I was so mesmerized by Otty's ability to speak pictures to me that I even forgot we were sitting in water until Otty sent me another type of sense. Cold. I actually felt cold for a split moment, but it also felt as distant as if it had nothing to do with me. A feeling that was not my own. But it made me realize that I was getting chills in the bath as well, so I picked up Otty and jumped out of it, going back inside.
After that we sat in the bedroom simply experimenting with that skill of his, trying to find a way to communicate, but after some time I noticed that Otty became weary and drowsy. I understood that this ability was tiring him, so I printed him another burger and let him rest before going to sleep myself.
By the time I woke up, Otty was full of energy once again, so we spent a few hours with him trying to convey to each other all kinds of things, learning how to communicate.
I learned that, not only could he send his thoughts to me, but also I could make him understand my thoughts better when I learned to concentrate my mind on conveying the thought to him as if I was talking to him inside my mind. So he wasn't just looking through my thoughts, it was more like he was skimming with his mind on the precipice of mine, and could hear my loudest thoughts; the ones that stood out or were intense.
We also learned that Otty had no limit to the distance from which he could send me his thoughts, at least within the limits of the distance I could walk for the experiment. However, he could read me only from a very close distance. Probably, the reason he understood me at all when we first met was because I was just so hungry that my thoughts were screaming 'I need food' and because I sat down on my hunches, bringing myself so close to him.
After some time, Otty got tired again and had to rest. At first I thought he recharged from consuming food, but if what Otty says can be trusted, food is merely a building material for a body and helps him sustain life. His power to send thoughts relies on something else, and I had quite a strong feeling that this something else was Cry. Not only did he absorb 4GM and excrete it in solid form, but he could use it this way as well. Probably. I had no way to prove it, though, at the moment.
At least 4GM explains some of his communication method's peculiarities. Because they are very similar to our method of communication. Just in a simpler form.
Although Otty's ability to send thoughts into someone's brain was a novel way of using 4GM particles that I had never heard of before, in its essence it wasn't really much different from what we could do with the help of technology. Using our antlers or horns, name them however you want, we send signals with 4GM, then AI inside our heads decodes the received signals and gathers them into something understandable to us. Otty simply could do it directly, bypassing the AI and horns.
So sending thoughts was not so unusual. I think that, given time, this skill can be recreated with technology by our scientists. What interested me more, however, was his mind-reading skill. Is this also an ability of 4GM? To figure it out, I would need to understand how the brain and mind work, but I am a mechanic, not a medic, to know much about the workings of the brain. My knowledge about it does not go further than knowing that the brain is situated inside the skull and that you die when it's smashed.
I thought of trying to send messages to Otty through horns, but he did not seem to get it, and I could not make many adjustments to my horns to make them pick up Otty's signals. My version of horns was just too limited. At that time I had a civilian version of horns. The one that had all the safety to prevent civilians from killing themselves in a stupid way. I heard that the battle version of the horns that fighters use had more freedom in settings and a wider range of possible adjustments. But again, you need a trustworthy guy with solid knowledge about them to make adjustments without risk to your own life, and I am not a guy with this kind of knowledge. At least I wasn't at that moment.
Still, Otty's existence was fascinating, and I wanted to find if there was maybe any information that could be found about him on the NET. But it's not as easy as you might think. I couldn't just type a word into a search bar, as people in ancient times did, and have the program scour the entire net for me in search of any mention of the said object in the vast ocean of data that the Galactic Internet contained. Our net does not work this way.
You see, the information net we have with our technology differs greatly. And it's a bit long-winded explanation, but I'll start from the bottom so that you would have a better understanding of where the problem originated from.
For obvious reasons, you can't just cover the whole galaxy with radio waves as people did on separate planets in the past before they learned to travel through space. Different races called their planetary nets different names: Eywa, Hive, Nirvana, Cluster, Library, Akashic Record, Yggdrasil root. We humans called it the internet or web, as the communications covered the whole planet like a giant spider net.
As I said, the method of relying on radio waves fails miserably in interplanetary communications. Once distances become so vast that even for light it takes a few hours to travel, communication becomes impaired. Not to mention the distance of millennia of light-travel that intergalactic communications would actually need. So people had to find another method to send information.
And our ancestors did. They used quantum entanglement. It allowed them instant communication throughout the entire conquered universe, but there was a limitation.
Quantum entangled particles come in pairs. There are two of them in a bundle, and information spreads between them. Meaning you have to have one of them "in hands," so to say, while the person with whom you communicate holds the other one. This changed the way people communicated, creating two directions.
The first is when two planet's governments have established a communication line between their planets, exchanging entangling factors. This way they can synchronize particles and use them to communicate. It was similar to cables that people used on the same planet in the past to connect between continents. Invisible interplanetary cable.
Through these two-way lines, every inhabited planet in the galaxy was connected to each other.
