Surprises Now and Then

I headed toward the generator to insert the next update into the transmission slot, and got a huge surprise. The circuit was open and when I jumped in to look, I got blasted with a different set of patterns that I normally encounter, and then I discovered the counter. I did a few odd taps, and the counter increased.

This was not good, so I exited, examined the junction, and discovered that I had run down a bypass cable. I had to hang out a bit, waiting for the bypass to be removed. A little checking found a copy of the trouble ticket, and I figured out that my little attempt at artwork created a string of errors in the stream. Not good.

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The repeating patterns stopped, and even in the presence of large signals from the photon detectors, things were shutting down. The unresolved patterns in the well below were becoming stronger and began to trigger unexpected cascades and fragments. This was a bit of a surprise [almost as much of a surprise as the bypass cable in my way] so I spun up and fired the recall sequence which was acknowledged by the remote pairs.

Returning via locator taps, the pairs and their Shorties appeared in clear scanning range, lined up on transfer trajectory. The neatest part of their transfer was that the pairs had trained some of the local electrons to keep the Seven away from the mesh and keep the Eights hopping, long after they had swapped over during the high-speed pass.