Ensconced in the Captain's briefing room, Petchy stared in silence. The clip replayed for perhaps the tenth time. Or was it more like the one hundred and tenth? The entity who had taken control of the Z7M7-Z has to be Gharlane! No other explanation sufficed. The raw power displayed sent terror deep into his soul. Petch had long believed their foe was powerful. This wasn't just power, this was supernatural.
As the Captain and his crew stood powerless, they had collected volumes of data on the incursion. Video, audio, sensor scans including the complete electromagnetic spectrum. Now quarantined, the impact of the incursion is the subject of intense analysis.
It seems unlikely the entity would have allowed the recordings if there was anything …show more content…
Nothing ordinary was in any sense useful. The data that caught Petchy's attention seemed the most uninteresting possible. It originated in one odd sensor. Dubbed the Psionic Egg, the sensor detects mental energy, or so some claim. Not everyone agrees. Some claim it monitors the space-time continuum itself. Still others claim it is reflecting random motions of atom, nothing more. Often used by quacks and charlatans, it earns little respect. Disparaged as a pseudoscientific gimmick, it's known by unflattering names of varying disrespect. It's often called disdainful names ranging from 'Mood Detector' to 'Galactic …show more content…
He began approaching the task much as they had done, taking over menial tasks. He would, much as they had done under Jessica's tutelage, run 'scripts'. Scripts that, just as in his own world, encapsulated the expertise of another.
Knowledge is additive. Each new fact must hang from the tenterhooks of existing knowledge. Each complex concept hangs from the prongs protruding from lesser concepts. A gap between concepts understood and ideas newly learned makes integrating the new difficult. Menial tasks opened pathways to extending the metaphorical tenterhooks of his knowledge. He was learning as his Klovian friends fought to identify any damage the invader may have wrought.
It took time, but Fitz reached what he considered the 'bits is bits' enlightenment phase. He finally grokked the concept of swarm intelligence. There is nothing he would call 'ship's computer' in a traditional sense. There is not even a cluster of computers.
That was a difficult mental hurdle. Instead, the ship itself is alive with computing elements. He grasped how many millions of individual elements comprised the ship's intelligence swarm. He came to understand the difference between a swarm and a cluster, a mob and a