EI Building
As a part of Project CEREBRO, the unoccupied EIs were going to be maintaining many of the support routines of High Tortuga, at the Hidden Space Fleet Base.. ADAM takes Bethany Anne on a tour of the planned building and operations: >>This is the beginning of the structure for the EIs. We will build it out and bring in the components, then secure it by dropping hundreds of tons of rock on it.<< What happens if the machines need servicing? That’s going to be a bitch to open. >>We are using Anne’s technology to allow certain groups access through the Etheric. Since no one who doesn’t need to know is aware of the possibility, as far as rumor is concerned we are locking them under a lot of stone and metal.<< If we drilled out the rooms, someone else can drill a new way in. >>That is the purpose of the metal surround, but even that can be removed eventually. The purpose is to stop anything but a full-on attack where the defenders have been neutralized. With these defenses, the EIs will have the time to shut everything down and escape.<< Bethany Anne was shocked. “Escape?” she exclaimed, then realized she was talking aloud. ESCAPE? >>Yes. I am working with Anne’s protégés to move a large amount of the infrastructure for the EIs into the Etheric so the room they are physically located in will have the secondary defense of looking insignificant. Their primary room, which contains a large amount of very expensive computer equipment, is used for reporting and secondary data storage. It is, for all intents and purposes, bogus.” What brought this on? >>The CEREBRO Project, and some personal understanding of the Etheric. Once we have the machines in the Etheric and powered by the Etheric, they are effectively immune from attack from anyone besides Kurtherians. High Tortuga would only lose the connectivity in our dimension.<< Yeah, but it’s possible to feel things through the Etheric. Are we going to have someone come looking? >>No. I am aware of the issues of announcing events through the Etheric. In fact, I have started tracking events—<< Tracking what events? >>I don’t know. Since we can’t travel within the Etheric I can’t find out. Think of it as hearing a loud boom in a forest, but you can’t see farther than a few trees and you can’t move. Eventually the sound dissipates and you only know something affected something else nearby.<< Well, that’s not odd or anything. I’ll get with TOM on it. >>I have worked with TOM. This is how we have gained more capabilities in the Etheric than we had before.<< >>The cores are being temporarily run on the superdreadnoughts, except Reynolds. He, as you know, has gone looking for the Kurtherians, but the rest are enjoying the efforts to remake the world.<<
