Decision

Once people get used to something, it is hard to break out of it. Waking up around the same time, buying the same or similar things. Basically, humans are afraid of the unknown. Heki is no different. Not thinking about every single detail is what society is for. It is built on beneficial exchanges. You don’t have to worry about water, food, electricity, let those worry about it, who understand what they are doing. At the end of the day, that is what you are paying for, in exchange you do your own job as well.

Seceding from society and all of its comforts is incredibly hard. If you do that you will feel lost, like you are staring into nothing.

(… I think I should head back. Finding another civilisation in this vast space is near impossible… Even if I find one, they are more likely to not have the same comforts as Origin has.)

Just like that, comfort won out in the end.

(With that said, I’ll have to hide Cecil, before we get back. Also, the map is still not restored yet, so I should experiment with this new sense of mine.)

Heki tried out various things with her new sense. She discovered that she could sense the cosmic background radiation. She tried to increase her sense to be finer and she succeeded in sensing the quarks, which make up the subatomic particles. Trying to sense below that level started to interfere with the quarks, and she received quite the backlash from it, almost passing out.

(I guess this is the limit. Now for distance.)

She decreased the accuracy of her sense and increased the distance. She extended her sense to the whole ship and started to go beyond it. She could go all the way to the nearest stellar system.

“Ugh…”

That is when the backlash hit her.

(What if I further decrease the accuracy?)

While before she could still sense what kind of materials the things inside her senses were made of, now she could only sense it vaguely and the borders between materials started to blur.

(Let’s go further.)

She managed to encompass the entire star system in her sense and further expanded it.

(Another one.)

She found another stellar system and started to decrease the accuracy.

(So, the more things I have inside my senses the less accurate I should be. It is better to have it with the least distance and accuracy… Let’s try that, after I finish with this.)

She decreased her accuracy until she could only sense the position of the objects inside the range, but not their material or the state they are in.

(Let’s expand to the max range.)

She expanded the range and she could almost get the entire star cluster inside her sense, but had to stop.

(Seems like this is my limit.)

Although her sense could be expanded, her brain couldn’t handle all the information, since storing the everchanging position of objects numbering too many to count, causes a great strain on the brain. Theoretically she could further decrease the accuracy, but there is no point to increasing the range, if you don’t know where the objects are. It is like trying to see better in pitch black with a telescope, it is pointless.

(So, let’s see where my sense is located.)

She immediately decreased the range to the minimum.

(I can decrease it further, but it is like decreasing the exponent of 10… I am getting infinitely close to zero but I will never reach it. It is located inside my brain, but it is smaller than the quarks… apparently. If I try to increase the accuracy it returns nothing. Well let’s try something else.)

She tried moving her sense away from herself, but that didn’t work. Then she tried expanding it in one direction only, but that also failed.

(So, I can only centre it around myself and can’t modify its shape, only its accuracy and size. Guess that is the end of my experiment… Now what?)

Having no network meant that the only things left were offline stuff. She could try and navigate space with her powers, but in space there were no absolute positions, you had to rely on precise calculations, to calculate your position. Thanks to a detector built on the theory, that higher dimensions exist, it was possible to gather, receive and send information way above the speed of light. Though there were still some delays, the margin of error for distance calculations became 1mm for every 100000 light years.

But for that, you had to know the major beacon’s locations, their exact movement speeds, relative to each other and a lot more. After that you had to calculate the most efficient route, with no major objects in the way.

The network also helped a ton, since it had relay points in multiple locations. Based on their distance from each other and your current location, their ID and other data, you could skip some of the calculation. It would take under a millisecond to calculate your route. Having to calculate the route home without network and relay points, you had to manually adjust some parameters. This was especially true for Heki, since she didn’t know the current time and date. Using the wrong time could get you to the other side of the universe.

(Hah… Maybe I should look around the ship and check if everything actually works…)