Chapter 11 Part 1

Rei walked to her home at a brisk pace. Her steps made light impressions in the sheets of water standing on the sidewalks. Her feet were the only thing that the water could could contact since she had generated what was known as a stay-dri water shed around her. Before the holonosphere, most ways to stay dry involved material being water-resistant. The basic idea was to keep the water out.  With the ability to create more abstract things with the emergence of the holonosphere, that thinking was reversed. Rather than keep the water out, the principle the stay-dri used was to actually let the water in. The difference, though, was that once it got in it was instantly evaporated, just as it would be on a hot summer day. The mechanism exploited to accomplish this was relatively simple. Phase changes in liquid were caused by sufficient energy. The sun typically supplied this energy, and on hot summer days, water molecules moved enough to turn to vapor. In winter they were sluggish enough to turn to ice. The only thing necessary for these changes to happen was sufficient energy.

The holonosphere could not break the laws of Thermodynamics, but it could bend them significantly. The say-dri borrowed energy from a zero-point vacuum long enough and often enough to excite the motion of the rain entering the field. On average, the stay-dri did not exist from a classical laws of physics point of view. The energy of a vacuum was only zero on average, but instantaneously it was whatever it needed to be. The stay-dri exploited this principle to create evaporation from energy that only existed momentarily.

There had been some debate at first that the energy of evaporation had created free energy in the form of latent heat, but then it was realized that actually there was nothing fundamentally new or different in that what HAD been evaporated WOULD have been evaporated eventually anyway, and it could not now be evaporated since it was already in the air. The only thing that had been bent was the time that it would have taken for the water to evaporate. Th system remained in equilibrium, however.

To Rei, the mechanisms of the stay-dri were banal. She had more pressing things on her mind. She could not quite shake the contents of the message she had opened. Once some information touches a mind, it is almost as though that information unlocks some hidden passage. Did the passage exist first, or had the information created it? When the probing of the mind's neural net had first began, this was a central question. Consensus arrived in the form of researchers collectively throwing up their hands. What they knew was that the brain was a particular kind of hologram, and that very often the network of holographic information that the brain was composed of was often entangled and connected in complex, unexpected ways. 

Rei reviewed the contents of the message in her mind.