BOUNDARY(57)

Diane's screen suddenly showed some animated robotic drones running through Phobos' corridors. "Resistance is futile—if less than one ohm" scrolled across the bottom as a subtitle.



"Hey, that's pretty good," A.J. said. "Did you do that just off the cuff?"



"Well, sorta. I had these little guys drawn up a while back, but I had to get the computer to kick in and draw the animations pretty quick, once the conversation turned in that direction."



"Cute. Well, it'll be a little bit more before we get telemetry back to show whether we've still got Faeries or if Peter Pan will need a new sidekick. So I'm going to run down and get me something to drink. Anyone else want something?"



"Coffee," Jackie said immediately.



"As if I couldn't have guessed. Diane?"



"Well, I'd like a Margarita, but I'll settle for a diet Coke."



"One coffee, one diet Margarita Coke. Got it."



A.J. jogged to the cafeteria; while he could've gotten the drinks nearer to hand, he wanted munchies too. About fifteen minutes later, he trotted back into the control room, balancing the drinks in one hand and a large plate of cheese nachos in the other.



"A.J.! You can't bring that in here!"



"That theory has been falsified, as I obviously have brought this in here. Here's your substitute Margarita." He put Jackie's coffee— dead black, no sugar—in front of her as Diane continued her protest.



"Well, you're not supposed to bring food into the center."



"If you read the rules," he retorted, sitting himself before his workstation again, "I think you'll find that you're not supposed to have drinks in the center, either. Which is a bigger problem around electronics than food, usually. And it's one of those rules that I'll lay big odds was disobeyed about fifteen seconds after it was first enacted at the first computer workstation in history."



He gazed down cheerfully at his nachos. "I always clean up after myself, anyway."



"Aren't you supposed to be in training?" Jackie demanded. "That's like about a billion calories, mostly fat." She eyed the golden mass, sprinkled with deep green peppers, with a combination of clinical contempt and instinctive longing.



"I am indeed in training, but there's nothing wrong with my weight, thanks very much. I have an iron stomach and intend to keep it that way."



"Allow me to hope that you are right, A.J." Hathaway's voice came from behind them. "But I've known several guys with iron stomachs on the ground who spent their first time in real weightlessness fighting every second to keep from blowing their groceries all over the interior of the spacecraft."



"Well, I'm not a complete idiot. I don't plan to eat much before my first experience. Got a lot of other training to do first. Lots of suit practice."



A.J.'s conciliatory tone was then replaced by his usual theatrics. "Glad you could make it, Colonel! We're about to try to open up and see what's behind Door Number Three."



"Actually, Door Number D-11," Jackie corrected.



"Well, darn. Janice was always behind Door Number Three. D11 just has alien artifacts behind it."



"A.J., you're not old enough to remember that show," Hathaway snorted. "Hell, I'm not old enough to remember that show."



"Old shows never die. They live on in sound bites and cultural references for generations."



Movement showed on the screen. A.J. instantly focused all his attention on his VRD-enhanced display. "Grab a seat and don't spill your popcorn, ladies and gentlemen. It's showtime!"



The display showed four separate images in the separate quadrants. Three were image streams from their respective Faeries; the fourth was a constructed representation of the view of a hypothetical observer standing in the corridor, watching the three goggle-eyed metallic probes trying to open the ancient door.



"You people should appreciate just what's going into this show. Even with all the advances in the past few years, there's severely limited bandwidth available for Ariel to use in transmitting this back." A.J. watched tensely as the three probes slowly took their positions in the corridor, using their manipulator arms to brace themselves first.



"Can't be all that limited if you're sending us three streaming images," Diane pointed out. Then she frowned. "But . . . I know the bandwidth you specified. You can't be putting three image streams down that, not even with compression. Not even with the fact that we're using a much more capable relay satellite to handle the Earth transmissions directly."



"Not with ordinary compression, no. But what I'm doing here is not ordinary. There's an entire neurofuzzy expert system in each Faerie dedicated to smart compression, and I can specify methodologies if I need to. First, they take the main images and scans. Then they chop out all the stuff not in the immediate ROI except for a really general representation. Remember, in any given frame of video, very little usually changes; so you only need a small amount of data to represent it. Then, for people watching it, much lower resolution will do, so you can drop that. You can encode the picture even more by being able to have an encoded representation of the presented image concept. For instance, sending the image of the Faerie itself is a matter of just sending a listing of the current condition of the Faerie, something I can squeeze into very few bytes and then generate here based on the original design, with updates from later pics if needed. If we ever need the raw data, the Faeries can send that on demand later. They actually give me reminders to check data for importance before I erase it. Then I—never mind, here we go."