Heart of Darkie: Black Sector
Prologue - Part 1
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Upon the observation deck of the L-Camino class galactic heavy cruiser Jazz, Dayquan and Terrence sat by a viewing window and shared a bottle of Hennessey while staring out at the shimmering cosmic ocean.
"It never get less stunning, huh?" Terrence spoke.
Dayquan took a sip, leaned forward and took a drag from his Spaceport electronic cigarette. He released its menthol vapour in a stream of slow smoke rings.
The rings retained their form easily because of the imperceptibly gentle, uniform airflow on the deck, until they shattered against the window. Then they disappeared. But until then they remained strangely coherent and shimmered strangely in the glow of the starlight
"That's not what I see on spacewalks. Its much brighter" Dayquan said.
"You know how matrix glass works?" Terrence tapped on the window with his knuckle.
Dayquan shook his head. "Guess I never really looked into it. I know it's everywhere though."
"Yeah, every display you've ever used recently. There's something called PIDGRI, pixel dust that's suspended in the glass basically. They sell it by the kilo, it's transparent and a real pain to clean up. It's magneto-electroluminescent so if you apply a magnetic field to it, it emits light."
Terrence outstretched his hand.
"May I see your vape?"
Dayquan took a drag off the Spaceport and handed it to him.
"The charging base is magnetic, right? Look."
He held the base of the device against the window and a bright white glow formed in the glass around where they touched. He slid it around and the glow followed.
"Hey that's pretty cool man" Dayquan said as Terrence handed it back to him. He tried it himself and found it more amusing than he had expected.
"Also embedded in the glass is a carbon nanofilament mesh" Terrence said while capping the bottle of cognac. "It lends the glass incredible durability."
He hurled the bottle at the window with all his strength. It bounced off with a dull, resonant thud. But neither the bottle nor the glass were even slightly damaged.
"You can drive a loader into this pane and it wouldn't make a ding."
"Ah... Let me guess the rest" Dayquan said. "The mesh must also serve to make the whole volume electronically addressable as a display."
He paused and scratched his chin.
Terrence suppressed a smile and nodded, as if to say "go on."
"There must be sensors around the exterior of the Jazz" Dayquan continued, looking now around the frames of the observation window, "that would include cameras that are sensitive to the parts of the electronic spectrum we cannot see such as infrared and ultraviolet."
He then gestured to the window itself. "From that point, it simply becomes a matter of overlaying information from the cameras on the panel, adjusted towards colours in visible bands to make those wavelengths visible to us."
"That's a pretty good guess" Terrence replied with a smile, "not really wrong either, but... Let's see..."
Then he laughed.
"Don't take this the wrong way but your answer betrays your primitive way of thinking. A very advanced primitive though."
This time Dayquan smiled.
"Condescension existed in my time too."
"Like I said, don't take it the wrong way" he chuckled.
"I said a very advanced primitive for a reason. The earliest technological precursor to matrix glass was first scalably manufactured over four hundred years after you entered hibernation... and what you said was a fairly accurate description of the very first iteration of that precursor."
He pointed to the window and a sharp rectangular region of the glass turned to a frosted blur. Terrence had summoned a display window on the panel from his personal computing implant.
A photograph was displayed on it, a man in a lab coat holding a thin, rectangular glass wafer that sparkled with strange colours as he slowly rotated it
"It didn't use carbon filaments or PIDGETs though. It used micron-scale fibre optics." He dismissed the display window.
He took a sip from his tumbler.
Dayquan grinned. "Now tell me how dumb I am".
"That's the thing, I can't!" Terrence laughed. "But I'm not saying you are 'dumb' at all."
He took a long sip before continuing in a more serious tone. "Your answer just helped me understand exactly how... big... a fourteen thousand year knowledge gap really is."
There was a silence between them for a while.
Then Dayquan blew a big puff of vapour in his friend's direction. "You haven't lived fourteen thousand years though, future-man" he said with some amusement.
"True" said Terrence. "I'll give it a shot, broad strokes."
He pointed at the glass again.
"In a real way, every panel of matrix glass is itself the camera, the computer that processes the image as well the display it feeds forward to. There's lots of spare processing power left over too, so it just contributes it towards the ship's systems."
"That's not too crazy" Dayquan said.
"It's not crazy at all to me. That's the thing." He paused.
"The PIDGRI aren't just for output of display information. They also work in reverse, as photoreceptors. Together they make the whole panel into one large array of camera sensors. But the important thing is that it gives each PIDGRI the ability to be aware of the state of others around them."
"Like neurons" said Dayquan.
"Again, good guess. But again, it's a primitive analogy. Anyway, in short the matrix glass itself detects the EM radiation that hits the exterior surface, adjusts it to visible wavelengths, then re-emits the relevant photons to exactly match the incident angles. The so-called glass is actually naturally opaque when unpowered."
He snapped his finger and pointed to the window. A square panel turned blank, a pearlescent white.
"Again, not that crazy" Dayquan said. He finished his 40 and set it aside. "What about the mesh?"
"Ah yes the mesh. Well that's the thing... Here, it's easier to show you this way." Terrence got up and stood between Dayquan and the window. He outstretched his arms.
A rapid clicking sound broke out all around them and then dulled to silence. Dayquan felt a slight acceleration forward. It grew smoothly and then stopped. He looked around. He wondered to himself, did the ship change course?
Terrence picked up his glass. He seemed to know what Dayquan was thinking. "I separated the observation deck. It's still travelling inside the warp bubble created by the Jazz. I just want to get to a safe distance."
"A safe distance?"
"You'll see." Terrence downed the rest of his drink and turned to the window.
"The mesh," he said "is for this"
He pushed the tumbler against the window and as he did so, it did not make contact and recoil but rather seemed to enter it as if being lowered slowly into a custard. And then it was fully enveloped by the glass.
Dayquan made to speak but Terrence raised a finger to silence him. He turned to face him and folded his hands behind his back.
"Keep watching."
The entire observatory deck turned to glass. Dayquan looked around him and saw the Jazz in the distance, and the colourful starbows that enveloped the warp bubble. He looked back at Terrence.
His arms were now outstretched. His mouth was agape and blue light shined brightly from it and his eyes. The entire vessel had begun to warp like a crystalline kaleidoscope around him and as Dayquan looked around him, he saw it had formed pointed arms in the form of a cross and these arms now began to rotate around the crossection they formed of what was formerly the deck. Finally they began to elongated while angling backwards and then undulated like the tentacles of a jellyfish. It made a rush of strained clicking noises as it morphed.
"Nigger what the fuck you is doin?" Dayquan shouted.
"Relax Dayquan" Terrence said calmly, "it's alright."
The deck had returned to its usually form.
Dayquan sat back and took another hit of his Spaceport.
He blew it at Terrence again.
"Explain, future nigga."
