Nominality

The wands had returned to their standard composition of mainly Fifties with a little more than one Twenty-Nine for every eight doublings of Fifties. I specifically requested to be notified of any Eighty-Twos that were detected, and to my surprise, not one ping popped. Wand time had returned to it's normal brevity, but that did not diminish the intensity of the signals that were received from the molecular detectors, nor the reaction of the central network to these inputs.

Activating the external scanning modes that the pingers had been equipped with revealed that there were a few other central networks hovering nearby. Tracking their movement was an interesting exercise, but much beyond that, it was not so productive considering the low signal levels that were detected. On two brief occasions, we were able to pick up the fringes of internal patterns, but none of the networks were energized to the level such that the received patterns were clear and unmistakable.

Only a single wand was used at the second of three normal sessions during the active cycle. The intake session was extended somewhat by the thermal state of the intake material. The explorer-class pingers reported that the agitation level of the contacted material was above and beyond that of the meshworks and soup. This was rapidly confirmed as self preservation centers activated in response to surface sensors that were in close proximity to the molecular detectors. A triplet of command tokens, Hold, Wait and Relax, were queued for general processing as a strong signal began to arrive from the compression-relaxation input channel.