Read Online Ad Astra by Jack Campbell - Free Book Online Page A

with all of the pantherish grace you’d expect from a first degree black belt, her blue eyes watching William speculatively. He tried not to stare back. At 23 years old, Janice was the most brilliant and the most beautiful quantum physics researcher in the entire world. What was left of the world after the singularity crash, that is.
    Janice crossed her arms, drawing William’s gaze to the magnificent breasts which led her hetero-male colleagues to speak admiringly of the amplitude of Janice’s wave functions. “You’re in a rush. Going on some important mission?” Janice purred.
    “You might say there’s a high probability of that,” William replied. “I need to acquire some samples of a new cryogenic process.”
    Janice’s gorgeous eyes narrowed. “Are you talking about the Renz/Injira process? I understand that freezes organic matter in crystalline matrices that preserve cell structure. When it’s returned to normative temperature its composition is perfectly preserved.”
    “That’s what they say. I need to find out if it’s true, and there’s a certain item of Asian origin which will give me the answer.” William hesitated, feeling a strong attraction to Janice that had nothing to do with the gluons holding her quarks into such an attractive package. She had once told him that they would never occupy the same space. Did her exclusion principle still apply to him? “Would you like to come along?”
    Janice’s eyes glowed a little brighter as her nano-vision enhancement implants reacted to her excitement. She reached into one pocket and checked the charge on the twenty-gauss energy pistol she carried everywhere. “Sure. I’d calculated there was a high probability of deflection in my plans for today. It looks like I was right.”
    #
    The agent: Much better! Very SciFi. But I did notice that the story doesn’t seem to flow as well as it used to. Maybe you can fix that by using some of the real cutting-edge concepts. You know, quantum foam and dark energy and stuff. And try to make the characters a little more exotic. You know. Weird. More science-fictiony. Give it a shot and see if you can clean the story up a bit.
    #
    The re-revised story begins: Wilyam sensed the arrival of a message from his old rival and comrade Robertyne, who had existed in an indeterminate state since an accident while researching applications in the mysterious world of the quantum foam, where literally anything was possible. Waving a hand to freeze his work in mid-motion above his desk, Wilyam waved again to bring up the message display.
    Particle functions coalesced into a functional framework emitting radiation on visual frequencies. The familiar features of Robertyne appeared as if he/she were actually looking at him through a window, though Wilyam suspected that Robertyne had actually ceased to exist some time before and he was really speaking directly to the inexplicable presence that seemed to animate the quantum foam. The image of Robertyne displayed a very human smile, though even when Robertyne had been unquestionably posthuman he/she had never been easy to understand or to trust. “Have you heard the ripples in the foam, Wilyam? Organic matter from the macro-place you call Asia now exists in a frozen state without flaw.”
    Wilyam frowned as the implant linking him to the bare edges of the foam glittered with possible outcomes. He saw himself in a million different mirrors, each one reacting slightly differently to Robertyne’s proposal. “As you know, Robertyne, nothing actually exists, so it isn’t possible to preserve something that doesn’t exist. Previous attempts have produced probability chains that wander off into reduced states of replication quality.”
    “There’s something new/old/past/present/future in this perception reference, Wilyam. It represents a low probability outcome of extreme accuracy.”
    It sounded tempting to the millions of different Wilyams staring at him from the could-be’s