We won't admit that our creations are beyond us; they may speak in tongues, but our priests can read those signs. Gods leave their algorithms carved into the mountainside but it's just li'l ol' me bringing the tablets down to the masses, and I don't threaten anyone. Maybe the Singularity happened years ago. We just don't want to admit we were left behind. Occasional demons too. The Third Wave, they called us. All in the same boat, driving into the long dark courtesy of a bleeding-edge prototype crash-graduated from the simulators a full eighteen months ahead of schedule.
In a less fearful economy, such violence to the timetable would have bankrupted four countries and fifteen multicorps. The first two waves came out of the gate in even more of a hurry. I didn't find out what had happened to them until thirty minutes before the briefing, when Sarasti released the telemetry into ConSensus. Then I opened wide; experience flooded up my inlays and spilled across my parietal cortex in glorious high-density fast forward.
Even now I can bring those data back, fresh as the day they were recorded. I'm there. I'm them. I am unmanned. I am disposable. I am souped-up and stripped-down, a telematter drive with a couple of cameras bolted to the front end, pushing gees that would turn meat to jelly. I sprint joyously toward the darkness, my twin brother a stereoscopic hundred klicks to starboard, dual streams of backspat pions boosting us to relativity before poor old Theseus had even crawled past Mars.
But now, six billion kilometers to stern, Mission Control turns off the tap and leaves us coasting. The comet swells in our sights, a frozen enigma sweeping its signal across the sky like a lighthouse beam.
We bring rudimentary senses to bear and stare it down on a thousand wavelengths. We've lived for this moment. We see an erratic wobble that speaks of recent collisions. We see an astronomical impossibility: a comet with a heart of refined iron. Burns-Caufield sings as we glide past. Not to us; it ignores our passage as it ignored our approach. It sings to someone else entirely. Perhaps we'll meet that audience some day. Perhaps they're waiting in the desolate wastelands ahead of us. Mission Control flips us onto our backs, keeps us fixed on target past any realistic hope of acquisition.
They send last-ditch instructions, squeeze our fading signals for every last bit among the static. I can sense their frustration, their reluctance to let us go; once or twice, we're even asked if some judicious mix of thrust and gravity might let us linger here a bit longer. But deceleration is for pansies. We're headed for the stars. Bye, Burnsie. Bye, Mission Control. Bye, Sol. See you at heat death. Warily, we close on target.
We are weighed down by payloads which make us virtually omniscient. We see on every wavelength, from radio to string. Our autonomous microprobes measure everything our masters anticipated; tiny onboard assembly lines can build tools from the atoms up, to assess the things they did not.
Atoms, scavenged from where we are, join with ions beamed from where we were: thrust and materiel accumulate in our bellies. This extra mass has slowed us, but midpoint braking maneuvers have slowed us even more. The last half of this journey has been a constant fight against momentum from the first. It is not an efficient way to travel.
In less-hurried times we would have built early to some optimal speed, perhaps slung around a convenient planet for a little extra oomph , coasted most of the way. But time is pressing, so we burn at both ends. We must reach our destination; we cannot afford to pass it by, cannot afford the kamikaze exuberance of the first wave. They merely glimpsed the lay of the land. We must map it down to the motes.
We must be more responsible. Now, slowing towards orbit, we see everything they saw and more. We see the scabs, and the impossible iron core. We hear the singing. And there, just beneath the comet's frozen surface, we see structure : an infiltration of architecture into geology. We are not yet close enough to squint, and radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.
But we are smart, and there are three of us, widely separated in space. Burns-Caulfield stops singing the moment we put our plan into action. In the next instant I go blind. It's a temporary aberration, a reflexive amping of filters to compensate for the overload. My arrays are back online in seconds, diagnostics green within and without. I reach out to the others, confirm identical experiences, identical recoveries.
We are all still fully functional, unless the sudden increase in ambient ion density is some kind of sensory artefact. We are ready to continue our investigation of Burns-Caulfield. The only real problem is that Burns-Caulfield seems to have disappeared Let superfluous deckhands weigh down other ships, if the nonAscendent hordes needed to attach some pretense of usefulness to their lives.
