Read Online Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber - Free Book Online Page A

fast as the chemically transmitted impulses of the human body—matching the interconnectivity of the human brain required the equivalent of a data bus literally trillions of bits wide.
    A PICA could be directly neurally linked to the individual for whom it had been built, but the sheer bandwidth required limited the linkage to relatively short ranges. And any PICA was also hardwired to prevent any other individual from ever linking with it. That was a specific legal requirement, designed to guarantee that no one else could ever operate it, since the individual operating a PICA was legally responsible for any actions committed by that PICA.
    Eventually, advances in cybernetics had finally reached the level of approximating the human brain’s capabilities. They didn’t do it exactly the same way, of course. Despite all the advances, no computer yet designed could fully match the brain’s interconnections. Providing the memory storage of a human brain had been no great challenge for molecular circuitry; providing the necessary “thinking” ability had required the development of energy-state CPUs so that sheer computational and processing speed had finally been able to compensate. A PICA’s “brain” might be designed around completely different constraints, but the end results were effectively indistinguishable from the original human model…even from the inside.
    That capability had made the remote operation of a PICA possible at last. A last-generation PICA’s owner could actually load a complete electronic analogue of his personality and memories (simple data storage had never been a problem, after all) into the PICA in order to take it into potentially dangerous environments outside the direct neural linkage’s limited transmission range. The analogue could operate the PICA, without worrying about risk to the owner’s physical body, and when the PICA returned, its memories and experiences could be uploaded to the owner as his own memories.
    There’d been some concern, when that capability came along, about possible “rogue PICAs” running amok under personality analogues which declined to be erased. Personally, Nimue had always felt those concerns had been no more than the lingering paranoia of what an ancient writer had labeled the “Frankenstein complex,” but public opinion had been adamant. Which was why the law required that any downloaded personality would be automatically erased within an absolute maximum of two hundred forty hours from the moment of the host PICA’s activation under an analogue’s control.
    â€œThe last personality recording you’d downloaded was made when you were still planning that hang-gliding expedition in the Andes,” Commodore Pei’s holograph reminded her. “But you never had time for the trip because, as part of my staff, you were tapped for something called ‘Operation Ark.’ For you to understand why we’re having this conversation, I need to explain to you just what Operation Ark was…and why you, Kau-zhi, Shan-wei, and I set out to sabotage it.”
    Her eyes—and, despite everything, she couldn’t help thinking of them as her eyes—widened, and he chuckled without any humor at all.
    â€œBasically,” he began, “the concept was—”

    â€œâ€”so,” Pei Kau-yung told her a good hour later, “from the moment we found out Langhorne had been chosen over Franz Halversen to command the expedition, we knew there was going to be a lot of pressure to dig the deepest possible hole, crawl into it, and fill it in behind us. Langhorne was one of the ‘we brought this down on ourselves through our own technological arrogance’ types, and, at the very least, he was going to apply the most stringent possible standard to the elimination of technology. In fact, it seemed likely to us that he’d try to build a primitive society that would be