Bon Voyage

I must have slid across more than five doublings of meshwork during my exploration session. Much like the ringlet, there was much to gain from the abilities of each of the Electrons that made up the active team on my Shorty. Once we got the slide mode down, it was more a matter of making sure we were on course and not making circles than it was about choosing the next micro-hop. Certain tasks were better left to those close to the action.

One of the other niceties of slide mode was that I could perch up on the floating Seven end and swingshot around the Ones, making scan passes as needed. Aside from the cloud of Shorties that I had been tracking, there was not much activity to speak of. Just the occasional pulse to keep a pathway happy and open. There was, however, activity of a bustling kind, but the signal that I could see was so low in amplitude that I could not match any patterns.

Much of the signal was being scraped off by the meshwork, and that meant that I would need to get away from this sea of Ones and into the soup once more. With the flip of a spin and a wiggle in my orbit, we were off and switched into soup mode. Once we were more than forty Shorties' span away from the meshwork, the signal began to improve. There were familiar bursts and pauses in the patterns, but the details were muddled, so I pushed the synchro-drive as hard as I could, heading for the source of the signal.