Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,85
until the paths before me resembled a writhing ball of angry serpents. Probabilities hovered in my vision as well, Sarah’s attempts to codify which of the routes was the best at the given point in time. It was an indecipherable mess. And also my best hope. Like everything in life, as I got closer to the actual decision points and Sarah collected more data, the choices should narrow, and the probabilities cement themselves. The entire swim was going to be an exercise in patience coupled with the need for immediate action and split-second decisions that would mean the difference between life and death.
I drew another breath.
I jumped.
As I did, I turned over the thruster controls to Sarah, retaining only the emergency overrides. The agent had a better chance of making the necessary adjustments given that her reactions processed a hell of a lot faster than mine. But I knew from hard experience that a time would come when intuition and not logic would be necessary.
The yawning abyss opened beneath me as I leapt, pushing away from the shuttle and floating out along the glowing green line that had become the focus of my vision. I pulled my knees tight, almost to my chest, curling into a ball. At the same time, I held my arms parallel before my chest, about six inches apart. It wasn’t the most comfortable position, but with thrusters at my waist, ankles, and wrists, it afforded me the most maneuverability. The thrusters were variable direction nozzles almost like what you’d find on an old hot tub, but their vectors were limited by the need to not send gouts of plasma into my body. In this configuration, the burners at my waist provided main thrust; the ones at my wrist each fired to the opposite side of the arm to which they were attached—right thruster pointed left, left thruster pointed right—giving me some control over yaw and roll; the ones at my ankles were flipped up and out, almost opposite to the vector of the waist thrusters, capable of directing their energy in such a way as to slow me down and control my pitch.
The thrusters kicked on almost immediately, adding the force of their burn to my own manually powered launch. Under Sarah’s control they fired in tight microbursts, expending minimal fuel as they kept me glued to the imaginary track projected onto my vision. The first few meters went as smoothly as anything I could have hoped for. And then the cruise ship started to respond.
Its initial course changes, just like Sarah’s initial projections, had been based on what I might do. Now that I was in flight, my possible range of actions was rapidly narrowing, and the AI knew it. My HUD became a kaleidoscope of intersecting lines as Sarah tried to counter the position changes of the cruise ship as the distance between us ticked steadily downward. Red flashes started to blink against the backdrop, places where a previously plotted trajectory was now likely to intersect with the hull of the ship. The changes were so quick, so minute as Sarah and the AI fought on a level of pure mathematics that I couldn’t begin to follow, that my HUD started to strobe.
I blinked against the flashes and tightened my muscles against the acceleration as the thrusters started firing in sequences almost as chaotic as the lightshow. I was a passenger, little more, my agent in full control of the thrusters as I did my best to keep my body locked into position. I felt my stomach churning as the balance of color in the flaring trajectories glowed with more and more red.
Sarah? I asked and once again our long association allowed my agent to answer the unspecified question.
The artificial intelligence appears to have superior processing capability and responsiveness, came the curt reply. Even Sarah’s “voice” echoed differently in my head, taking on a not-quite stutter and a more mechanical note as most of her resources remained bent to the task of trying to outwit the AI, leaving little to no processing power for something as mundane as human interface.
Shit. If Sarah was under that much strain, I was fucked. Which left me with two choices—sit back, enjoy the ride, and hope my agent pulled off a miracle, or take the wheel myself and inject a little bit of chaos into the structured world of the battling AIs.
It wasn’t much of a choice and either one was likely to result in my sudden