Read Online Ability (Omnibus) by Travis Hill - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Travis Hill
Tags: Urban Fantasy
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could get away with.
Brian growled at him and tried to snatch the sandwich away, but Garret anticipated it and deftly threw up a fancy Taekwondo block with his other arm. He finished off the sandwich and took a swig of homebrew beer that their neighbors had given them, a present for procuring some free weed and a couple of pirated holos.
“So…” Garret smiled. “I figured out something interesting. I found that it imprints into the brain’s memory with increased efficiency if I strobe the image stream and data stream at certain frequencies. Not speed up or down how fast the images and data display, but actually strobe them on-off. Like one second they are on the holo, the next they are gone. And so on. It really messes with your eyes, especially through H-Vis, but as you just found out, it’s quite effective.” He beamed with exaggerated pride.
“My eyes are bugging for sure,” Brian said, rubbing them. Garret gave him a funny look, and he realized he’d said it in Japanese. He repeated it in English. “But it only took thirty seconds or so to flash. How long does it last?”
“Two hours and twelve minutes is the maximum I’ve been able to coax out of it. If I try to loop it for longer than a couple of minutes, it feels like someone is smashing my eyes in with a hammer, and it doesn’t seem to increase the retention time. There seems to be very little difference between flashing for thirty seconds or one minute. Or two. Other than the major eye pain. Anything less than twenty seconds, and I can’t get the module to do a full run, so the retention is either of partial, incomplete information, or a total failure. But there’s another cool thing I found. If I mess around with the strobe rate and the display rates, I can do neat things.”
“Like what?”
“Like make the retention only last five minutes. Or make it last twenty minutes. I’m still messing around with it. I want to try it with Receiver though. Thirty seconds, plus Receiver, equals full retention. I’m hoping. I want to try the three of us using different settings while dosing, to see what happens. I’ll go with the shortest retention frequency setting. You go with a longer one, and Derry can have what I guess would be the full retention. The one I’ve maxed out at two hours.”
“Okay. I won’t be able to make a new batch until Saturday night. She got me thinking about some stuff that I want to test out. I want Receiver to keep all of the good attributes, the attributes that make the brain open up, but I want to eliminate the ‘tripping’ part, or at least tone it down. It’ll go over a lot easier down the road if we don’t have to fight the perception that it’s some deadly new hallucinogen that makes you jump off buildings or eat live babies.
“I’ll make ‘proper’ doses for us to use, but I’m going to make a couple of experimental batches. Real small ones, like maybe four doses total,” Brian said, thinking aloud. “Also, we should pick a module that none of us have messed around with. Just to make sure we don’t have something we’ve tested before floating around in a hidden memory cell of our subconscious.”
“I think I have one we can do,” Garret said. “I’m still tweaking it, but it should be ready in time.”
“Well, let’s get high to celebrate then,” Brian said in Japanese, heading back to his desk to refill the pipe.
CHAPTER 7
March, 2044
“We’re going to do what?” Derry asked.
“We are going to drop Receiver, wait for it to kick in, flash with our H-Vis through my tablet, and then play ice hockey,” Garret told her.
“I’ve never been on skates in my life. Not even roller skates,” she protested.
“Neither have I,” Brian said. “Well, I think I roller skated maybe twice when I was little. I’ve never been on ice. They didn’t have ice rinks where I grew up.”
“I’ve been to hockey games,” Garret said, “and I’ve been on ice skates a fair amount.
Brian growled at him and tried to snatch the sandwich away, but Garret anticipated it and deftly threw up a fancy Taekwondo block with his other arm. He finished off the sandwich and took a swig of homebrew beer that their neighbors had given them, a present for procuring some free weed and a couple of pirated holos.
“So…” Garret smiled. “I figured out something interesting. I found that it imprints into the brain’s memory with increased efficiency if I strobe the image stream and data stream at certain frequencies. Not speed up or down how fast the images and data display, but actually strobe them on-off. Like one second they are on the holo, the next they are gone. And so on. It really messes with your eyes, especially through H-Vis, but as you just found out, it’s quite effective.” He beamed with exaggerated pride.
“My eyes are bugging for sure,” Brian said, rubbing them. Garret gave him a funny look, and he realized he’d said it in Japanese. He repeated it in English. “But it only took thirty seconds or so to flash. How long does it last?”
“Two hours and twelve minutes is the maximum I’ve been able to coax out of it. If I try to loop it for longer than a couple of minutes, it feels like someone is smashing my eyes in with a hammer, and it doesn’t seem to increase the retention time. There seems to be very little difference between flashing for thirty seconds or one minute. Or two. Other than the major eye pain. Anything less than twenty seconds, and I can’t get the module to do a full run, so the retention is either of partial, incomplete information, or a total failure. But there’s another cool thing I found. If I mess around with the strobe rate and the display rates, I can do neat things.”
“Like what?”
“Like make the retention only last five minutes. Or make it last twenty minutes. I’m still messing around with it. I want to try it with Receiver though. Thirty seconds, plus Receiver, equals full retention. I’m hoping. I want to try the three of us using different settings while dosing, to see what happens. I’ll go with the shortest retention frequency setting. You go with a longer one, and Derry can have what I guess would be the full retention. The one I’ve maxed out at two hours.”
“Okay. I won’t be able to make a new batch until Saturday night. She got me thinking about some stuff that I want to test out. I want Receiver to keep all of the good attributes, the attributes that make the brain open up, but I want to eliminate the ‘tripping’ part, or at least tone it down. It’ll go over a lot easier down the road if we don’t have to fight the perception that it’s some deadly new hallucinogen that makes you jump off buildings or eat live babies.
“I’ll make ‘proper’ doses for us to use, but I’m going to make a couple of experimental batches. Real small ones, like maybe four doses total,” Brian said, thinking aloud. “Also, we should pick a module that none of us have messed around with. Just to make sure we don’t have something we’ve tested before floating around in a hidden memory cell of our subconscious.”
“I think I have one we can do,” Garret said. “I’m still tweaking it, but it should be ready in time.”
“Well, let’s get high to celebrate then,” Brian said in Japanese, heading back to his desk to refill the pipe.
CHAPTER 7
March, 2044
“We’re going to do what?” Derry asked.
“We are going to drop Receiver, wait for it to kick in, flash with our H-Vis through my tablet, and then play ice hockey,” Garret told her.
“I’ve never been on skates in my life. Not even roller skates,” she protested.
“Neither have I,” Brian said. “Well, I think I roller skated maybe twice when I was little. I’ve never been on ice. They didn’t have ice rinks where I grew up.”
“I’ve been to hockey games,” Garret said, “and I’ve been on ice skates a fair amount.
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