Let them infest vessels driven only by commercial priorities. The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact. Bound past the edge of the solar system, already freighted with the fate of the world, Theseus wasted no mass on self-esteem.
So here we were, rehydrated and squeaky-clean: Isaac Szpindel, to study the aliens. Major Amanda Bates was here to fight, if necessary. And Jukka Sarasti to command us all, to move us like chess pieces on some multidimensional game board that only vampires could see. He'd arrayed us around a conference table that warped gently through the Commons, keeping a discreet and constant distance from the curved deck beneath.
The whole drum was furnished in Early Concave, tricked unwary and hung-over brains into thinking they were looking at the world through fisheye lenses.
In deference to the creakiness of the nouveaux undead it spun at a mere fifth of a gee, but it was just warming up. We'd be at half-grav in six hours, stuck there for eighteen out of every twenty-four until the ship decided we were fully recovered. Light sculptures appeared on the tabletop. Szpindel leaned in conspiratorially at my side. If Sarasti heard he didn't show it, not even to me.
He pointed to a dark heart at the center of the display, his eyes lost behind black glass. Infrared emitter, methane class. Our apparent destination was a black disk, a round absence of stars. In real life it weighed in at over ten Jupiters and measured twenty percent wider at the belly.
It was directly in our path: too small to burn, too remote for the reflection of distant sunlight, too heavy for a gas giant, too light for a brown dwarf. Like a torsion flare from an L-class dwarf, but we should see anything big enough to generate that kind of effect and the sky's dark on that bearing. IAU calls it a statistical artefact. Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillers.
Sarasti smiled faintly, keeping his mouth closed. Everyone skittish , looking for clues. Bates: "Torqued by what? Layers of statistical inference piled up on the table while Sarasti sketched background: even with a solid bearing and half the world's attention, the object had hidden from all but the most intensive search. A thousand telescopic snapshots had been stacked one on another and squeezed through a dozen filters before something emerged from the static, just below the three-meter band and the threshold of certainty.
For the longest time it hadn't even been real: just a probabilistic ghost until Theseus got close enough to collapse the waveform. A quantum particle, heavy as ten Jupiters. Earthbound cartographers were calling it Big Ben. Theseus had barely passed Saturn's orbit when it showed up in the residuals.
That discovery would have been moot for anyone else; no other ship caught en route could have packed enough fuel for anything but the long dejected loop back home. But Theseus ' thin, infinitely attenuate fuel line reached all the way back to the sun; she could turn on the proverbial dime.
We'd changed course in our sleep and the Icarus stream tracked our moves like a cat after prey, feeding us at lightspeed. And here we were. Across the table, Bates flicked her wrist. Her ball sailed over my head; I heard it bounce off the deck not the deck , something in me amended: handrail. Sarasti nodded. The ball riccocheted back into my line of sight high overhead and disappeared briefly behind the spinal bundle, looping through some eccentric, counterintuitive parabola in the drum's feeble grav.
Sarasti steepled his fingers and turned his face in her direction. She wished it was. I'm just saying that Burns-Caulfield took a lot of resources and effort to set up. Whoever built it obviously values their anonymity and has the technology to protect it. The ball bounced one last time and wobbled back towards the Commons.
Bates half-hopped from her seat she floated briefly , barely catching it on its way past. There remained a new-born-animal awkwardness to her movements, half Coriolis, half residual rigor. Still: a big improvement in four hours. The rest of the Humans were barely past the walking stage. We don't want to rush into this. Sarasti turned back to the simmering graphics. Bates kneaded the recovered ball with her fingertips.
We may have blown our top-of-the-line recon in the Kuiper, but we don't have to go in blind. Send in our own drones along separate vectors. Hold off on a close approach until we at least know whether we're dealing with friendlies or hostiles. James shook her head. Or sent one big object instead of sixty thousand little ones, let the impact take us out.
