Absolution Gap Read Online Free PDF

time, making corrections as it accumulated more information. It was a never-ending task, but at this late stage in the game it considered itself rather splendid at it.
    It knew, for instance, that planets—or rather the abstract objects in its model that corresponded to planets—were definitely not supposed to do that . The error was completely inexplicable as an outside-world event. Something must have gone badly wrong at the data-capture stage.
    It pondered this a little more. Even allowing for that conclusion, the anomaly was still difficult to explain. It was so peculiarly selective, affecting only the planet itself. Nothing else, not even the planet’s moons, had done anything in the least bit odd.
    The subpersona changed its mind: the anomaly had to be external, in which case the subpersona’s model of the real world was shockingly flawed. It didn’t like that conclusion either. It was a long time since it had been forced to update its model so drastically, and it viewed the prospect with a stinging sense of affront.
    Worse, the observation might mean that the Gnostic Ascension itself was . . . well, not exactly in immediate danger—the planet in question was still dozens of light-hours away—but conceivably headed for something that might, at some point in the future, pose a non-negligible risk to the ship.
    That was it, then. The subpersona made its decision: it had no choice but to alert the crew on this one.
    That meant only one thing: a priority interrupt to Queen Jasmina.
    The subpersona established that the queen was currently accessing status summaries through her preferred visual read-out medium. As it was authorised to do, it seized control of the data channel and cleared both screens of the device ready for an emergency bulletin.
    It prepared a simple text message: SENSOR ANOMALY: REQUEST ADVICE.
    For an instant—significantly less than the half-second that the original event had consumed—the message hovered on the queen’s read-out, inviting her attention.
    Then the subpersona had a hasty change of heart.
    Perhaps it was making a mistake. The anomaly, bizarre as it had been, had cleared itself. No further reports of strangeness had emanated from any of the underlying layers. The planet was behaving in the way the subpersona had always assumed planets were supposed to.
    With the benefit of a little more time, the layer decided, the event could surely be explained as a perceptual malfunction. It was just a question of going over things again, looking at all the components from the right perspective, thinking outside the box. As a subpersona, that was exactly what it was meant to do. If all it ever did was blindly forward every anomaly that it couldn’t immediately explain, then the crew might as well replace it with another dumb layer. Or, worse, upgrade it to something cleverer.
    It cleared the text message from the queen’s device and immediately replaced it with the data she had been viewing just before.
    It continued to gnaw away at the problem until, a minute or so later, another anomaly bumped into its in-box. This time it was a thrust imbalance, a niggling one-per-cent jitter in the starboard Conjoiner drive. Faced with a bright new urgency, it chose to put the matter of the planet on the back-burner. Even by the slow standards of shipboard communications, a minute was a long time. With every further minute that passed without the planet misbehaving, the whole vexing event would inevitably drop to a diminished level of priority.
    The subpersona would not forget about it—it was incapable of forgetting about anything—but within an hour it would have a great many other things to deal with instead.
    Good. It was decided, then. The way to handle it was to pretend it had never happened in the first place.
    Thus it was that Queen Jasmina was informed of the sensor event anomaly for only a fraction of a second. And thus it was that no human members of the crew of the Gnostic Ascension —not