With this method, planets stayed covered with their planetary nets that could be built however they wanted: electric or optic cables, and satellite radio or light transmitters, where all the people living on the same planet communicated through various ways. However, an interplanetary communication line had to be used to connect to the outside world. This allowed restricting access and use of planetary networks to outsiders.
A galactic net made of multiple closed-off nets. There already was a name for such a type of connection left from ancient times, so people quickly adopted the word INTRANET. Only, instead of a home network or work office network, as it was originally intended for, now this word includes the entire planet. Where a planet's net contained the entire internet for one race in the past, with planetary lines it became only a small portion of it, or an intranet.
This method allowed trillions of people from all the inhabited planets to freely communicate with each other and needed a massive amount of entangled particles. Each planet had to build multiple intergalactic communication stations to connect these lines.
I am not sure why, but for some reason these stations were always in the shape of pyramids. It may have something to do with optimal use of the quantum entanglement principle. People of that time were good at optimization and efficiency. So, there has to be a reason if all the planets, without exception, made them this way. The pyramids were also always built in a line, separated from each other by some distance so that the line encircled the planet like a belt. Don't ask me, as I said, I am not a pro in ancient technology.
As you understand, these stations were MASSIVE, and there was no way to fit them to any spaceship. Thus, the second method of that technology's use was established.
The second method allowed two people who were in contact with each other to exchange quantum entanglement factors and establish a small line to contact each other. This was like knowing each other's private phone numbers, or any other private contact. People and companies could exchange this kind of contact and have a private communication line.
It allowed galactic-sized companies and organizations to freely communicate with all their branches without relying on public planetary communication lines.
The amount of information sent this way was, of course, incomparably miniscule, and it was a lot more expensive to build a private line than to use the public one.
However, it was especially useful for communication with spaceships that traveled the galaxy.
The spaceship could not have a huge amount of lines to be connected to every known planet, only to some. So, spaceships used an old trick to communicate. Similar to how first communication devices, named Telephones, used operators to connect them with someone, spaceships used an agent method, contacting one planet, that then would connect them further to the galactic internet.
The communication was slower on spaceships, and data volume was limited. But basically, the entire galaxy, from planets to colonies and spaceships, was connected and formed the Galactic Internet.
I said "ancient technology" before, but actually, in this regard, people were more advanced than our civilization.
With the introduction of 4GM particles and the fall of the previous social system, everything changed.
The first to fall was the Galactic network, as lines between planets were "chopped and severed" as soon as the first conflicts raged throughout the galaxy. New governments, concentrations of power, and alliances occurred and disappeared within mere days. Any sort of intergalactic agreement was impossible. Very soon, the leftovers of the previous communication line turned into monuments of a previous era.
However, people were able to exchange the old net for a new type of communication. 4GM transmission. These particles allow us to instantly communicate over the entire galaxy, the same as quantum entangled particles did, but with them we can contact anyone we want without the need for communication lines at all. The lines are no longer from one point to another; they are now from anywhere to anywhere, as long as there is some retransmitter somewhere near you.
The problem is that 4GM particles are owned and have to be used to send information. Used, as in used up. Wasted. Lost from you.
Yes, the amount is miniscule, and we can always earn some, but I think I have mentioned it enough times to make you all understand where it comes from.
Basically, anything alive and slightly sentient attracts and absorbs 4GM particles. We can extract Crystaline from any natural, biological being, but the amount that can be extracted from nature is quite small. For some reason, the more sentient the being, the more Cry it absorbs throughout its life. There are farms that mine Cry while selling biological resources for food production all over the galaxy, but they are monopolized by the ruling family who owns the territory. And to tell you the truth, there are very dark rumors about such farms. What beings exactly do they grow there? I don't like to dwell on that idea. There's not much I can do about it, after all.
As you understand, extracting Cry means killing a living being that is not sentient enough to do it willingly. So, only beings capable of rational thought, such as humans and other races that comprise the galactic society, can extract just a bit from themselves without killing themselves and use it as a currency.
Well, sending information may not be the problem, but you want to also receive it if we talk about full-fledged communication. And that is an issue.
Old technology relied on electricity and had communication based on sending and receiving data packets. You could send data using your own electric power, but to reply to you, someone on the other side had to spend their electric power to send data back to you.
But who would spend their Cry to send you information when you request it in our days? Why would they? Imagine some popular site that many people visit. Viewers request information from the site when they enter it, and the site sends them the data. But where would it get so much Cry if millions of people ask it to send them data? The person operating that site would die in minutes if he used his own Cry to send everyone the data.
With the adoption of 4GM communication, the old system of sending and receiving data has perished. Not entirely, though. We have saved the planetary intranet, where, in the confines of a single planet or part of it, we still use something similar to the old internet.