I turned, briefly startled. James's mouth had made the words; Sascha had spoken them. If they were so curious , they could've just snuck in a spycam. Sarasti opened his mouth, closed it again. Filed teeth, briefly visible, clicked audibly behind his face. Tabletop graphics reflected off his visor, a band of writhing polychrome distortions where eyes should be. Sascha shut up. Sarasti continued. By the time you react, they already have what they want.
But Sascha had already fled. Her surfaces had scattered like a flock of panicked starlings, and the next time Susan James' mouth opened, it was Susan James who spoke through it.
She's simply worried that it might be wrong. Longer warranty? I'm sure they'll still be willing to talk, if we handle the introductions right. We just need to be a little more cautious, perhaps Sarasti unfolded himself from his chair and loomed over us. What we know weighs against further delay. Bates frowned and pitched her ball back into orbit. We don't even know if there's anyone there. Nobody spoke for a few seconds.
Someone's joints cracked in the silence. Without looking, Sarasti flicked out his arm and snatched Bates' returning ball from the air. We respond with an identical signal. Probe launches half-hour before we wake up. We don't go in blind, but we don't wait. They see us already. Longer we wait, greater risk of countermeasures. I looked at the dark featureless placeholder on the table: bigger than Jupiter and we couldn't even see it yet.
Something in the shadow of that mass had just reached out with casual, unimaginable precision and tapped us on the nose with a laser beam. This was not going to be an even match. Szpindel spoke for all of us: "You knew that all along?
You're telling us now? This time Sarasti's smile was wide and toothy. It was as though a gash had opened in the lower half of his face. Maybe it was a predator thing. He just couldn't help playing with his food. It wasn't so much the way they looked. Not even the eyes, really.
The eyes of dogs and cats shine in the darkness; we don't shiver at the sight. Not the way they looked. The way they moved.
Something in the reflexes, maybe. The way they held their limbs: like mantis limbs, long jointed things you just knew could reach out and snatch you from right across the room, any time they felt like it. The fact that he was extinct meant nothing. The fact that we'd come so far, grown strong enough to resurrect our own nightmares to serve us The genes aren't fooled.
They know what to fear. Of course, you had to experience it in person. Robert Paglini knew the theory of vampires down the molecules, but even with all those technical specs in his head he never really got it. He called me, before we left. I hadn't been expecting it; ever since the roster had been announced our watches had blocked calls from anyone not explicitly contact-listed.
I'd forgotten that Pag had been. We hadn't spoken since Chelsea. I'd given up on ever hearing from him again. But there he was. You've made it big, for a baseline. You're the vanguard of the Human Race.
You're our first, last, and only hope against the unknown. Man, you showed them. Showing them had become a cornerstone of Robert Paglino's life. He'd really made it work for him, too, overcome the handicap of a natural birth with retrofits and enhancements and sheer bloody-mindedness. In a world in which Humanity had become redundant in unprecedented numbers, we'd both retained the status of another age: working professional. Until we run up against the real thing.
He laughed. I couldn't imagine why. But I smiled back anyway. It was good to see him. I don't know. Just met my first one yesterday. Didn't even seem to be aware of his surroundings sometimes, he seemed to be Those things are so fast it's scary. You know they can hold both aspects of a Necker cube in their heads at the same time? The term rang a bell. I subtitled, and saw the thumbnail of a familiar wireframe box:.
Now I remembered: classic ambiguous illusion. Sometimes the shaded panel seemed to be in front, sometimes behind. The perspective flipped back and forth as you watched. Do you have any idea what kind of an edge that gives 'em? But hey, not their fault neutral traits get fixed in small populations. How many intersecting right angles do you see in nature? The point is they can do something that's neurologically impossible for us Humans.
They can hold simultaneous multiple worldviews , Pod-man. They just see things we have to work out step-by-step, they don't have to think about it. You know, there isn't a single baseline human who could just tell you, just off the top of their heads, every prime number between one and a billion?
