Restoring Data
[Good morning passengers. This is the pre-boarding announcement for flight 184 in the direction of Narda. All passengers with children under 14 and all passengers requiring special assistance with their boarding should proceed to gate 17. Please have your SID ready.]
“We should head to the gate.”
Everything was blurry around Heki, but she still recognised this place. Crossweg Airport, the third largest airport on Origin.
Origin used to be made up of several countries, but that is in the past. Ever since resource on the planet reached a critical degree, after multiple economic crises, increasing death rates and decreasing birth rates, they formed a country under the name of Origin. With the help of the super AI Anna, they choose people for each position in the government.
Crossweg used to be the capital of one such country called Avaria, one of the largest trading cities in the world.
“Your SIDs please.”
“Here.”
*Beep* *Beep* *Beep*
“Your seats are in row 10, A, B & C, please proceed to your seats.”
Heki was automatically following the two adults leading her.
(Mom, dad….)
Yes, this is a memory from her past, just before departing for their next holiday destination. Crossweg Airport was one of the twelve locations attacked on that day. Why? The crew responsible for building another base for Anna was at the airport at the time, waiting for their flight to depart at gate 16, right next to gate 17.
*Crash* *Smash* *Boom*
The body of the plane took away the bridge leading to their plane and burning liquid was splashed onto Hekis parents, before the whole contraption collapsed in front of Heki. Her parents fell with it.
“NO!”
Heki found herself leaning on the terminals keyboard.
[Good morning Heki!]
She heard a synthetic voice.
“Hey, Cecil. Please do a self-check of the ship.”
[Life support system ok. Navigation system… error, no navigation database found. Attempting network connection… failed, no network found. Searching for backup… magnetic based backup not found… Restoring data from optical backup. Please set the time and date.]
“3525 23, and let’s go with 00:00.”
Since Heki didn’t have a separate clock or watch, and the built in one’s data was erased, she didn’t know the exact time, but she still knew the date. The 23rd day of the 3525th year. Probably.
“Ugh, I feel a bit dizzy… What?”
She felt something weird. It was like her perception of her surroundings increased. It was more than intuition or 6th sense. It was more like a 3D scanner, which is aware of its entire surroundings. Down to the subatomic particle level.
Since Heki was able to utilise more of her brain than an average human, she could handle all the extra information flooding her brain, but she still had to somehow control this newfound ‘sense’.
“Let’s try decreasing the sensing distance.”
Thankfully there was nothing else in the area other than the ship. If there were other things, she might have had an information overload.
“Success. It is relatively easy to control, and it has more flexibility than my other senses.”
Vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste are the five main senses everyone knows of. There are still others like your balance and movement related stuff, your awareness of your body parts’ location relative to each other, heat and cold, pain, and maybe some others as well. But this new sense was different from all of them. It was on a completely different level. The difference between this and the other senses was like the difference between taking a picture with the first camera and the highest quality modern capture device.
“This could cause a new revolution. Research, measurement, all kinds of operations and debugging would become much, much easier… As long as your brain can handle it. Let’s try it right now.”
Heki headed to the ASM device, which could modify the structure of existing atoms, and immediately got to work.
(This is harder than I thought. I can perceive the structure of the atoms and molecules just fine, but sensing them takes up all my mental capacity. I can’t do any of the necessary calculations for adjustments.)
The ASM is a very sensitive device, and it requires detailed calculations to operate.
(If I modify the chip in my brain, maybe I can increase the throughput of data to Cecil, but there would still be a bit of delay, and sending the data would cause interference in in of itself. By the time the calculations are done, they would be worthless. Using a physical connection somehow, would also end up causing interference, depending on the material, it might be smaller or larger. I guess this is a dead end.)
(Though this power should still be able to help with my research, and also search for new mines.)
Having thought that, Heki only had a rough idea of where they were. Until the map is restored, she could return to Origin.
“Cecil, what’s the progress on the data restoration?”
[Restoration process is currently at 2%]
(Wow, optical sure is slow… but it is still the most secure way of storage, apperantly.)
3D optical storage can hold a large amount of data, but both reading from and writing to them is painfully slow. Though it is also the most reliable way of storage out of all of them. Both electric and magnetic based storage are prone to some kind of interference, while for optical you need physical force to damage it. Heat is probably the only opponent is has got common with the other two types of storage. There also exist poorly made editions of optical storage, Hekis ship has the toughest type, since it is used for backups.
(Prioritizing restoration of the map would just slow the whole process down, so it is better to leave it to do its work.)
Restoring yottabytes (1024) of data, certainly takes time. The backup not only contains detailed map data, but also research, mining related, and all other exploration related data, in addition to system data.
(Fortunately, Belle doesn’t have a local backup, so that is one less thing to… Wait, since Belle is not here… Can’t I just leave?)
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