A short post this week, mainly consisting of two extracts, one each from Far from the Spaceports and Timing. These are both on Kindle Countdown deals from this Friday, October 26th, for one week, price set at £0.99 / $0.99 depending which side of the Atlantic you’re on. More of that later… here are the extracts.
The main characters are Mitnash (Mit) and his AI persona partner Slate. in this extract, Mit and Slate are recovering from a difficult episode in which Slate was hacked by a shady individual known as The Wise Man…
“Slate, how much do I talk to you without knowing it?” She was amused. “All the time, Mit. You murmur to yourself while you’re thinking, and you subvocalise throughout the day. There’s very little about your thought life I don’t know. Or your fantasy life. You’re whispering to me almost all the time.” I sat back, bouncing a little as I forgot to adjust the move for the low gravity. “Oh.” “It’s nice. I like it. It makes me feel very intimately connected with you. Why? Does it worry you?” “Not with you, no. If I can’t trust you, I might as well give up now. But I suppose that means you know all sorts of things that I have never told Shayna.” I considered that soberly, while she was tactfully not replying. It was definitely something to think through on another occasion. “But anyway, when the hand-held had been compromised, and that other thing was quizzing me, I started to wonder how much I was giving away. Or how much the Wise Man was learning without me knowing.” “While you were in his quarters, he would have had a direct link from the hand-held into his main system. It was a very old model Ziggurat, like I said before, not very responsive at all. Male gendered, but only just. Badly set up and very poorly programmed. But he has the name Hunn Gravfelt, which at least shows that one of them has read a few decent books. Very arty. But anyway, once you left there, he had no way of querying the hand-held until you got linked up to a ground system. He’s a shady character, but not a very competent one.” “I suppose the big question is how much information he now has.” “Yes. But actually, we don’t know for sure what he was able to derive while you were on Agnes. We deliberately left a lot of material out in the open, so he would find it easily enough. We now have to wait and see where that turns up. Like the breadcrumbs in the old children’s stories.” “But he doesn’t know anything I said on the way home?” “No. There was a very large data packet all ready to be sent back, but it was never buffered. Do you want to know what was in it?” I stayed silent and thought about it for a long time, and Slate stayed silent with me. “Don’t tell me the details. But do run through it again, and tell me if I was about to give away anything critical to the job. Or that might have put Shayna at risk.” There was a very short pause. “Nothing like that. If Yul Yulsson was a voyeur, and if he’d ever received it, he could have had some fun with it, for sure. But he would not have learned anything of real value. There’s actually more about me in the packet than Shayna.” “Hmm. Best not to tell her that, if you don’t mind.” “This can be our secret.” I moved to the cabin, pulled out some of the new pieces of clothing which, so far as I could tell, would help me fit in at the Frag Rockers bar a lot better than the formal garb I had worn to see the Wise Man. “Slate, who’s leading at Frag Rockers tomorrow?” “A prog rock fusion band called The Descenters. The keyboard player and drummer are locals, from St Martins and Tresco respectively, and the rest are from Ceres. They have a very big fan book on SystemPlus. They’re best known for extremely long concept gigs. They lost their way a bit with Trails on Topological Notions – the twenty-eight minute triangle solo called Geodesics confused even their best fans. But then the electro-gamba player left, and they built up their reputation again.” “Will I like them?”
Next up, in another book, Mit is discussing a recent shipwreck with his friend Parvati…
I wanted human company again, so I stretched and went in search of Parvati. She was brewing chai as I wandered in to the kitchen. Seeing me, she doubled up the amounts, found a second mug, and arranged some savoury crackers and a red and yellow striped cake on a tray. “Did you and Slate get anywhere?” I shook my head. “Total blank. The figures don’t tell us any more than the basic alert message we got from Finsbury, and they won’t let us access the code yet. There’s almost nothing we can do until we get there.” We moved back to the bridge and enjoyed the snack together. “Chandrika just picked up the latest from the wreck site for Selif’s ship, if you’re interested?” I very definitely was interested. We finished the crackers, and she sliced two generous portions of the cake. “They’ve made available the results from the data recorders. There’s nothing at all unusual until about three minutes before the crash. At that point, Selif took the vessel’s riding lights offline and uploaded an amendment to the nav plan.” “Presumably to avoid being identified by the duty porters?” “Most likely, yes. You’re not supposed to disengage them, but people do. As you say, he was motivated to slip in without attracting attention. It’s also uncommon to amend the plan at that late stage, but it happens. Anyway, the upload was completed successfully, taking only the expected lag. Except that a couple of seconds later, both recording devices ceased gathering data. At the same instant. That is unheard of.” I looked at her. “How did that happen?” “The maintenance log for the recorders showed that Selif had skipped two routine services. So they highlighted that in the report, and almost immediately the manufacturer put out advisory notices basically denying all responsibility if people ignore the recommended schedule. So the official version simply lists an open verdict.” “Is there an unofficial version?” She grinned. “Of course. Chandrika, why don’t you tell them?” “To be sure. I heard this from one of the personas on Martin’s. He works part-time with a man who’s an expert on the embedded systems in boat engines.” I nodded. It was a highly specialised area, and one that I knew next to nothing about. But it made sense that a man with those skills would have an opinion on data recorders. “Well, he said two things. One is that a full restart cycle for those boxes is about half a second longer than the time from the point of failure up until the impact on Teän. And the second thing is that there are only two known exploits for that model of recorder which could bring down both boxes together. One of them cannot possibly have anything to do with this case: a different ship configuration altogether. The other one happens to rely on a routing plan change.” I sat there, absorbing the news. It made sense that these units would go into an automatic reboot mode if they went dark for some reason. Normally that would restore them to full operation in plenty of time to carry on doing their job. But in this case, the boat had hit Teän before they had started up again. I stirred in my seat, but Slate beat me to it. “That’s very precise timing on someone’s part. Does anybody think it is just a coincidence?” “Oh, Slate, the official verdict is open. Nobody is suggesting anything.” We all laughed together. “Either it was phenomenally bad luck on their part, or…” I paused, and Parvati continued. “Or else someone wanted rid of them, and found a clever way to do it.”
Why the Countdown deals? Well, the last day of October marks the last day of my current job in London. I shall be opening a new phase of working life up in Cumbria. Expect more posts about life up there.
So it seemed fitting to post some extracts, and to discount on Kindle, my science fiction series where coding, AI, and financial fraud in space are the main themes.
But I’m not saying goodbye to that style of writing! As regular readers will know, The Liminal Zone shares a lot in common with those books, though it has a different focus and is set a couple of decades further in the future. And behind that, the third in the Spaceports series is toddling along, tentatively named The Authentication Key at present.
Next week’s post will still be from London, but the one after that will be from Grasmere. And don’t forget… there’s a week of Countdown deal on each of Far from the Spaceports and Timing!