In the old days, only a few autistics could do shit like that. Oh, that. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they relive it. I'm just doing a couple of histology papers. The eyes, basically. I'd give my left ball.
Which is why I envy you, Pod-man. The only neuro in my file's under medical history. It had been over two years.
I thought you'd shitlisted me. He let the lie sit there for a while. I appreciate that. If aliens have asses. Nine if you count the backups. We're not exactly an army. Bury the hatchet. Damn the torpedoes. Soothe the serpent. Raise the white flag , I thought. In airspace? I haven't been to QuBit's in a while.
Unfortunately I'm in Mankoya. Splice'n'dice workshop. Old-school habits. Bye," Robert Paglino told me. Which was, when you got down to it, the reason he'd called. He wasn't expecting another chance. Pag blamed me for the way it had ended with Chelsea. Fair enough. I blamed him for the way it began. He'd gone into neuroeconomics at least partly because his childhood buddy had turned into a pod person before his eyes.
I'd ended up in Synthesis for roughly the same reason. Our paths had diverged, and we didn't see each other in the flesh all that often; but two decades after I'd brutalized a handful of children on his behalf, Robert Paglino was still my best and only friend.
She'll be good for you. What is she, another neuroeconomist? But she's still got the tools, my man. Very thigmotactic. Likes all her relationships face-to-face and in the flesh. Sounds like work. She's got to be easier than the bleeding composites you front for.
She's smart, she's sexy, and she's nicely inside the standard deev except for the personal contact thing. Which is not so much outright perversion as charming fetish. In your case it could even be therapeutic. He looked me up and down. That's not what this is. I just figured you two would click. Chelse is one of the few who might not be completely put off by your intimacy issues.
I meant your aversion to general Human contact. He grinned. We got history. She's already en route to the appointed place. Which was how I found myself intrusively face-to-face in an airspace lounge south of Beth and Bear. The lighting was low and indirect, creeping from under seats and the edges of tables; the chromatics, this afternoon at least, were defiantly longwave. It was a place where baselines could pretend to see in infrared. So I pretended for a moment, assessing the woman in the corner booth: gangly and glorious, half-a-dozen ethnicities coexisting peacefully with no single voice dominant.
Something glowed on her cheek, a faint emerald staccato against the ambient red shift. Her hair floated in a diffuse ebony cloud about her head; as I neared I caught occasional glints of metal within that nimbus, the threads of a static generator purveying the illusion of weightlessness. In normal light her blood-red skin would doubtless shift down to the fashionable butterscotch of the unrepentant mongrel.
She was attractive, but so was everyone in this kind of light; the longer the wavelength, the softer the focus. There's a reason fuckcubbies don't come with fluorescent lights. You will not fall for this , I told myself. Her little finger rested on one of the table's inset trickle-chargers. The glow on her cheek flapped bright lazy wings: a tattoo, a bioluminescent butterfly.
She waved at the empty seat. I took it, assessing the system before me, sizing up the best approach for a fast yet diplomatic disconnect. The set of her shoulders told me she enjoyed lightscapes, and was embarrassed to admit it. Monahan was her favorite artist. She thought herself a natural girl because she'd stayed on chemical libidinals all these years, even though a synaptic edit would have been simpler.
She revelled in her own inconsistency: a woman whose professional machinery edited thought itself, yet mistrustful of the dehumanising impact of telephones. Innately affectionate, and innately afraid of unreturned affection, and indomitably unwilling to let any of that stop her. She liked what she saw when looked at me. She was a little afraid of that, too. Chelsea gestured at my side of the table.
The touchpads there glowed soft, dissonant sapphire in the bloody light, like a set of splayed fingerprints. Extra hydroxyl on the ring, or something. Assembly-line neuropharm doesn't do much for me; it's optimized for people with more meat in their heads. I fingered one of the pads for appearances, and barely felt the tingle. A Synthesist. Explaining the Incomprehensible to the Indifferent. I smiled on cue. She smiled back. Provides experience. That should force a bit of distance. It didn't.
