Fleeting Feelings

I activated external detection mode as quickly as I realized that the visitor was leaving abruptly. I pushed some of the more local detectors out to the edge to boost the signal level. Without one of the hovering network nearby, the interference was minimal and the pingers locked in on harmonics that kept most networks humming. Data arrived, confused and uncollated.

The first layer was the maddening pulse of a deadline. Worked against the stress of the clock, there was only so much time left to complete a task, and this drove the underlying frenzy. There was also a strange triple-pulse to the waveform that was helping to drive things, and this was adding to the frenzy. Foremost in the consternation was a mixture of joy and apprehension. The joy clearly came from the confirmation received and a sense of duty, but the foreboding came from a broader conundrum.

It was this uncertaincy that sometimes washed across Ben's network, and it was at times like this that the whorl helped to prop up the central network and provide some guidance that prevented the foreboding from forbidding all processing and locking things down in an causality loop. The pingers were reporting looped waveforms. I could only hope that the loop shadows that we were receiving were temporary. The amplitude did not seem out of control. Yet.