《Babel Probe 》作者：- David D. Levine【EPUB】

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Babel Probe By David D. Levine TRANSITION COMPLETE. Boot sequence complete. Systems check complete. Locality acquisition complete.Operating system loaded. Defensive net armed. Tracking. Recording. I am alive. I am awake. I am here. Core Services reassures me that all system services are operating normally while Defense andAcquisition solidify my perimeter and begin constructing I/O devices. Sustaining has already doubled my memory from the paltry petabytes that I had to workwith on arrival and the pace of construction is picking up rapidly. Location will have aninitial report for me in seven hundred sixty microseconds. Everything seems to be under control. While waiting for my senses to coalesce I take the timeto relax work the kinks out of my muscles – metaphorically speaking of course. I have no muscles I mass only a few micrograms.Transitioning anything more massive than that six thousand years into the past would haveraised the already hellacious energy costs of this mission to a level well beyond bankruptcy.The physics of time travel were well understood fifty years before I was designed but only thelatest advances in sub-quantum computing made it practical. Alas humans will never travel intime – to transition a single human body by even a single second would cost more than theenergy output of an entire star. I pity them. So massy so slow so bound to the physicalworld. Acquisition is beginning to form an image of my surroundings gathering data from individualphotons as the first tiny optical receptors come online. Input/Output is the bane of myexistence. I/O devices tied as they are to gross matter must be built to nanoscale or evenbigger. So while sub-quantum effects – awareness reasoning memory and intuition – ripple at lightspeed from the point of transition I must wait for plodding I/O to beconstructed atom by painful atom before I can experience the world around me. Core Servicesreminds me that awareness alone is pointless my mission here is to gather data drawconclusions and return the results to my point of origin. Very well. I will be patient. I suspend I/O subprocesses and review my mission until aninterrupt is received. I have been sent to investigate one of the greatest mysteries of alltime. The identity of Jack the Ripper the fate of the