But without being linked with each other, every planet is now basically a closed-off intranet. You can enter it, save, and receive data freely when you are on the planet using old communication technology, but once you leave the planet's surface, radio waves will not be able to reach you. So, you need another way to access the data in that intranet.
And that's where we come up with retransmitters. Basically, it's a device that allows me to use my own Cry to send data from somewhere to myself. That's right. Now we use our own power for both sending and receiving data.
We waste our Cry for both sending messages and downloading information from some sites. Obviously this kind of method led to efficiency and thriftiness. Now no one can force us to download useless pieces of crap data that the old network was full of.
Commercials, intrusive ads, mass promotions, malware, all kinds of trash data like stylization, pointless pictures for design and other useless crap people came up with to make their sites or products attractive; none of it matters in our time. If it cost me my Cry to send it to myself, I ain't sending any of that. I send only what I need, and all else can go fuck itself.
This basically turned our intranets into big forums.
We connect to a planetary intranet of our choice, where we see basic topics or names of sites or simple representations, in rare cases. Yeah, we are still not entirely barbaric to just make it pure text. Some notes of design do exist, but are very basic, and even that can be avoided if you are as thrifty as I am and block all design stylisations altogether. I get only text. Once we are connected to the intranet, we can use search engine software integrated into it to filter data. Get the list of pages with topics we are interested in, and then filter it again. Before sending data, we also can check it lightly in a preliminary view, getting some pieces from it to get a short introduction. Only when we know it's what we need, we get to send it to ourselves and study it in full.
Direct communication between people is a different story. After making a call and the person agrees to receive it, we both use the Cry to send data, so the load is shared.
I blabbered a lot again, but I finally approached the initial problem at hand.
Where do I look for information?
As the intranets are not connected to each other, I can't just search through all the data in the world like people did in the past. I have to connect to different intranets, checking them one by one, hoping to find the needed information among those intranets that I know of.
The worst thing is that there are hundreds of thousands of them, but to connect with any planetary or some other intranet you have to have its connection code. Address, of sorts. And there is no list of them somewhere out there. You need to find the addresses on your own.
So, how do we find out about the different intranets and connect to them?
Well, basically, when we visit some planet or space colony, we get their intranet address from the locals. Also, while we are connected to their intranet, we roam their net and chat with people and see if they would share the addresses of other intranets that they know. This way we build our connection database.
I have traveled quite a lot on spaceships and have connection codes for quite a lot of intranets. Besides, I have a friend from elite circles, as you know. And they, elites, I mean, have access to a big list of addresses. They gather information with money, and pass it on throughout generations. But even they don't have a full list of all the intranets out there.
The problem with this method of finding intranets is that people tend to communicate more with those whom they can reach and have less things to do with those who are very far from them. Because of this, the list of addresses tends to be confined to a part of the galaxy. Basically, the Galaxy is divided into zones, where everyone has almost the same lists of addresses and knows the same intranets. Some a bit more, some a bit less. But planets further away, on the other side of the galaxy, are most likely not included in it.
In other words, there may be information I need somewhere in the galaxy, but it may be on some intranet that I have no access to or don't even know about its existence.
There is, however, one other method of finding addresses. The so-called Roaming, or Dive as some more tech-savvy call it.
Remember I said we have retransmitters all over the place. Also, these retransmitters allow us to use the ability of 4GM to manipulate something from a very far away and send it to ourselves. So basically you can scan the area near that retransmitter for signals or paths of 4GM and see if there is anything nearby. This way you can map the net of retransmitters with 4GM and reach out through them to the next closest one. And so on and so on. As if building a road of breadcrumbs.
Theoretically, it is possible to find every planet with a retransmitter and find every intranet in existence using this method. But roaming, as you may guess, wastes a hell of a lot Cry.
Obviously I don't have much Cry to waste on roaming. I heard there are people, though, who do it in search of something that I don't really understand. They say the fact of roaming or diving itself is addictive, so people happily waste away Cry on it. Not me. I am not that crazy.
So what Intranet should I go to to search for information?
My answer is quite simple. There is an intranet that EVERYONE in the galaxy knows about. The Intranet of the Arena. Yep. The very planet/star/space rubble I am currently on.
As I said, this is the most popular place in the galaxy, and people built on its surface an intranet, or multiple intranets, that they connected with each other, creating the most popular forum/website/library/hive/Eywa, or whatever you may call it. I typically refer to this as a forum.
Arena's forum is maintained by all the planet's participants, who gather here to sort out their differences and has the largest Intranet, both data volume-wide and user-wide.
In my opinion, it would be smarter to inquire about the needed information on this Arena's forum. At least I can leave a message on the forum and hope that someone from the trillions of people visiting it would see it and have the information I need, and maybe also decide to reply. Not a high chance, but it's something.
And yeah, at that time I still did not know what I would start with that simple post of mine on the Arena's forum. But it's a story for the future, yet.