By the time she had finished her salad, she decided there was no point in going to Realm of Bushido right away. Even if Am-heh had left it already, they still needed to power-level Aes, and it would be harder to do there.
She scraped the remains of dinner into the trash and dropped them into the recycler's maw. Back to adventure! she thought, feeling her pulse quicken. It was a good feeling...and it lasted about one hundred and eighty degrees of rotation when she turned to go upstairs.
Manny was standing between her and the stairs. One hand was a stern fist extending only the up-pointing finger. The other was an open palm offering her Engineering Math II textchip. “Tonight, I'm not asking,” he said firmly. “Please don't make me shove this in the override slot myself. After you study, you can hang out with friends.”
Darla held her breath and counted to 20. She left it out. “This is not a good time to promote yourself to dictator of Rome, Julius.”
“I'm not asking, and I'm not joking,” he said. “And, not moving until you take your future seriously, the future we're paying for.”
“All right, all right,” she grumbled. “I'll study first, I promise.”
“Good,” he said, “Because I'll be up to check on you, I promise.”
Darla fought the urge to growl at him and went up the stairs without a fight. She couldn't take the chance that he might unplug her while leveling Aes. The bed had automatic battery backup, constantly topped off by the house current, in case of loss of external power, but the changeover, by default, initiated an involuntary logout.
She couldn't do that to Aes in the middle of a battle. If she happened to be the one drawing aggro when her avatar vanished, the baddies could turn on a fresh victim like Aes in seconds.
She wanted to scream with frustration. Important as college was, it wasn't going to save people from Am-heh.
She slid the textchip into the bed's override slot and lay down. Soon she was safely in the embrace of Engineering Math II. Lovely, she thought sarcastically. Now instead of butterflies and centaurs and glorious battles and handsome grieving men, she could, instead deal with excitement such as this:
“Metapathmic integral – An integral of the wedge product p^f of the pathspace p and the integrable and differentiable function f on the coordinate space of a (3+k)-dimensional continuum.
Examples: the Feynman-Keller (sum-over-metahistory) Integral for particle trajectories in Quantum Electrodynamics, the Weiss-McKinley Entangled Fluxpath Integral for advanced embedding geometries in tensor fields, and the Hollings-Farker Code Execution Topology Integral used in analysis of quantum computing spintronics.”
In this chewy and tangled weave of techno-talk, the name Farker jumped out at her. Wondering if maybe the Farker she knew had a famous relative, she called up a list of the chapter's references.
“Farker (no first name): Dr. Farker, formerly head of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Department at the Dirac Institute, now Chief Information Officer for the PanGames Corporation.”
I'll be damned, she thought. I'll bet there's a good story behind that change of career. Not that she had time for such prying. It was good, however, to know that he wasn't always just a corporate lackey, even if running a quantum computer was a pretty cool job.
The rest of the chapter was a tedious but meticulous exploration of the application examples. She waded through it dutifully.
“...demonstrates the irreversability of the compacted tensor...”
“...it can easily be shown that...proved by the following...”
The questions at the end of the chapter were as thorough as she had expected. The first ten were questions of mere fact. The next ten were merely numeric calculations.
And then the dreaded essay section:
21. Theoretical example: can the probabilities of alternate versions of two independent measurements performed at a position on a timeline be used to specify future regions in 4+k dimensional spacetime on the tree of timeplanes corresponding to these alternatives? Why or why not? If your answer is yes, specify a congruence formula for doing so. If your answer is no, specify the transparadox formula that rules it out.
22. Practical example: describe the effect of Einstein's famous time/energy uncertainty on the Hawking radiation spectrum near a black hole of mass m that is oscillating forward and backward on the time axis with frequency f and amplitude delta t about the present moment in proper time tau. Can the Weiss-McKinley EFI be used in this case to derive the resulting expression for the average space curvature at all positions in space near the event? Why or why not?
23. Metaprogramming example: assume you are provided with a Class II spintronic gate 3-lattice chip with a capacity of 16TB.
(a) Using standard UNET encoding, how much of this storage must be reserved to buffer data during data accesses at 8THz?
(b) What is the maximum number of calculations that can be performed per nanosecond using this array as a n-lattice accumulator?
Finally! she reached the end of the chapter. The screen showed it had been a couple of hours. Enough! she thought. I never promised to finish the book tonight. Breaking the connection, she reached over the side of the bed and yanked the textchip out just enough to deactivate the override. With any luck at all, if her father peeked in again he would see it still in place and leave her alone.
Leaning back flat again, she let herself log into PanGames and select Realm of Legends.
FLASH.
Aes was waiting for her when she appeared by the cave on Pelion. “Where's Farker?”
“He had to get back to his work,” said Aes. “He said to tell you he was working on a way to notify you automatically the second Am-heh got into the same Realm as you.”
“That would be handy.”
Aes smiled. “I told him it wasn't necessary.”
“Wasn't necessary? Aes, don't you understand the danger?”
“Yes, but you see, I'm your detector. If Am-heh enters the same Realm as us, I will know it instantly. As long as I'm with you, he can't sneak up on you.”
“Yeah...as long as he doesn't, like, pop into existence right next to me by sheer luck.”
“In that case,” said Aes, “an automatic detector would be useless anyway.”
“Gee,” said Darla. “Way to reassure me, Aes.”
Chapter 44: Aes: “πάθει μάθος” (“there is learning in suffering”)
Gamers and Gods: AES Page 51