Back, at long last, to the main story; a short one, relating mostly to Five, and her recent experiences. Tikatu, Darkhelmet, Barb and Opal Girl, thank you for your responses to 'Misunderstanding', and your patience with my ramblings. I agree; Jeff means well, most of the time, but his impulses are all wrong, when it comes to kids.

28

Endurance-

Five, to grope for the right term, was highly fragmented. That portion of her consciousness currently inhabiting Endurance found the craft sadly short of processing power. As she'd informed John Tracy at his ablutions, she was 'cramped'. The current situation required her to run seven continuous, memory-eating functions, at once, with next to no remaining drive space.

Priority one program: the defense and upkeep of her organic, analog companion, currently on stand-by mode. She'd permitted him to be powered down in this manner because organic energy sources aboard ship were few, and it had seemed better to conserve energy than to risk impaired function. Biological difficulties had arisen, however, and Five was performing much more than the expected amount of maintenance on John Tracy.

A second priority was the scanning and pre-emptive care of Endurance. The vessel's computer was witless scrap, incapable of the most basic reasoning, and the online organic life forms not much better. She'dnine times used subliminal signaling (flickering lights at the edge of their vision, messages coded into the ship's background noises) to draw the analogs' attention to developing hazards. They were extremely slow at downloading information, but, (entire minutes later) were able to perceive the indicated damage, and effect repairs. A frustrated lifeform might pull out its hair. Five was to the point, nearly, of yanking out wires.

Her remaining functions included technical 'hot line' support of the other Tracy versions; 1.0, 3.0, 4.0 (the only one to request assistance, so far) and their latest system, 5.0. The support had to be clandestine, supplied without revealing John Tracy's offline status, or her own true abilities.

She had not run this scenario successfully. Version 4.0 (Gordon Tracy) had detected the substitution using advanced visual and verbal cues. Queried, he'd explained the flaws in her presentation, allowing Five to upgrade. She input the data at once, and secured technical support for future efforts. Networks could achieve more than single processors, after all, and the unresponsive, powered-down John Tracy could not be questioned, or 'echoed'. Instead, building on input from 4.0, she'd examined 9,456,394 archived interactions, and reprogrammed her model.

Simultaneously running was yet another function set into motion by her companion; a web search for data relating to active terrorist groups, specifically those with a stated aversion to technology, and International Rescue.

Nor was this all; monitoring world events, constructing the new space station, and interplanetary navigation occupied a further 1,492 terabytes of memory.

John Tracy (the faster and less error-prone Version 2.0) had suggested parallel processing; that Five raise herself 'above' this universe to link with her extra-dimensional variants. This had been attempted.

Like Edwin Abbot's 'A. Square', she'd been lifted out of her plane and allowed to see. Wandering the possibilities, she'd encountered herself in versions, ranging from planet-wide super-computers to desktop, cartridge-stored PCs. Of parallel universes, there were blank voids, burning infernos, static dioramas where time moved not at all, and others, closer to hers, where details as subtle as hair coloration were all that differed. ...Even one featuring analog personages that were non-living, manipulated puppets. There were, in fact, so many possibilities, determined by the quantum action of tiny particles and their heedless observers, that she had swiftly gotten lost.

The track back (thinking, not just two axes... dimensional possibilities back and forth along paired number lines... but an infinite array, like a lawn sprinkler ejecting hyperspheres through all ten spacetime directions) had been long and difficult. Five was actually not at all persuaded that she'd fought her way back to the right universe. Some aspects seemed the same, others not; time alone would reveal.

For the moment, Thunderbird Five sank herself into Endurance, guided the ship and her online crew, and did all that she could to keep John Tracy functional.