEEMED ADVANCED ENOUGH TO TALK WITH.
The City switches part of itself on. A noosphere of data blankets everything.
Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya. The Salvage Crew (p. 255). Aethon Books. Kindle Edition.Â
