Bead on a hoop

"That'll deuce the AP Ha Ha!" chuckled RatH, and ran his chart again.

It would be a while now. So, back to the Log Tasks. He plugged in the capsule from NIH Bethesda and let it run through, in a perfunctory way. This was one of the quotidian deeds for him, a day in the life on ISS-7. A Log Task. On the other hand, ... to be precise, on the other under hand, what he was doing prior to this, what had caused merriment to him, was a trace>job.

In either case, The QueryInterface was EVERYTHING, absolutely EVERYTHING. It was the basis for Life out at the Fringe, and the Promise for the Beyond.

The Game Crystal cockpit was now loaded with a a pilot run for the QueryInterface. Sort of, a "let the kids have at it and see what gives" deal. An evaluation version so to speak. There were, inter alia, several condensed matter technologies and fairly non-trivial communication systems involved in making the Play to be sure. But deep down at the heart of it, there was the Query on a definitively Complete Set of Databases in the Vault. You Move By The Power Of The Query. That was The Law now. The essential principle was The Classical Adiabatic Angle, or Holonomy.

With the QueryInterface, mankind had worked out a decent via media for the purposes of attaining the "hyperspace overdrive". To get to the stars, this would be the Chosen Way. Sic itur ad astra. And oh yes, the label that got attached to it was The New Deal, naturally.

Well, this was what was out there, on the drawingboards of the International Space Agency back at Earth. And they had, with an incredible flash of insight, let loose a trial version for the benefit of the Fringe Folk. And that was why anything to do with The New Deal was a trace job whereas all the rest of what RatH officially did, was Log Tasks.

To be sure, one malicious Query could screw up a whole space station, once The New Deal came into Force. That was the thing about it, it held out the Promise of the Stars, but this was the string attached: it perforce employed every sentient being (which meant, basically you and me and all your neighbors, yeah!but, to start with, all the crew out at the earth-moon libration point based stations were the pilot run jockeys) in order to bring that about. Certainly you needed a Police out there. One could just about smell the trail of the HellHounds about to be set loose.

It was nearly three hundred years since the old school on Earth for Control and Dynamical Systems, out at CalTech, had instituted the Holonomy Drive. It took a while for the industrial scale implementation to happen of course.

So, here we were then, the calendar was as yet Gregorian but effort was under way to convert to a scale based on three degrees above zero, the cosmic background temperature.

And oh boy, Neda was on vacation out at the Imbrium City Lunar Base. Which meant that he could make a sly Play. Which might be all to the Good, or it could lead to some Outer Probe careening into the yawning chasm of uncharted Space, and then it would take more resources than the AP, to identify the problem, let alone rectify it. As things stood, no one had a clear enough picture of how much of the Game Crystal touched the Live Systems, but to be sure, some of it did. And that was where the AP came in. The Admin Police.