her, âand Iâm afraid this oneâs going to be lengthier than most. Iâm also afraid youâll find you wonât be able to move until Iâve finished it. I apologize for that, too, but itâs imperative that you stay put until youâve heard me completely out. You must fully understand the situation before you make any decisions or take any action.â
She watched his expression, her thoughts whirling, and she wasnât surprised to discover she wasnât breathing. The digital display had already warned her about that.
âAs Iâm sure youâve already deduced, you arenât really here,â Commodore Peiâs recorded message told her. âOr, rather, your biological body isnât. The fact that you were the only member of what I suppose youâd have to call our âconspiracyâ with a last-generation PICA was what made you the only practical choice for this particularâ¦mission.â
If sheâd been breathing, she might have inhaled in surprise. But she wasnât, because, as Pei had just said, she wasnât actually alive. She was a PICA: a Personality-Integrated Cybernetic Avatar. And, a grimly amused little corner of her mindâif, of course, she could be said to actually have a mindâreflected, she was a top-of-the-line PICA, at that. A gift from Nimue Albanâs unreasonably wealthy father.
âI know you wonât recall any of what Iâm about to tell you,â the commodore continued. âYou hadnât realized thereâd be any reason to download a current personality record until just before we went aboard ship, and we didnât have time to record a new one before you transferred to Excalibur . For that matter, we couldnât risk having anyone wonder why youâd done it even if thereâd been time.â
Her eyesâthe finest artificial eyes the Federationâs technology could build, faithfully mimicking the autoresponses of the human âwetwareâ theyâd been built to emulateânarrowed once again. For most people, PICAs had been simply enormously expensive toys since they were first developed, almost a century before Crestwellâs World, which was precisely how Daffyd Alban had seen his gift to his daughter. For others, those with serious mobility problems not even modern medicine could correct, theyâd been something like the ultimate in prosthetics.
For all intents and purposes, a PICA was a highly advanced robotic vehicle, specifically designed to allow human beings to do dangerous things, including extreme sports activities, without actually physically endangering themselves in the process. First-generation PICAs had been obvious machines, about as aesthetically advanced as one of the utilitarian, tentacle-limbed, floating-oil-drums-on-counter-grav, service âbots used by sanitation departments throughout the Federation. But second- and third-generation versions had been progressively improved until they became fully articulated, full-sensory-interface, virtual doppelgangers of their original human models. Form followed function, after all, and their entire purpose was to allow those human models to actually experience exactly what they would have experienced doing the same things in the flesh.
To which end PICAsâ âmusclesâ were constructed of advanced composites, enormously powerful but exactly duplicating the natural human musculature. Their skeletal structure duplicated the human skeleton, but, again, was many times stronger, and their hollow bones were used for molecular circuitry and power transmission. And a final-generation PICAâs molycirc âbrainâ (located about where a flesh-and-blood human would have kept his liver) was almost half the size of the original protoplasmic model. It had to be that large, for although a PICAâs ânerveâ impulses moved literally at light speedâsomewhere around a hundred times as
She watched his expression, her thoughts whirling, and she wasnât surprised to discover she wasnât breathing. The digital display had already warned her about that.
âAs Iâm sure youâve already deduced, you arenât really here,â Commodore Peiâs recorded message told her. âOr, rather, your biological body isnât. The fact that you were the only member of what I suppose youâd have to call our âconspiracyâ with a last-generation PICA was what made you the only practical choice for this particularâ¦mission.â
If sheâd been breathing, she might have inhaled in surprise. But she wasnât, because, as Pei had just said, she wasnât actually alive. She was a PICA: a Personality-Integrated Cybernetic Avatar. And, a grimly amused little corner of her mindâif, of course, she could be said to actually have a mindâreflected, she was a top-of-the-line PICA, at that. A gift from Nimue Albanâs unreasonably wealthy father.
âI know you wonât recall any of what Iâm about to tell you,â the commodore continued. âYou hadnât realized thereâd be any reason to download a current personality record until just before we went aboard ship, and we didnât have time to record a new one before you transferred to Excalibur . For that matter, we couldnât risk having anyone wonder why youâd done it even if thereâd been time.â
Her eyesâthe finest artificial eyes the Federationâs technology could build, faithfully mimicking the autoresponses of the human âwetwareâ theyâd been built to emulateânarrowed once again. For most people, PICAs had been simply enormously expensive toys since they were first developed, almost a century before Crestwellâs World, which was precisely how Daffyd Alban had seen his gift to his daughter. For others, those with serious mobility problems not even modern medicine could correct, theyâd been something like the ultimate in prosthetics.
For all intents and purposes, a PICA was a highly advanced robotic vehicle, specifically designed to allow human beings to do dangerous things, including extreme sports activities, without actually physically endangering themselves in the process. First-generation PICAs had been obvious machines, about as aesthetically advanced as one of the utilitarian, tentacle-limbed, floating-oil-drums-on-counter-grav, service âbots used by sanitation departments throughout the Federation. But second- and third-generation versions had been progressively improved until they became fully articulated, full-sensory-interface, virtual doppelgangers of their original human models. Form followed function, after all, and their entire purpose was to allow those human models to actually experience exactly what they would have experienced doing the same things in the flesh.
To which end PICAsâ âmusclesâ were constructed of advanced composites, enormously powerful but exactly duplicating the natural human musculature. Their skeletal structure duplicated the human skeleton, but, again, was many times stronger, and their hollow bones were used for molecular circuitry and power transmission. And a final-generation PICAâs molycirc âbrainâ (located about where a flesh-and-blood human would have kept his liver) was almost half the size of the original protoplasmic model. It had to be that large, for although a PICAâs ânerveâ impulses moved literally at light speedâsomewhere around a hundred times as
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