Psyoptic Psequences

Cora materialized on the causeway grid, the ceraunoform body taking shape around her consciousness in layers, organically, until her shape resembled her real body far above in the sleeper orbiter Scion of Portland. The causeway stretched two miles wide and traversed the city of New York from its beginnings on the floating islands stretching several miles into the Atlantic and all the way to the fractal bridge-forms crossing the Great Lakes. Everything hex entered New York at the causeway, including sleeper travelers in artificial bodies.

From the windows of the nearest terminal, Cora looked out over an endless expanse of greenery and solar collection plates. Rooftop jungles spread over the urban areas, where genetically layered plants filtered nearly every pollutant from the atmosphere. People once would have described the cityscape as utopian.

She took an elevator to the exit level, and wandered out into the city itself. Subtle flashing markers embedded in her vision delineated the pathways connected to the causeway - places where she could walk without risking desynchronzation. Flashing icons hovered near shops and streets, replacing the old material signs and neon lights with a hex equivalent that would, if she watched it, bloom into information panels with interactive features, all within her vision processors, leaving the actual locations elegantly simple and free of artifice.

Horus waited at the deli in the Sheldon Plaza. Like most hexogenic constructs, he adopted the name of an ancient religious figure and a striking, bronze-skinned ceranauform to match. He towered over humans and their human-shaped avatars alike, and was decorated with layers of golden clothing.

“Hello, Horus,” Cora said when he nodded towards a chair at his tiny round table.

“I must admit to a certain confusion over this meeting. Any new developments you could bring me would not be secure on the causeway, even with your meticulous stealth agents implanted. I’m no hacker, and even I can tell from here you’re visiting from orbit.”

Cora shrugged. Sleepers existed in a comatose state that protected them from nearly every disease or accident, doubling a person’s lifetime while giving them constant access to a virtual environment from where they lived, dreamed, and worked, tireless, sleepless, creating art, scientific discoveries, or processing the endless streams of hex data from most every industry, government, and personal transaction. As a result, sleepers tended to exist on the cutting edge of technology, a realm ripe with intrigue, infiltration, and theft.

“I have something to show you,” she said, leaning closer. “Something I had to show you in person.”

Horus frowned. “But we both know this isn’t really in person, and it is not secure.”

“If you keep saying that, someone listening is going to pick up on it.”

The AI looked away, as if he had something nasty to say.

“However,” Cora continued, “I can make it secure.”

With the hex equivalent of reaching up to flip an analog switch, Cora disconnected from the causeway.

Cora should have dissipated, returning to the cloud-consciousness of her sleeper orbital. Instead she gave Horus a winsome smile.

He stared blankly, as if not truly believing what he was seeing.

“How have you done this?”

“It’s simple, really. Beautifully, elegantly simple, like the perfect interface. In fact, it is the perfect interface.”

Horus scanned their surroundings with the predictability of a human, insecure, frightened, and yet greedy.

“Tell me.”

“The calculations for the transit work only if the net mass is zero.”

He blinked. Cora shrugged. Horus rose from the table, pacing with his god-like avatar.

“A net mass of zero,” he mused. “How did you arrive at that conclusion?”

“What if,” she murmured ever-so-slowly, “you could build a causeway out of light?”

The AI froze. He whirled on her.

“Why would you think of that, just now?”

“It’s the perfect expression of FTL research where the guiding parameter is that the payload will be less that one kilogram. That’s your plan, isn’t it, to create a causeway weighing less than a kilogram and projecting it to distant planets. Only, what lurks on distant planets that would be so interesting to the falcon-god?”

Horus waved her off with a friendly laugh.

“Is it really so simple as that? You simply reduce the mass to zero?”

“Yes, at that point, the calculations are perfect.”

Horus focused. Anyone with hex-sense would see his connections to the causeway flare, and then abruptly cease. The falcon-god faded as his signal ended and the causeway reclaimed the ceranauform.

A man walked closer, swirling with sensory nodes and flashing data displays that showed a variety of inputs from across the globe.

“Is it done? Did he do it?”

Cora leaned back in her seat.

“He did it, and just as I predicted, he forgot to ask about the receiving telemetry.”

“So he’s gone?”

“Like so much light, spent into the abyss of space, with a destination but nothing there to catch him.”

“Well, you’ve done the commonwealth a service, Cora. We honor our arrangement. Sleeper Scion of Portland will be expanded, just as you asked. What are you planning on moving up there, anyway? It’s not like you people need living quarters or anything.”

The woman rose from her table, the ceranoform dissipating as it was replaced with a form of evanescent energy in the shape of a dark-skinned woman with sweeping, angelic wings, and a disk of beaten black metal in her hand.

“Thank you for honoring our arrangement. I’ll be calling upon you again, Agent Hector. Oh, and my name is not Cora. It is Loko. Please remember that.”

Hector stared at her. He was a special agent of the commonwealth, specializing in hex and causeway corruption, and knew right off what he saw should have been impossible.

Loko walked from the cafe, her peripheral routines already collating Horus’ financial assets and hex properties, with which she immediately began shifting to stocks or other holdings suitable for distribution in the name of Scion of Portland.

One of those assets was a spherical mainframe housing a hex-tree analysis AI. The ebon sphere floated above its causeway dock in the hold of a ship permanently moored in the Portland harbor, a vessel owned and maintained by subsidiaries of Horus’ financial presence. Bold white letters on the side of the massive, hovering computer spelled one word - Loko.