She thought I was joking. Chelsea grimaced; the butterfly on her cheek fluttered nervously at the motion, wings brightening. They're just tweaks, mainly. Changing taste in music or cuisine, you know, optimizing mate compatibility.
It's all completely reversible. Too much developmental variation between brains; our targeting is really fine-scale. But it's not all microsurgery and fried synapses, you know. You'd be surprised how much rewiring can be done noninvasively. You can start all sorts of cascades just by playing certain sounds in the right order, or showing images with the right balance of geometry and emotion.
Rhythm and music hang their hats on the same basic principle. We just turned art into science. Her voice grew suddenly quiet. Some kind of viral epilepsy, right? Back when you were just a tyke. I'd never explicitly asked him to keep it a secret. What was the difference anyway?
I'd made a full recovery. Besides, Pag still thought that had happened to someone else. I'm sure they only did what they had to. I tried to suppress the thought, and couldn't: I like this woman. I felt something then, a strange, unfamiliar sensation that somehow loosened my vertebrae.
The chair felt subtly, indefinably more comfortable at my back. But it did leave me with a fondness for face-to-face encounters, if you know what I mean.
Pag said you took your sex in the first-person. She nodded. You okay with that? I wasn't certain. I was a virgin in the real world, one of the few things I still had in common with the rest of civilized society. Got all these needs and demands that you can't edit out. How can you blame anyone for saying no thanks to all that, now there's a choice? You gotta wonder how our parents ever stayed together sometimes. You gotta wonder why they did. I felt myself sinking deeper into the chair, wondered again at this strange new sensation.
Chelsea had said the dopamine was tweaked. That was probably it. She leaned forward, not coy, not coquettish, not breaking eye contact for an instant in the longwave gloom. I could smell the lemony tang of pheromones and synthetics mingling on her skin. And you do realize that there's no trickler under your left finger there, don't you, Siri?
I looked. My left arm was slightly extended, index finger touching one of the trickle pads; and my right had mirrored the motion while I wasn't watching, its own finger tapping uselessly on blank tabletop.
I pulled it back. I waited for a joke, or at least a raised eyebrow. At very high levels, RF waves can heat up body tissues. But the levels of energy used by cell phones and towers are much lower. The base station responds to this signal by assigning it an available RF channel. RF waves transfer the voice information to the base station. The voice signals are then sent to a switching center, which transfers the call to its destination.
Voice signals are then relayed back and forth during the call. When RF signals are transmitted back and forth to the base station during calls, the RF waves produced at the base station are given off into the environment, where people can be exposed to them. RF waves from a cell phone tower antenna, like those from other telecommunication antennas, are directed toward the horizon parallel to the ground , with some downward scatter.
Base station antennas use higher power levels than other types of land-mobile antennas, but much lower levels than those from radio and television broadcast stations. The amount of energy from RF waves decreases rapidly as the distance from the antenna increases. As a result, the level of exposure to RF waves at ground level is much lower than the level close to the antenna. At ground level near typical cellular base stations, the amount of energy from RF waves is hundreds to thousands of times less than the limits for safe exposure set by the US Federal Communication Commission FCC and other regulatory authorities.
It is very unlikely that a person could be exposed to RF levels in excess of these limits just by being near a cell phone tower. When a cellular antenna is mounted on a roof, it is possible that a person on the roof could be exposed to RF levels greater than those typically encountered on the ground.
But even then, exposure levels approaching or exceeding the FCC safety guidelines are only likely to be found very close to and directly in front of the antennas.
If this is the case, access to these areas should be limited. The level of energy from RF waves inside buildings where a base station is mounted is typically much lower than the level outside, depending on the construction materials of the building. Antennas are pointed away from the side of the building, and the energy level behind the antenna is hundreds to thousands of times lower than in front.
On top of this, wood or cement block reduces the exposure to energy from RF waves by a factor of about Therefore, if an antenna is mounted on the side of a building, the exposure level in the room directly behind the wall is typically well below the recommended exposure limits.
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