Read Online Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 by Lj Cohen - Free Book Online Page A

could simply mirror it or link to it. Either would serve Ro's purpose if she could find it.
    Something blinked in the corner of her eye. She called up the file. Barre had started to fill out an application for a music scholarship program off Daedalus. "Gotcha," she said to the empty room and the bright display. Paging through the application, she searched for the required medical information. At the very least, they would require proof of inoculations and a basic psych profile.
    He'd attached a musical score to the file, along with the old fashioned convention of notating the song. The black dots scattered across the lined paper made absolutely no sense to her. If she had the time, she would've had the terminal play it for her, but if she could pull this off, she figured Barre owed her a live show.
    "There you are." The medical info had been tucked into an addendum to the application. Now all Ro had to do was figure out how to follow the breadcrumbs back to where the original lived without Daedalus noticing.
    Ro cleared everything in Barre's files except for the relevant addendum pages. Those she enhanced and enlarged, hanging them at her eye level like a piece of art. But she needed to see past the surface display. The language AIs used to render data evolved from the original source code of the old web. There were still simple applications that ran happily on historically accurate versions of HTML, C++, and Java, and a whole network of home-brew hobbyists who preferred them to the more complex languages that emerged later.
    They reminded Ro of re-enactors, not programmers.
    She gestured with her left hand and pulled up her toolbox, a collection of small custom subroutines she could use like building blocks to do practically anything she needed. This time, she wanted something quiet and patient to tiptoe through Daedalus's convoluted data-paths, that if discovered, would dissolve into harmless bits of junk code.
    This is what Ro loved. The process was as much architecture as programming. She linked segments together by feel, looking at the resulting shape with approval. Now to reveal the display code. She pulled one small, elegant program out of the toolbox and tossed it toward the application. It latched on to the lower left hand corner of the page and pushed. The page spun around and around, each revolution a little slower than the one before, until it stopped, and flipped face down.
    Line after line of simple code wrote itself across the page as Ro waited. Even with the advances in AI self-programming, it didn't take much to display a basic visual. She scanned down the commands looking for one specific tag.
    "Your turn, Rover. Go!" She flicked the tracker program she'd designed toward the plain codes. It went burrowing in, found an opening almost immediately, and disappeared.
    Now she just had to wait.
    She turned to the AI mods, unwritten code burning in her mind's eye.
    ***
    Locating the drones would probably be harder than doing the actual reprogramming. After poking through all of the ship's compartments, Jem found one sweeping a corner in the aft corridor. The stupid thing got itself tangled in a recursive loop banging between two adjacent walls. Jem grabbed the little all-purpose robot and hit the kill switch. It powered down with a soft whine.
    Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Jem hunched over it, frustrated that Ro set him to waste his time on something even Barre could have done. He thought of their morning in the computer lab and grimaced. So what if Barre didn't care about what Jem loved? It didn't make his brother stupid.
    Taking bittergreen did.
    He grabbed his micro-loupes and dialed up the magnification. He hated busy work. Jem had been playing with dumb drones like this one from the time he could crawl. He should be in there with Ro, digging out Barre's records or working on the interface design she wanted, or at least keeping an eye on Micah, not sitting here flicking tiny switches on a control