Chapter 7 Part 1

Sal felt his stomach still churning as he sat restrained in what he was guessing was a sensory deprivation room. He was not certain how long he had been here, but since his stomach started to feel like this four hours after point-to-point slip stream travel, he was guessing he had been here for at least that long. Sal could feel the hair on his head falling around his face. This was unusual as he typically kept his hair in chaotic spiked peaks in a multitude of colors. The style was a little bit retro for the time, but Sal didn't mind standing out. He had picked the style in part because it was no longer common. He grew weary of casting glances at other people and finding that their sense of style were carbon copies of one another. Sure, this person might be wearing this brand, and that person wearing that brand, but for all the powers of the holonosphere, people still felt some compulsion to conform to what other people did as though they were schooling fish. Like schooling fish, no one ever seemed to know what direction they were going to go in next, but rather when the neighboring fish turned they too turned so that the school cohered.

Sal knew what direction he wanted to go in life, he just often had found that the means of getting there was lacking. Since he was a good thinker and could understand things quickly, he had found his way into deception because it was an area where someone could be judged more on what they knew and their merit than by other external measures.

Still, Sal wish he had not taken this job. The churning in his stomach intensified as he considered what might come next. He tried to think back to the wild ride that had landed him here.

Slip stream travel basically took advantage of what amounted to worm holes. Worm holes were shortcuts in the spacetime fabric that allowed a person to travel impossibly far distances in a short amount of time. With the recognition that the world was a hologram firmly cemented, it became possible to spontaneously generate these wormholes at will should a person wish to travel. They were not generally used, though, because they proved hard to stabilize. If the person attempting to generate a worm hole faltered too much in their concentration, they might find themselves spit very far from their intended destination. This might not be so bad if you wound up somewhere else on the Earth, but if you wound up on some uninhabitable planet, or worse, space, your day was guaranteed to become very bad. To navigate a wormhole, you had to guide yourself down various junctures. Each juncture would provide a preview of where it might end.

When the discovery was first mad, some intrepid wormhole generators thought it would be cute to use the wormholes to travel back in time. What they neglected to remember when they did this was that no one in the past ever mentioned anyone returning from the future. So either a) everyone going to the past had kept their secrets along with all the information they knew, or b) when people tried to go back in time they fundamentally created another universe which was divided form the one from which they came. B) seemed the more likely alternative, although nobody knew for certain. People kept slip stream travel strictly within a local time slice for this reason. Since reality was a hologram, it was possible that it was more than one version of itself. Nobody could see the whole thing, so nobody knew the pattern that was holographically repeating. 

Sal racked his brain for familiar landmarks. He remembered seeing the Prescott High Rise levitating in the distance. This wold tend to indicate that Telray had hired some goon to keep an eye on him in the event that he did not deliver on his deception. The thing that bothered Sal about this idea is that since he was so good at deception, it would have been very hard to conceal anyone near him without his notice. If someone had succeeded in doing this, their skill level would be fiendishly high.

Sal glanced down at his wrists and ankles--digital restraints holonospherically generated. He sighed as he wished these had been physical restraints. The only way to break digital restraints was to generate the key necessary to release them. Since quantum computers had come into common usage, most of the the time the key needed was an entangled particle pair that was impossible to eavesdrop upon without causing the entangled state to collapse into something else other than the key. It was possible if this happened to run quantum equations to indicate what the entangled pair most likely was, but this was time consuming and not fool-proof. At the very least, Sal would need his hands to attempt to access the interface. Or would he? Sal had almost forgotten about the ability of the holonosphere to be navigated strictly by eye movement. He had always been a more tactile person. Sal uttered a voice command to try to access his interface. When he made this effort, he found that no audio was heard. Sound dampeners. They cancelled out all audio information. If a a sound wave was formed, the dampeners would simply perturb the air to create a wave that exactly cancelled out the first one. 

Sal had to had it to Telray. They were very thorough in their facilities for holding people against their will. Of course, it would have been unlikely that they would have risen to be one of the top underworld operatives were that not the case. Sal began to become very uneasy at this thought.